Ex cathedra statement

A couple of weeks ago I went to St Paul's Cathedral.  I often skirt the borders of this wonderful landmark but it had been a long time since I had entered as a tourist and on this occasion my wife and I took the tour.

Our guide, Diane, was excellent and kept us in rapt attention for two hours and 40 minutes, making the entry price exceptionally good value.  We learnt about the architecture, its renovations, the links with the Navy and the arts and much along the way about the hierarchy of the Church, with its Canons, Deans and Bishops.

It was this latter information that intrigued me.  My university has Schools that are headed by Deans and Sub-Deans.  This is not an uncommon Latin derivation and its use appears to be a borrowing from the Church.  What struck me about the Church organization was not so much its hierarchy but the very real social order attached to this.  Each role was meaningful.  For example, the Church could bestow a living on a Vicar or Rector, which would be a parish that could be wealthy or poor, urban or rural.  The Vicar would oversee the pastoral care of his parish, including adjudicating over various disputes and transgressions.  Deans would do the same for their deanery and so on.  All of this would be held together by the authority of a distant third party who had the ultimate sanction and right of punishment at some point in the future - God.  This must have prevented runaway disputes that might otherwise have exhausted all of the options available from Vicar to Archbishop.  The threat of an abysmal afterlife and total condemnation might keep people mindful of the need to compromise at some point.

Third-party punishment has been much discussed in academic circles of late, with particular reference to the establishment and maintenance of social norms.  The Church is an excellent example of this idea.  It also embodies another key element - ritual.  Rituals bring people into social groups but also help to remind them of their membership and adherence to an agreed set of norms, thereby minimizing the use of punishment and driving down costs.  Rituals can be invented, but they also emerge around developing cooperation.  Richard Sennett has written, in Together, about the emerging rituals around manufacture.  A strong belief in the role of manufacture in establishing cooperation is given much evidence in this excellent book. What greater act of cooperative manufacture could there be than the construction of a cathedral?  That is surely a part of the symbolic power of St Paul's. All of these ideas came to the fore on our guided tour.

Back at work I had the task of finishing the research strategy for my department.  This had to be delivered soon, and sent to one of the Sub Deans of my School to aid in School-level strategic development.  The central issues to address were the quantity of our research output and how to increase research income.  This could be thought of in manufacturing terms but it is not the case that the whole department works together to achieve this. Research is done individually, or in small groups and often those groups span a number of departments around the world.  Meanwhile, staff within the department want to draw on limited resources to support their work.   A clear problem to avoid would be that of a tragedy of the commons.  The denizens of our research parish could easily exhaust our pot in order maximize short term utilities; and without reinvesting because they would not see themselves as part of a cooperative.

Whilst our Sub Deans, Dean, Deputy Vice Chancellor and Vice Chancellor are all invested with certain powers there is no role for a distant third party in our organization.  This is left to Human Resources to model within the limitations of national and European legislation.  Any imposition of research rules on colleagues could lead to runaway disputes without end.  Moreover, I was not keen to use the spectre of punishment in order to channel creative activity.  So this left me with the lessons from Sennett.  The department would benefit from manufacturing something together and engaging in collective rituals.  For example, if we were all to produce an edited volume together, or organize a conference, we would become better connected and in turn begin to understand the pressures on our common pot.  Income and knowledge generation would be seen both as a departmental and an individual good.  My research strategy became a social one.

If general collective action is engendered through a manufacturing project it will in turn empower the senior staff of the university.  Their role will become that of arbitrators and moderators at the level of the department and higher.  The social norms that emerge from the manufacturing collective will occasionally require pointing out, and managers will need to enforce them according to an agreed set of rules.  But those rules will have more bite if they are born of this creation.  These are the lessons from the work of Elinor Ostrom.  Ostrom detailed the essential social norms for collective action, cataloging their presence in numerous systems.

A good university will differ in its social organization from the Church in just this way - authority is created from the bottom up, rather than imposed from the top down.  I think a deep history of the Church will show that the managerial concept of God, the third party punisher, is a consequence of more natural processes of the sort outlined by Sennett and Ostrom. Indeed, God may have been a necessary rhetorical trick at some point in the history of social living.  Most of the business of the Church will have been achieved by sensitive Vicars observing their parishes, Deans their deaneries etc. and fostering emergent cooperation.  But my hypothesis is that as industrialization began, and when people began to move from their communities to find work, the job of a Vicar became much harder and the potential third party punishment more readily invoked.  This would be a sufficient destabilizing force to nudge the modern world into secularization, the abandonment of a managerial God, and the radical need for new rituals.  This is something governments should reflect on, as well as university administrators.