Life After COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis 9781529215786

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“A collection of thought-provoking, desperately needed essays, guiding thinking towards a better future for all. It’s a call to action which needs to be heard in the corridors of power.”

Edited by Martin Parker

David Sproxton, Aardman Animations

Katherine Trebeck, Wellbeing Economy Alliance

“A very timely and important book. We owe a duty to those who have suffered and died from COVID-19 to use the opportunity to rethink how we organize our society. Martin Parker has gathered a diverse and insightful range of experts to help us do just that.” Henry Leveson-Gower, Promoting Economic Pluralism

What might the world look like in the aftermath of COVID-19? Almost every aspect of society will change after the pandemic, but if we learn lessons then life can be better. Featuring expert authors from across academia and civil society, this book offers ideas that might put us on alternative paths for positive social change.

Martin Parker is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Bristol and lead for the Inclusive Economy Initiative.

LIFE AFTER COVID-19 EDITED BY MARTIN PARKER

“This timely collection brings together a rich range of perspectives to shed light on the critical questions of our time – how do we truly build back better and what is ‘better’ when so much needs to change?”

LIFE AFTER COVID-19 The Other Side of Crisis

A rapid intervention into current commentary and debate, Life After COVID-19 looks at a wide range of topical issues including the state, co-operation, work, money, travel and care. It invites us to see the pandemic as a dress rehearsal for the larger problem of climate change, and it provides an opportunity to think about what we can improve and how rapidly we can make changes.

ISBN 978-1-5292-1539-7

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

9 781529 215397

B R I S TO L

@policypress

COVID-19 COLLECTION

“Insights from lockdown to help us focus on what we need to change with inspirational scaffolding to help us build our collective journey.” Dick Penny, Creative Producer “A post-coronavirus world enabling everyone to live a fulfilling life is possible. This book by leading academics shows how and should be essential reading for policy makers and others.” Prem Sikka, University of Essex

EDITED BY MARTIN PARKER

LIFE AFTER COVID-​19: THE OTHER SIDE OF CRISIS

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1-​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2020 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-1539-7 paperback ISBN 978-1-5292-1540-3 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-1578-6 ePdf The right of Martin Parker to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editor and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Liam Roberts Front cover image: iStock / pinkomelet Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in the UK by CMP, Poole

Contents

List of Contributors one

vii

Beginning, Again

1

Martin Parker

two

Telling a New Story

11

David Hunter

three

A World of Care

21

Neil Howard

four

From Conflict to Collaboration

31

Emilia Melville and Hen Wilkinson

five

The Contested Home

43

Harriet Shortt and Michal Izak

six

Working Lives

53

Vanessa Beck, Vanesa Fuertes, Daiga Kamerāde, Clare Lyonette and Tracey Warren

seven

Democracy and Work

63

Alex Bird, Pat Conaty, Anita Mangan, Mick McKeown, Cilla Ross and Simon Taylor

eight

New Foodscapes

73

Jonathan Beacham and Alice Willatt

nine Cash

83

Daniel Tischer, Jamie Evans and Sara Davies

ten

Artificial Intelligence Dan McQuillan

v

95

Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

eleven

Resilience and the City

105

Malu Villela

twelve

The Nation and the State

115

Bridget Anderson

thirteen Unleadership

125

Carol Jarvis, Hugo Gaggiotti and Selen Kars-​Unluoglu

fourteen

Carbon and Climate

135

Colin Nolden and Michele Stua

fifteen Growth

145

Ed Gillespie, Jonathan Gosling and Kate Simpson

sixteen

Innovation and Responsibility

155

Richard Owen

seventeen Together into a Future

165

Miki Kashtan

Notes

175

vi

List of Contributors

Bridget Anderson is Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol, a Specialist Research Institute at the University of Bristol. Jonathan Beacham is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol, with interests in ‘alternative’ economic spaces in the food system, society–​environment relations and consumption. Vanessa Beck works at the University of Bristol and researches unemployment and under-employment. Alex Bird is a co-​op researcher and activist with over 20 years of experience as a freelance business adviser specializing in co-​operatives and social enterprises. Pat Conaty, Fellow of the New Economics Foundation and a research associate of Co-​ops UK, works on co-​operative democracy, co-​ops for care services and co-​operative solutions for the self-​employed. Sara Davies is Senior Research Fellow at the Personal Finance Research Centre (University of Bristol), conducting social research on household finance policy. Jamie Evans is Senior Research Associate at the Personal Finance Research Centre (University of Bristol) and conducts research related to financial inclusion and consumer financial services.

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

Vanesa Fuertes works at the University of the West of Scotland and studies policy governance and disadvantaged groups. Hugo Gaggiotti an associate professor in the Bristol Business School at the University of the West of England, is a social anthropologist, and writes about displacement, transfiguration and liminality in organizations. Ed Gillespie is a futurenaut, author and provocateur. Jonathan Gosling is a sailor and emeritus professor, interested in responsible citizenship. Neil Howard is a researcher and activist based at the University of Bath. David Hunter is a lawyer with Bates Wells, an activist and aspiring social innovator. Michal Izak works at the University of Roehampton and writes about conceptual and practical complexities associated with the renegotiation of boundaries between work and non-​work. Carol Jarvis is a professor in the Bristol Business School at the University of the West of England, and is interested in teambased entrepreneurial learning and the everyday experience of change and innovation in organizations. Paul Kahawatte works as a facilitator, mediator and trainer with Navigate Co-​op, helping people to work together to support social and environmental justice.

viii

List of Contributors

Daiga Kamerāde works at the University of Salford and researches work and employment, the voluntary sector, and wellbeing and mental health. Selen Kars-​Unluoglu is a senior lecturer in the Bristol Business School at the University of the West of England and researches lived experiences of innovation, learning and capability development in organizations. Miki Kashtan is a practical visionary pursuing a world that works for all, based on principles and practices rooted in feminist nonviolence. Clare Lyonette works at the University of Warwick and studies gender and the labour market, flexible and new ways of working, and work–​life balance. Anita Mangan works in the School of Management at the University of Bristol and researches co-​operatives as alternatives to austerity, marketization and precarious work. Mick McKeown works in the School of Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire and is interested in issues of power and equality within mental health services and wider society. Dan McQuillan is Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics and has worked in mental health, learning disabilities and human rights. Emilia Melville is a researcher and activist exploring commons, democracy and community in regional zero-​carbon transition.

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

Colin Nolden researches sustainable energy governance at the intersection of climate policy, demand and mobility at the University of Bristol and the University of Oxford. Richard Owen, a professor at the University of Bristol, researches the entanglements between science, technology and society and is interested in the concept of responsible innovation. Martin Parker is a professor in the School of Management at Bristol University and lead for the Inclusive Economy Initiative. Cilla Ross is Principal of the Co-​operative College and has taught, written and researched on life-​wide education and the changing nature of work, as well as aspects of adult and labour education. Harriet Shortt, Associate Professor at the University of the West of England, writes about organizational space and the materiality of work, and uses visual/arts-based methods in her research and teaching practice. Kate Simpson is Managing Director of Wasafiri Consulting and Institute and specializes in systems-based approaches to change. Michele Stua is an independent researcher and an internationally recognized expert on climate change governance and finance. Simon Taylor researched union co-​ops for his Master’s dissertation and is a trade union activist seconded full time to union duties in a large local authority.

x

newgenprepdf

List of Contributors

Daniel Tischer works in the School of Management at the University of Bristol and writes on money and banking. Malu Villela, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Bristol, researches and engages with social economies, crosssector governance and alternative types of organizations in cities. Tracey Warren works at the University of Nottingham and researches paid and unpaid work and the relationship between them. Hen Wilkinson is Director of Community Resolve and a conflict facilitator stretching back 25  years, as well as a lecturer, writer and practitioner in constructive engagement with conflict. Alice Willatt lectures at the University of Bath, holding interests in feminist care ethics, emergency food provisioning, alternative food networks and research co-​production.

xi

ONE

Beginning, Again Martin Parker

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. (Maya Angelou)1 There is a great deal of horror around at the moment as I write. Overwhelmed critical care departments in hospitals, quiet funerals with no relatives allowed to attend, migrant workers tramping home and the refugee and homeless dead buried in unmarked graves. This is a book prompted by an urgent optimism, but I must begin with acknowledging the desperation, tears and hurt wrought by COVID-​19. With tired eyes looking over face masks, and families crying for their dead. Every generation appears to think that they are balanced on the hinge of history, between a broken past and the possibility of a better future. This global crisis intensifies that sense that we are living through a moment that is pregnant with dread, and consequently also of possibility. Crisis, after all, comes from the Greek root krinein, to separate, decide or judge, and in turn probably from the proto Indo-​European root krei, to sieve, and therefore to discriminate between what we want to keep and what we want to throw away. The struggle for the future is what propels this book, trying to make a particular intervention into current thought and action. There are a lot of academics in these pages, but it is not meant to be an ‘academic’ book. It’s a series of provocations, short on sustained argument and references, but gesturing

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

towards the idea that rebuilding after this crisis must involve challenging pretty much everything that we know and do. Bouncing back One of the common metaphors used by politicians and policy makers has been the idea that ‘the economy’ –​and we come back to that later –​must rebound after all this is over. We have seen graphs and bar charts of decline, and then the uptick in ‘growth’ that will follow. It will be tough, we are told, but we can get our jobs back, buy a new car, have that foreign holiday. There is a longing in this, a nostalgia for what we knew and were familiar with. For some well-​heeled inhabitants of the global north, boomers with pensions, the past few decades haven’t been too bad really, so why wouldn’t we want that back? The story works for the majority of people on the planet too, not as a return to something that they have lost, but the possibility of something that they have been promised. The ‘Western’ lifestyle of burgers and travel is no more than a dream for most people in the global south, so they too are keen to be told that economic growth will return, and their lives will become closer to what they have seen on their phone screens. Politicians are not going to tell you that you can’t have what you want, otherwise they run the danger of not being re-​elected, or having stones thrown at the windows of their palaces. So the bounce-​back story works, but, rubbery metaphor that it is, only if we let the 1% keep what they already have, and stay in the realms of fantasy for the 99%. As the virus has demonstrated, and many of the chapters in this book explore, we are not all in the same boat. If you have a garden, a nice house, money and work in a knowledge-​based occupation, lockdown will not have been too painful. If you live in poor quality or overcrowded housing, are a migrant or from an ethnic minority background, or are in precarious employment, you are much more likely to die. Like an acid eating away the flesh, COVID-​19 has allowed us to see the bones of the social

2

Beginning, Again

structure, to unveil the inequalities that mean some have to travel to work in care homes and fruit-​picking fields, while others self-​isolate and edit books. Nice work, if you can get it. COVID-​19 has also allowed us to see infrastructure more clearly, to see the roads and airports, the container terminals and distribution depots, the supermarkets and smart phone apps. Human beings have made a world that is profoundly entangled (allowing the global spread of this pandemic in months) and also profoundly concentrated (meaning that certain big companies have benefitted massively). In that sense, rebounding could all too easily be shaped by the patterns of infrastructure that already exist. Since we have logistics, highways and trucks, let’s use logistics, highways and trucks. And since these are owned by big companies, and the media has an interest in selling us the idea that we need what they have to sell, then the shape of our straitjacket is already prefigured. The danger is that, as the COVID-​19 crisis becomes less urgent in the global north, we will see a rebound to carbon capitalism on a global scale, as states, corporations and consumers try to ensure that economies return to growth just as extreme austerity measures are demanded to pay down state debt. (And the heroes of the story will be strong government, and then a list of the big corporations that have provided us with supermarkets, pharmaceuticals, logistics, home entertainment and social media.) Crisis will be forgotten for a while, and human beings will once again imagine that they really are the masters of the world. If we bounce back, the ball thrown hard from US President Donald Trump’s pudgy hand, then we could rebound to a world in which choices and opportunities are radically unequal, in which big companies such as Amazon, Walmart, Netflix and others have consolidated their market dominance, and smart surveillance protects the elites from the masses. It doesn’t take much for this to become a recognizable cyberpunk dystopia, with enclaves of smiling fools protected by snake-​eyed guardians who threaten war on their enemies, while outside

3

Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

in the cursed earth the starving migrants roam.2 And this is not even to mention climate change. #NoGoingBack The Extinction Rebellion Twitter hashtag is clear in its refusal of nostalgia. That past is now another country, somewhere for the history books. There are many such memes circulating now  –​recovering better, building back better, closed for good. These are frightening slogans in their uncompromising demand for the future, their grim-​jawed sense that we must let go of our fantasies and throw ourselves into something unknown. (I don’t want this. I’m frightened. It’s easier to pull the duvet up around my head and plunge into the next box set.) But the climate crisis is coming, and as the water rises and superstorms destroy cities, it will make COVID-​19 look very small. Microscopic. In an essay about politics and the pandemic from early 2020, David Runciman suggested that responses were divided depending on how the commentator thought about the future. For conservatives, he says, ‘the future is long, almost as long as the past. It is a place where we will have to live, whether we like it or not.’ This version of the future smacks of inevitability, of recognizing like grown-​ups how much of the future is already prefigured by the past. For radicals, Runciman says, ‘who itch for action sooner, the future is both more remote and more pliable. It is a place that can be what we would like it to be, if only we put in the effort.’3 I suppose that the authors in this book think that’s its worth putting in the effort. So taking a deep breath, and using other meme metaphors, this is a chance to pivot to a new normal, it’s a critical juncture, a moment of decision, an opportunity  –​an assemblage of clichés that is not itself a cliché, but should be a punch in the head. All our routines have been broken, so we have a chance to establish new ones. It is an irony that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party,

4

Beginning, Again

described Victorian capitalism in terms that seem to capture the first half of 2020. All fixed, fast-​frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-​formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Even the gender seems appropriate. Locked down, locked in, locked out, many people have had time to draw breath and notice some things about the way that they live their lives. Yet many of these changes have been positive. We will have driven and flown less, bought less, walked more, cycled more and cooked at home more. The air is cleaner and our cities are quieter. We can hear the birds, and the sky is not slashed by contrails. We might have done complex meetings and projects virtually, such as this book, produced without a single face-​to-​face meeting. We might have spent more time with our families or housemates, helped neighbours or joined some mutual support or volunteering group. Perhaps we will have done some more gardening, crafts or art, or caught up on decorating or DIY. We might have read a book that we always wanted to read, or seen a film that has really made us think, and that we wouldn’t have bothered with in busier times. We will have wondered what we really need and remembered to value some very ordinary things that we miss. (And yes, as I said before, this experience is not universal and is shaped by the already existing patterns of labour, care, spatial and financial inequality and so on. Patriarchy, xenophobia and exploitation did not disappear. Lockdown does not mean one thing, but that variability also means that not all pandemic experience is bad, or good. It means that we can see the world we have made more clearly for a moment.)

5

Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

Whether valuing these quieter routines, or seeing the jagged bones of the social more clearly, COVID-​19 has made us ask questions about what we want to return to. What sorts of local forms of resilience have grown, and what new communities have been built? What sorts of organizations and businesses have survived the crisis, and which have disappeared? Has universal basic income become politically possible, and can we imagine borrowing and stimulus measures for a green new deal? What sorts of narratives about nations have encouraged people to remember forms of co-​operation in adversity, and how have different neighbourhoods coped with the demands of collective support? Have less ‘efficient’ supply chains provided better buffers against uncertainty, and have less financialized companies had the reserves that allowed them to survive in adverse circumstances? What mobilities of people and things have been necessary, and when has it been better to stay still? Politics and change It is easy to demand change, to stand on a soap box and say that something ought to be done, but without specifying who does what and when. As if there were an audience of fixing monkeys who would listen to our pronouncements and then go and make things happen. This book could easily be seen to be an example of that. Yet this book is just one tiny fragment of a torrent of writings from across the political spectrum, from people across the globe, who are trying to make sense of COVID-​19. Everyone has an opinion about it, and for most people the central issue is what lessons we learn. What should, or shouldn’t, we do in future, whether that is a narrow matter of being prepared for another pandemic, or a demand for system change. The idea that the virus is teaching us something is common; the question is just what it is saying. This is what I hear. First, when discussing climate change the response is usually that we can’t change, or that we are changing but these things

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Beginning, Again

take time, or that we can only change some things but not others. The past 50 years has been one of missed opportunities, of warnings unheeded and strategic marketing and public relations funded by oil company budgets claiming that science was wrong, of meetings where rich countries protect what they have and poor ones have to live with the consequences. But the rapid and massive response to the virus demonstrates just how much can change and how quickly. It shows us that this is about political will, not economic or infrastructural inertia. Hospitals can be built in weeks, homeless people can be housed, basic income can be guaranteed, and carbon emissions can fall drastically. Charles Eisenstein’s essay, ‘The coronation’, contains a nice analysis of the paradoxes of corona giving us the opportunity for a ‘reset’.4 Not just vague promises, or cautious reform, but really radical change. We have seen that happen over the past few months. Second, the nature of the economic needs to be rethought. For the past century, business and economics schools in universities have been teaching that something called ‘the economy’ has a particular set of rules and imperatives. It is almost as if ‘the economy’ is assumed to be a demarcated sphere of action –​something to do with tax, investments, finance –​that underpins what happens in everyday life. For many people the economic sphere is external to their lives, something that affects their ability to live in a safe home, eat good food, clothe their children, but that they have no control over. The glimmering skyscrapers of New  York, London and Tokyo are where the market lives, and it’s best not to upset it in case it chooses to take vengeance. But this disembedding of the economy from everyday lives makes no sense, because the economic is never separate from all the other ways in which we might describe ourselves and the others we care about. It is one part of a complex system that allows human lives to be lived well or lived badly, and its abstraction from those lives simply makes it more likely that

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

it will benefit some and hurt many others. The economy needs to be reclaimed.5 Finally, because of who I am and where I live, many of the authors in this book tend to be from the city of Bristol and the south-​west of England. In some sense, this makes the book parochial, because there are no voices here from the global south, and only a few from outside the UK. But this groundedness is also important here too, because it points to the idea that demands for things to be done are often local ones. They happen in streets, houses and cities, because politics (just like economics) is not restricted to what happens in elected chambers and global climate change meetings such as COP26 in 2021. Indeed, we could argue that the response to COVID-​1 9 has been depressingly national, with comparisons between states being weaponized to claim higher testing rates, lower death rates, faster response times, quicker releases from lockdown and so on. Many of the authors in this book, including the academics, are involved in local and regional activism. They have taken to heart the idea that what they do, in their cities and their lives, matters. Mutualism, care, community are words that refer to things that are close to us, whether that is Bristol, Barcelona, Belo Horizonte or Bulawayo. Nation states are important, but they are not the only places where politics gets done, and they are very rarely sites for radical change, being often already co-​opted by people and organizations who are invested in the status quo. Any crisis asks questions of common sense. It exposes the problems with existing arrangements, provokes responses that were previously unthinkable and collectively reminds us that all that appears to be solid can very easily melt into air. Arundhati Roy has suggested that the pandemic is a ‘portal’, an opening into a different world, and she is very clear –​writing about the US and India –​that this could easily be a world of sickening inequality and suffering.6 Or it could not, so let’s dispose of nostalgia, and make the future with courage.

8

Beginning, Again

This book At the start of lockdown in the UK, in March 2020, I asked people I knew whether they would be interested in writing short essays about the possibility of a better future after COVID-​19.7 I told them that I would be requiring the text very soon, that I  would only allow them 4,000 words and very few references, and there would be no money in it. I also worried that, in the middle of the chaos, my forced optimism was tin-​eared, misunderstanding the gravity of the times. I even thought about calling the book ‘Covidtopia’, deliberately jarring so violently with the mood that my intention could not be mistaken. I also worried that this was a bad idea, an opportunistic excuse for another book that no-​one needs, and that I should do something else instead. Like collecting shopping for elderly neighbours, or learning how to make facemasks from old dishcloths. But within a week, I had received well over twice as many offers of chapters as I  needed. Other people seemed to be thinking the same as me. Lots of other people, all wanting to grow something good from all this shit. Even by shrinking the chapters and growing the book, I still had to reject half of them. So imagine this book twice the size, ten times the size, with essays on changing legal structures for companies, on play, on children, on transport and holidays, on consumption and marketing, on compassion, nature, housing, meat, activism, social media, universities and, and, and … What you have here is a document of a particular time, of a moment when the world seemed to be becoming undone, and many people started to imagine that it might be stitched together differently. It was a moment before Black Lives Matter activists toppled the statue of the slaver Edward Colston in Bristol. While the shops were still closed. Before the second wave. And before whatever else has happened since I wrote these words. This series of mini-​manifestos, and all the chapters that never got written, add up to a collective longing for a

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

different way of life, a different way of relating to each other, and to the non-​humans that surround us. As you read this now, whether COVID-​19 is still present or has become history, try to think back to this moment, that splinter in the eye of history. We should make this mean something, in the name of those who have died and those who come after us. The pandemic was a dress rehearsal, a warning, a reminder that the human relationship with the non-​human (whether virus or planet) is at breaking point. There must be no going back.

10

TWO

Telling a New Story David Hunter

We can, together, reimagine our place in this world. As human beings we all have the outrageous fortune to be here on this planet at this moment of extreme consequence.1 Christiana Figueres is adamant that this is the moment in which we are collectively writing the future of humanity. Christiana Figueres is worth listening to. She is the Costa Rican who was one of the architects of the Paris Agreement. We are constantly writing humanity’s future (and living the future others have written for us). However, as existential risks swirl around us, threatening to combine in a perfect tornado, it feels more important than ever that we step into our role as authors of our collective destiny. This authorship involves a creative imagining and a vivid communicating and is achieved, most powerfully, through stories. Stories set humans apart from other living organisms on the planet. They have the capacity to shift the minds and moods of nations, yet in turn are influenced and affected by the particular language (down to individual words) with which we choose to communicate them. This chapter looks at archetypal elements of the great stories. It identifies the story that has dominated human culture over recent generations and some other stories it has ignored. It engages with the remarkable rewriting that has been taking place during the COVID-​19 crisis, the language used and the lessons this offers

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

for us as we build a new narrative and share the stories that flow from it to create the future we want for our descendants. This chapter tells its story from the perspective of its teller, so is a white, Western, privileged version of where we have been and where we are going. It focuses on a possible positive future, but in describing some of the positive effects of the pandemic only, it is not intended to be dismissive of the enormous pain and disturbance many have suffered. It offers one reality, by no means the only one, but hopefully one that contains sufficient traces of universality to offer something for all readers. The magic ingredients The following table identifies, with reference to The Wizard of Oz, the core elements found in most of the great stories, as distilled by the Stronger Stories initiative.2 Everyday hero

Universal, distinct, interesting Ordinary world Relatable, but also frustrating Compelling villain Manifesting an inner frustration to overcome Mentor and gifts Wisdom and experience Call to adventure Trigger Allies and gifts

Support en route

Dorothy Kansas Wicked Witch of the West

Glinda and red shoes Tornado to Oz Scarecrow, Tin Man, Lion

Three challenges Jeopardy and struggle

Wicked Witch; flying monkeys; weary Wizard

Better world

Home to Kansas with Toto

Transformation

Not every narrative maps directly on to this, but we will see in this chapter various echoes of these elements recurring.

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Telling a New Story

The narrative before COVID-​19: more, more, more! There are always multiple narratives in circulation. Here we identify the dominant tale of recent times, but also reference two others, relatively overlooked, which resonate as the shortcomings of that pre-​eminent story become apparent and we seek alternatives. Globalization is the process enabling financial markets and corporations to operate internationally, largely as a result of deregulation and improved communications. This is, arguably, the ultimate manifestation of capitalism, with the entire planet regarded as a source of raw materials and labour; a series of markets to be developed and exploited; and a collection of jurisdictions through which to move capital, ideally accumulating perpetually and rarely resting long enough to be taxed. This has been the dominant narrative of the Anthropocene, built around tales of the desirability of wealth and the virtues of generating it. In many respects, it has been a rousing success story: increasing immensely humans’ abilities to communicate with one another, travel easily around the globe, and lift millions of the poorest people out of extreme poverty.3 For many, it carries the technicolour lustre of the yellow brick road to the Emerald City. It has been increasingly apparent, however (even to ardent advocates for that narrative4), that it is unsustainable on its established trajectory. It has reached the point where the pursuit of wealth has become its own undoing, with the effects of biodiversity loss, climate heating and wealth inequalities undermining the economic, social and political foundations on which it depends. Behind the glamour of the Wizard, there are glimpses of a disgruntled old man, weary at the effort of preserving the façade, but struggling to see beyond it. To turn to an old fable, if capitalism is the goose that laid the golden egg, globalization has been factory farming geese until there is no land for anything else, creating conditions for

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

zoonoses like COVID-​19 to flourish and in which those with the gold will have nothing to spend it on. There is a yearning and a real need for other stories. Counter-​stories The US cosmologist Carl Sagan used an image of Earth as a ‘pale blue dot’ taken by the Voyager space probe in 1990 to offer a compelling tale of human history.5 In a few hundred words he created perhaps the ultimate perspective of the place and endeavours of humans in the vastness of time and space and conveyed a sense of the fragility not only of our lives but of the planet itself: the only place we know of that provides the conditions for life. It is a story that, depending on the disposition of the listener, can be awe-​inspiring or overwhelming. It builds on a foundational, simple truth –​we live on, and rely on, the earth –​but it is so fundamental that for most of us, most of the time, we are blind to it. A similar story was born when the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration agency (NASA) approached the scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s asking what they should send to Mars to establish definitively whether life existed there. Lovelock disappointed them by demonstrating, without the need for their mission, that there’s no life on the red planet. From this, the Gaia hypothesis6 grew, as Lovelock proposed that the conditions for life on Earth are the product of the organic and inorganic elements of the planet interacting synergistically to form a complex, self-​regulating system. Humans are one part of that system –​a system that adapts to preserve the whole if it suffers changes that threaten its equilibrium. Some sections of the scientific community bristled, but the empirical evidence increasingly suggests human activity is dramatically disturbing that equilibrium with ominous consequences. Can these two stories, both questioning the necessity and wisdom of growth-​driven globalization, inform new of seeing our world, and our collective future?

