A Fairly Interesting and Completely Free Blog About Organizations
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons
Chris Grey is Emeritus Professor of Organization Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, and was previously a Professor at Cambridge University and Warwick University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS). He originally studied Economics and Politics at Manchester University, where he also gained a PhD on the regulation of financial services.
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I blog in a personal capacity and all views expressed are mine, not those of any institution or organization.
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Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 3 June 2022 English
One of the most widely discussed societal impacts of Covid, mentioned on p.121 of the latest edition of my book, has been the shift from working at work to ‘working …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 27 March 2022 English
In successive editions of my book since the second and including the latest, fifth, one, I have included the firm P&O in a long list of examples of what were …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 13 February 2022 English
Over eight years ago, in 2013, I wrote a post on this blog about the absurdity of a supposedly competitive market for electricity, and energy more generally. That absurdity was …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 16 April 2021 English
The growing scandal in the UK over corporate lobbing of government – which has implicated the former Prime Minister David Cameron as well as a former civil servant – is …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 28 June 2020 English
I’ve recently read two extraordinary and, I suppose, largely forgotten novels, both published in the early 1940s, and both three-generational sagas set mainly in the Pittsburgh steel industry from the …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 11 April 2020 English
This blog has been sadly neglected in recent years, as all my blogging time and energy have been taken up with my Brexit Blog. But the current coronavirus crisis prompts …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 2 May 2019 English
A House of Lords report this week has concluded that forensic science in England and Wales is “in crisis” and “has now reached breaking point”. This matters, hugely, because it …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 5 June 2018 English
The biggest organizational story in Britain at the moment – the abject chaos on the railways – is one which happens to affect me personally. I use one of the …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 30 April 2018 English
The still ongoing Windrush scandal has now claimed the scalp of Home Secretary Amber Rudd, primarily for misleading Parliament by saying that there were no deportation targets when, in fact, …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 25 March 2018 English
The still emerging scandal of the use of Facebook users’ data by Cambridge Analytica for political campaigning has numerous dimensions to it – political, technological, ethical and social. One particular …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 19 January 2018 English
Since the very early days of this blog, I have written several posts about the danger and damage done by public sector outsourcing and it’s also discussed in my book …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 28 July 2017 English
Almost a quarter of a century ago I published my first ever academic journal paper, an analysis of the career projects of accounting professionals (Grey, 1994). It enjoyed a brief …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 18 June 2017 English
The Grenfell tower fire, with its still rising death toll, not to mention the injuries and homelessness it has caused, is one of the most shocking disasters in Britain for …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 23 May 2017 English
Waking up today to the news of the despicable bomb attack in Manchester I felt, like all but a tiny few degenerates, a sense of sorrow and disgust which has …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 13 May 2017 English
In my previous post I mentioned the ‘mysteries’ of writing, and this week I have been reading a book about writing’s conjoined twin: reading. It is Daniel Gray’s Scribbles in …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 5 May 2017 English
Just a short post today, to draw attention to my podcast on Social Science Bites. Social Science Bites features interviews with leading social scientists and covers a wide array of …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 25 April 2017 English
In June 2014 I wrote a post on this blog suggesting that a new political landscape was emerging in which the primary cleavage was between ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘locals’. These were …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 19 March 2017 English
There is story told by the writer Bill Bryson which has always appealed to me. He recounts how, when working as a journalist, he was commissioned to write an article …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 4 March 2017 English
This week the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a hard right free market think tank, produced a report entitled ‘Lackademia: why do academics lean left?’ It claims – and treats as …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 24 February 2017 English
A long way behind the trend, I started using twitter a couple of weeks ago. The reason for this was to try to publicise my other blog (the Brexit blog) …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 6 February 2017 English
A remarkable victory appears to have been won by anti-corruption demonstrators in Romania. The largest street protests – involving a reported half a million people, that in a country with …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 2 February 2017 English
In my book I write briefly (p.xiv) about the depressing nature of academic journal publication in organization studies, and have done so at more length in a post on this …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 23 January 2017 English
I posted recently about the growing possibilities for replacing human workers with robots, but alongside that it’s possible to discern a growing ‘robotization’ of human workers. That thought was prompted …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 13 January 2017 English