14

Telling a New Story

The response to COVID-​19: “This ain’t Kansas, Toto!” The speed and thoroughness with which apparently entrenched elements of the previous globalization narrative have been jettisoned as a result of COVID-​19 has been remarkable. It has been disorienting and breathless, as if the animated dog Gromit7 is up front, frantically laying down the track for us seconds before we need it. The scale of the threat to human life posed by COVID-​ 19 has forced governments into stark choices. There has not only been a broad consistency in their responses but those responses illustrate some fundamental principles underpinning our societal priorities. These are captured in the following vignettes: • Protection of human life is more important than short-​term economic performance –​this carries moral weight and is also pragmatic, as letting the virus rip through society would have devastating economic, as well as human, consequences. • Economic performance is dependent on a healthy workforce –​ and this is true of the low-​paid and so-​ called unskilled workers performing care work as much as anyone else. • In unusual times, we cannot rely on the market to meet society’s needs –​it is to government we then turn (and so too do businesses that at other times seek to reduce the influence and effectiveness of the state). • In such times, even when our trust in politicians has been eroded, we expect them to act in our interests –​ we accept laws that severely constrain our individual liberties and we conform to those laws, notwithstanding that there are adverse personal consequences. • Citizens will put their lives on the line for the greater good –​ a common refrain among those engaged in such selfless acts is that this is what they were trained to do, and

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

• •

•

•

•

why they do their job: their work has meaning and they stay true to it. There is a value in investing in knowledge and listening to experts –​and not just when convenient, as the US is discovering. There is a forest of magic money trees8 if you know where to look –​finance has resumed its role as one useful means to achieve our greater end, rather than being an end in itself. We are all stakeholders  –​at different times, we are the customer, the employee, or part of the supply chain; sometimes we are the owner (through our pensions) and sometimes part of the directly affected community. We are always stakeholders in impacts on the environment and on future generations. Our appreciative instinct is easily accessed and mutually sustaining –​those applauding care workers gain from the gesture as well as those applauded and it ripples through society as gratitude is voiced for all manner of simple acts of service. Anything is possible –​former Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “You may as well debate whether autumn should follow summer”9 as debate the merits of globalization. It is not only that major narrative, but its underpinning assumptions, that are now up for discussion.

A bigger story We might view the current crisis as one episode in a meta-​ narrative of humanity and the planet. Homo sapiens have been around for roughly one million of the 4.6 billion years of Earth’s existence. We have begun to exert dominion over the planet and its other inhabitants only in the past few hundred years and only in the most recent decades to disrupt its equilibrium. We have not proceeded in ignorance. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring10, advocating an urgent change

16

Telling a New Story

in our relationship with nature. Ten years later, The Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth11 warned that economic growth was incompatible with life on a planet of finite resources. Economic growth accelerated. Scientists became more adept at finding evidence of our adverse impact on the planet and nature itself began to demonstrate this with dramatic increases in desertification, ocean acidification, flooding and wildfires. Humanity kept calm and carried on consuming. Are we now encountering our final trial? Having failed to act in the face of climate catastrophe because it is not right here, right now, we appear to have responded appropriately (initially at least) to the COVID-​19 crisis and prioritized life over money. Can we join the dots and recognize similar changes are needed, now, to avert future, greater crises? Can we build on what has already been done? Or will we revert to a decline and fall of a global civilization? Build Back Better (not busyness12 as usual) It’s reasonable to assume that, for many, the phrase ‘there’s no place like home’ is the last refrain they want to hear as countries emerge from lockdown. Our instinct may be to flock to the familiar, but wiser words come in the form of the UN-​approved response to disaster scenarios: ‘Build Back Better’. Do not replace what contributed to, or was unequal to, the recent disaster with more of the same, but come up with something less likely to trigger a repetition and/​or more likely to survive the next one. The seeds for this lie in the language we use to discuss our current experiences and our future aspirations. Language during the crisis has been awash with military imagery, with talk of battle and defeating the disease, of mobilization against a deadly enemy and citations of bravery. These are problematic, but when the British Queen broadcast to the nation in April 2020, she echoed E.M. Forster, who, during the Second World War, invoked fundamental decency as an essential bulwark against

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

forces of evil. This is a more constructive message to build on, from a persuasive messenger (the UK’s Glinda), supporting a narrative of what we gain in co-​creating something new, rather than retreating to familiar but flawed ways. It was during the London Blitz, not when the war was over, that William Beveridge was asked to write the report that paved the way both for Britain’s recovery from the war and the creation of its welfare state. It is now, in the midst still of the COVID-​19 crisis, that we need to write our new narrative. It need not be science fiction. Much of what we need is already available to us  –​whether renewable energy technology or different means of food production, green finance or purposeful business, local mutual aid programmes and global Sustainable Development Goals. William Gibson’s observation, “The future is already here –​ it is just not evenly distributed”,13 particularly resonates. Our task is largely one of redistribution, restraint and reuse. It is not about carrying on until new technologies exist to enable us to continue as we were. It is about confronting the fear of change that also held back Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion, and letting go of the story of globalization that is no longer fit for our purpose. A post-​COVID-​19 narrative No consensus has yet emerged around what should replace the narrative of wealth creation. The loss aversion instinct identified by Daniel Kahneman14 has seemed so deeply rooted that the will cannot be mustered to step away from the credit card (real and metaphorical). The COVID-​19 crisis has shown us both that this is possible, and what it might look like. Instead of a narrative of wealth, we need to embrace one dedicated to health. This must underpin all our relationships, which must be based on care: of ourselves and one another, for our work, and what we eat. We need to commit to improving the health of our soils, water courses

18

Telling a New Story

and oceans; our air quality and global temperatures; and the diversity and resilience of our ecosystems: in short, our personal and planetary health. It is for us, collectively, to write our story as Christiana Figueres advocates. People from a Swedish teenager to an English nonagenarian who walked around his garden 100 times have shown that anyone can assume a heroic role. Politicians, business leaders, financiers and media figures all have the capacity, at this moment, to become hero or villain. Just as Dorothy’s friends found the qualities they thought they lacked within themselves, so businesses adopting B Corp15 or Fourth Sector16 principles can discover their hearts, and politicians who embrace the clear sightedness and passion of the youth climate strikers may find their courage without the need of help from a wizard. Our allies can be those who, like Beveridge, have already done the thinking. Kate Raworth has already developed Doughnut Economics,17 which is sufficiently compelling for the city of Amsterdam to adopt it (see Chapter Eleven). She recently captured where we are when she said, “The world is experiencing a series of shocks and surprise impacts which are enabling us to shift away from the idea of growth to ‘thriving’. Thriving means our wellbeing lies in balance. We know it so well in the level of our body. This is the moment we are going to connect bodily health to planetary health.”18 Might another ally be the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson? Almost his last public utterance before succumbing to COVID-​19 was the statement that “there really is such a thing as society”,19 directly contradicting the famous utterance by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1987. When Johnson emerged from hospital, he declared, “It is thanks to … love that our NHS [National Health Service] has been unbeatable.” Embracing the power of love need not be confined to the NHS. Respected business gurus such as Robert Greenleaf and Stephen Covey have argued for bringing love into business

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

practice and culture. If the Prime Minister can hang on to that thought, and let it guide him in his role, particularly as Britain hosts COP26 and the G7 in 2021, and if others follow his lead, he will be one hero creating the space for many others to be the same in their lives. We can each own our story like the janitor at NASA who, when asked what his role was by President Kennedy on a visit to Mission Control, replied, “I am helping America put a man on the moon, sir.” The Wizard of Oz, like any great story, teaches us something about ourselves. We are at the convergence of a greater awareness of where we are in our meta-​story, appreciation of the positive tales emerging from the crisis and an urgency for a new narrative. Powered by compassion, decency and love, we have the opportunity to prioritize health and care, in all their forms and for all forms on our planet. This would mean a shift to building business relationships from the question ‘How can we help each other to improve lives, and make some money, without damaging the environment?’ In doing so, we might achieve a sort of homecoming, returning, not to Kansas, but to a new relationship with our pale blue dot.

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THREE

A World of Care Neil Howard

The COVID-​19 crisis is different from anything we have ever experienced, and different from what the majority of us ever imagined experiencing. Yet  alongside the suffering and dislocation, a huge window of opportunity has opened, to leverage the best of the present into a future that works for all. I argue that that this future could centre around care, which has been irrupting back into the mainstream of public and political life. Our task as political actors is to harness the hope, possibility and desire for change that this is generating and to channel it towards that better future. This chapter aims to contribute to efforts in this direction. Why is now so different? In ‘normal’ life, those deemed economically expendable are left to suffer and often die. Given this, one may have expected our political leaders to respond to the COVID-​19 outbreak in neo-​Malthusian ways, letting it root out the ‘weak’ while business carries on as usual and perhaps even benefits.1 Yet this is not how they have responded. In fact, for all their dithering, their basic response, at least in the first major phase, has been to subordinate business in the service of society, with the express intention of caring for all, and in particular for vulnerable groups. Concretely, this has involved pressing pause on most of the economy, taking progressive steps such as infrastructure nationalization, and even efforts to end homelessness. Most leaders have been exhorting us to look after each other. This

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

both acknowledges that there is another principle around which society can be organized –​care –​and, temporarily at least, sees the system logic of profit suspended in favour of it. Part of this radical divergence from the status quo can be explained by the universal nature of a pandemic. One individual can ultimately be a vector of transmission for all others. Likewise, protecting (caring for) one individual becomes a universal imperative –​if we fail to protect the one, we might all get ill. In the same vein, if we are to protect all of us, we must act as if each individual life is all our lives. That is why contained in the logic of social distancing –​however worrying it may also be  –​is something so potentially transformative. Authorities that usually compel us to be separate and alienated in our togetherness, our collective experience of market life, are now compelling us (and in many cases pleading with us) to be together in our separateness, and this time in service of life (our lives) beyond the market. It is also significant that so many of us are now experiencing a sense of shared humanity. Again, this is because a pandemic brings home that we are all made of the same stuff, we are all human, vulnerable, and thus in need of care. This embodied experience of our shared vulnerability is extremely connecting. And the connection (and in many cases community) being weaved between people is manifest in the sheer scale at which so many are responding with acts of care, ranging from the millions participating in localized mutual aid groups to the hundreds of thousands who have volunteered in support of national health systems. Care is also returning to the foreground of public consciousness through the blurring of ‘traditional’ boundaries. Typically, within Western market society, home and work life are constructed not just as distinct but as opposites. Yet during lockdown, for perhaps the first time in the history of capitalist civilization, we have almost all been asked to work and care from home at the same time. This has had a number of consequences. First, it explodes the fiction of separate realms

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A World of Care

and makes it possible for many to acknowledge that they have caring commitments and priorities beyond the domain of work even while at work. Second, it has made clear that care is the foundation of all else, including ‘work’, since those with dependants have largely been asked to work ‘as much as possible’ and only after attending to their caring responsibilities. This is like a general return of that which has been repressed. And the repressed is also returning socially in the sense that lockdown/​slowdown is exposing the routinized brutality of the system we normally live under. Whereas, in ordinary times, many people are too busy to worry about homelessness, too stressed to think of those living hand to mouth, and too distracted to remember all those bodies in need of specialized attention, right now such societal detachment is impossible. Slowdown is bringing vulnerability into the public consciousness like never before, focusing attention at last on everyone for whom the system is not well designed. Partly this is because millions have at last had the time to stop and see what was always there. But partly it is because slowdown has affected ‘normal’ lives so deeply –​with countless numbers losing income security and access to the services they rely on –​ that suddenly they have gained a sense of what life is ordinarily like for disadvantaged groups. This has led to a groundswell of calls for the better organization of our collective resources so as to care for those who usually fall through the cracks. In turn, I think all of this is opening deep-​rooted questions about meaning and how society is or is not set up to support people in experiencing it. Ordinarily, large swathes of the population live working lives characterized by the experiences that David Graeber describes in his book, Bullshit Jobs.2 That is, they do things that neither care for anyone nor carry any meaning, which is part of why so many people ordinarily feel so alienated. But now, for the first time in most of our lives, we are living, however briefly, in a system that urges us to take responsibility for each other and invites us to do so. In addition, given that the incessant treadmill has momentarily stopped,

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

we now actually have the time to do so. It is no coincidence that millions have therefore stepped forward, and what this points to is that people both need care and want to offer it, which stands in stark contrast to the individualizing stories behind neoliberal claims that ‘there is no such thing as society’. Moreover, it supports claims that humans have evolved to crave both care and meaning, and that performing the former often leads to an experience of the latter.3 The radical potential in this is huge, and I think it explains a great deal of why so many people are presently connecting to hope that the world could really be different. Four moments In organizing hope towards this different world, I  think it may be useful to break the times we are living through into four distinct moments. All are interrelated and overlapping, but separating them can help us to recognize and act on their uniqueness. Each can be seen in Figure 3.1. In Moment 1, millions have begun to perceive the system we live under as a system and to see the many holes in it. People recognize that it leaves too many uncared for, unsafe or on the verge of being so. This is generating anger and resistance. In Moment 2, people are sensing that other ways of doing things are possible, with citizens and political leaders responding by taking care of each other through organizing time and the flow of resources to do so. With Moment 3, we are witnessing the irruption of long-​ suppressed needs into the mainstream of public and political life. Care has returned as a central principle of our collective being. Similarly, a sense of connection and community is being fostered in our shared vulnerability and the many caring responses to it. The interaction between care and community is generating meaning for millions. All of this coalesces in Moment 4, which I understand to be woven through and a consequence of the previous three

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A World of Care

Figure 3.1: Making sense of moments of opportunity

Ordinary life in the system

Moment 1

CRISIS!

Moment 2 We begin to see the system as a system; are aware that it is failing…

We see and experience alternatives; orthodoxies start breaking down…

The better world beyond…

Moment 3

Moment 4 We experience a rebirth of possibility and of…

Long-suppressed shared needs return to the foreground:

HOPE!

care, connection, meaning

Source: Author’s own.

moments:  that hope is back, specifically in that it may be possible for us to live in a world set up to care for and attend to our needs rather than one focused on accumulation. Vision Every revolution needs a vision, a big story (see Chapter Two), and in organizing our hope I  think we need one too. For me, this could centre around a different telling of the human story. The story we have so far been told is tragic. It holds that humans are inherently self-​serving, that there is never enough to go around, and that we have to compete in order to decide who gets what. This is the definition of hopeless, and it is being contradicted by the explosion of solidarity witnessed during the COVID-​19 crisis. The alternative story that I think has just become possible is that we are complex creatures capable of love as well as harm. We are primed for connection because we are born into and sustained by webs of care. These webs can be nurtured, and when they are, we grow. If we trust in each other and in the abundance of life on this planet, we are able to co-​operate

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

in order to distribute resources in caring ways to meet our individual and collective needs. Doing this is deeply meaningful, in part because these needs are always shared. We are united in being ‘needing-​beings’, for we all require food, water and air, just as we require care, connection and meaning. These threads of sharedness are also threads of possibility. What Ana Dinerstein calls ‘critical hope’4 is revitalized right now precisely because these threads are again perceivable on a mass scale. People are connecting to their shared humanity and with each other; they are doing so in order to offer care through the provision of things like food and water, and in the process they are experiencing meaning. In it are contained the foundations of a better future. In my version of the future, which is inspired by people like Miki Kashtan (see Chapter Seventeen of this book) and Ian Gough,5 our basic needs are provided for, be these food, water, clean air, or shelter, alongside systems to support our physical and mental health. We are the ones doing the providing. Because of this, we all feel deeply that we belong, are part of a community, and this engenders a foundational trust. That trust is what enables us to stand humbly but calmly in the face of uncertainty. For although we won’t always know how to deal with our challenges, we do know that we are committed to finding solutions that work for everyone, because in this world everyone is valued. Principles Organizing for this world will involve many strategies and numerous disappointments. To that end, I  offer a list of principles for the strategic and tactical choices that we are going to have to make. Although far from complete, if I am right in my analysis as to why this time and the four moments within it are so different and full of possibility, then these follow on logically as core guides for what we do.

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A World of Care

• Grow the space opened by at least one of the moments described earlier. Otherwise, we waste the opening and the energy attached to it. • Link different moments to each other. This will grow the space opened by each moment and do so in ways that could set off mutually reinforcing dynamics. • Link everything to the golden thread of hope. As the social theorist Ernst Bloch6 argued half a century ago, hope is the foundation of all progressive politics because it affirms that other better worlds are possible and that we can sense them in this one. In my view, it is therefore absolutely vital that whatever strategic choices we make be grounded in the intention to grow people’s hope. • Link everything to a meta-​narrative centred around care. The return of care is at the heart of the return of hope and in this sense it is vital that we pivot our stories around care as the alternative principle by which we could organize our society. • Build coalitions. All social movements are pushing for a world of care. Right now, each is thinking about how to respond to this crisis, and all are asking how best to use the opportunities it has opened. This makes this moment an unprecedented chance to push for the broadest possible coalition aiming in the direction of a world of care. • Be intentionally diverse. In actively co-​creating our coalitions, we would be wise to develop strategies and tactics in conversation with those we might not ordinarily encounter or agree with. This will increase our chances of reaching across existing divides, something that this crisis is making possible. • Target different pillars of the status quo. In their book on civil resistance, Paul and Mark Engler argue that major social shifts tend to seem impossible until they feel inevitable.7 The avalanche of inevitability gathers pace as established pillars of society begin to reject the old paradigm and move into line with the new one. Churches, mosques,

27

Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

temples, universities, unions, business associations, public bodies, civil society coalitions: all are pillars of the norm, and we need to progressively nudge each towards a demand for a different future based on care. • Walk the walk while talking the talk. Few qualities are more inspiring than integrity. And if we want to build a world based on care for our shared humanity, then we will need to treat everyone with care and respect. For those in positions of privilege, this means confronting the painful reality that our privilege is made possible by the suffering of those who lack it. Towards a world of care In applying these principles towards the more caring world latent in this one, I think the following could be fundamental steps to take and targets to work towards: • Mutual aid. Already, exceptional solidarity has coalesced around local mutual aid groups providing unleadership (see Chapter Thirteen in this book) to people throughout this crisis. All of us can be a part of these. They are vital for now and as prefigurations of the better, more caring world. • Universal basic services and universal basic income. If we want to live in a world of care in which we share our resources to attend to our needs, we require the infrastructure to make that work. This means well-​funded, basic services free at the point of delivery for all. Likewise, in a money economy, we need money to survive; this makes basic income vital both as a humanitarian intervention in the present and a potential tool for leveraging the new world into existence. • A movement of movements. Inside every progressive demand, and therefore every progressive movement or organization, lies care, and specifically the desire to organize social life to advance it. Now more than ever the caring

28

A World of Care

imperative is in our collective consciousness, so now more than ever we have a chance to make care explicit as the foundation of a movement of movements that unites our struggles against a common problem and towards a common alternative. • #NoGoingBack. It is impossible not to be struck by what we are living and how different it feels. Much of that difference involves hardship. But in many respects, it is better. This cuts across party politics and makes the cry that there can be no going back, one that people of all political persuasions can rally around. Like many other powerful demands, this one is open. It does not narrowly circumscribe; rather, it articulates the essence of what is shared by so many and in the process affirms our collective interests. • A people’s assembly. I  have not discussed any of the elephants in the room: climate change, a new economy, a new social contract. This has been intentional. These are the issues and we all know it. The problem is that we are not united in how to deal with them or in believing that doing so is possible. Now, possibility is in the air, but still there is no agreement as to how to use it. For me, this makes a state-​mandated people’s assembly potentially very attractive. People’s assemblies, mentioned in several of the chapters in this book, are intentionally inclusive processes designed to arrive at solutions that care for the needs and interests of all stakeholders. In this, they could appeal both to those who may have to give up what they hold as part of the status quo and to those who want change but do not yet know how to organize it so as to care even for those who stand to lose in transition. The crisis we are living through is opening up fissures and shifting tectonic plates. As those plates shift, mountains are moving, and when they do the ground on which we stand shakes. These tremors bring danger, fear and uncertainty. But

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

they are also exhilarating. The exhilaration so many of us feel is rooted in the irruption of care and its re-​emergence as the always-​ever-​there foundation of our lives. In this, there is hope. Our challenge is to organize that hope towards the caring alternative reality that has begun to make itself visible.

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FOUR

From Conflict to Collaboration Emilia Melville and Hen Wilkinson

One of the most intriguing aspects of the experience of lockdown is coming face to face with ourselves and those we live most closely with. For many, navigating daily relationships at home and work is an exercise in dodging difficult conversations. When there is no way out –​physically or psychologically –​we are left confronting our own internal contradictions as well as butting up against the competing interests of others. This chapter explores what impact a greater awareness and understanding of those small, everyday conflicts  –​within ourselves as much as with others –​could have on our collective future. It reframes conflict as inevitable, normal and not necessarily destructive, an integral part of all human interaction and one that serves a useful purpose, directing our attention to issues that need addressing and reminding us that our interests and worldviews are not necessarily those of others. This understanding leads to a flexibility in thought and imagination, which is a key skill for navigating our relationships at home and at work, as well as for collaborative working in any arena. Conflict skills are also essential for effective stewarding of commons at any scale, the concept of commons here referring to shared resources –​from the quality of silence on your street during lockdown to public health or climate change impacts. What COVID-​19 and lockdown has made more evident is what we take for granted: when crisis happens, we recognize the layers of hidden relationships and shared world that we all inhabit. Recognizing these hidden relationships can help us to better steward the commons.

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

In this context, we draw on a conversation between Paul Kahawatte (P), Hen Wilkinson (H)  and Emilia Melville (E) exploring the potential for the lockdown to transform our experiences of conflict in a positive way. We know that for many people lockdown is hard and dangerous, and that conflict in domestic violence situations may be deadly. However, crisis calls for work of the imagination, and so this chapter aims to leave you with some clues and excitement about how we might transform our experiences of conflict and what this might mean for the world after COVID-​19. What is conflict? P: ‘Our culture doesn’t teach us much that’s useful about how to relate internally, interpersonally, how to operate in groups. Groups often find themselves in a mess. Even when people have done lots of work looking at themselves, they can still slip back into patterns around conflict that don’t work so well.’ A widespread reluctance to engage with conflict in any form is perhaps in part because it is often conflated in our minds with the idea of violence, and we are given little or no training around how to manage interpersonal conflict as we grow up. When we are not in lockdown, we can dodge facing these differences through avoidance strategies –​putting off the conversation, leaving the room or house, arranging diversionary activities. But when we have no choice about staying or going, we are forced into negotiations. How each of us individually understands conflict and our particular ways of engaging with it will affect those negotiations and how we engage with the views of others. H:  ‘Conflict is an indicator of something within a system that is clashing, not necessarily wrong, an

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From Conflict to Collaboration

indicator of where to put some attention. Conflict is a complex system, with multiple routes through. Where systems bump up against each other there will always be friction –​this is where my sense of inevitability comes from. It is how we manage, understand, engage with conflict that takes us to a next place.’ P: ‘I feel 100% aligned around the inevitability and at least neutrality of conflict, I think it can even be positive. Something that emerges within systems, at the overlap of systems, and it’s more about how we engage with it. It’s a process, not a thing. Feedback that something is not working very well, or there’s an opportunity to evolve. And if we don’t give it attention it will raise its volume much of the time.’ H: ‘I’m keen to avoid framing conflict as wrong or as a problem because I think that’s the very thing that leads to conflict avoidance and to a lack of skills.’ Although our experiences of conflict are often difficult, it is in fact a useful form of feedback. Without an understanding of conflict as normal, it becomes frightening, an exercise in wielding power of multiple types. H:  ‘It’s power relations in action  –​how you position yourself or are positioned (or maybe a bit of both), the interface between our own internal worlds and programmings and the external worlds and contexts that we’re operating in. Conflict itself is neither good or bad but an inevitable dynamic in human interaction.’ What form conflict takes depends on what form power takes. One form of power derives from being a trusted person in a community.

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

H: ‘Conflict is a localized dynamic, different in different cultures and communities and closely related to trust. When I  did an exercise based on power and agency around sorting out water shortages with development workers in Yemen in 2014, the person with the least relevance in that situation was the local policeman. When I do the same exercise around local community development in the UK, the police tend to be among the most relevant.’ In many urban areas of the global north, community has been eroded such that we don’t know who to trust. What if we knew of people we could reach out to for help with conflict before it got to the point where we needed to call the emergency services? How can we transform our approach to conflict? P:  ‘The management thinker Mary Parker Follett1 suggests that “there are three ways of dealing with difference:  domination, compromise and integration. By domination, only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.” ’ How can we transform our understanding of and approaches to conflict so that we increasingly see options beyond domination or compromise? We live in a complex world of interlocking systems –​as the pandemic has made clear –​and so we need to engage with conflict at multiple levels, including the systems and processes we turn to when we face conflict, and the way we understand our own internal world. Anxiety is a key component of conflict, both impeding clear communication and an outcome of an unsuccessful

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From Conflict to Collaboration

interaction. Having in place prior understandings and skills in relation to managing conflict has been shown to greatly reduce anxiety, both at a personal and at a shared level of experience.2 Suddenly being locked down in a house with people you may or may not have chosen to be with or know well, you may feel anxiety about whether negotiations will lead to collaboration or competition –​something that will only emerge over time. But if you are confident of a common vocabulary and approach to the situation, the chances of a constructive outcome are greatly increased. P:  ‘In his work on restorative systems, Dominic Barter3 talks about the need for prior agreement about how we’ll handle conflict. He uses the metaphor of human dwellings, where you’ll always find some version of a kitchen and some version of a bedroom. That’s because humans have noticed that with a certain rhythm they get tired, they get hungry, and rather than wondering what to do every day they get ready for it –​a bed, a kitchen. What’s the equivalent of that for conflict? If we stand back we see that conflict also arises with a rhythm –​it’s part of life. So how do we prepare for that in the same way that we build a kitchen? It’s a terrible idea to build your kitchen when you’re really hungry, or your bed when you’re really tired. It’s even worse to set up your agreements about how you handle conflict when you’re in conflict because you may not even be talking to each other.’ P: ‘There’s a framework developed by Miki Kashtan4 [see Chapter Seventeen in this book] that I find quite helpful, both in terms of smaller units like an organization or a family and at a much larger social scale. Kashtan identifies five systems: decision making; resource flow –​how we share resources; how we engage with conflict; how we gather feedback –​or not; and information flow –​how information flows within whatever unit you’re talking

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

about. I think it’s useful to think of a sixth also, support and care. Part of this perspective, from Dominic Barter’s work, is that we have a pattern or system for handling these parts of life, whether or not we have noticed it or chosen it. We can’t avoid having a way of organizing these aspects of life.’ We don’t currently know when the lockdown is going to lift, or how. But we can share information about how we are all doing with our families, people we share a house with, our neighbours. There could be feedback if someone lights a barbeque in their garden and a neighbour says the smoke is coming in through their windows, or if noise from builders is bothering them. There is information when we walk in the park and see how many people are wearing masks and staying two metres away from each other. We also need to develop our understanding of our internal worlds. We often fail to recognize how easily good projects and initiatives are brought down by individual lack of self-​awareness, by adversarial and confrontational ways of communicating that bring about the collapse of collective endeavour. H:  ‘Experience of training development workers across multiple environments has led to an interesting observation: that while people can be taught processes, actual agreements are often stymied by the entrenched positions held by individuals. The importance of each individual developing a deeper, personal understanding of the nature of conflict and how they engage with it is essential but often bypassed in conflict training. This level of internal, visceral understanding is as key to unlocking lasting agreements with others as setting up conflict processes in advance [as discussed earlier]. In over 20 years of using experiential exercises to bring alive people’s own individual responses to conflict, I’ve

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From Conflict to Collaboration

seen how this enables them to reflect on themselves. This regularly leads to lightbulb moments and ongoing lasting change in their relationship with conflict and others. One piece of feedback from work in Yemen, for example, was that while development workers are often taught what to do in relation to conflict, they had never previously been shown how to get people to do it. Now that they understood how they themselves operated in and around conflict, they had a far better understanding of others’ responses and how to engage with them.’ One approach to facilitating such ‘lightbulb moments’ is walking people through Argyris’ Ladder of Inference (see Figure 4.1). This enables them to understand how they form their worldviews (from the moment of birth onwards) and how this then affects their actions and decision making in all spheres of their lives (note the feedback loop, which causes us all to self-​select information that fits our internal framing of some event or idea). It also brings home how others form their worldviews and leads to the unforgettable realization that there is therefore no right or wrong in anyone’s worldview, simply difference. Another approach is to ask a group to respond to three conflict scenarios  –​ in the street, at home and then at work –​by standing on pre-​prepared written words on the ground that are closest to their first reaction:  walk away, laugh, intervene, silence and so forth. As you ask people to explain where they are standing and why, multiple reasons for any one person’s response in any one moment emerge, immediately highlighting how differently we all act in different situations. The nuances of conflict jump out, from the significance of immediate contexts (hunger, tiredness) to previous experiences (how conflict was dealt with in our childhood) or a sudden awareness of our simultaneous

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

Figure 4.1: Recognizing our own worldviews I take action based on my beliefs I adopt beliefs about the world

You can improve communication (and challenge your own assumptions) by:

I draw conclusions I make assumptions based on the meanings I added

• Reflection – be more aware of your own thinking and reasoning • Advocacy – make your thinking and reasoning clear to others

I add meanings (cultural and personal)

• Enquiry – ask about the thinking and reasoning of others I select data from what I observe Observable ‘data’ and experiences (as a videotape recorder might capture it)

Source: Author’s own, based on the Ladder of Inference model developed by Chris Argyris and reproduced in Senge (1994).5

reactions to conflict at physical, emotional and intellectual levels. The inaccurate idea that we are restricted to binary ‘fight or flight’ reactions to conflict is immediately dispelled as everyone in the room identifies the subtlety and flexibility of their own and others’ conflict responses. These are simple but highly significant learnings and come into their own when trying to shape group agreements. Suddenly, there is less certainty about the ‘rightness’ of any one individual’s approach, and less need to defend a stance at all costs once it is understood how fluid our experiences truly are. Following on from that, there is more openness to the views of others and to understanding conflict as a moment when different views meet rather than a tussle between right and wrong/​your way or my way. The binary concept of conflict is diluted further, and more space arrives in the room to accommodate the thinking of others. Changing our understanding of conflict At this moment of being confronted with scarcity and challenge  –​as will be the case more often in future as

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From Conflict to Collaboration

climate and ecological collapses unfold –​it is fundamental that we develop experiences, systems, processes and skills for communities to navigate collaboratively rather than competitively. Competitive response to collapse would be disastrous. The more we can collaborate, the more likely we are to be able to take care of commons at all scales, from the peacefulness of our streets to the prosperity of our towns to the climate of our planet. Community and commons emerge where there is shared risk and shared prosperity, and in such situations there is increased potential for conflict. Just as learning to see our own inner conflicts helps us to navigate conflict with others successfully, the successful management of commons at a global scale, such as a peaceful and just response to climate change, begins with having experiences of positive navigation of conflict in our daily lives. E: ‘The clear conclusion that Elinor Ostrom6 came to when she was looking at how people manage commons round the world was that where people were successful there were accessible and quick means of addressing conflict. An example of commons working well were irrigation systems where a really important person in the community was the water arbitrator. People knew who that person was and they were always very easy to access when needed.’ Sustainable collaboration demands the active acknowledgement and working through of conflicts, an ongoing process of developing a shared collaborative ethos that underpins management of commons and encourages increased levels of reflexivity among all those working together. The more that skills and structures for managing inevitable conflicts are embedded in everyday life (from political systems and societal structures to institutions, agencies and individuals), the more easily and creatively differences of interest and worldview are accommodated.

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

P: ‘People love to collaborate, almost more than anything else, if you create the conditions for collaboration rather than for competition.’ The possibility of transformation As so many of the chapters in this book argue, COVID-​ 19 and lockdown have taken us to a moment of viscerally experiencing our interdependence: in shared risk, shared care, shared experience. This interdependence is revealed at the personal, local, national and global and international scale as the commons of public health comes into sharp focus. In our homes there is no escape from the emotions in the household, the noise on our street, relationship tensions and our own inner demons. We are cracked open by shared risk. P: ‘The illusion of everything being fine, everything good to carry on, business as usual –​that’s not an illusion for a lot of people because their faces are right in it inevitably, every day, they know that things aren’t working –​the illusion has been shattered.’ During lockdown, some people are stuck in abusive situations and cannot escape, or are alone or struggling with mental ill health. There may be no way out without external help. For others, dealing with working at home plus childcare, or overloaded as a key worker, there is no space to do anything differently. However, the cracks are where the light comes in, and there is an opportunity here to get to know ourselves better. Our own anxieties, thought patterns and how we are affected by each moment are there to see. We are seeing the same small number of humans every day –​whoever we are living with, our neighbours, or our own selves. So we can’t get away from negotiations. We may be more willing to articulate our experience to other people, where otherwise we would have stayed silent, because there is nowhere to go to get away

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From Conflict to Collaboration

from it. We talk to our housemates about how strictly they or we follow lockdown rules, as this affects the value of our own efforts. And if communication goes badly, lockdown affords us another chance and another and another. Being confronted with the unknown of how the world will be after the virus is deeply unsettling, but within it there is the possibility of learning and of change. In lockdown, there is an opportunity to nurture the seeds of self-​knowledge and to open up collaborative conversations with others that allow our experiences of conflict to be transformed. After COVID-​19, we need the imagination to bring this learning to multiple arenas of our lives, from personal relationships to group endeavours and the stewarding of our commons.

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FIVE

The Contested Home Harriet Shortt and Michal Izak

While working from home is claimed to alleviate problems including work–​life balance and commuting, the COVID-​19 pandemic has undeniably provided us with a more nuanced understanding of using our homes for work. This enforced live experiment has helped expose how we interact with our private spaces. Thrust into appropriating dining rooms as classrooms and kitchen tables as meeting rooms, we suddenly found ourselves in a space with multiple meanings and uses. What was once private was made (partly) public and the boundaries of work and home were broken and re-​established. These new ways of working have provoked questions about how, why and where we work: how has being ‘on show’ in our homes on Zoom positively contributed to our relationships at work (or not)? How have control and monitoring measures been reshuffled, and how has it affected boundary making while working from home? How have the liminal spaces in our homes –​stairs, hallways, rooftops –​offered newfound and important places of work, rest and play? This chapter explores the spatial complexities of working from home in a crisis and how we can learn from this to better enable people to work from home in the future. Using stories from UK and European workers, we reflect on how the COVID-​19 emergency forced many of us to set up home working spaces overnight, and how this has fundamentally changed how we understand and use our homes for work. Some of these stories have been gathered from workers  –​ colleagues, networks and friends –​all of whom have shared

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

photographs and narratives of their experiences with us over the past nine weeks. Others come from our recent visual analysis of images posted on social media platforms, such as Instagram, during the crisis. Visibility/​vulnerability The domestic environment is more visible now and these spaces are typically private, often places of care for ourselves and others close to us (see Chapters Three and Four). During COVID-​19, our homes have been opened as public spaces to be shared with others –​particularly in relation to video calls and the explosive use of Zoom and other communication tools. This makes the home a contested space with multiple meanings and in which competing interests play out.1 In the images shared with us during our conversations with workers, we have been struck by the juxtaposition of ephemera and paraphernalia of all parts of our lives. Loaves of bread and pets, laptops and children, schoolwork and garden hammocks sit cheek by jowl in these photographs, each representing the complexities of working from home and ‘juggling it all’. And what is made visible in the home matters, and matters to people for different reasons. A quality leader working for an American corporate took a photograph of his laptop screen during a Zoom call and told us: ‘I think Zoom is great, but you can tell we aren’t used to this way of working. We’re all too interested in what’s on the shelves of people’s homes, what our colleagues’ homes are like, what’s on the walls, where are they sitting. We’re spending more time looking at the background than listening!’ An academic working in Bristol took a photograph of his desk at home, with his cat curled up on his shoulder and said:

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The Contested Home

‘This sums it up for me really. I think it’s been great to see people as people y’know. I’ve seen colleagues and their kids, their pets, they’ve had to turn off beeping washing machines in the middle of a meeting, answer the door. It’s funny, but it’s real life and I like seeing that and I feel like I’m getting to know my colleagues better now we’re apart, which is really interesting.’ What is seen and heard in the backdrop of work-​based online video calls gives the impression of everydayness and for some this has been beneficial to workplace relationships. The vulnerable ‘real me’ has been revealed and there is arguably social value in seeing the ordinary things of others. The disparate objects of work –​such as drinks, clothes, animals –​are now on show. From this extraordinary experience co-​workers have become humanized and as a result we might argue that barriers between people have been broken. A  post-​COVID-​19 world might mean that previously formal, hardened relationships, where bringing emotions and ‘life’ to work were discouraged, will now be modified and contain an appreciation of the mess, struggle and balance of everyday life. However, this is a double-​edged sword –​this new wave of visibility/​vulnerability has affected people differently. During the crisis, the exposure of the home –​a place of shelter, retreat and solitude2 and one that usually remains hidden unless we are invited in  –​has meant lots of people have been invited in, including those we would never choose to invite into our homes: strangers, students and colleagues we might not like very much. As much as some may feel closer to colleagues, others feel exposed and that their place of retreat from work has been infringed. In addition, this flips the power balance: if you are a manager, it may not be easy to lead a wide-​scale restructuring project when you have a cat sitting on your shoulder and a child coming into view every few minutes. Indeed, the new

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

‘Room Rater’ Twitter account has just been set up to feed this new sense of voyeurism –​people can (brutally) comment on the backdrops and interiors of the rich and famous.3 We might argue, then, that the (potential) legitimacy once found in the office (or position of power) becomes contested through this visual rebalancing of power relationships, now brought down to the backdrop of one’s bedroom or kitchen table. Even Harriet’s five-​year-​old daughter commented on the home of her teacher during an online video lesson: ‘Is that Miss Hubbard’s kitchen? It’s a very pretty kitchen. I like the colour of the tiles.’ Out of this experience, Miss Hubbard may emerge to be, to Harriet’s daughter, more likeable and the rapport between them (and perhaps the parents too) may be enriched. However, we might question whether this will this compromise Miss Hubbard’s capacity to be the formal teacher figure Harriet’s daughter is used to. The exposure of the home and the sights and sounds it offers could affect power relations in organizations in unexpected ways as well. When we return to work, we might want to be conscious of what people have seen and heard, and how this might be remembered. Privacy has been breached and the balance of power might have been subtly tampered with. Liminal spaces Privacy and rest at work are found in liminal spaces. As we have found in our previous research,4 liminal spaces –​defined as somewhere that is on the ‘border’, a space somewhere in-​between the front stage and back stage –​such as toilets, corridors, stairwells and corners, are frequently used by workers. These vital spaces are used to escape the visibility of the office or shared workspace and become important territories for private conversations, quiet reflection, and inspiration and creativity.

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The Contested Home

Working ​from ​home during COVID-​19 has shed light on the liminal spaces of our homes  –​corners and crevices of domestic spaces have emerged as unexpectedly useful. As a response to lockdown, we have seen how territories on the margins of dominant spaces of our homes (those we have defined uses for, like living rooms or kitchens), are now in regular use in new ways. One entrepreneur we are working with sent us a photograph of her on the roof of her house. ‘This is the only place I can get some rest … some peace and quiet. This is where I can just breathe for a minute. It’s a beautiful view and a lovely skyline, all the trees and rooftops. I love being up here, I might do this more often.’ Liminal spaces are helping us, just as they do in the office, to find private quiet moments of respite from family, technology and being on show. The ability to reflect and make sense of the day is being sought in the corners of homes and liminal spaces are being used in the practice of self-​care. For others, liminal spaces are now appropriated as new workspaces. For example, from our visual analysis of hairdressers adapting to working from home, toilets and cupboards are now hair salons, from which stylists across the UK are filming ‘how to …’ demonstrations and posting these on Instagram. One celebrity hairstylist in London is seen in a walk-​in-​wardrobe demonstrating an up-​do with their wife as a model. Another hairstylist in Wales is pictured in a hallway by the mirror demonstrating how to do a boy’s haircut (son as model). Another stylist in London is filmed in a toilet demonstrating a guide to toning your hair at home (self as model). Perhaps this is a response to the vulnerability through visibility mentioned earlier; the use of a liminal space  –​a space in-​between –​avoids the exposure of dominant parts of the hairdressers’ own homes, allowing them to reconnect with clients without compromising privacy.

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

On the other hand, we have seen how liminal spaces are being appropriated for play during our home-​based lockdown. An academic in Bath, working full-​time and home schooling a four-​year-​old said: ‘I’ve seen my daughter make a den on the stairs, under the stairs, under the table in the dining room, in the hallway, on the landing. Dens have been built in every nook of this house over the past few weeks!’ From this we might learn more about children’s needs for privacy/​ownership over space. Children compromise all the time in relation to space, with their bedrooms perhaps being the only haven they might have in a home, and even then parents place restrictions on these places –​no food, no drink, tidy up, make your bed. It is no wonder that children, while in lockdown with their parents who are desperately seeking their own spaces and managing boundaries for work/​home life, are claiming snippets of space and drawing new boundaries for themselves –​even if it is just a few steps on a stairway. Corners are ‘a symbol of solitude for the imagination’5 and reappropriations of these spaces have perhaps always reflected the malleable ways our boundaries are drawn. However, during lockdown those boundaries are more prone to being fundamentally contested, enabling –​as the spaces that were in our peripheral vision now come into full view and full use –​ new patterns of spatial liminality to be formed. As rules are being rewritten, new agreements will be made and home/​ work trade-​offs may be reimagined, drawing on the creative potential of spaces in-​between. Transitory as current changes may be, we are unlikely to resume where we left off. Control/​monitoring During this crisis, organizations and leadership teams have been exposed. Their ability (or sometimes lack thereof) to

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The Contested Home

recognize the human working from home and show that they understand the complexities of boundary making and breaking is often evident in their responses to staff. The ways employers’ monitoring strategies affect our work life when working from home vary in how intrusive they are –​ these are usually connected to how accustomed an employer is to the concept of home working. Good practice abounds, and we have been reassured to hear about organizations in the current climate accommodating the surplus pressure home working may exert on some employees, for example, designating certain days in the working week as catch-​up days, when no new work is allocated. In a recent email from a senior member of a public sector leadership team, staff were reminded: Like many of you I’m attempting to juggle home schooling, childcare and work. There are times when it has made me incredibly anxious and other times, I’ve felt privileged to see my children. We’ve all had bad weeks and good weeks so hang on in there, next week will be better. For those organizations that did not think it was possible to work from home, stuck in ‘presenteeism’ culture where visibility was key, we now see a turn in the tide and new acknowledgements that working from home is possible. A senior partner in a Bristol law firm told us she feels warmer towards working from home now she has experienced it: ‘I have always preferred having my team in the office … but now, after experiencing how effective people can be, how much they enjoy their own space, I feel very differently. When life returns to normal, I will be open to allowing each of my team one or two days a week to work from home.’ On the other hand, trust recently became an issue for many employers:  there are media reports documenting the

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

enforcement of employee’ readiness in the hours required by organizing remote video calls at the beginning and end of the day and/​or monitoring activity on a constant basis.6 Similarly, others were asked to write daily journals describing their working day at home to evidence the process of achieving daily goals, on top of delivering actual output. All these instances of control were reported –​often directly by our friends and family members –​as obstacles to effective home working. This increase of remote scrutiny at all cost emerged when more direct modes of control in the office context diminished (or disappeared) almost overnight. As many organizations found the ground to be shifting, they responded with various measures of intensified control, often hectically shedding off more nuanced manners of remote oversight, frequently with limited (or no) sensitivity. One young mother working in the public sector, who has two children under six and a husband who works away from home told us: ‘… my boss today, on our Zoom call, gave us all a bollocking and reminded me “you’re not on leave and this not an excuse to watch Netflix and play puzzles all day” … I mean really? He just has no idea. I sat there crying after the call.’ It seems COVID-​19 has provided some leaders with the excuse to be an “A-​grade prick” as our young mother later described him. Indeed, home-​working monitoring devices seem to have extended the legitimacy of leaders’ ‘A-​g rade prick-​ness’ to a whole new level. Before COVID-​19 some organizations were highly concerned with spying on employees in the name of productivity –​now this seems to have increased. For instance, some organizations are far more interested in the location of their employees rather than their output; we have witnessed first-​hand reports from a local government institution in which home workers are requested to send selfies taken in home

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The Contested Home

surroundings to their managers at varying times of day, within a narrow 20-​minute timeframe from being asked by email to do so. Another large public sector organization enforces constant availability for instant messaging (and calling). This is yet another arena in which our home is contested. The enforced lockdown endowed the process of liquefying home/​work boundaries with a new ally helping to legitimize both stringent monitoring and control measures, as well as normalizing working from home more broadly. The home of the future While some of the scenarios described here may suggest a grim picture of days recent and to come, other stories have pointed towards positive change. The point is to reflect on and learn from the increased overflow between work and private life –​ treating ‘the contested home’ as food for thought. The crisis will have changed us, and we think that we will find ourselves in homes that will only superficially seem identical to the way they were before. We may notice that our own private ‘territories’, both spatially and temporally, are now shared, or alternatively, have been reappropriated, first by those we cohabit them with. Such reshufflings may include ‘takeovers’ or instances of subtly negotiated shifts of ownership; some of the rituals that involved specific times and spaces may need to give way to new ones. Yet, this is where the two-​way nature of contestation may open whole new territories and perhaps new rituals and settlements will be created. Liminal spaces may certainly be our allies, easing the transition between old and new as many of them are all around us and are now up for grabs. Second is the impact of work itself. The extent to which we invite work into our private life may shift. Once allowed in, some snippets of work are likely to stay, for some time at least, if only through our colleagues’ memories of our private home spaces witnessed during a Zoom call, or via tacit

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

acquiescence with the possibility of working at night after much of the traditional working day has perhaps been spent home schooling, or gardening. Yet, this too is a two-​way-​street; we have most likely witnessed similarly unmade beds during those calls (so colleagues can be rendered just as vulnerable as we are), and the possibility of deciding when work is performed has obvious advantages as well (if only by freeing time to pursue ‘unproductive’ interests when one wishes). This, however, brings us to the third way in which homes are contested –​by external monitoring and control. The manners of snooping on or directly disciplining employees that have emerged and/​or intensified during the lockdown are perhaps the least negotiable and potentially most objectionable aspect of our post-​COVID-​19 work lives. And yet, we can also consider the inefficiencies that such oversight entails in the long run; direct scrutiny of home workers is costly to organizations, unless employees self-​scrutinize and practice self-​control just as efficiently. This, however, shifts the initiative to the workers themselves, as noted previously. Since many people already work at home and a large-​scale return to office work was unlikely even before COVID-​19 and is even less likely now, our remote working spaces –​often our homes –​are where the contest for the times and spaces of control will take place. And our sofas, cats, children and kitchen tables will all be involved.

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SIX

Working Lives Vanessa Beck, Vanesa Fuertes, Daiga Kamerāde, Clare Lyonette and Tracey Warren

The COVID-​19 crisis will have fundamental impacts on the future of working lives. Daily forecasts predict a depressing picture for the working-​age population. This makes it difficult to identify positive outcomes from the crisis for work, life and welfare. Poor government planning and decision making concerning health and economic responses have further added to the problems, rather than resolving them. This is exemplified by the lack of clarity, speediness and sufficiency of many of the schemes devised to help employees, employers and those unemployed. Increases in sales and recruitment by tax-​avoiding online marketplace Amazon (up 2.53% in the first quarter of 2020, according to according to financial information website MarketWatch)1 provide just one example of the economic and labour market effects of this crisis being unfairly distributed. While online sales and delivery companies, food production and supply organizations, internet service providers and TV and film streaming companies are likely to be among the big winners from the current crisis, there will also be many losers. We begin this chapter by setting out the predicted outcomes regarding employment, unemployment and underemployment, exploring the effects of the pandemic on individuals’ working lives, and reflect on issues emanating from the crisis such as the contribution of key or essential workers, the rise in flexible working, and clear gender inequality as well as inequality experienced by Black, Asian and Minority

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

Ethnic (BAME) groups. We then switch our focus to highlight potential lessons learned from the crisis in order to achieve better work and life arrangements that will benefit individuals and society as a whole. Winners and losers As a result of COVID-​19, the rise in unemployment globally has been predicted to be between 5.3 million and 24.7 million from a base level of 188 million in 2019,2 compared with the increase of 22 million during the global financial crisis of 2008–​09. Similarly, already high under-employment rates are expected to increase, since previous crises have shown that a decrease in labour demand translates into wage and working-​hours reductions.3 Current UK figures show that one third of firms that are still operating are doing so on reduced hours, with the majority of these reductions taking place in the accommodation and food services sectors.4 Although all industries and sectors will be affected by the crisis, not all will face the same challenges and thus require the same solutions. A substantial number of workers will be able to continue their employment from home. Many others without the possibility to work from home will be left vulnerable to job loss or furlough (temporary leave). Others, notably those in essential roles, continue to rely on public transport to get them to their place of work where they are exposed to added risk of contracting the virus. Men working in the lowest skilled occupations (such as security guards), women and men in social care, and occupations such as taxi and bus drivers, chefs, and sales and retail assistants have experienced some of the highest rates of deaths involving COVID-​19.5 There are clear and deep inequalities in what is possible for different occupational groups. One of the main outcomes of the crisis is the realization that jobs in areas such as care work (whether in health, care homes or private settings), rubbish collection, public transport, security, cleaning, food transportation and food picking, among others, are essential. As Neil Howard suggests in Chapter

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Working Lives

Three, we need to recognize ‘care’ as central to the economy. These jobs are usually low-​paid and undervalued, in many cases precarious and physically demanding. Key workers were and continue to be most exposed in economic and health terms, while being taken for granted rather than recognized, supported and rewarded. People who were underemployed or in precarious jobs before COVID-​19 (most often women, younger/​older workers, minority ethnic groups, working-​class and service sector employees) have been vulnerable to income loss and layoffs during the crisis, and will continue to be so after it. The ‘double whammy’ of cuts to public sector budgets and COVID-​19 seems to hit similar groups of people. While a country like the UK hit a record high 76.3% employment rate for the September to November 2019 quarter (the highest since the mid-​1970s), it has been evident for some time that an increasing part of that figure constitutes insecure and insufficient employment (that is, under-employment). A Trades Union Congress (TUC) analysis in 2018 showed that one in nine workers were in insecure forms of employment (i.e. those on temporary and zero-​hour contracts, and self-​ employed people earning less than the minimum wage).6 According to the UK Office for National Statistics figures, in the last quarter of 2019, almost one million people had a zero-​hour contract as their main job, and, of those working part-​time, 10.9% could not find a full-​time job. In 2019, 16.2% of all employee jobs were low-​paid.7 Moreover, other groups of workers such as self-​employed people and those whose jobs cannot be done remotely will soon be similarly affected. For a significant number, missing any amount of their already low income during lockdown will tilt them into poverty and even hunger. The Food Foundation reported in mid-​April that three million people were in households where someone had to skip a meal and Trussell Trust figures show an 81% increase in the need for emergency food parcels in the last two weeks of March compared with 2019.8 In the same period, almost one million people applied for Universal Credit.9

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

The increase in the number of people having to rely for the first time on the welfare system has highlighted its inadequacy and dysfunctionality –​severe limitations already very well known to those socially disadvantaged groups who have suffered from them for some time. As a result, the UK government has been forced to increase the safety net through a number of measures, such as a £20 a week rise in Universal Credit (still worth just a sixth of average weekly pay, according to the TUC),10 mortgage holidays, support for renters, and agreements with energy suppliers to support the most vulnerable groups in the crisis. The government’s Job Retention Scheme and Self-​Employed Income Support Scheme, much more generous than Universal Credit, providing 80% of usual monthly wages (up to a £2,500 limit) for furloughed employees and self-​employed people, has slowed the already very high rate of out of work benefit claims. The increase in food bank use and food insecurity is, however, a good gauge of the magnitude of the inadequacy of the government response and the intense strain on a welfare system already undermined before the pandemic hit. For those workers, the so-​called ‘lucky ones’11 often but not always in professional jobs, that have been able to continue in their employment from home, not everything has been positive either. Around 39% of workers in the UK worked entirely from home in April.12 Given the extended closure of schools, and the reliance on parents to home school or at least supervise children’s studies, home working has turned into a juggling act, as Chapter Five explores. Many workers live in cramped domestic spaces, with no designated area for work, unsuitable heating and lighting, no appropriate desk or chair and poor IT provision, as well as a lack of social contacts. The requirement to work from home during the pandemic also raises the financial burden on individual workers, in terms of potentially paying for enhanced broadband and mobile phone contracts, having to buy office equipment, paying for their own

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printing and office supplies, and for higher heating and lighting bills over an extended period. While many will welcome the enhanced provision of flexible working in the long term, others will prefer to return to a workplace with adequate resources and the opportunity to socialize with colleagues. The pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on domestic lives as well as paid working, entrenching gender and BAME inequalities. In terms of paid work, there is a clear gender dimension to risky, low-​paid, and key jobs, where the majority of workers are women.13 Among these are occupations characterized by physical contact with others, and with the highest risk of contracting the virus. Women’s ‘double burden’ of work is also intensified in the pandemic and the need to balance multiple work demands is further complicated by the challenges of shopping, cooking, caring and home schooling under lockdown. Evidence shows that women are bearing the unpaid work burden created by the crisis, with the Women’s Budget Group14 arguing that they are still being expected to juggle looking after children (most of whom are now at home) and work, while, in mixed-​sex couples, men’s jobs tend to be prioritized over those of their female partner. Before the pandemic, BAME groups were already most likely to experience unemployment and low-​paid, precarious work, with women especially affected. The UK’s BAME workers are concentrated in socially and economically disadvantaged occupations and locations that are being hit hardest by the pandemic, with deaths among BAME healthcare and other essential workers making national headlines. The highest death rates between March and April 2020 were in the ethnically diverse London boroughs of Newham, Brent and Hackney.15 BAME key workers include NHS staff as well as taxi drivers and small shop owners. The impact of the pandemic has not been equally distributed, but what lessons can we learn from this? We now turn to consider how the crisis can become an opportunity.