Today, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has produced a widely-reported research document showing the huge growth of part-time working amongst British men in recent years. Specifically, amongst men aged 25-55 …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 6 January 2017 English
In this post I want to draw the links between two current UK news stories. The first concerns the report today that forensic science services are operating in a risky …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 27 December 2016 English
This blog, at least, is now living in new times since regular readers will have seen that there has been a complete revamp of the site design, to reflect the …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 16 December 2016 English
In the new edition of my book I mention (p.25) cyber security as an example of how organizational rules are often flouted, leading to risky behaviour such as inadequate passwords …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 12 December 2016 English
The de-skilling thesis associated with Harry Braverman’s classic work of labour process analysis, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) is a staple of organizational sociology (see p.36 of my book). I …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 30 November 2016 English
Our topic today is not four wheel drive vehicles, but rather the fact that this blog is now four years old and also that today sees the publication of the …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 18 November 2016 English
It has become a truism of at least some parts of the research literature on leadership that to focus on successful leaders is to neglect the importance of the other …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 11 November 2016 English
I wrote in my last post about the possibility of Donald Trump being elected. Now that it has happened, I want to share some preliminary thoughts about what it means. …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 6 November 2016 English
This week will see the outcome of the US Presidential election, with the possibility of the victory of Donald Trump. If this occurs it will have profound consequences not just …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 28 October 2016 English
After my last rather gloomy post, today there is some good news. I’ve posted elsewhere about the rise of uberfication and the gig economy, and also about how this links …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 20 October 2016 English
A couple of years ago I had some spare money and decided to donate it to a charity. There are so many charities that command out attention – all of …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 13 October 2016 English
The unfolding scandal at US bank Wells Fargo, one of the most historic organizations in the USA, is an interesting illustration of the perils of managerial target-setting (see p. 30 …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 8 October 2016 English
In my book I talk a lot about issues around bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy, and make the point (p.86) that for all that post-bureaucracy arguably allows freedom and innovation it necessarily …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 28 September 2016 English
I must admit that I do not like air travel and avoid it as much as I can. It’s not the flying – I quite like that, apart from the …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 16 September 2016 English
Today’s post is prompted by the story this week that Hillary Clinton has had to take time off from campaigning because she has pneumonia. In fact, she only took four …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 8 September 2016 English
There has been a huge – 20% - rise in the number of workers in the UK on Zero Hours Contracts (ZHCs) in the last year, bringing the total to …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 4 September 2016 English
Readers of this blog will be aware that I have posted many times about the EU, especially in the run-up to the Referendum. This remains a topic of passionate interest …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 2 September 2016 English
I’m just back from holiday and, like many people, holidays are a chance to catch up on reading – meaning reading novels, that is, as opposed to reading organization studies. …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 6 August 2016 English
Many thanks to those readers of this blog who have written to me commiserating with the dental problems I talked about in my last post. Treatment is still ongoing. But …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 27 July 2016 English
There is so much that is painful in the world right now – events in France, Germany and Turkey come particularly to mind – that there is no shortage of …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 9 July 2016 English
In a complete shift from recent posts, I am writing today to mark the death in March this year (but which I have only just heard about) of Earl Hamner …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 5 July 2016 English
Within less than a fortnight some of the consequences of Brexit are becoming clear. What was dismissed as ‘project fear’ turns out to have been true. The pound has collapsed, …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 25 June 2016 English
So post-truth politics won the day and in a grotesque act of national self-harm Britain has voted to leave the EU. Within hours reality began to bite back as the …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 23 June 2016 English
The expression ‘post-truth politics’ is one which I have only just become aware of, and I am not sure who coined it. The earliest usage I have found is an …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 11 June 2016 English
I’ve written previously about the collapse of retailer BHS. This week, some of the grisly details began to emerge, as a parliamentary select committee began its investigations. Particularly striking was …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 28 May 2016 English
Last February I wrote a post in which I peevishly listed various experiences of organizations not working very well. One item on the list concerned the problems of getting through …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 24 May 2016 English
Before the virtual ink had dried on my last post, the campaign for the UK to leave the EU produced their biggest and, so far, most pernicious, lie with the …