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

No going back As and when we emerge from COVID-​19, we cannot and should not rely on market forces to solve the issues of low-​paid, precarious and undervalued jobs. Applauding key workers or offering a ‘CARE’ badge as pledged by the UK government does not provide the support and help required. These jobs are indispensable to society and should be recognized and rewarded as such. The Scottish government’s one-​off £230.10 payment to unpaid carers and the 3.3% pay increase to social care staff is a more meaningful recognition of their contribution. However, a long-​term solution to ensure decent work (as defined by the Fair Work Convention in Scotland) needs to be advanced. This requires, as a minimum, making the ‘Living Wage’, as put forward by the Living Wage Foundation, obligatory rather than optional. In order to prevent a rise in the number of workers who do not have enough work, the Living Wage should be combined with a new ‘living hours’ guarantee to provide enough work for those who want it (16 hours a week is the minimum that the Living Wage Foundation proposes).16 New legislation is also essential to improve the security and predictability of working hours and to guarantee suitable work schedules, especially for employees on precarious contracts, with notice periods for any changes to scheduling and financial compensation for cancellations to shifts (as is the case in Ireland). Alongside this, job retention solutions should be explored. For example, the work-​sharing scheme in Denmark or the short-​time work schemes across Europe are innovative responses pioneered as a result of the economic crisis.17 Long-​ term initiatives such as a four-​day standard working week, beneficial in terms of productivity gains and firms’ savings,18 could be an option to achieve a more equal sharing of jobs. In addition, current discussions in the UK of boosting the Health and Safety Executive to enforce safety and wellbeing at work

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on the return to workplaces after lockdown are positive, since this could potentially raise awareness and the level of workers’ rights around health and safety. Any attempts to downplay health to ensure economic wealth can only work in the very short run since, in the long term, wealth obviously requires health and vice versa. Despite their contested nature, flexible and home-​working solutions that would not have been considered before the pandemic have become possible for many more workers. There is no doubt that improvements in IT can contribute to the death of the ‘traditional workplace’. A recent survey suggests that half of workers expect to work more flexibly after lockdown.19 Remote working should be a factor in new business models to attract and retain talent from individuals who would benefit from home working and a range of flexible working options, such as people with caring responsibilities and/​or disabilities. New opportunities for flexible and home working, together with the realization that domestic and caring work are essential forms of work (albeit often underappreciated within a patriarchal and paid-​work focused society), and the fact that women are often employed in essential jobs that cannot be done remotely, could rebalance women’s double burden. Periods of crisis have long been charged with paving the way for rethinking stubbornly gendered work roles. This pandemic, in making women’s unpaid work more visible, creates opportunities for sharing the housework and caring load with men. On the other hand, remote working does not need to be, and in some cases should not be, the default position for firms. While selling off expensive office space and enforcing remote working for all employees could be attractive to hard-​pressed organizations, it would also mean there is no turning back, and many organizations and individuals benefit from the opportunity to work –​at least for some of the time –​ alongside other colleagues. Decreased employee wellbeing, loyalty and commitment could result from the ‘virtualization’ of organizations in response to the pandemic.20

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

The consequences of COVID-​19 have been made worse by the current insufficient UK social security system. Years of austerity have weakened public services including the health and care services. Philip Ashton, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, blamed the high levels of poverty in the UK on austerity policies by the current Conservative government. He recently stressed that COVID-​19 government measures not only reflect a social Darwinist philosophy, but are ineffective due to the harm and misery caused by austerity to individuals and communities, most of which cannot be undone quickly. Lifting the benefit freeze, upgrading benefit levels to reach a minimum decent income standard, eliminating waiting periods, and increasing accessibility would ease the economic effects and the worry of job losses. In the long term, the inadequacy of the welfare system needs be tackled. The government has shown that measures previously considered impractical or undesirable, such as housing those who are homeless or increasing Universal Credit, are not only necessary but also possible. Many have been discussing for some time the advantages and shortcomings of a universal basic income (UBI); the time has come to have a wider debate on how UBI could help build resilient and healthier societies. While there are many types of UBI, research on various pilots have shown the benefits and practicalities of these schemes.21 In order to achieve these positive outcomes from the crisis –​ decent work through job, income and hours security, flexible working practices, and a higher social security net –​a more active social partnership approach is needed. There are many examples to learn from, such as New Zealand’s Future of Work Tripartite Forum and the so-​called Nordic Model in which social partners share risk and benefits.22 A partnership approach will benefit all actors in society. It will require impetus and facilitation from government. It will also necessitate input from citizens.

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Sharing risks and benefits

Perhaps one of the more elusive predictions is the effect that changes imposed on us by COVID-​19 –​such as having to fit work (sometimes literally) around and within our family life; relying on social security due to being unable to work; spending more time with our housemates, partners and children; relying on and celebrating essential workers; and performing acts of solidarity by staying at home, wearing a mask, checking on neighbours or volunteering to help –​will have on our perspective on working lives. Will COVID-​19 create new attitudes, opinions and practices? Will a new perspective facilitate or demand a revised employment and welfare regime built around fewer working hours, enhanced flexible working options, decent work and a social security net that could sustain emergent community support and (national) solidarity and achieve both better work and life after COVID-​19? The COVID-​19 crisis has highlighted that low-​paid, precarious jobs are key for society, that flexible work and homeworking is possible in many sectors, that current welfare policies provide insufficient protection, and that higher levels of social security are possible. Social security measures previously dismissed as unrealistic and impractical have been put in place, showing what is possible if the will exists. The crisis has shown that austerity policies have weakened vital and necessary public services, including (but not only) health and social care. As we are coming out of the shock of COVID-​19, we cannot return to business as usual, because the previous settlement between social actors (that is, citizens, government and businesses) did not work in the interests of all. Yet it is in the interest of society as a whole that we strengthen our economic, labour market, and welfare system to enable a sharing of risks and benefits among all people. Only then, perhaps, will our recently unstable political system also be strengthened.

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SEVEN

Democracy and Work Alex Bird, Pat Conaty, Anita Mangan, Mick McKeown, Cilla Ross and Simon Taylor

As the UK adjusts to life during COVID-​19, one of the unexpected features is that it has created a better appreciation of workers in low-​skilled, poorly paid and precarious work. For example, the BBC One Panorama programme ‘Lockdown UK’ referred to hospital cleaners and supermarket workers as ‘minimum wage heroes’1 and food delivery drivers were added to the government’s list of key workers. Yet as Jason Moyer-​Lee of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain points out, although these workers are doing essential jobs, they have the least rights and little or no job security.2 As Chapter Six showed, the world of work has already been changing over the past decade, with a rise of in-​work poverty, low-​paid work and insecurity, caused by low-​paid self-​employment, temporary work and zero-​hour contracts. COVID-​19 has accelerated the move to online work, created new kinds of precarity and increased the risks for workers who are already engaged in low-​paid jobs serviced by digital platforms.3 So apart from a better public appreciation for workers who do low-​paid, stigmatized or dirty work, what have we learned from COVID-​19? That decent work is a right for everyone4 but that lockdown has made the possibility of finding and keeping decent work harder, especially for those working in the gig economy or in low-​paid, low-​skilled work.

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

These are issues that trade unions can and should address, but unions are facing a number of serious and existential challenges that frustrate their efforts. These include: difficulties in recruiting and retaining members; a decline in activism; ageing membership; and diminishing union density, bargaining power and representation. Furthermore, many unions have been pursuing a member-​servicing approach at the expense of more traditional organizing tactics. In this chapter, we consider decent work for life after lockdown by reimagining industrial democracy. We do this by proposing a ‘union co-​op’ model5 of work. This is a fully unionized, worker co-​operative, owned and controlled by those who own and work in it. Workers’ control, democracy and equality are built into the model, which offers a solution to inequality and injustice both in and outside the workplace. The upheaval to life during COVID-​19 provides a clear stimulus for the model. In what follows, we outline the principles and benefits for adopting a union co-​op approach. We conclude by arguing that life after COVID-​19 offers an opportunity to recognize the value of decent work for all workers by embedding democracy and fairness in the workplace and fighting in-​work poverty through union co-​ops. The union co-​op The International Labour Organization’s Recommendation 193 states that decent work is a right for everyone and that co-operatives, working with trade unions, are one of the best ways to achieve it. Co-​operatives and trades unions have a shared history dating back to the 19th century and their collective efforts to respond to pressing social needs. The union co-​op model draws on that shared history. It does so by offering a vision for democratically organized workplaces, using a model that counters mainstream economic narratives. A union co-​op is a worker co-​operative, a co-​op that is controlled by its workforce (although it may have others in

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membership, as long as they are in a minority). It has both a formal place in its governance for a trade union to represent the members as workers and a separate place where the worker members manage the business they own. The idea of the union co-​op has emerged from studying the formal collaborations in different countries between trade unions and the co-​operative movement, some of which we outline in the next section. The principles for the union co-​op include the seven principles adopted by the International Co-​operative Alliance,6 as well as three additional principles that are focused on protecting workers’ rights, creating decent work and paying a fair wage. The ten core union co-​op principles are:  (1) voluntary and open membership; (2)  democratic member control; (3)  member economic participation; (4)  autonomy and independence; (5) education, training and information; (6) co-​ operation among co-​operatives; (7) concern for community; (8) subsidiarity of capital to labour; (9) solidarity and fairness in remuneration; and (10) commitment to union co-​op development. The first four principles enshrine the ideals of equality, fairness, democratic control and autonomy. Membership is open to anyone who is willing to become a member and the co-​operative is democratically controlled by those members. Key to this democratic control is the principle of ‘one member, one vote’, meaning that power is not concentrated among the wealthiest or largest shareholders, but is distributed equally among members. Members collectively own the co-​operative’s capital and determine how surpluses can be reallocated. For example, members can choose whether to grow the co-​ operative, return the surplus to members, set some aside as reserves or support other community activities. Principles 5–​7 move beyond the individual union co-​op to outline how it should interact positively with the local community and other co-​ops. Giving information to members and the wider public is crucial to educate people about the benefits of co-​ops and how to make them work to everyone’s

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mutual benefit. Principle 6 emphasizes the value of co-​ operation over competition and acts as an important corrective to the Darwinian narrative that organizations must be ruthless, competitive and aggressive in order to thrive. Principle 7, concern for community, highlights the need to develop sustainable business practices and to consider community in broad terms. Principles 8, 9 and 10 have been developed from the ideas of the Mondragon worker co-​operatives in Spain and are a vital addition to the International Co-​operative Alliance’s principles because they enshrine workers’ rights and fair pay in the governance of the union co-​op.7 The subsidiarity of capital to labour (principle 8) is about ensuring that the workers, rather than external investors, have real control of their union co-​op. It fosters workplace democracy by specifying that all decisions are made at the lowest practical level in the organization. Capital should be a tool that workers use to develop their co-​op, not a means to control them. Thus at least 51% of voting shares should be held by worker members, to make sure they are in overall control. Fairness in remuneration (principle 9) addresses wage inequality to ensure that all staff in the union co-​op are paid using a fair and balanced wage scale. It embeds decent pay for decent work. The top pay should reflect the size and scope of the union co-​op but should never exceed a ratio of 12:1 of the lowest paid worker. Finally, principle 10 is a commitment to developing other union co-​ops by introducing a levy of at least 10% of pre-​tax profits, in cash or in kind, which should be used to finance and develop other union co-ops. We suggest that these ten core principles form a set of strictly bounded ethical principles by which each union co-​op is run. However, while they guide the shaping of each union co-​op, they also allow flexibility for each individual union co-​op to adapt and respond to local contexts. The union co-​op model is not a ‘one size fits all’ model: it is flexible and can adapt to local needs and requirements. Most importantly, it addresses the inequalities that COVID-​19 has laid bare.

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Creating decent work So how are these sorts of organizations made? There are six different ways to set up a union co-​op, as follows. Convert an existing company into a union co-​op

The existing company might already be unionized, but possibly not have 100% union membership. It could be employee-​ owned, a small or medium business or a family firm. It could even be a public limited company. By converting it into a union co-​op, it will become 100% unionized and owned and controlled by its workers. There are some barriers to doing this in the UK at present as the law is unfavourable to worker co-​op buy-​outs. Currently, the tax regime makes it most advantageous for the current owner to sell to a trust-​based worker or management buy-​out rather than a worker co-​op. Rescue a failing company

In this case the company is already struggling financially, often as a result of a takeover by a multinational company or venture capitalists, perhaps because of a recession or simply because the company has lost its way following a generational ownership change. Occasionally a potential rescue situation arises as a result of industrial struggle, such as a factory occupation. Here, prudence and good business advice is essential, to ensure that the company is saveable, before starting a rescue mission that often involves the workforce risking its redundancy money and/​or borrowing heavily. Convert an existing co-​op into a union co-​op

The majority of UK co-​operatives are consumer-​owned rather than worker-​owned. Many of these co-​operatives are not unionized, so converting a consumer co-​op into a union

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

co-​op needs radical change. The governance would have to be changed to a multi-​stakeholder model, with ownership being shared between the consumers and workers, with workers having at least 51% of the voting shares, and the workforce becoming 100% unionized. There are, however, a growing number of multi-​stakeholder and worker co-​ops in the UK, and they can be transformed into union co-​ops with only some small changes to their governance, and the unionization of the workforce. Converting a social enterprise or charity into a union co-​op

Charities and social enterprises already have social purpose as a core belief, and many try to reflect this in their employment practices, although very tight contract pricing, mostly from austerity-​affected local government, makes this difficult. The transformation from a charity to a multi-​stakeholder co-​op needs to involve staff, service users and their families, with the full co-​operation and support of union representatives. Create a brand-​new worker co-​op that is fully unionized

In this option, a start-​up route, the new organization would have decided to be a fully unionized, worker co-​op from the beginning. Governance models for this are available off the shelf, but of course all the start-​up needs of any other type of business are still present. Finance has to be raised, and a business plan drawn up, but the combination of co-​operative business support agencies and the market knowledge of the trade union movement make this possible. Creating a union co-​op for the self-​employed

Self-​employed people are an increasing part of the precariat, those workers without any security and often on zero-​hour contracts. A  small number of co-​ops have been formed to

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provide such workers with shared workspace and/​or back-​ office admin services. UK examples include IndyCube,8 IPSE,9 the IT Co-​op10 and Webarchitects,11 but few of these, except IndyCube, have any trade union involvement. However, the most successful back-​office co-op for self-​employed people is SMart (Société Mutuelle pour Artistes)12 in Belgium, which is currently working to integrate trade unions into its organization. However, some really good UK examples of union-​co-​ops for self-​employed people have been with us for many years, such as taxi co-​ops and actors’ and musicians’ co-​ ops (discussed in the next section). Employment after COVID-​19 Union co-​ops are not a magic bullet that can instantaneously restore decent working conditions. They require effort, persistence and compromise to start up and maintain. When they work well, however, they offer a persuasive vision for how work might be reimagined. Here we offer some examples of successful union and co-​op collaborations in the US, Europe and the UK. The examples here are not exhaustive but provide some insight into the wide range of areas where the union co-​op model could be used. United Steelworkers, the largest trade union in North America, has developed a union co-​op model as a response to trade union decline, and to counter the effects of neoliberal practices such as offshoring and wage suppression. The core governance model promotes fully integrated workplace ownership and trade union representation allowing the benefits of trade union services and worker ownership to be delivered simultaneously. Its economic development network (1worker1vote.org) operates in ten cities across the US. In Belgium, SMart was formed in 1998 to enable artists, technicians and intermittent workers to face the administrative complexity of the arts sector. Since then, it has grown to over 80,000 members across eight countries. It provides shared and

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

individual workspace, and back-​office services to its members, as well as its key function –​to provide employed status rights to self-​employed workers. Similarly, in the UK, the Musicians’ Union has helped its members to set up music teacher co-​ operatives, whereby the co-​operative provides a range of ‘paid for’ services to its teacher members, who are all self-​employed. Over one thousand firms across Europe have been taken over by their workers to stop closure or a relocation of jobs.13 In France, when Unilever announced the closure of Fralib, a long-​established local firm that produced Thé Elephant, all 182 workers, supported by their unions (Confédération Générale du Travail [General Confederation of Labour] and Confédération Française de l’Encadrement –​Confédération Générale des Cadres [French Confederation of Management –​ General Confederation of Executives]), occupied the factory. Legal action against Unilever was unable to stop the formal closure of Fralib in September 2012. A group of 76 workers developed a Social Plan for a worker co-​op, including a switch to production of natural and organic teas using mainly regional products. In May 2014, Unilever agreed to a legal settlement to hand over the plant, but not the Thé Elephant brand. It agreed to sell the machines (valued at €7 million) to the workforce for €1 and to pay total financial compensation of €20 million. This enabled the worker co-​op, Scop-​TI, to be launched and for production to be restarted under the new brand, 1336, named after the number of days the workers had struggled to save Fralib. Suma is a common ownership worker co-operative in West Yorkshire, UK. Set up in 1977 to supply wholefoods shops with a broad range of organic, Fairtrade and own-​brand products, it has an annual turnover of £50 million and a workforce of 250 that includes 180 worker members and 70 other employees on contracts of 18 months or more. Suma is collectively owned, and all workers are on the same, equal pay rate. The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union has been on site since the 1980s and 75% of the workforce are union members. Base

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pay for Suma workers and employees is £15 an hour, which is twice the industry rate in Yorkshire. In the past ten years, when wages have stagnated generally, Suma has maintained annual pay increases of 5%. A relatively new union co-​op is the Drive Taxi Co-​op in Cardiff, Wales, which was suggested by the local professional drivers’ branch of the GMB (known by its initials, but officially the General, Municipal, Boilermakers  and Allied Trade Union). As a response to the drivers’ continued frustration about the way the local taxi-​circuit operators exploited them, the GMB got in contact with the Wales Co-​operative Centre, City Cabs (a taxi co-​op established in Edinburgh in 1925) and Eastleigh Co-​operative Taxis in Southampton. Following their advice and guidance, eight drivers established Drive Taxi Co-​ op in December 2018, which has grown steadily and now has 15 drivers on its books. What have we learned from COVID-​19? There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism when thinking about what we have learned from the virus. On the plus side, there has been a greater public appreciation for workers in health and social care. Migrant care workers, who were demonized in the UK Brexit debates and who may not have met the government Home Office minimum salary threshold for visas, gained public recognition. Other low-​paid workers such as delivery drivers, who were previously part of the self-​employed precariat, found themselves redefined as essential workers by the government. More widely, many of those who are working from home are experiencing the benefits of not commuting, having time to cook and see their families. Yet for all these positive experiences, there is a very real danger that COVID-​19 will be another example of the ‘shock doctrine’14 used to promote more deregulation, marketization and further erosion of workers’ rights and pay. Perhaps the

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

public appreciation for health and social care workers was simply driven by self-​interest? How long will it take for the rancour and right-​wing extremism of nationalism to re-​emerge after lockdown? How many business will fail? How many furloughed workers will lose their jobs? Will we experience mass unemployment? Will the ‘new normal’ actually be a place where decent work is a distant memory and workers consider themselves lucky to have any income at all, especially given that automation and robotization is continuing apace? Will government rescue funding be funnelled into large corporations and banks, with social enterprises, small businesses, the arts and community groups side-​lined? If we have learned anything from COVID-​19, it is that we need hope and a positive way forward. We do not have to return to business as usual. We do not have to accept mass unemployment, low pay and reduced workers’ rights as an inevitable consequence of the pandemic. We do not have to accept reduced public services, weakening of civil society, loss of the arts and Darwinian narratives promoting the ‘survival of the fittest’. We have an opportunity to reimagine what decent work might look like. We have the opportunity to reimagine the future by bringing democracy into the workplace, combining the democratic traditions of trade unions and co-​ ops to create union co-​ops where workers can take pride in their work, have control over their working lives and get paid a decent wage. The post-​COVID-​19 world need not become a race to the bottom. It could be an opportunity to find a solution to inequality and injustice both in and outside the workplace.

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EIGHT

New Foodscapes Jonathan Beacham and Alice Willatt

In light of the far-​reaching consequences of the pandemic, there are few areas of social and economic life around the world that have been as profoundly affected as the foodscape.1 As Peter Jackson notes, contemporarily food has become an increasingly potent source of anxiety and worry for many.2 Yet the early days of the crisis played host to a more fundamental threat of the food supply collapsing, or unravelling, in its entirety. Images of these fears playing out on the ground became hallmarks of the emergence of the crisis, with pictures of shoppers stockpiling household essentials and ‘vulnerable’ customers browsing desolate aisles widely circulated through media platforms. While these fears have largely abated as supply chains have stabilized, the fallout of the pandemic seems likely to further economic hardship, which in turn appears likely to deepen the UK hunger crisis that has been fuelled by more than a decade of pernicious austerity measures following the global financial crisis of 2007–​08. As three million British people report going hungry in the first three weeks of the lockdown,3 foodbanks have struggled to manage demand while neighbourhoods up and down the country have established informal emergency food-​provisioning networks. The crisis has brought into sharp relief many ills of the current foodscape. We might ask how neoliberal governance has conditioned foodscapes by continuing to displace the responsibilities of the state on to the charitable sector. We might question how we have come to treat that most intimate of commodities that sustains us as if it were not somehow

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distinctly different from other commodities. Relatedly, we might also ask why much of the world now relies on a handful of powerful corporations –​which exist by legal definition to deliver profit to shareholders –​to supply populations with the nourishment they require. Further, these ubiquitous images of empty shelves raises questions around the supposed ‘flexibility’ underpinning the complex supply chains that bring food from disparate geographical contexts to supermarket shelves ‘as if by magic’. Ultimately, it has raised innumerable questions around how we understand our current juncture and what foodscapes ‘after COVID-​19’ might be like. With these spurs in mind, our interest in this chapter rests on understanding food as something much broader in its scope than merely providing nourishment. Conversely, food connects members of societies together in numerous ways through a wide range of provisioning practices with attendant political-​ economic and organizational dynamics. As Goodman puts it, food is always ‘more-​than-​food’ in that food is always more than the role that it plays in purely biological processes.4 Taking stock of the diverse ways in which more-​than-​food might be differently provisioned, we argue that the crisis cannot be neatly disentangled from the problems associated with an increasingly corporatized foodscape in recent decades. Yet among the wider fallout, the crisis has unintentionally revealed glimmers of different ways of organizing foodscapes that potentially offer better outcomes than the corporatized status quo. Before we begin to articulate this narrative, we delve a little deeper into the making of the contemporary ‘food regime’. The corporate food regime From the political economy perspective, the 1970s onwards represented an epochal turning point that led to growing corporate power in the food system.5 A general trend of trade liberalization, combined with shifts towards the primacy of ‘free markets’, has concentrated power within the foodscape

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New Foodscapes

in the hands of ever fewer transnational agri-​businesses. The negative consequences of this food regime have been profound. In producing historically cheap food through supply chains that crisscross the planet, a wide range of externalities have been pushed on to those –​both human and non-​human –​ least able to absorb them.6 Importantly, these historical shifts in agri-​food in recent decades have not only influenced the emergence of the pandemic in the first place, but these shifts have concurrently created a perfect storm for responding to crises such as COVID-​19. Yet the internal contradictions of the corporate food regime were evident long before the pandemic. The negative impacts of the corporate food regime on public health are now widely acknowledged, and countries such as the UK have seen food insecurity accelerate drastically in recent years. Given a general historical trend of the state withdrawing from interfering in the ‘free markets’ that have allowed the corporates to grow, resistance to this regime now derives from a wide range of non-​governmental organizations, civil society initiatives and social movements. These spaces not only illuminate growing discontent within this status quo, but are also where we might pin our hopes for better foodscapes. The politics of possibility To achieve this, we need to find ways of thinking that encourage us to look beyond the concentrated power of the corporate food regime in order to recognize the ways in which this crisis has accelerated these contradictions and rendered them increasingly visible. Equally, we must look beyond the state for easy solutions given a widespread ideological unwillingness of governments to put into practice measures that might alleviate food insecurity. In doing so, we direct our attention towards a range of organizational models that show how dominant capitalist framings of food might be disrupted and questioned.7 Even within the places from which we write, the

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

crisis has revealed a wide range of civil society initiatives from the ‘bottom up’ which –​by their very existence –​encourage us to diversify the story surrounding what might be possible. We begin with commercial considerations, albeit one that might be telling in terms of empowering local economies in ways that are not engendered by the corporate food regime and its valorizing tendencies. A survey undertaken by The Food Foundation has shown how veg boxes and direct-​to-​ door delivery schemes across the UK increased sales by an average of 111% from the end of February to mid-​April 2020.8 Many of these schemes have subsequently been forced to restrict orders to manage demand, often with lengthy waiting lists. Given demand that is not being met, we suggest that this predicament reveals one of the ways in which local economies might be empowered after COVID-​19 by taking a stronger role in food provisioning. This, in turn, relates to changing ways in which we might grow food, a question we return to briefly later. These rapid shifts in the foodscape have also manifested in arguably more intriguing ways. Notably, a plethora of ‘mutual aid’ networks have cropped up around the world. Facilitated primarily through social media platforms, these networks aim to provide support, initiating different practices of care for those who might struggle to access basic necessities. As we have seen within our own neighbourhoods, the sourcing and distribution of food through these networks has been central to their operation. We also note the ways in which the logic of scarcity underpinning many of our market-​driven relations with food came to be inverted. For example, supermarket delivery services, which until the crisis have tended to represent a small percentage of retail sales, have come to represent a point of contention as corporates have been unable to meet elevated demand. Within these networks, informal collaborative arrangements have become commonplace, with offers to group together within the supermarket delivery slots that members had secured. With these small gestures,

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the sovereign and individualized ‘consumer’ concerned with meeting only their needs seems to become less important. We have also happily been involved in offers of sharing surplus food or produce gathered from allotments and gardens, revealing an underlying ethic of care and generosity towards others involved in these networks. Other areas of the foodscape have seen their operations reconfigured in unforeseen ways. The Bristol Food Union notes on its website that within the space of two weeks post-​ lockdown commercial kitchens across this English city had been repurposed to feed over 700 homeless and vulnerable citizens daily, alongside feeding frontline staff in the emergency services and social care system. This is emblematic of initiatives in other geographical locations, such as the triple Michelin starred restaurant in New  York City now serving food to thousands in need every day. Although our analysis of these shifts is limited and piecemeal given their ‘in process’ nature, it reveals the ways in which our collective practices around food can rapidly change. Though we might not celebrate these as automatically good, we suggest that they point to the diversity of practices within foodscapes, which are both constrained by neoliberal rationality but also open to other ways of being and becoming. While these initiatives do not represent fully fledged alternatives to the dominant models of market-​based food provisioning, we remain excited by their emergence. They might be understood as conservative manifestations of the ‘Big Society’ –​informal, charitable relations that reaffirm the status quo –​but also point to a more radical conceptualization of civil society, or as many of the other chapters in this book have suggested, an economy based on care. Far from something wholly withered, these initiatives point to a widespread social generative capacity that crisis has clarified and brought to the fore in ways that might otherwise have been inconceivable. Yet the question remains as to how this more radical spirit of mutual aid is retained within these initiatives in foodscapes after COVID-​19, and they are

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not institutionalized into a landscape of (nonetheless laudable) charitable efforts. To develop this perspective, we suggest that examining the case of a community kitchen that emerged prior to the crisis provides important insights. Lessons from the kitchen The community kitchen in question is organized by a team of volunteers who deliver weekly community meals made from surplus food collected from local stores and supermarkets. It operates from a community centre in a deprived neighbourhood, providing hot meals and food donation boxes to vulnerable members of society. With COVID-​19, they have shifted to redistributing surplus food parcels in surrounding areas. The second author was engaged in a co-​produced research project with the community kitchen, which opened inquiry into the tensions and challenges that arose in this space. While a comprehensive overview of this research is beyond this chapter, we offer a brief reflection on the complex negotiations that take place in the day-​to-​day doing of care in emergency food provisioning spaces. In so doing, we illuminate the importance of cultivating ethical deliberation on how efforts to address food insecurity are simultaneously constrained by a market logic, but also open and available to alternative possibilities. We suggest that these spaces open a politics of possibility for building a more socially just and sustainable foodscapes after COVID-​19. In keeping with current understanding of emergency food provisioning spaces, in one sense the community kitchen operates through a paternalistic model of charity that risks co-​ option by neoliberalism.9 Furthermore, while the community is repurposing food ‘waste’, the supermarkets it is partnered with accrue benefits through Corporate Social Responsibility agendas, diverting attention away from the unsustainable practices that perpetuate waste in the first place. However, the research also casts light on volunteers’ efforts to constructively

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engage with these tensions by talking about them in the day-​ to-​day doings of care, at the end of a kitchen shift or during team meetings. These moments often opened reflective deliberation on the intrinsic value and worth of such a project. Is the community kitchen just a ‘sticking plaster’ response to social and environmental crises? Can it evolve into something more transformational? To what extent do volunteers embody an ethic of solidarity, standing with rather than for individuals who are marginalized and excluded? As responses to COVID-​19 from civil society grow and attempt to sustain themselves in light of the spike of food insecurity, a key dimension of these endeavours lies in negotiating what it means to care in times of crisis. Reflecting on first-​hand accounts of individuals experiencing hunger due to benefit sanctions led two participants to participate, for the first time, in direct action against government austerity measures. Ongoing deliberation about the creeping appropriation of food banks and community kitchens into the aforementioned ‘Big Society’ agenda of the government at that time, through a succession of public visits from politicians, prompted other volunteers to engage in advocacy. One volunteer wrote a blog post reflecting on research that identified a correlation between austerity policies and a growth in food bank use, which resonated with the increasing number of families attending the community kitchen. These examples show the importance of reflection and learning for shaping what it means to care, in this case contributing to the extension of care beyond service provision to encompass action for radical systemic change. While this offers insight into how deliberation can help us make sense of what it means to care for those made vulnerable by this pandemic, it remains important to acknowledge that care is a complex and contested terrain. While we have pointed towards the progressive potential of such initiatives, we recognize how the white, middle-​class volunteers at the community kitchen, and potentially other newly emerging

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mutual aid networks, can affirm dominant power relations by casting those experiencing food insecurity as passive recipients of charity. Such tensions underscore the need for collective reflection around how best to respond to the unfolding crises connected to the pandemic, not only to meet individual needs in the here-​and-​now, but also in seeking social transformation to build a more socially just foodscape. Towards a deliberative ethic Lessons from the community kitchen reveal the need for deliberation. Despite the seductive power of techno-​scientific ‘fixes’ for our troubles, a more modest transformation in our foodscapes might emerge from thinking about the voices that are heard in these debates and the ways in which stories can be retold from different perspectives. As we have shown here, foodscapes can look very different when we focus on the social relations that food might foster between people. The power of corporates in our contemporary food regime encourages us to think of our agency as ‘consumers’ first and foremost, ‘shopping with our feet’ by making narrow and largely irrelevant choices between brands from different corporations. As an important example of the ways in which these deliberative spaces might be opened up, the National Food Strategy review –​one of the first substantial reviews of agri-​ food in the UK in decades –​was launched prior to the crisis. The first author participated in one of the public consultations in the north-​west of England, where approximately 40 citizens were invited to explore food in their lives. As with many of the other authors in this book, we think that this model of ‘citizens’ assemblies’ is important in broadening the scope of voices that are heard, and as Rebecca Willis has suggested with reference to climate: Deliberation won’t, in and of itself, solve the climate crisis. We need far-​reaching action, which will require

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radical policy, and confrontation of vested interests. But this policy and action will only be achievable if people understand and support it. The more we find out about how to build a public mandate for climate action, and the more we include people in genuine debate and deliberation, the more likely we are to find a way through.10 If foodscapes after COVID-​19 are to be better, they require new ways of thinking, understanding and narrating our experiences. More-​than-​food In speculatively exploring foodscapes after COVID-​19, we need not choose between returning to the status quo prior to the crisis nor predicting the grim intensification of corporate capitalism’s stranglehold. Understood as more-​than-​ food, food touches on so much more than what we eat to sustain ourselves –​it is fundamental to the ways in which we understand and relate to one another. Our task is to tell stories that simultaneously recognize corporate power and its ills in the foodscape without totalizing it or casting it as inescapable. We must also resist the tendency to read emergent and possibly more positive formations as merely embroiled within restoring the status quo but instead as radically exploring the terrain of what might be possible. The limited space we have here necessarily constrains us. A fuller perspective may give more credence to the politics of knowledge and the way in which our daily routines shape (and often limit) our experiences of the foodscape. Equally, we have barely touched on the ways in which food might be produced differently  –​for example in the growing interest in urban agriculture and ‘guerrilla gardening’, signalling a resurgence of the utopian underpinnings of ‘garden cities’. Nonetheless, the crisis has generated glimmers of possibly

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better ways of doing things. Without wishing to downplay the struggles involved in bringing about better foodscapes, amid the upheaval of the virus we must become more open to ‘to what can be learned from what is happening on the ground’ in ‘read[ing] the potentially positive futures barely visible in the order of things’.11

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NINE

Cash Daniel Tischer, Jamie Evans and Sara Davies

Cultural representations of pandemics and other apocalyptic scenarios often encourage us to reflect differently on those things we take for granted in our day-​to-​day lives. Seemingly mundane and dependable items no longer appear so mundane, nor so dependable. ‘Money’ itself is one such entity, which has been the object of various reimaginings within fictional accounts of disaster and subsequent societal breakdown. In ‘Bartertown’, the fictional trading place in the Mad Max film, for example, we witness the total collapse of civilization and, with it, the entire monetary system; swapping and bartering are all that matter in such a place. Money is erased from a society in which violence dictates everyday life. Thankfully, such fictional accounts appear not to reflect the reality of the COVID-​19 pandemic; however, the crisis does still provoke important questions about the future of money and how we pay for things. Cash  –​our physical coins and banknotes –​has moved from being a mundane and dependable thing to something that many view as a threat, another source of spreading the virus. Cash as a medium of ‘exchange’ has taken on a new meaning. As such, many retailers are strongly encouraging customers to pay by card, while the limit on contactless payments has been increased from £30 to £45 per transaction in the UK, with similar moves across Europe. Automated teller machine (ATM) withdrawal ­figures –​which were already on the decline –​have plummeted. What just a few months ago might have seemed like fiction –​ a seismic shift in the way we pay for things –​has now become

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reality. The future of cash is very much at stake, and in the discussion that follows we begin by exploring why this still matters. We then consider the effect of COVID-​19 on access to cash, situating these changes in the broader context of digitization and pre-​crisis trends. We conclude by reflecting what the pandemic can teach us about what we can do better moving forward, ensuring that no one is left behind. Cash matters Money has been integral to human history for thousands of years. Early coins in circulation across Asia and Europe enabled civilization and economies to evolve from bartering to the generalized system of exchange that continues to exist in modern capitalism. But money does more than just facilitate transactions; it is also an integral part of everyday life. It is given to others as tips, donations or gifts; it is used to save and budget. At its essence, money buys citizens the ability to participate in society. These days, money comes in two forms: cash –​the physical coins and notes in circulation –​and digital payment methods –​ such as payment cards, mobile payments and, increasingly, digital currencies such as Bitcoin. Digital payments now trump cash and we may well soon arrive at a point where physical money ceases to exist. This alone is not necessarily problematic. Indeed, returning to fictional imaginations of the future, many are very positive about the possibility of a cashless society. Science fiction gives us a digital form of money: the ‘Credit’. Be it the television series Star Trek or Altered Carbon, or the film Total Recall, the Credit is universally accessible, and run and accounted for by a supranational government or corporation. Everything works smoothly, and no one in such futures opens their wallet to find that they need to nip to the cash machine. But reality is more nuanced than fiction. In the real world, we see that while digital payments offer speed and convenience for many, there are those for whom it presents real problems. The independent Access to Cash Review (AtCR)1 estimates that

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over 8  million Britons would struggle in a cashless society, be it those who do not use banks, those reliant on cash for budgeting, those in areas poorly served by digital infrastructure or those simply lacking the required digital skills. Others may have specific medical conditions or disabilities that make digital payments less suitable: some with visual impairments may struggle to read the amount requested on a card terminal, but are fine with the more tactile and colourful cash. For such people, having continued access to cash is more than just a preference, it is a necessity. Technological solutions may in time be able to overcome most, if not all, of these issues. Nonetheless, at present, many people –​especially those in vulnerable situations –​face the possibility of exclusion from full participation in society should cash disappear too hastily. We are just not yet prepared to live without traditional money. Beyond the issues facing individual consumers, there are also broader challenges to contend with. First, a cashless society depends on technology always functioning correctly. Even if all members of society have access to one means of digital payments, they are reliant on the functioning of that particular system. In recent times, we have witnessed banks suffering from technical glitches frequently and even a European-​wide outage of the Visa electronic payment network.2 The danger of mass cyber-​attacks, too, looms ominously for any cashless society with no good backup plan. The second challenge relates to privacy. Some fictional accounts of cashlessness turn dystopian by raising the possibility of traceability; in some scenarios, money  –​ the Credit  –​ becomes a panopticon, a medium through which all citizens can be tracked and, potentially, controlled.3 It is commonly argued that one of the main ‘problems’ with cash is in the way that it facilitates tax evasion and black markets, such as those for drugs and sex work. The assumption of such arguments is that these activities might be prevented in a cashless society. What is more likely, however, is that these activities would be

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pushed towards the dark web, with new under-​the-​counter currencies or bartering emerging to side-​line authority. Those hoping to end such activities may in fact simply exacerbate them. This highlights the issue of the ‘gentrification’ of money.4 Cashlessness forces people to take part in a system that largely benefits large banking corporations, and while some will avoid this in illegal ways, others will have no choice but to have all their transactions mediated through a third party. COVID-​19: the death of cash? The future was already looking bleak for cash. Over the past decade, card and mobile-​based contactless payments have dramatically changed how we pay for things. In the ten years to 2018, cash payments halved in the UK, to 11 billion annually, comprising approximately 28% of all transactions. By 2028, cash payment volumes are projected to fall to just 10%5 –​ largely mirroring previous developments in Sweden and Canada towards a ‘cash-​lite’ society. Such decline is predominantly the product of changing consumer behaviour, but it comes with the side effect of substantially reducing the profitability, and therefore sustainability, of cash infrastructure in the UK. As the authors of the AtCR and LINK –​the network to which all UK cash machines are connected –​have cautioned, this raises the very real possibility of the market of cash collapsing altogether without legislation introduced to protect it. COVID-​19 has almost certainly accelerated this risk. As shown in Figure 9.1, cash withdrawals declined substantially as the pandemic progressed. In the UK, in the first full week after the government announced a nationwide lockdown on 23 March, transactions were down 57% in value and 62% in volume compared with the same week of the previous year. The average withdrawal value per transaction meanwhile increased by almost one third to £84 compared to 2019’s average of £63.6 This may well be linked to people taking out cash to keep at home, withdrawing larger sums to avoid

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Figure 9.1: Weekly ATM cash transaction volumes and value for 2020 (in millions) 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

£2,500

Lockdown

£2,000 £1,500 £1,000 £500

05-Jan 12-Jan 19-Jan 26-Jan 02-Feb 09-Feb 16-Feb 23-Feb 01-Mar 08-Mar 15-Mar 22-Mar 29-Mar 05-Apr 12-Apr 19-Apr 26-Apr 03-May 10-May 17-May 24-May 31-May 07-Jun 14-Jun 21-Jun 28-Jun

£0

Volume (m)

Value (m)

Source: LINK.

touching ATMs, or because of less frequent, but larger, purchases from supermarkets. Nonetheless, most recent data for the week ending 28 June shows that ATM transactions have since recovered slightly, indicating the continued importance of cash, even amid a lockdown. While Figure 9.1 makes it patently obvious that COVID-​19 has negatively affected cash, it is unclear whether this represents customers choosing digital payment methods instead, or whether it reflects less spending generally as retailers, restaurants and many other merchants shut up shop. Nationwide Building Society, for example, notes that debit card spending also dropped 41%.7 Some of the reduction in cash use might even have been expected anyway:  volumes in both January and February 2020, for example, were down around 12% on the previous year, even before the pandemic took hold. Amid the unprecedented disruption of everyday life caused by the virus, people are rightly concerned about limiting their exposure to items and goods handled by others, and this is likely to have caused some to turn their back on cash. British newspapers8 headlined early in March 2020 on the idea of cash as ‘dirty’, a transmitter of a deadly disease. This was based

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on claims that the World Health Organization (WHO) had advised people to use contactless payments instead of cash; however, this was subsequently denied by the WHO. While the evidence that viruses can be transmitted via cash handling appears mixed,9 the news coverage, and moves by retailers, as shown in Figure 9.2, have potentially contributed to the public’s abandonment of cash. What’s the damage? Regardless of the precise reason for declining cash use in the pandemic, surely the damage is done? The imaginary of the

Figure 9.2: A common appeal to use card payments rather than cash during the crisis

Source: Authors’ own.

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cashless society previously confined to fiction has entered reality. It must now only be a matter of time before the whole cash system comes tumbling down? One of the biggest debates pre-​pandemic was how to retain sufficient local access to cash, as demand for it drops, within a system in which the organizations delivering such access are largely profit-​driven. Certainly, in recent years, the declining use of cash  –​and general digitization of banking  –​in the UK has affected provision of various cash infrastructures across the country (Figure  9.3). First, the introduction of online and mobile banking saw the disappearance of a third of the country’s bank branches between 1994 and 2010, variously citing demand and cost-​cutting to justify the reduction in service.10 Continued access to cash during this time of disappearing traditional infrastructure was enabled by automation in form of cash machines, with numbers almost tripling over 20 years to a peak of over 70,000 in 2015.11 Since then, however, as consumers began turning their back on cash, Figure 9.3: Development of UK cash infrastructure 1998–​2019 60,000 50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 1998

2001

2004

2007

2010

2013

2016

ATMs − free to use

ATMs − pay to use

Bank branches

Building society branches

Post office branches

Source: House of Commons Library (2020) Bank Branch and ATM Statistics.12

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2019

Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

ATM numbers have dropped by 10,000. Many are simply no longer financially viable. The overall numbers of each type of cash infrastructure, however, matter less than the way in which they are geographically distributed. We know that, as bank branch numbers dropped after 1995, closures disproportionately took place within rural and poorer communities.13 ATMs owned by independent ATM deployers (IADs) –​as opposed to bank-​owned ATMs –​largely filled the void that was left behind in such areas. Many introduced pay-​to-​use ATMs to these neighbourhoods, leading LINK to set up a financial inclusion programme in 2006 to tackle the issue. However, in recent years, as cash use has declined, it is ATMs owned by the IADs that have been converted from free to fee-​charging. This has led to a growing concentration of fee-​charging ATMs in more deprived areas –​a trend that may equate to a higher ‘poverty premium’, in which the poor pay more to access essential services.14 Pre-​COVID-​19, the potential collapse of the UK cash infrastructure prompted calls for industry and government action to protect the system.15 The industry response has been fairly mild: a ‘Community Access to Cash Initiative’ led by the financial services sector trade association UK Finance and a government announcement in its 2020 budget of plans to protect access to cash via legislation and to ensure the financial sustainability of the UK’s cash infrastructure. While this is encouraging, it did not offer commitment to ‘free’ access to cash, or to prohibit retailers from rejecting cash, as New York City has done. After the virus, and despite some action, the pressures already facing the cash system will be multiplied, risking further exclusion of some communities. For proponents of cash, the best-​case scenario is merely that cash usage returns to the slower, pre-​pandemic downward trajectory it was on; the worst case is that demand drops irreversibly, and more retailers begin refusing cash payments altogether. Either way,

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without intervention, it is likely that IADs will drop ATMs that become unprofitable or transfer yet more machines to pay-​to-​use. Banks may further close branches and ATM locations because of additional cost pressures, although doing so may provoke a consumer and political backlash. The Post Office will most likely maintain its bank and cash services, although increasing demand may also have a negative impact on communities dependent on those services. The risk of any closure of cash infrastructure is that access to cash simply vanishes for those who continue to need it most in urban peripheries and rural locations. Overall, pressures on the UK’s cash infrastructure would have persisted, even in normal times. The COVID-​19 crisis has not only put these commitments in question, but is likely to speed up the decline of cash. Out with the old, in with the new? COVID-​19 perhaps represents a moment in history where ‘everything changes’. Does that necessarily mean that everything needs to change? Do we simply ditch cash and become the cashless society of fictional depictions of the future? The answer, we suggest, is ‘no’; protecting the ‘old’ and bringing in with the ‘new’ are not mutually exclusive. The pandemic teaches us to value and protect that which is already good, while –​at the same time –​working towards a better future. While the crisis has seen a dramatic reduction in the amount of cash used, it is remarkable just how persistently cash continues to be used by millions of households despite a national lockdown. The crisis highlights the importance of equal access to technology moving forward, and until such equality is achieved, there can be no cashless society. Rural communities, those lacking digital skills and lower-​income households all are at risk of being left behind and becoming ‘trapped in a cash economy’.16 If the ongoing costs of running devices and

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accounts  –​account fees, mobile phone contracts for smart phones and so on –​are taken into consideration, one can argue that the cost of accessing digital payment channels becomes another poverty premium. We need to do more to protect our most vulnerable individuals and communities. For many, digital solutions do not yet meet their needs or have not yet gained their trust. It will take both time and effort to overcome these barriers, although there are signs of digital innovation beginning to fill the gaps: for example, in the midst of the pandemic, Starling Bank brought out ‘connected cards’, which allow account holders to give a second debit card to a carer or trusted friend who can then buy groceries and other essentials on their behalf. Such innovations retain important features of cash, but do so in a digital space. Challenges lie, however, in ensuring that sufficient investment is made in building such products, involving those who would use them in their design, and ensuring the technology actually reaches those who would stand to gain from it. To date, the shift from cash to digital payments has been market-​driven, not collaborative. Cash is woven into our social fabric; therefore, overly zealous and uncoordinated approaches to force change to digital payments must be rethought. Another major lesson from COVID-​19 is to expect the unexpected. While mass cyber-​attacks or technological failures capable of rendering an entire digital payments system unusable seem unlikely, they are not impossible. As a society, we must prepare against future dangers, or we do risk finding ourselves accidentally living in Bartertown. COVID-​19 is not the end of cash, and anyway, the current economic fallout is not an opportune moment to rejig our system of exchange to such an extent. The immediate consequence of COVID-​19 requires government intervention to safeguard ‘free’ access to cash, not just for the vulnerable, but for everyone. And this requires some reorganization of

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the cash industry. In the long term, a utility approach to cash seems inevitable to sustain the system: it would reduce costs and remove the profit incentive. Moreover, costs would not be borne by individuals and cash will not be stigmatized as a second-​class means of payment. The cash-​lite society will arrive sooner than expected, but cash is here to stay.

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TEN

Artificial Intelligence Dan McQuillan

The COVID-​19 pandemic has been marked by computer modelling and tech solutionism as much as it has by a global lockdown. Tech solutionism is the term for proposals such as proximity-​tracking apps and digital immunity passports; the substitution of advanced technology for the proper resourcing of epidemiological responses or open political debate about state priorities. Never mind that fluctuating Bluetooth signals, for example, are a very poor proxy for viral exposure. Technological innovation does the job of diverting attention from questions about underlying material and structural conditions. The tools to hand for modern states are the infrastructures of surveillance and tracking that already pervade daily life, from smartphones to social media. The pandemic has transformed the tricky balance between commercial surveillance and customer unease. Where corporations previously tried to play down their data collection and Cambridge Analytica was a scandal for its use of data mining and micro-​targeted political communications, tech giants can now offer surveillance as a public service. Companies such as Palantir with dubious track records are suddenly in open partnership with national health services and facial recognition start-​ups repurpose their tech to do distant readings of your body temperature. And yet these same extractive data logics underpin the wider structures of outsourcing, privatization and precarity that have left societies underprepared for the pandemic itself.

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Life after COVID-19: The Other Side of Crisis

The overall pandemic response is set within a logic of computational modelling and behavioural modification. The imperceptible multiplication of COVID-​19 in our cells conspires with data science to produce anticipatory governance, where numerical projections of the future become the rationale for state actions in the present. It is important, in the midst of grief for our losses, not to miss the significance of a governmentality based on algorithmic prediction and preemption. Like surveillance, it was already present prior to the pandemic and is set to become a dominating feature of post-​pandemic society, in particular through artificial intelligence (AI). Abstraction and optimization AI, meaning the technology of machine learning and neural networks, will become even more important in a post-​pandemic society, not least because its core operation is the prediction of risks at scale. All actual AI is a form of machine learning, a set of computational methods that learn from data; the more data there is, the better they get. The algorithms of machine learning adapt statistical methods for probabilistic pattern finding and classification. Their power is their generalizability; given the right supply of labelled data, they can be equally applied to predict which cell growth will become cancerous or which customer is likely to make a repeat purchase. AI works through reductive abstraction and optimization. Aspects of the world are transformed to vectors of numbers between zero and one and used to calculate a mathematical distance between the algorithm’s predictions and labelled target data. This so-​called ‘loss function’ is painstakingly minimized through a massive number of iterative calculations. The results can be uncanny; AI can recognize faces with greater accuracy than people and drive cars on the open road. But at heart it is mathematical pattern guessing, achieved by rendering diverse

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aspects of the world commensurable such that they can be statistically traded against each other. Moreover, advanced AI is highly opaque exactly because of these complex calculations, and it is impossible to directly interpret its judgements in terms of human reasoning.1 At the same time that AI is high tech hyper-​abstraction, it is curiously dependent on invisible labour. The datasets it needs to learn from are typically labelled by poorly paid click-​ workers, who are frequently women from the global south. This workforce is itself assembled algorithmically, via online crowdsourcing platforms. AI is a part of a global pattern of racialized, gendered and invisibilized labour practices, much like those in ‘care work’ covered in other chapters in this book. The important point about AI is that is it not aimed at understanding but at intervening. Unlike ordinary science, it doesn’t produce probabilities as a way to test an underlying theory but as a way to enable preemption. The purpose of YouTube’s algorithm, for example, is to present you with a next video that you are most likely to click on, not to ask why there’s a high probability of you taking that action (let alone whether there might be a link to any factors like self-​harm or growing radicalization). The mathematical optimizations of AI are utilitarian and instrumental. AI’s predictions become most problematic when applied to people and to social problems. They are inferential classifications based on ‘people like you’ –​so not only do they reproduce data bias, but they are inherently a form of stereotyping. Applying these calculative logics across society will inevitably have an asymmetric impact, as of forms of classification and ranking are inseparable from questions of power. The orderings of AI will become forms of segregation leading to continuous partial states of exception2, whether that is the denial of cheap car insurance or being prevented from working based on predicted infection factors. These divisive operations of AI will act as an additional downward pressure on the existing social fractures that have been so starkly highlighted by COVID-​19.

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The allegiance of post-​pandemic states to anticipatory governance will only boost the hubris of AI. In the eyes of many, its number crunching ability to convert any kind of data to optimized predictions has no limits. Even before the pandemic, ideas that deep learning could deliver better healthcare than most doctors or better cancer detection than most radiologists were already widely promoted.3 Machine learning was already being deployed to predict which job applicants would have a successful career or which parents would go on to abuse their children. This is despite its demonstrated fragility, where shifts in the underlying data produce unexpected failure modes and adversarial examples. Prior to COVID-​19, the opaque predictions of AI were already being lined up for tricky social interventions and to manage austerity. A post-​pandemic society of risk and debt will supercharge this algorithmic solutionism, under the banner of continued neoliberal optimization. We are clearly not all in this pandemic together. Whereas one of the vectors for the rapid spread of the virus was international business flights, as many of the chapters in this book show, the most at risk include the very care workers who are holding the show together. It is society’s most vulnerable, those who can least afford to isolate, who are hit hardest. In the UK, the death toll in the most deprived areas is double that in the wealthiest, while for black and ethnic minorities it’s up to four times that of the white population.4 But AI and other technologies of computational prediction, which will be heralded as ways to manage post-​pandemic society and the coming climate disruption, are also engines for intensifying those inequalities. They are made for targeting, and lend themselves more to rationing and scarcity rather than to levelling up whole communities. AI’s algorithms are means of stratification, in the long lineage of bureaucratic and statistical methods deployed by institutionalized power. AI’s function is to discriminate in a technical sense, which maps to a social role of distinguishing between the deserving and the undeserving. In post-​pandemic society, therefore, AI

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becomes fully necropolitical,5 that is, part of a wider apparatus of governance that is involved in ‘letting die’, where that serves overall goals. In pre-​pandemic neoliberalism it was refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, or disabled people on benefits, who were subject to systemic neglect up to the point of death, and at the height of the initial COVID-​19 outbreak it was older people in care homes and care workers themselves. In the ‘forever pandemic’ that will follow, the machinations of computational learning will continue to act both as political obfuscation and engines of systemic neglect. People’s councils With the coming of COVID-​19, as we have seen in this book, there has been a collective realization that our lives depend on low-​income labour; from care assistants and nurses to warehouse workers and cleaners, much of it contracted under conditions of extreme precarity. And if there is one thing that the pandemic has made clear, it is the centrality of care work –​ not only the paid care work that is disproportionately done by immigrants and women of colour, but the care work at home that becomes newly visible as, for many under lockdown, the home and the workplace become one and the same. These physical and affective labours are what feminists have identified for decades as the work of social reproduction; the unvalued activity that arises from our dependencies and vulnerabilities and has to be taken care of before any economic activity can take place. Social reproduction, as it turns out, really does supersede production. Clearly a version of tech dystopia beckons us from beyond COVID-​19. AI produces both thoughtlessness and carelessness: thoughtlessness, because the ‘humans in the loop’ will not be in a strong position to challenge the opaque but authoritative predictions of the systems; carelessness, because the algorithms abstract away from the myriad knock-​on effects that will ripple outwards from their optimizing exclusions,

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especially among the most vulnerable and least visible. The question is how to reconstitute our technologies of knowing and doing as matters of care. In nor mal times, care and social reproduction are overshadowed by the detachment and abstraction that are common to AI, bureaucracy and business. A techno-​politics of care starts with attention to the exclusions and boundaries of a stratified society. Our first question for any AI should not be by what percentage it has improved its score on a dataset but how its application might increase the burden of care or amplify neglect. In the task of transforming machine learning, our greatest resource is not lakes of surveillance data but situated knowledge. Whereas any failures of AI or tech solutionism are explained away by the need for more data, their actual failure is the promotion of a perspective that somehow sits outside the situations it is actually influencing. Feminist and post-​colonial thinkers have long cast doubt on empirical knowledge that claims to be free of social history. They suggest that objectivity is stronger when it recognizes that knowing always has a standpoint, that all knowledge is situated knowledge. Starting from these overlooked understandings of the world can be a more rigorous approach than relying on AI’s claims to neutrality. Situated knowledge gives us a way to interfere with the automated sedimentation of injustice in post-​pandemic society, by finding ways to start from the perspectives of those at the edges. We can bring care into AI by putting the perspective of social reproduction at the centre. The aim is to challenge the erasure of lived experience by the ideology of efficiency and to generate a counter project to the algorithmic production of carelessness. The approach proposed here is to introduce into machine learning and AI structures that ‘slow the universalizing process by unsettling existing assumptions, boundaries and patterns of political action’6, in particular the people’s council. People’s

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councils are bottom-​up, federated structures that act as direct democratic assemblies, demanding that innovation be responsible (see Chapter Sixteen in this volume, for example). The mutual encounters and consensus making of people’s councils are themselves transformative in terms of creating different relationalities. The purpose of people’s councils is to become a mode of ‘presencing’, of forcing the consideration of the unconsidered, or more fundamentally of reordering the idea of AI such that its production of pairings of concepts and material effects iterates towards an actually different society. The idea of people’s councils is rooted in the social histories of workplaces and communities. Introducing them into AI means that the automation that would otherwise exacerbate the power and wealth gap is subject to collective influence. With people’s councils, no labour is invisible. Instead of allowing transcendental knowledge claims that act from outside and above to enforce a post-​pandemic ordering, people’s councils accept the limitation of seeing things from diverse points of view. Instead of passing off to machine learning the task of regulating behaviour, people’s and workers’ councils collectivize the task of learning together how to improve our mutual wellbeing. Knowing, caring The need to collectively occupy our mechanisms of knowledge production is signalled by the authoritarian tendencies of machine learning and a brittleness in orthodox science that has been highlighted by the pandemic. The scientific method has been refined over centuries to filter out the bias of individual scientists but remains vulnerable to cultural bias and to the parts of the process that come prior to the scientific method itself, such as who decides the questions to be studied and why. While science is successful under the narrow conditions it sets itself (ceteris paribus –​all other things being equal), it is not able to provide the answers when the evidence base is lacking

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and the stakes are high. ‘More data (even “reliable data”) and better predictive models cannot resolve the … arbitration of conflicts and dilemmas that appear at every scale.’7 The same applies to our technologies of knowing; refinements based on computational statistics are swamped by bigger sources of uncertainty. Witness the way Singapore’s highly-​rated Bluetooth contact-​tracing app counted for little when it turned out the government had ignored the thousands of low-​status immigrant workers packed tightly in their segregated hostels. We must be guided instead by shared value commitments. Scientific inputs can only be a part of the process that establishes our collective response. The legitimacy required for public agreement cannot be won by an appeal to higher authority but by widespread participation in the process. The idea of post-​normal science, which was first proposed in the early 1990s,8 deals with these dilemmas by radically extending the scientific method of peer review. The extended peer community is where all those with an interest have a say, from the experts of various scientific disciplines, to stakeholders, whistle-​blowers, investigative journalists, and the community at large. In the version proposed here, for forms of predictive computation, the role of the extended peer community is filled by the people’s council. It seeks a robust position through different viewpoints and experiences, rather than the technocratic optimization of disempowered people under assumption-​laded models developed by the institutionally and epistemically privileged. With councils of peers, the issue of behavioural modification is no longer extant, because the grassroots participation of people themselves becomes core to a successful response. Taking together the need to place social reproduction at the centre and the need to extend our empirical methodologies, we can say that post-​pandemic computational predictions need to be embedded in ways of knowing that are inseparable from caring. Instead of predicting-​preempting, we need to develop an approach of knowing-​caring. This is not a substitution of

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sentiment for the empirical, but an acceptance of the fact that all knowing is immersed, participatory and relational. Rather than seeking to minimize distances in abstract space, for example, it seeks insights in the differences of subjectivities and experiences. The contention is that this form of analysis will act differently in the world. Instead of approaching a problem as a matter of identifying the most risky entity, it reflects on transformations in the shared context. For example, rather than sinking resources into deep learning models that try to predict which members of society will become troublesome, it intervenes through changes that try to improve the situation across the board. There should be no post-​pandemic future for a technology that does not start from the question of social justice. AI (like stories, money, the city, the state and so on) is a form of apparatus, one that produces both meanings and material consequences. Like any apparatus, its actions can be described as forms of boundary-​drawing practice; delineating the distinctions between this and that as a way of marking how they should be acted on. Any post-​pandemic boundary-​ drawing practices must start from a concern with the impact of exclusions. Rather than inheriting established boundaries and hierarchies of being, it should concern itself with what these structures obscure and erase. The aim of transformed machine learning will be to open up questions about borders and relations rather than to engage in brute force calculations that reinforce them. This requires the abandonment of AI as an authoritative engine for social ordering. Solidarity is seeking to know the situation of the other and acting on it on the basis of a shared and interdependent being. To actively approach the world through knowing-​caring is a form of solidarity. Knowing-​caring is a way of knowing that does not start with a separation between the knower and the known, but with an acknowledgement of co-​constitution. This is what Isabelle Stengers calls caring cosmopolitics9: being attentive and responding to the multiples of being with which

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we are entangled and co-​constituted. Solidarity is also the political stance most strongly linked to the historical emergence of unions, co-​operatives and people’s councils. Alongside putting care in the spotlight, the popular response to COVID-​19 has also seen a revival of solidaristic activity at community level, in the form of self-​organized mutual aid. Much of the discourse in mutual aid groups, in between organizing support around food and housing, is about how to avoid returning to the social neglect of ‘business as usual’ or worse, as neoliberalism imposes another round of punishing austerity. This chapter warns of the danger that post-​pandemic inequality will be supercharged by technologies like AI that are claiming to manage risks and solve problems. It proposes people’s councils as a way to interrupt this hegemony with views from the community and workplace that prioritize care. To begin, we can examine every situation where AI or its ilk are offered as solutions and ask instead how risks and resources can be dealt with through a radical commoning. As the social theorist Donna Haraway reminds us, our intra-​actions and interdependencies stretch across vast fields of biota and abiota. Nevertheless, ‘the doings of situated, actual human beings matter. It matters with which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others.’10 Change starts with collectives that are prepared to take on the necessary activities of repair and resistance. The modelling that needs to take priority is not that delivered from on high by vast structures of computation, but the modelling to each other of forms of mutual aid. Reclaiming political agency from engines of abstraction means starting from a standpoint of solidarity.

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ELEVEN

Resilience and the City Malu Villela

As we try to understand all the forces that led us to this crisis, with cities at the forefront of it, we find ourselves facing the same old problems that were already here but not receiving decisive attention –​growing levels of inequality, climate change as a global emergency, precarious work spreading, struggling health and care systems, unsustainable business models, and the crisis of mental health. Although over the past decade many cities have tried to become more proactive in addressing these issues and building local resilience, the virus is a test. In this chapter, I ask the following question: can cities build out of the crisis to sustain some of the collective sense of interdependence that has arisen in response to COVID-​19 and central government policies? I respond to this question with optimism by underscoring the lessons that we have learnt so far and how we can take urban resilience more seriously in the years to come. But why should we turn our focus to cities and places and not countries and nations? The city Analysis based on nation states can sometimes mask the more nuanced picture of unbalanced growth within countries, especially regarding levels of income, wealth, wellbeing and sustainability. It could be that a country ranked as prosperous has just a few high-​g rowth regions and a large number of ‘left behind’ places. Tackling such issues in the context of social, economic and environmental inequalities in ways that

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benefit all, not just a few, has become an urgent priority that is reshaping governance and networks in city regions across the world. That is the reason why most of the social innovation and progressive experiments that have emerged in recent years take the form of place-​based solutions at the local level. It is no exaggeration to suggest that cities are leading the way towards more inclusive, sustainable and democratic futures. Likewise, it is no surprise that having played such a leading role they would also be at the forefront of the current and recent crises. This light and shadow are not only faces of the same coin, but are also the source of their potential to spark new ways of thinking, organizing and doing that will, ultimately, create urban resilience. As the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) suggests, ‘resilient cities are cities that have the ability to absorb, recover and prepare for future shocks (economic, environmental, social & institutional)’.1 Through being tested so many times, trying and failing, processing and learning, cities have been accumulating knowledge and experience. Values of inclusivity, democracy, pluralism, collaboration and sustainability have been informing new behaviours towards the commons and a new ethos around what it means to coexist interdependently. Slowly, they are rendering cities fit for the purpose of addressing the major systemic challenges we face. Their main asset is diversity and the ability to provide a shared identity for inhabitants. As the writer and photographer Taiye Selasi would say, experience is local –​‘Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local.’2 As a microcosm of society, cities materialize our sense of citizenship and propel us to engage with the world around us. In doing so, we can build a broader sense of group identity that transcends the borders of the local to resonate with a global community around a shared set of principles and values. This is a work in progress, of course, and what this current crisis offers is a very powerful glue to hold us together and eliminate any remaining differences. This is not the same

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as seeing the crisis as a leveller; it is about testing our views of what is ultimately important and building solidarity and empathy to recognize the human being behind the other, with all their joy, sorrow, strength and weakness. In other words, as a British commentator predicted in January before the crisis, there is hope to move away from an illusory idea of personal autonomy that fuels individualism because ‘a new age of collectivism seems to be dawning –​and not a moment too soon’.3 Well, it may have arrived. In the following section, I explore values and proposals that have been tested or already implemented in cities around the world, and highlight the lessons and ideas that might help us in this transition towards a new age of urban resilience. Circular economy The idea of a circular economy was brilliantly captured by Kate Raworth in the image of a doughnut. In her seminal work Doughnut Economics, she offers a framework for a new economic thinking that puts people first by meeting their core needs and respecting the limits of the planet. The Doughnut is ‘a social foundation of well-​being that no one should fall below, and an ecological ceiling of planetary pressure that we should not go beyond. Between the two lies a safe and just space for all.’4 It builds on the collective power of human beings, markets committed to being a force for good, and public partnership to catalyze progressive change. When these three pillars are brought together to address the social and environmental challenges of our time, real change can be achieved. The first step is repurposing our economies from a productivity and growth mindset to ‘meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-​g iving planet’.5 We then must use the potential of the market, government, households and the commons in order to collaboratively create solutions to the wellbeing of both people and planet. This comes as a realization of our interdependence and the need to approach

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the economy through promoting a more equal distribution of wealth and a regenerative (circular) economy. An example of this in an urban context is the implementation of the doughnut economics model by the city of Amsterdam. The model seeks to mobilize the city’s changemakers and stakeholders around a compelling shared vision of what it means to become a thriving city in order to bring about change. The first step was the creation of a ‘city portrait’ following the Doughnut’s social and planetary boundaries, which presents the big picture of the city life via the impacts expressed through the social, ecological, local and global lenses. This tool becomes the starting point for collaborative innovation by connecting local community initiatives, start-​ups and civil society with public institutions, businesses, schools and universities. Underpinning this, a city network –​Amsterdam Doughnut Coalition –​was created bringing together 30 organizations across all local sectors to support the implementation of the model, something that Raworth herself suggests is increasing the likelihood of such process being successful.6 Social economy Discussions about the ‘social’ economy have been happening for a long time and gained prominence after the 2008 financial crisis with frustrations about ‘business as usual’ and the belief that another economy is possible. The social economy engages more or less inclusive, sustainable and democratic organizations, and it is expressed in a variety of forms according to different contexts and places. It can vary from mission-​led businesses that combine social and economic goals within their hybrid form (for example, B Corps, as created in the US), to not-​ for-​profit social enterprises with 100% of their resources and profit aimed at social good (for example, social businesses that follow Muhammed Yunus’ ‘Grameen Bank’ model, created in Bangladesh).

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More recently, the social economy has been considered ‘a business model for the future of the European Union [EU]’, which is home to 2.8 million social economy enterprises and organizations.7 The EU describes the social economy as ‘a wide diversity of enterprises and organisations  –​ co-operatives, mutuals, associations, foundations, social enterprises, paritarian institutions of social protection etc. –​ that share common values and features such as the primacy of the individual and the social objective over capital, a democratic governance, and the reinvestment of most of the profits/​surpluses to carry out sustainable development objectives, services of interest to members or of general interest’. It also considers that ‘because of its strong social commitment, the social economy offers innovative solutions to the main economic, social and environmental challenges of our time’.8 Collective action Collaboration is needed not only to contain the spread of the virus, but also to get us out of the crisis. Although national governments, especially in the rich nations, have stepped up to rescue the economy and its workers, the long-​term solutions will not come from policy makers, businesses, academics or civil society working separately. All sectors have limitations and are being urged to rapidly learn how to respond, change and adapt to the ‘new normal’ ahead of us. The complex issues of the urban environment have become even more entangled. When considering health, for example, we must not only imagine it as human health, but as social, economic and environmental health as well. Unless we learn to appreciate the systemic nature of all our problems and engage in meaningful collaborations, we will not be able to rebuild better. Acknowledging the big picture, as in the Doughnut model, is a good starting point to transcend the individual and embrace

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the collective. Operating within our own boundaries and knowledge might feel more comfortable, but we will only go so far. We need to embrace uncertainty together. Cross-​ sector governance, inter-​organizational collaboration, meta-​ organizing and co-​production/​design/​creation approaches have been adopted by many sectors, networks and institutions in the urban environment, with some notable examples such as community wealth building (CWB) and civic wealth creation (CWC). In the CWB model, economic development is organized around people and places, promoting values of equality, fairness and sustainability. It seeks to connect local anchor institutions (city governments, hospitals, universities and so on) with social economy organizations (co-​ops, social enterprises, community businesses and so on) by enabling the latter to participate in the market created by the former. In this process, it retains the wealth locally and increases the leverage of social enterprises in the local economy.9 The CWC model distributes local stakeholders into categories of community (area, culture, ethnicity); enterprise (organizations with a social and/​or environmental mission that engage in revenue generation); and regimes of support (government agencies, funding bodies, large corporations, universities and so on). Civic wealth is created when the different groups of stakeholders engage in collective action and converge their mutual interests to improve collective social welfare.10 Approaches, scales and frameworks Many approaches have been combined to build transition frameworks based on different city visions. The resilient, happy, healthy, edible, green, regenerative, inclusive, just, people-​c entred, smart, circular and sustainable city are some of the visions that have been around lately. They do not all follow the same principles. A  sustainable and

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healthy city, for example, would favour more green areas, whereas a just city would be concerned with more affordable housing. Nonetheless, there are several intersections that can be balanced to find the most suitable design for each city’s particular issues and challenges. The tension that sometimes arises between social inclusion and environmental sustainability should not be faced as a threat but rather as something to fuel creativity, disruption and innovation to solve problems in the local level. Instead of putting them in separate boxes or silos, bringing them together and appreciating the tension can actually enrich the process of developing initiatives and solutions that cut across themes. When it comes to different levels or scales, an important aspect is how international frameworks, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can translate to different scales and contexts. Voluntary local reviews (VLRs) of progress on SDGs have been carried out by cities since 2018. One of them, the English city of Bristol, identified issues such as coordination challenges in the delivery and monitoring of the SDGs sub-​nationally, which are attributed to the jurisdictional complexity of administrative city boundaries that do not reflect the reality of a functionally integrated urban region with its multiple towns, smaller cities and communities. The emphasis on cities as units of governance, as in this case, can miss the endless movement that happens across city borders and lead to unnecessary urban, suburban and rural divides, which will ultimately prevent a better integration of the region. Another aspect highlighted by the Bristol report is the need to disaggregate data in order to account for the inequalities within and across the city, which is usually masked by national statistics or lacking in local statistics. Some indicators are simply not appropriate or miss local forms of organizing and innovating, which led the report to suggest that ‘there is a clear need for a standard set of indicators for cities that are spatially appropriate and globally applicable’.11

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The future of participation Most of what we need has already been created, but it comes as fragments of a puzzle that need connection. The innovators and disruptors needed are the ones able to translate, connect and broker the web of overlapping initiatives and reinvented wheels that are already out there  –​in sum, to connect the dots. Finding common ground where different parties can agree on the direction to take is a necessary starting point. In this process, technology can be put at the service of transparency, solidarity and democratic participation. Tools such as mapathons, hackathons, ‘ask and offer’ platforms, and citizen observatories and assemblies are progressive uses of the internet for the common good. Mapathons are collaborative efforts to collect geographic data and map specific places in the form of map marathon events. Hackathons are another collective effort type of event where programmers and participants of diverse background collaborate to create proof-​of-​concept applications. Both of them operate through crowdsourcing. In 2018, a mapathon in Pretoria (South Africa), for example, involved university students mapping important features in the draft plan of coastal management for the city of Cape Town. The data generated in this event was later used in a hackathon event to develop web or mobile applications focused on the blue economy (that is, the use of marine and ocean resources in a sustainable way for economic growth and to improve livelihoods in coastal areas) of the region.12 These tools can also be used to map new economies in cities, which usually slip under the radar of official statistics and databases. Mapping and identifying the variety of organizations in these social economies can help to better understand their scope, scale and diversity, and ultimately help to enhance their contributions to the overall economy. Ask and offer platforms have been used to enable individuals to ask for or offer help during the COVID-​19 crisis. Such platforms match specific asks with suitable offers and more

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easily link people and organizations in a web of solidarity. In Brussels, for example, a platform called Brussels Helps13 was created during the crisis with support from all authorities and municipalities in the region in order to gather requests, contributions and bring citizens together. These tools have been proliferating in the crisis but could also become a permanent asset for the city and go beyond the urgent asks of these times. By involving different sectors, such as the private sector and universities, for example, it could help to link corporate volunteers, students and academics with small local businesses, social enterprises, co-​operatives and charities in order to support them with specific technical and research needs. As an open space, it provides inclusion and democratic access to the population, as long as issues of digital literacy and connectivity are also taken into account, for example through partnerships with public authorities or organizations that can address these challenges. Citizen observatories and (as mentioned in a few other chapters in this book) assemblies are another good use of technology to ensure democratic participation of local citizens in city-​level planning and development. Although survey and consultations have been used as an approach by the public sector, more inclusive and participatory designs have been created to ensure democratic decision making and overcome power asymmetries. A public and independent platform where all information concerning citizens is made available can be used by citizens to monitor public authorities and establish a dialogue over their claims and concerns. In addition to that, it can provide a space for forums and discussion over issues concerning grand challenges such as climate crisis and inequality, alongside other SDGs. Ultimately, this would enable a people-​centred vision of urban governance, participatory planning and design, operating as a tool for citizen involvement in democratic decision making.14 As a profoundly social species, human beings need the collective to survive. Cities magnify that dependency, and

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also bring us into contact with others who are often very different from us. Urban and personal resilience ultimately involves rethinking the transactional mode that drives most of our interactions, commodifies our roles and creates power imbalances between us. This is needed if we are to nurture a collective spirit that respects and values our diversity as a strength rather than a threat, and hence helps us overcome the challenges of our times together.

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TWELVE

The Nation and the State Bridget Anderson1

When I was a child, I wanted to be a librarian and for some reason that entailed writing on the title page of books: Bridget Anderson, my table, my bedroom, 9 Stow Park Avenue, Stow Hill, Newport, Gwent, South Wales, Wales, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, Europe, the world, the solar system, the Milky Way, the universe. During the COVID-​19 pandemic, I hunkered down in my parents’ house in Newport, Gwent, South Wales (and so on) and I suspect I was not alone in being thrown back into that Russian doll-​type imagination of how I inhabit the world. Notably, the microbiological was not on my list. COVID-​19 is requiring us to take the microbiological seriously and it throws these scales into confusion through its movement across and between them. The virus is ‘zoonotic’ –​a pathogen that has jumped (moved) from a non-​human animal to a human, and human movement across short and long distances is key to its transmission. Public health responses to the virus focused on controlling movement. From March 2020 onwards, many of us were required to confine ourselves to domestic spaces in order to contain the virus’ spread, retreating into the innermost Russian doll. This is replicated at/​replicating the level of the national. Flight bans and quarantines were imposed by multiple states, and across the world there were brutal crackdowns on people on the move: boats crammed with people left to drift in the Mediterranean and on the high seas, mass confinements in dangerous camps, deportations and immigration bans and abandonments. As Ailsa Winton writes of Guatemalans

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stranded in Mexico: ‘What else to do with these disposable bodies when they can no longer be discarded in the usual receptacles (detention centres, migrant shelters, countries of origin), other than to just toss them on the side of the road.’2 Movement, it seems, is bad for our health and looking to the future there are already plans for harsher border regimes. States including Italy, Germany, Chile, the UK and the US have suggested ‘immunity passports’ as a way of exiting lockdown, exempting holders from mobility restrictions. Such an approach has been deemed impractical, unethical and discriminatory, and as incentivizing infection, but this does not mean it will not be adopted.3 The virus will infect regardless of race, class and passport, and this is precisely what exposes race, class and passports as the inequality-​producing mechanisms that they are, for certain populations are far more likely to sicken and die. Moving people Migrants have particular vulnerabilities in this context: public attitudes to migration in the context of COVID-​19 have focused on fear of infected invaders, anxieties that have been fed by symbolic gestures (US President Donald Trump’s order to paint the US/​Mexico border wall black, for example) that present an illusion of control, of taking bold action, even as the disease thrives. Making the solution walls –​whatever their colour –​turns attention outwards to borders as if the virus is not already inside. Moreover, one has only to think about the death tolls and stories emerging from refugee camps, care homes and prisons to see that by themselves barriers do not keep infections out nor do they lock them in. I am not disputing that isolation and the prevention of movement and interaction can be, in circumstances such as we are facing today, an important emergency public health measure to contain infection. But turning an emergency measure into a long-​term strategy hung around international borders risks smuggling

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in methods of surveillance and population control that affect everyone and are not confined to ‘migrants’. But there are also real opportunities, cracks in hegemonic reasoning where it is possible to insert crowbars. Consider the example of Portugal. At the outset of the crisis, the Portuguese state granted (temporary) citizenship rights to many migrants and asylum seekers to facilitate their access to social security and healthcare. Ensuring access to care and treatment for the virus helped limit its spread, and guaranteeing access to essential services and a financial safety net meant that migrants were under less pressure to work to pay for food or care, again helping to limit contagion. In the UK, when pandemic struck, various contagion-​limiting measures were implemented including the suspension of evictions from asylum accommodation. When the requirement to ‘stay at home’ was imposed, the UK government ordered that local authorities house, not only homeless UK citizens, but also migrants and asylum seekers with no recourse to public funds (NRPF) who are usually explicitly excluded from accommodation rights. Certain aspects of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’4 were mitigated, and COVID-​19 was put on the list of conditions where free treatment is permitted irrespective of immigration status. However, that freedom was highly circumscribed. Treatment for an underlying condition that makes a person vulnerable to the virus, for example, was specifically excluded, and data-​sharing agreements between hospitals and the British government were still in place, making it likely that some people continued to be reluctant to come forward for treatment. The fear of authorities that has been deliberately inculcated through the hostile environment policies puts everyone at risk. This risk will be magnified when the government implements contact tracing. It is estimated that there are up to 1.2 million undocumented people living in Britain who are likely to be extremely reluctant to sign up to the government’s app.5 Limiting access to healthcare does not necessarily preserve a

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scarce resource, but risks increasing stress on it by facilitating spread that is not containable to ‘undeserving’ migrants but is experienced across the population. Regularization and access to free healthcare is a public good, not just good for migrants. Even at the peak of the pandemic, desperate efforts were being made to facilitate the movement of key workers. Trump’s proclamation suspending immigration did not apply to hundreds of thousands of migrant temporary workers that keep the US economy going. As many of the chapters in this book have argued, the COVID crisis has exposed how the jobs on which all our everyday lives depend –​the hospital cleaners, supermarket shelf stackers, retail workers, drivers, carers and agricultural and food processing workers –​are low-​ waged, ‘low-​skilled’ and often undertaken by BAME people and migrants. Across Europe and North America, non-​citizens account for a substantial share of employment in many sectors designated as essential, including health and care services. They are also at high risk of illness because of their interface with customers and clients. In many wealthy states, including the UK, immigration policies have been driven by human capital approaches, a desire to attract ‘the brightest and the best’ and to value immigration according to a hierarchy of ‘skill’. Skills and earnings are not necessarily reflections of social and economic contribution, and this needs to be reflected not only in wages and conditions but also in immigration policies that currently rarely offer paths to long-​term residence and citizenship to low-​waged workers.6 COVID-​19 has also exposed the harshness of the NRPF condition, as many legal residents are not able to claim Universal Credit, nor in-​work benefits, and are living in or on the edge of destitution, and simply cannot afford to not work or to self-​isolate even at the risk of their own and others’ health. Lifting NRPF has become a public health issue. Any re-​evaluation of work and social contribution must have questions of citizenship and migration at its heart.

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Moving things In the same way that migration cannot be disentangled from labour, so it is also entangled with other forms of movement of goods and capital. There has been a relentless political focus on human movement across borders –​‘migration’ –​ that treats it as separable from human movement within national borders, and from the movement of goods and of finance. Consider the case of strawberries. The UK is now almost self-​sufficient in strawberries between April and October but only thanks to the work of EU migrants, who were flown in at the height of the pandemic to harvest crops that would otherwise have rotted. The British soft fruit sector’s concerns about how to replace low-​waged seasonal agricultural workers from Europe post-​Brexit has it seems been vindicated. Economic advisers suggest that the time has come for the UK to stop growing crops that are difficult to mechanize, and turn to imports instead, moving strawberries instead of people. But that does not mean that British consumers will therefore no longer be dependent on low-​waged migrant labour. Spain is a key source for out-​of-​season strawberries, and Spain too relies on migrant labour. The pandemic caused a significant shortage of seasonal workers in Spain, beginning on 13 March when Morocco closed its borders and stopped the exit of thousands of Moroccan women who would usually go to Huelva in Spain to pick fruit. COVID-​19 has exposed how low-​waged, seasonal migrant labour, with its flexibility and poor wages, underpins a wide range of foods, and the farm-​to-​ plate chain relies not only on migrants wanting to come, but on other states’ immigration policies, on international transport infrastructure, and on sending states permitting their citizens to move. If we value resilience and sustainability, we need to think laterally –​to see connections between the movements of people, goods and capital.

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The state of the nation This exemplifies the ways in which Russian-​doll thinking constrains our understandings of the connections between us that are manifest in mobilities, because of the powerful work that is done by the scale that is the nation state. During lockdown, we were reminded daily through charts, graphs and international comparisons, that the state we are living in matters. The infrastructure, preparedness and responses of states differed significantly and became quite literally matters of life and death. But the nation rather than the state was also mobilized metaphorically, and despite the planetary reach of the pandemic this often relied on images of war. The language of immunology has long drawn on the imagery of the body as a nation state defending its borders from viral intruders7 and conversely the language of politics has drawn on the imagery of the nation as a body. To quote UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speech when he left hospital following his treatment for COVID-​19: “We will defeat this coronavirus and defeat it together. We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country. It is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.” Daily updates were given from Georgian panelled rooms and speakers were flanked by Union Jack flags. Citizens were ‘enlisted’ to fight a ‘national battle’, and ‘frontline’ staff who died were spoken of in quasi militaristic terms as ‘fallen heroes’. The NHS indirectly but powerfully invoked solidaristic nationalism, even as it serves at the same time to showcase British tolerance through the celebration of the contributions of BAME staff. It exemplifies the exclusions engendered by an ostensible inclusive multiculturalism that takes citizenship status for granted, manifest in Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s Twitter assertion of 17 November 2019:  ‘It’s the National Health Service not the International Health Service … after Brexit we’ll extend the NHS surcharge to all non-​UK residents’ [emphasis added]. And ‘migrant’ easily morphs into racial and ethnic discrimination.

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While citizenship is assumed and therefore overlooked, the nation state has been key to the politicization of the virus, particularly in terms of its national origins. The World Health Organization strongly recommends against using geographic locations in disease names on the grounds that it is stigmatizing and plain misleading –​the so-​called ‘Spanish ’flu’ pandemic of 1918, for example, did not originate in Spain, but news coverage of it did because it was a neutral country and its press was not subject to wartime censorship. The origins and spread of the virus are far more complex, and a focus on national origins leads towards migrants and refugees being vilified as spreaders of the virus and away from a clear understanding of how the multiple intersections of (im)mobilities of capital, of food, of humans, of animals, of the microbiological, have produced the contemporary situation. The biologist Rob Wallace has written brilliantly about how across the world multinational agribusiness has undermined local food security and changed the dynamics of land use in complex ways.8 A number of different socioeconomic processes play out that broaden human’s interface with wildlife such as undercutting smallholders who branch out into wild game (let’s not call it ‘bush meat’), pushing rural poor people into areas that are difficult to cultivate and raising the price of food, so that these people turn to other sources of protein. Human movement is bound up with our vulnerability to viruses as it exposes us to new pathogens and disrupts ecologies that have held them in check, but we should not blame the impoverished rural people who move, but rather understand that migration in the context of global agri-​business, fisheries and livestock production. These huge industries are owned and controlled by a handful of multinational corporations and invested in by finance capital. These are the forces shaping the interface between the socioeconomic and the biological that has turned toxic. COVID-​19 confronts us with the interlacing of our cell structure with the socioeconomic and points to different ways of understanding how we live with, in and against the world.

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Connecting scales The microbiological is pointing to the importance of relational thinking that is quite different from my childhood address listing, and that locates the origins of the crisis not in a single animal in a wet market in Wuhan, nor in the movements of super-​spreaders within populations, but in entanglements whose ‘knots’ are not only in Beijing and Hong Kong but also in New York, London and Paris. The logic of the national and the scapegoating of migrants directs attention away from these entanglements, mapping viral pathogens and migrants on to one another and driving impoverished responses that depend on a vision of separation to preserve purity in the (national) body. The microbiological requires us to take seriously our interdependence with each other and our world, understanding human movement as systemic and as part of complex ecologies that cannot be reduced to input and output.9 COVID-​19 teaches us that when the UK government deliberately fostered a ‘hostile environment’ for undocumented migrants, it created a hostile eco-​system for undocumented migrants, legal residents and citizens alike. We are all living with, not separated from, and this is for better and for worse. As Hupert argues, the microbiological moves us away from ‘us versus them’ and teaches us that ‘us equals them’.10 We are not hermetically sealed. We ingest and excrete. Our bodies typically contain a mass of about 0.2 kg of microbes and we host more microbial than human cells (ratio 1.3:1). Our microbiota harbour fungi, bacteria, viruses and archaea and we cannot live without them. We co-​developed and our bodily systems depend on them; they support our digestive and immune processes, protect us from certain cancers. Some argue that animals and plants are not discrete entities but holobionts –​a biomolecular network in an intimate, co-​dependent relationship with microbes.11 And the microbiological teaches us too that we are the world. We are not simply porous but we stretch beyond ourselves,

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located in ‘cloud bodies’ that, for the moment, require us to keep two metres apart and that two metres is not a hard bubble surrounding us, as we leach into our world, whether we like it or not.12 The microbiological confounds purity, integrity and stasis. It also exposes the impossibility of disconnecting the socioeconomic from the biological and the biological from the socioeconomic. Milton Friedman wrote: ‘Only a crisis –​actual or perceived –​ produces real change. When that crisis occurs the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.’13 The idea of the nation that is lying around is very powerful. It normalizes strict mobility controls, hyper-​surveillance, and the ready association of race and disease; it distracts from the powerful financial and industrial interests that today shape the interface between the socioeconomic and the biological spheres; and bizarrely, it makes preventing human movement more imaginable than planetary public health. But we are also focused on the microbiological more than ever before, and this suggests responses to human movement that prioritize life and multi-​species health, and offers ideas enabling us to reimagine a more just and integrated future for human mobility.

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THIRTEEN

Unleadership Carol Jarvis, Hugo Gaggiotti and Selen Kars-​Unluoglu

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (George Eliot)1 COVID-​19 can be described as what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben would call a ‘state of exception’, a crisis allowing political leaders to extend the reach of their power beyond the usual reach of the law, privileging further the voices of those in power and diminishing the rights of citizens.2 Dissenting voices, challenging the ‘truths’ of those in power, come to be seen as treacherous, diverting time and resources away from dealing with ‘the enemy’. In this chapter, we explore how in both setting aside the desire to be ‘in control’ and in stepping away from the competitive discourses of ‘us versus the enemy’, what may emerge is a form of active citizenship that both complies and resists but is neither compliant nor resisting. We have termed the acts and practices associated with this ‘unleadership’ as they turn our views of leadership on their head.

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Leadership Received notions of leadership portray leaders who mobilize people towards a vision, inspire action and model the way, who set the pace and expect self-​direction and excellence.3 The stories of the heroic efforts of these leaders teach us lessons on the importance of clarity of purpose, acts of boldness and courage, dedication and self-​sacrifice. Those who are not leaders are life’s bystanders –​‘hollow men’ as T.S. Eliot would have described them4 –​infants afraid to take responsibility and act; shirkers preoccupied with self-​interest, stripped away from their creative capacities.5 More contemporary, post-​heroic, leadership theories encourage shared or distributed leadership practices. But these still assume an individual or small cadre to ‘empower’ followers to act and to provide a fertile ground for others to flourish by nurturing them along the way.6 These notions of leadership are underpinned by illusions: first, it is possible for a leader always to be ‘in control’; second, being in control is desirable and necessary; and third, being in control assumes even greater importance in a ‘state of exception’ since only the leader can command and mobilize the resources needed to succeed. Drawing on Agamben’s ideas, we argue that in normal circumstances, leaders consider organizations to be in a ‘state of potential perfection’ and their responsibility as to exercise control in pursuit of perfection. Unexpected circumstances, when they arise, are interpreted by leaders as ‘states of exception’, threatening their organizations with the menace of ‘permanent imperfection’. Agamben describes how these menaces are characterized as ‘impurities’, often attributed to immigrants, foreigners or others who are considered dangerous (see Chapter Twelve in this book). The threat caused by the menaces must be quashed at any cost. The leader must take control and show strong, decisive leadership. This control logic is reinforced by the ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’ discourse present in narratives of good

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leadership in times of crisis.7 Everyone expects leaders to rise to the occasion, recognize threats rapidly, select the correct path to take, unite the public and persuade them to follow through on decisions. We could fill this chapter with examples of how the ‘state of exception’ created by the COVID-​19 pandemic has shown this control logic to be inadequate and illusionary. Two that stand out from the UK are how the government’s determination to keep centralized control over testing and the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) has resulted in costly time delays and hindered provision. When the UK government abandoned its initial ‘test and trace’ strategy as the number of infections climbed, centralized testing laboratories were set up, disregarding offers and capacity from established and accredited laboratories. The government planned to recruit and train 18,000 contact tracers, at the same time that many of the 14,000 or so health inspectors employed by local councils and familiar with the protocols, if not these specific tests, were experiencing reduced workload with the closure of bars and eateries. The control logic, similarly, is evident in the approach to PPE provision. Reputable clothing manufacturers such as Burberry and Barbour claim to have offered to manufacture PPE through the official procurement channels. After several weeks and many attempts at offering to help, no response had been received. After the BBC covered the story, the government’s response was to externalize the problem, suggesting that the crisis was caused by health workers using PPE irresponsibly. At the time of writing, as we move into the next phase of lockdown management, having evidently failed to exercise control over testing and PPE provision, the government is now seeking to ‘control the virus’. According to Agamben, ‘the theory of the state of exception saw a moment of particular fortune’ between 1934 and 1948 when the metaphors of catastrophe associated with war lent weight to the narrative that being in control is both possible and desirable.8 The fantasy of being in control of the COVID-​19 pandemic is promoted using similar metaphors. The virus is

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being anthropomorphized into an enemy that we will ‘wrestle to the ground’. We are ‘engaged in a war against the disease which we have to win’, ‘going into battle’ against it ‘armed’ with strategies of containment and suppression, our defences manned by ‘key workers’ (many of whom were until recently classified as ‘unskilled’, many of whom have been starved of resources). But how do you wage war on an invisible enemy –​ an enemy that is not ‘out there’ but has jumped across borders to be in ‘us’? How can leadership survive when the narrative leaders rely on is rendered obsolete? COVID-​19 has upended the rhetoric that only the leader can command the resources to succeed in the face of the threat of permanent imperfection, supporting Naomi Klein’s assertion that established leaders can often make things worse in a crisis, by externalizing the problem and treating other people as though they are responsible for it.9 Unleadership In a state of exception, people are expected to show allegiance to the leader and forego creativity, self-​initiative and self-​ leadership. With COVID-​19, we have instead seen the opposite, with leadership coming from unexpected places. Within weeks, while many formal leaders across the world dithered, pivoted and pirouetted, companies, communities, neighbourhoods and individuals picked up the leadership mantle, taking responsibility, upskilling themselves intellectually and emotionally, and making their own decisions. What has emerged from the shadows is a set of acts and practices that we have termed ‘unleadership’. Beyond acts of good neighbourliness, individuals have used their resources and resourcefulness, without being asked but taking timely, creative and informed action for social good. A 15-​year-​old boy spent a Sunday evening designing a full-​ face protective plastic masks that can be 3D-​printed; a doctor has set up a website taking orders from hospitals and bringing

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together more than 5,000 volunteers to 3D-​print plastic visor parts to meet those orders; chefs have been working in their home kitchens to prepare and deliver meals to vulnerable people. When demand outstrips resources, many have turned to crowdfunding to continue their efforts. Small independent businesses have rethought their place in the supply chain to meet the needs of their community: the local delicatessen that responded to the pasta shortage in supermarkets by buying bags from their supplier and selling them on at cost. What do we mean by unleadership? We have adopted the term as it turns assumptions on their head. Unleadership is not a theory; it is embodied and can only be experienced or practised. It describes the spontaneous, uncontrolled practices and initiatives that have come to the fore during the state of exception of COVID-​19. Below we summarize its elements. • Unleadership is a proactive gesture, the best contribution I  can make to others and the social order in my current circumstances without an anticipated personal benefit. The gesture is made with a social intention in a spirit of compassion, generosity and optimism. These gestures have uncertain consequences, requiring a twist of attention from anticipated results to the quality of my contribution. • Unleaders do not seek to control events. They take responsibility for their acts but they do not seek to –​and cannot –​control the response to them. Ralph Stacey’s theory of Complex Responsive Processes of Relating10 suggests we can influence –​but not control –​the response of others, and reduce uncertainty, by paying attention to our gestures. • Unleaders are journeying into the unknown, with no clear vision of their destination and with no achievement motivation beyond ‘making a difference’. While they are likely to have a clear purpose, they do not have a clear vision for the results of their acts.

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•

•

•

•

There is no grand plan. Rather, actions evolve in line with the response they get. Unleaders have the courage to act into the unknown and to admit to not knowing. In so doing, they are making themselves ‘vulnerable’ to ‘failure’ or to being ‘wrong’. However, they do not seek the mantle of invulnerability, or claim to know right from wrong, or search for success. The risks of appearing vulnerable or being seen as a failure are, then, inconsequential. Unleadership is not alternative leadership or a response to lack of leadership. Unleaders do not define themselves and their acts in relation to the dominant (or alternative) narratives. They take responsibility without waiting for permission, or for authority to be delegated. Empowerment is irrelevant. Unleaders’ acts are not dependent on securing the commitment of others. They have no particular interest in generating followers. Nor do unleaders believe they have all the answers; they recognize the limits of their knowledge and resources and willingly enrol and/​or pass on responsibility to better-​placed others when they reach their limits. Nonetheless, unleaders may still succeed in framing and defining the reality of others even though that is not their intent. Unleaders act in the here and now, paying, rather than seeking, attention. In escaping from future predictions, unleaders can thrive in uncertainty and ambiguity. Complexity is subordinate to the capacity to act. By acting on the basis of the insight and information available to them now, unleaders can take timely, thoughtful action.

An example of unleadership in the UK that has gained a lot of attention is the story of Captain (now Colonel, soon to be Sir) Tom Moore. Captain Tom had a fall, nearly ending his life, and recovered due to care he received from the NHS.

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In recognition, he set himself a challenge to walk 100 laps of his garden with his walking frame in the weeks leading up to his 100th birthday. He set up a charity website in the hope of raising £1,000, seeing this as his best possible gesture given his circumstances. Events took an unexpected turn when first the local media and then the BBC got hold of the story. When put in the spotlight, he accepted the attention gracefully, with optimism and humility, and with no fear of being perceived as vulnerable or of failing to reach his goal. On being congratulated on his achievement, he replied: “People keep saying what I’ve done is remarkable. However, it’s actually what you’ve done for me which is remarkable.” At the time of writing, Captain Tom had raised £33 million. And although he did not set out to do so, he has inspired others to take on their own challenges. Public figures have also demonstrated unleadership, using their networks without seeking or claiming attention. For example, while government ministers were deflecting attention and scapegoating professional footballers as greedy, overpaid young men (many of them from overseas and from less privileged backgrounds), it emerged that Liverpool Football Club’s captain, Jordan Henderson, had been liaising with other club captains to co​ordinate donations from their players to NHS Charities Together. Equally, when Liverpool Member of Parliament and founder of Fans Supporting Foodbanks, Ian Byrne, raised the alarm around the impact on local communities of the loss of match-​day donations, Henderson responded immediately. Within hours, the players and club had contributed £40,000 to offset the shortfall. A future for unleadership? What we are experiencing with COVID-​19 differs from distributed or shared leadership; leaders are not working collaboratively with other stakeholders to create, nurture and sustain empowering environments and are not seeking creative

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ways to energize engagement. Conversely, without waiting for the leadership activities to be distributed, without an invitation to change the social order, unleaders –​clothing manufacturers, footballers, high school students, frontline health professionals, retired army personnel, members of the local community –​are acting unbidden. ‘Leadership’ is emerging from all directions, from everywhere and nowhere, although rarely from the expected sources of alternative leadership, such as trade unions, opposition political parties, specialist advisers, and even much of the mainstream media. Stuck in the discourse of war-​like competition, they have mostly been curiously silent or come extremely late to the conversation. Perhaps they have been paralyzed by the scale of the challenge, the speed of development, and –​like the government –​have been too wedded to unrealizable notions of control? Overly concerned with the personal risk attached to showing outright dissent at a time when national unity and pulling together is seen to be required? Unleadership shows a way forward based not on opposition to or power over, but rather on collaboration and co-​creation with. This disrupts and displaces the powerful stories of capitalism described in Chapter Two, and its associated values of competition, individualism, self-​serving interest and consumerism. COVID-​1 9 has uncovered both time to reflect and opportunities to act, to bring new social value in creative ways. This resonates with Rebecca Solnit’s suggestion that creativity and improvisation born of necessity in times of crisis can open new possibilities, something that all of the chapters in this book exemplify.11 As we emerge from the current virus-​ induced state of exception, what might be the legacy of this flourishing of unleadership? If nothing else remains, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people across the world will have undertaken acts of unleadership and experienced the power of making a thoughtful, proactive gesture. And many millions will have realized the value of what George Eliot terms ‘unhistoric acts’ in their everyday lives, and will perhaps

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be inspired to do likewise. Much of this learning may be carried into the future, to the benefit of us all. The emphasis then switches to the quality of gestures. When things don’t go as anticipated, unleaders re-​evaluate their gestures. Since unleadership is appreciative, the more you practise it, the more agency you uncover. If we can carry this learning forward into our collective lives after COVID-​19, we will see not only a flourishing of creativity, but also the humanizing of our work and lives. Unleadership also has implications for how business schools seek to develop the executives of the future. While unleadership can be learnt, it cannot be taught. Unleadership is developed through experience and practice. Instead of the ‘expert’ monologue of lectures and textbooks, unleadership will be communicated through experiential and inclusive approaches that value a diversity of voices. In business schools of the future, unleadership will be fostered in spaces that have sharing, discussing, questioning and co-​creating at the core of their ethos.12 A plethora of more creative approaches will come to the fore, from reflective walks to participant observations, from journaling and poetry, to drawing and film making. If we must stick with the metaphors of war, perhaps we should be looking instead to what the distinguished British scientist Paul Nurse described as the ‘Dunkirk moment’  –​ referencing the evacuation of the British army from France on a flotilla of small boats in 1940 –​by turning attention to the frontline, to other ‘key workers’, and those whose actions help to keep us safe. In the UK, COVID-​19 has exposed the limitations of strong leaders who cling determinedly to the illusion of control. The government seems to have missed its small boats moment, underestimating both their citizens’ willingness to limit their individual freedoms for the common good, and their creativity and resourcefulness in working around the barriers created by centralized control. Paradoxically, in relinquishing attempts to remain in control and accepting, if not embracing, imperfections, the practice

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of unleadership has the potential to move us towards a ‘good enough’ ‘state of potential perfection’. We can imagine the emergence of a self-​confident society, not promoting strong leaders but instead seeking leadership from everywhere and nowhere. We all have the potential to be unleaders, and in life after COVID-​19 we hope that many more of us will be.

134

FOURTEEN

Carbon and Climate Colin Nolden and Michele Stua

We can learn from the two converging trends of increasing mission orientation in support of public health and decreasing energy demand in support of planetary health. Both are outcomes of the COVID-​19 crisis. The former intentionally, through the mobilization of resources as the impossible has become inevitable regarding state intervention and collaboration. The latter unintentionally, as restrictions on the freedom of movement have scaled back demand for goods and services. This mission-​orientation experience around public health needs to be translated into international, collaborative mission orientation around planetary health to ensure there is no return to business as usual, with energy demand and carbon emissions rebounding accordingly. This chapter explores mechanisms within the Paris Agreement on climate change to operationalize such collaboration through climate clubs. Such clubs allow the market-​fixing carbon tax/​cap-​and-​trade dichotomy to be overcome through the reducer-​receives principle based on the positive pricing of carbon emission mitigation actions. Economic stimulus to foster a Green Deal is the first step to embodying planetary health objectives in our economic trajectory. Carbon emissions On 20 April 2020, US oil prices dropped below zero for the first time in history. With oil demand slumping by a third worldwide and storage at capacity, Western Texas Intermediate

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oil traders were essentially paying other market participants to alleviate their supply as oil contracts approached their expiry date for May delivery. With subdued demand because of the COVID-​19 crisis, oil is no longer the investment safe-​haven it used to be. In more general terms, this crisis is associated with a supply shock arising from the intentional constraints on economic activity due to lockdown. Its associated demand shock arises from the loss of disposable income and declines in investment activity as lockdown leads to a 20–​40% decline of economic output.1 As a result of this crisis, the share of global energy use exposed to lockdown measures increased from 5% in mid-​March to 50% in mid-​April. Countries in full lockdown in mid-​April experienced, on average, a 25% decline in energy demand per week as large end users such as manufacturers scaled back demand and offices, schools, universities, retailers, restaurants, pubs, gyms and cinemas shut across the service sector. Amid the suffering and death that COVID-​19 has caused, this was good news for planetary health. While global energy demand declined by 3.8% in the first quarter of 2020 compared with the first quarter of 2019, coal demand declined by almost 8% because of China’s COVID-​ 19 lockdown, cheap gas, growth in renewables and mild weather. Oil demand declined by 5%, with global transport activity almost 50% below the 2019 average in late March. Gas demand declined by only 2%, as a decline in industrial gas use has been partially offset by greater heating demand in homes under lockdown. Renewables, on the other hand, were the only energy source that recorded a growth in the first quarter of 2020. These figures suggest that the impact of this decline in economic activity on energy demand is highly asymmetrical. Cars are considered safer than other means of transport, which has led to a smaller decline in oil demand relative to distances travelled at a local level. Electricity demand, on the other hand, has witnessed the most significant reductions. According to

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the International Energy Agency (IEA), in countries under full lockdown ‘the shape of demand resembled that of a prolonged Sunday’.2 While relatively smaller declines in car use are bad news for both planetary health (climate) and public health (accidents and road deaths), the decrease in electricity demand has led to a relative increase in the share of renewable energy in our energy mix. As renewable energy generation is not affected by demand, and as daily demand peaks under lockdown conditions are more closely aligned with solar power supply, the renewable energy share in electricity generation increased proportionally. As a result, Germany alone is likely to reduce carbon emissions associated with electricity generation by around 15mt CO2 in 2020, which might put Germany on track to achieve its 40% carbon emission reduction target vis-​ à-​vis 1990, an achievement deemed impossible in late 2019. Globally, the growth in carbon emissions might fall by an unprecedented 8% in 2020. This compares with a 4% decline during the Second World War, a 3% decline during the 1991–​ 92 recessions, a 1% decline during the 1980–​81 energy crisis and a 1% decline during the 2009 financial crisis.3 To reach zero-​carbon emissions in 2050 and comply with the targets of the Paris Agreement, this decline in the growth of carbon emissions will need to be repeated year after year. Declining energy demand because of declining economic activity is also having very positive effects on air pollution. In Europe, lockdown has led to an approximately 40% reduction in average nitrogen dioxide levels and a 10% reduction in average levels of particulate matter throughout April 2020. This is primarily the result of falling coal and oil demand. Across Europe, reduced chronic air pollution exposure is expected to avoid 11,000 premature deaths, 6,000 new asthma cases among children and 600 preterm births during this period.4 Given the substantial permanent loss in economic activity likely to result from the crisis, this demand depression might result in more permanent energy demand reduction with

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associated planetary health benefits. Under such a scenario, fossil fuels will experience a year-​on-​year decline in demand, while demand for renewables might increase because of low operating costs. Carbon emission and air pollution would decline accordingly. However, this depends on financial stimulus aligning with the targets of the Paris Agreement as it is equally likely that lower oil prices might lead to increasing demand for oil and inhibit investments into cleaner energy sources. The IEA has warned that ‘the rebound in emissions may be larger than the decline, unless the wave of investment to restart the economy is dedicated to cleaner and more resilient energy infrastructure’.5 Mission orientation COVID-​19 has caused mission-​oriented market interventions on scales equivalent only to wartime economies. What was deemed impossible before the crisis has become inevitable, with government encouraging collaboration and cooperation throughout society and the economy. In particular, the mission criticality of protecting lives through restrictions on the freedom of movement has coincided with market intervention to facilitate medical supplies such as ventilators and protective clothing. Economic knock-​on effects of this mission orientation have also led to market intervention in other sectors. In the UK, for example, railway franchises have been brought under government control. These examples indicate the capacity of governments to intervene in times of crisis. Public support to act decisively has led to a major expansion of the role of the state. The success of these policies in strongly interventionist states is reflected in low numbers of both new infections and deaths, and the easing of lockdown restrictions. Now the challenge lies in channelling and harnessing this momentum for the deeper and more prolonged interventions necessary to tackle the climate emergency. With the United Nations Framework Convention

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on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow (Global Climate Conference) postponed to 2021 as a result of the COVID-​19 crisis, the intervening months are a rare if not unique window of opportunity to devise plans to ‘build back better’, rather than rebound into the system of corporate gain and environmental decline. Amid the suffering and death, there is thus a real opportunity to harness this mission orientation to foster transformative socioecological change by recognizing public health priorities as a function of planetary health. With the 2050 net-​zero carbon emissions target in place and climate emergencies declared across most local authorities in the UK, there is also a political mandate for politicians to act on climate change. Leadership for decisive and long-​term action is necessary to navigate complex climate diplomacy to ensure that the Paris Agreement will be implemented, and countries commit to its objective of limiting global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-​industrial levels. Current mechanisms Traditionally, many economists have treated planetary health as an externality. Following the standard sequential focus on stabilization of the national income, economic efficiency and fair distribution in times of crisis,6 there is a temptation to follow a familiar pattern at this point in time. First you get the economy right, then you think about externalities. In relation to climate change, the latter usually involves the imposition of carbon pricing, either through the polluter-​pays principle or the grandfathering principle. The main difficulty with imposing such carbon-​pricing systems at the tail end of this sequential focus on public finance is the allocation of responsibility. In the case of polluter-​pays taxation, the question is whether one taxes households for consuming carbon-​emitting goods and services or companies that produce and sell these goods and services. Either way, it

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usually takes the form of a direct tax on carbon emissions, usually through a proxy such as fuel or energy consumption. This polluter-​pays principle is thus concerned with the distribution of duties. The grandfathering principle is based on the distribution of rights. Emissions trading schemes are the most common application of this principle, based on capping and distributing ‘rights to emit’ carbon emissions through allocation and auctioning among electricity-​intense industries. This principle ‘states that the right to pollute today and in the future should be distributed in proportion to the amount of pollution agents have emitted in the past’.7 Major issues particularly with the grandfathering principle are evident in this time of crisis. The EU Emissions Trading Scheme has seen a sharp drop in carbon prices and a collapse of the market for the distribution of ‘rights to emit’ under decreased demand. This is likely to lead to reduced public income from auctioning revenues, which in turn might reduce further zero-​carbon investments. A similar market structure for the airline industry, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, was to be established based on average airline emissions in 2019 and 2020. This baseline would have established the means to distribute ‘rights to pollute’ in the future. With the decline in flights peaking at just over 90% because of the crisis, the baseline would be lower, and the offsetting requirements significantly higher compared with a business-​as-​usual scenario. Costs for airlines could easily increase five-​fold if this baseline were to be maintained. This prospect has resulted in increasing lobbying efforts by airlines to change the baseline years or scrap the entire scheme. The effect that the crisis is having on carbon-​pricing structures based on the grandfathering principle are evident: the silver lining of declining carbon emissions threatens market structures designed to reduce such emissions based on value assigned to ‘rights to emit’. The most common suggestion put forward

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to stabilize these mechanisms is the establishment of a carbon floor price to counter the perverse effects that declining carbon emissions are having on carbon markets. With the markets for distribution of ‘rights to emit’ collapsing under decreased demand for such rights, and the negative connotation of duties limiting the appeal of taxation policies in times of crisis, the focus needs to shift to alternative approaches beyond the polluter-​pays and the grandfathering principles. Future possibilities In this context, progressive voices challenge the conventional sequential approach to public finance by instead calling for a rethink of the long-​standing prioritization of the autocatalytic effect of market economics unbound by regulation. With oil prices reaching record lows, there is an understandable temptation to base rapid recovery measures on established infrastructures and carbon capitalism. Such rescue packages implemented following the 2008 global financial crisis led to a rebound in carbon emissions of 4.5% in 2010 following the decline of 1% in 2009.8 To counter this temptation, the International Monetary Fund, for example, is calling for a green recovery that prioritizes investment in ‘green technologies, clean transport, sustainable agriculture, and climate resilience’ to lay the foundation for the US$2.3 trillion required annually for the zero-​carbon transition of the global energy system alone. New mechanisms such as green bonds will be necessary to mobilize private finance for such investments, all underpinned by a higher carbon price as an integral element of stabilization and stimulus packages.9 EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to make the Green Deal the “motor for the recovery” to “avoid falling back in old, polluting habits”. She emphasized resilience, sustainable energy, demand reduction and circular economy principles to help protect planetary health. The trillion-​euro recovery fund will be “clearly linked” and funded through a

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temporary increase of the EU budget. It builds on the pledge to use the existing budget as a guarantee to generate €1 trillion for green financing between now and 2030. Particular emphasis lies on building efficiency retrofits into buildings and infrastructure through the ‘renovation wave’.10 As a result, this is potentially the most significant pivot point in our socioecological trajectory. Financial stimulus packages could either entrench or replace carbon capitalism. An analysis of over 700 stimulus policies plus responses from over 230 experts in 53 countries in relation to 25 major fiscal recovery archetypes has revealed that projects combining carbon emission reductions with economic stimulus deliver higher returns on government spending than conventional stimulus spending. This applies to the scaling up of clean physical infrastructure, building efficiency retrofits, investment in education and training, natural capital investment and clean research and development.11 Global co-​operation is necessary to address the global nature of COVID-​19 and align financial stimulus with international climate change targets. A  Sustainable Recovery Alliance outside the UNFCCC architecture or a ‘climate club’ within could help harness the mission orientation around COVID-​ 19 into mission orientation for planetary health. While a Sustainable Recovery Alliance could help build a shared vision, a climate club ranks among the most promising options to commit countries and their political leaders to the long-​term objectives of the Paris Agreement. Climate clubs The foundation for such a climate club was laid at COP25 in Madrid. In the early morning of 14 December 2019, nine countries, led by Costa Rica and Switzerland, established the San José Principles. These principles maintain environmental integrity in pursuit of the highest possible carbon emission

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reduction ambition while ensuring transparency, accuracy, consistency, comparability and completeness.12 Carbon clubs are based on the idea of border carbon adjustments, a fiscal tool compatible with World Trade Organization rules that allows countries or groups of countries committed to specific carbon mitigation targets to impose compensation duties on products and services from non-​ committed nations, thus reducing what it known as ‘carbon leakage’. They are potentially an element of the European Green Deal and are supported by over 3,500 US economists as a homogenous demand-​and-​supply system for carbon emission reduction. Border carbon adjustments help level the playing field between climate clubs and countries pursuing unilateral measures to support autocatalytic tendencies of market economies. Climate clubs delineated by carbon adjusted borders enable the establishment of shared yet ambitious carbon emission mitigation targets. As reductions are awarded through carbon credits, they are converted into valuable assets. This ‘reducer-​ receives’ principle can work alongside carbon taxation (polluter-​pays principle) and cap-​and-​trade (grandfathering principle) while shifting the emphasis from duties and liabilities to assets that capture the social and environmental value of reducing carbon emissions. Border carbon adjustment helps to impose the reducer-​ received principle on countries unwilling to engage in more ambitious carbon emission reduction trajectories. By levying carbon tariffs or taxes on imported goods according to their carbon footprint, border carbon adjustments guarantee exclusivity by ensuring that the benefits of partaking in such a climate club only accrue to partaking countries, which reduces the free rider problem. Border carbon adjustments thereby act as a membrane, delineating and protecting the low-​carbon commons established by climate clubs. It is a long way from declining energy demand as a result of a global health crisis to climate clubs assigning value to

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carbon emission reductions to address the planetary health crisis. The need to act decisively through financial stimulus, however, provides an unprecedented opportunity to place us on a socioecological trajectory compliant with the targets of the Paris Agreement. We could carry forward the energy demand reductions and associated carbon emission reductions unintentionally imposed on us through lockdown, but this time with intent. This would be first through green recovery stimulus and second through a global agreement at COP26 in Glasgow to address climate change through international collaboration. This crisis has provided a real opportunity to plant the seeds of change into the core of carbon capitalism.

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Growth Ed Gillespie, Jonathan Gosling and Kate Simpson

We have long known we are living beyond our ecological means; but what a struggle it is to do something about it. Maybe through this pandemic we can glimpse a different future –​one that suggests the struggle will be worth it. In March 2020, the economy was revealed to be a subset of the health system. The pandemic did what the British Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees suggested it might and overwhelmed our health services with a mortality rate of a fraction of one percent. And then took a third of the economy with it. Unimaginable? Not according to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which for 17 years forked out a £1 million a year on pandemic insurance that just paid out £100 million. The pandemic, the hospital overload and the disruption were foretold. In January 2020, we facilitated a workshop at the Bank of England on non-​linear climate risk. We had what at the time felt a daunting but safely distant conversation about the potential scale of impact of climate-​induced catastrophe, pandemic and economic crisis. Little did we suspect that within a few months we would be experiencing all three simultaneously. What no-​one foresaw –​and is yet to emerge –​are the effects it will have on attitudes about society, community, work, wealth and futures. In this chapter, we focus on attitudes to growth. We stray a bit along the way, but our argument is this:  we need to be clearer about what we want growth in and for. The things that grow are experienced in varied ways –​some

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growth is clearly bad (such as more sickness and hunger); some is clearly good (love and care); but a lot is ambiguous. For example, under-employment is bad when it creates poverty and depression, but could be turned to good if it allows for creativity and connection. Higher living standards are good, but the associated carbon emissions are bad. Our conclusion will be that among all this ambiguity, many have perceived a more fundamental difference in the things we find good and want more of, and we think this is a difference between intrinsic and instrumental goods. Underpinning this moral sensibility is an oft-​remarked truism: infinite growth in a world of finite resources is simply not physically possible. After decades of environmental ‘efficiencies’, we are still driving the economy off an entirely predictable cliff-​edge of ecological unsustainability. This was recognized way back in the era of coal when the economist William Jevons coined his paradox: increasing the efficiency of the use of a resource increased its availability, reduced its price and then subsequently tended to increase the rate of its consumption. This has certainly applied to further iterations of the fossil fuel economy, gas, oil and plastic, driving climate change in the process. And now, as negative oil prices mean you can’t give the stuff away, we have realized the truly terrifying volatility of a system built on such fluctuations and the destabilizing geopolitical ramifications that come from it. We’ve set the world, and ourselves on fire and growth seems bound to stoke it. The energy economy In Art and Energy: How culture changes, Barry Lord1 describes how each energy system that underpins our economic system also defines our cultural values. Burning wood necessitated access to land, ownership of property and feudalism. Coal an industrial era of mass production. Oil and gas an age of consumption. Electricity led to modernity. Nuclear energy a

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time of anxiety. Renewables a new dawn of stewardship. For the first time, the energy of civilization could be relational, not just transactional, drawn from the natural forces that surround us:  sunlight, wind, wave, tidal and geothermal energy, and maybe full circle, some biomass. But we shall probably have to live with a lot less energy. Renewable electrification of all UK energy consumption would require us to broadly triple UK electricity production, and while renewables are making great inroads into our electricity mix, that is a very tall order. David Wallace-​Wells estimates that all the energy produced by photovoltaic panels, worldwide, has just about kept up with energy used in Bitcoin mining.2 So we need to grow our renewable energy capacity rapidly while reducing our overall energy demand –​noting that carbon emissions are forecast to drop just 4% this year despite a peak decline of 17% on 7 April when India, China and the US were all in lockdown.3 Yet the Paris Agreement requires a 7.5% reduction every year. So even in this perceived paralysis we are using too much power. We need an economy that is absolutely (not just relatively) decoupled from carbon emissions (see Chapter Fourteen in this book), and that requires truly ambitious and radical change. What kind of recovery can we afford? In the context of climate change, this is a real dilemma. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, the quantitative easing and injection of liquidity came without climate checks and balances. The result was another decade of literally high-​octane economic growth that poisons the planet. We should not make the same mistake again. To do so would mean a return to the ‘suicide trajectory’. Besides, a reckless recovery could lead to a Roaring Twenties-​type surge in the economy followed by a crash, implosion and ensuing global trauma similar to that seen in the 1930s. scenario followed by the crash and implosion of the 1930s and the global trauma that ensued. Returning to growth must be more than ‘Death Star economics’, to use an analogy from the Star Wars films, in

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which Darth Vader proudly describes the construction of his new planet-​destroying battle-​star as a fantastic job creation opportunity. Hence the attractions of green growth’ and a ‘Green New Deal’, although both have been critiqued (by Jason Hickel and others4) as attractive and tempting ‘cake-​ and-​eat-​it’ delusions, essentially an extension of the belief that more industrial civilization will save us from the toxicity of industrial civilization. Economic growth has become a cipher, like its chronic mis-​measure Gross Domestic Product (GDP), that tells us little about our real, satisfied and high-​quality lives. As Robert F. Kennedy said, GDP counts everything “except that which makes life worthwhile”.5 After growth The lockdown has taught many in the rich world that we don’t need ‘growth’ per se; what we need is security and wellbeing and meaning and love. And narrow economic-​focused growth has not served us well; it has not given us what we need. There has been little ‘trickle-​down’. In the UK, people have been held back by a rentier economy, a decade of austerity and the gross wealth accumulation of the top one percent. The creation of a substantial precariat has in part fuelled populist instability and misguided prejudice such as the ‘othering’ of migrant communities. So what does real prosperity and wealth look, feel, smell and taste like, from our lockdown sampling? It is almost certainly about growing the love economy. One thing the pandemic has done with ruthless efficiency is sharply remind those of us engaged in competitive busyness of what really matters, the priceless human contact with friends and family, the simple pleasures of being outdoors in nature, food on the table  –​ hopefully homecooked and with none wasted. The pandemic has also shown how unevenly these ‘goods’ are distributed. Those with higher-​paid jobs have been more able to work

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from home and so worry less about how to keep that food on the table. Those with gardens and those living near parks and green spaces have been more able to access the simple pleasures of the outdoors, and those living in proximity to the people they like and know and those with digital skills and resources have been better able to sustain human contact. The prosperity that has come through an obsessive focus on economic growth has not been well shared. It has produced wealth for the few and not the many. The pandemic also shows us that we are all in the same boat –​ albeit not travelling in the same cabins or in the same comfort. Those with better resources (their own life boats) will better ride out the coming economic storm, but none of us will be totally insulated. From our food supply chains to our transport networks to the people that run our public services, none of us can or does live in isolation, and the pandemic has shown us that our independencies stretch well beyond the people and horizons we can see or choose. Real prosperity cannot just be building more luxurious cabins on the same leaky ship –​real prosperity has to be a better ship for all of us. Real prosperity has to be a more inclusive prosperity –​both in term of the goods it delivers –​wellbeing, green spaces, security (economic and physical) and who it delivers them to. The pandemic has shown we live on a shared planet with shared problems and we need to better share our resources. But we can’t run an economy on love, can we? Actually we already do. The value of unpaid services in the UK, from housework and mutual aid, to looking after children, the vulnerable and the elderly, runs to £1.2 trillion a year (the equivalent of just under half of GDP).6 A  vast amount of incredibly valuable work, arguably the very real ‘stuff of life’, goes unrecognized, unpaid or unrewarded. So what is interesting in our new era of a state-​dominated economy is how wealth is to be created, distributed and shared. How might we move towards a redistributive, steady state economy of dynamic equilibrium for the many? What we need

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is a growth that truly serves people and planet. What might growth in creativity, caring, service, stillness, conservation and rewilding look like in policy terms, growth without overwork, hypermobility, overconsumption, systematic exploitation and rampant individualism? What role will the joy of mutual conviviality and collaboration have to tackle the atomization, insecurity, depression and loneliness that stalks so many lives, hearts and minds? We are already seeing the seeds of a very different future. The insane inefficiency of the daily commute:  28  million UK commuters losing on average an hour a day, with one in seven travelling for two hours or more for work.7 The increased travelling distances; the increased duration; the exhaustion, stress and ill health; the vast impacts of air pollution and congestion; and the huge infrastructure costs –​all seem somewhat ludicrous from the perspective of lockdown. All this has meant growth but not increased wealth, more what the Victorian social critic John Ruskin called ‘illth’ –​wealth that makes you sick. Imagine streets reclaimed from the monstrous, space-​hungry presence of the private car. Children playing, food growing, a population remobilized by occasional electric vehicles but also a plethora of local bikes, both pedal and electric, scooters and walkers. There is a vast service economy of sales, maintenance and servicing to be secured there. Then what sort of infrastructure investment do we need? Expensive and outdated technologies like the UK’s High Speed 2 railway (currently budgeted at close to £90 billion) or other opportunities emerging from lockdown innovations? For example, extending fibre-​optic provision would support more distributed work and regional economies. Investment in improving the energy and water efficiency of housing across the country would provide jobs and reduce carbon consumption. Universities deprived of international students could find a new purpose in reskilling, redeploying and re-​energizing workers laid off from carbon-​guzzling industries, and become action

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research centres innovating their own city and regional futures (see Chapter Eleven of this volume). We have already seen the establishment of unprecedented local mutual aid networks, street-​b ased communities connecting with their neighbours for perhaps the first time. These new contact systems may start with protecting the weak, but if they endure they could prove invaluable in the strength and resilience they may provide. Imagine capturing that positive enthusiasm for local renewable energy projects, or food networks, or extracurricular learning and play for kids and adults. Redistribution What is the price we are all prepared to pay for a safe and secure society functioning within a thriving ecosystem? Undoubtedly that means redistribution into a much bigger collective pot. It will mean higher and more progressive rates of taxation, possibly also the creation of a universal basic income that underpins everyone’s essential needs. In the involuntary experiment of furloughing vast swathes of the workforce, we have already begun to test these waters. From an environmental perspective, personal income has an almost linear relationship with impact; the more you earn, the heavier your footprint on the planet. So redistribution and refocusing of economic needs on to the essentials may also mean living lighter. But let’s not ignore the costs. So far, the COVID-​19-​inspired pause in economic growth has also caused a growth in hunger, poverty and insecurity, and underlined existing inequality. At the time of writing, 21  million jobs have been lost worldwide, and that number is growing. Many countries face the complete end of hard-​currency revenues and hence the ability to import medicines, manufactures and more abstract but expensive goods. Decreasing use of raw materials (including coal, oil and gas) risks pushing dependent economies closer to

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catastrophe. Some oil-​exporting countries may face significant social and political unrest –​even collapse –​just when all that we advocate here requires more effective, more imaginative and trusted state apparatus. Yet this taste of no-​growth is new to only some of us. Japan’s economy has been at or near 0% growth for over 25 years. One part of the explanation is in the relative power of labour in relation to capital. Whereas Western capitalism constantly undermines and dissolves social bonds that might cause stickiness and resistance to the ever-​more-​efficient extraction of the surplus value of labour, Japanese capitalism turns around the keiretsu –​clan-​based cartels that are so powerful they can more or less dictate the cost of capital. One might almost say that this is clannism rather than capitalism. And when the power is with the social structures –​not the state, take note –​ economic growth is no longer the mindless motive of social policy. Whatever the pros and cons of Japanese society, it is a stunning example of a hyper-​modern economy in which growth has for many years been secondary to cultural cohesion and continuity. Other examples are more troubling. If preserving social cohesion is a predominant political aim, radical conservatism can become violent and repressive. Anti-​modernity may recall traditional values and express a rejection of mindless consumption, but it does not necessarily enhance the wellbeing of all citizens, only those who express nationalism as a hostility to the other (see Chapter Twelve). It matters how such choices are made; engaged, diverse participation and the dynamism of democratic institutions must be relevant measures of growth. Intrinsic goods But hold on: there is something different in type about the values of solidarity, continuity, participation and love that does not bear direct comparison with the value derived from resource extraction or financial profit. It seems obvious to point out that

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the former are good in themselves (intrinsic goods), whereas the latter are merely instruments to attain some other goods (money to buy things). It’s an important distinction to make –​ and in spite of appearances, all economies are actually bound by a common human intuition of the value of intrinsic goodness –​ and equally, an intuited disgust of when instrumental goods usurp this centrality. So health systems that subjugate caring to the profit motive inevitably lack the dedication and legitimacy of those run on a spirit of service and public subscription. As suggested in this chapter, the increased salience of intrinsic goods has been a prominent effect of the lockdowns and the existential anxiety prompted by COVID-​19. A  love-​based economy has tangible presence and meaning, and this unites many of us across the affected world. We believe it also unites us with people struggling against ravenous globalization, because they too are resisting the abusive logic of growth –​abusive not because growth is bad, but because it usurps the primacy of intrinsic goods. So if there is a path from COVID-​19 angst and lockdown towards a kind of economy that is not a slave to growth, it will be one that engages conversation about what matters –​what matters in and of itself; the meaningfulness of work, of making and doing, its purposefulness. Which brings us to some conclusions about how this will be done. Here are some glimpses of what might be possible: policy decisions establish incentives for an economic recovery that grows laterally towards green and pleasant industries; multilateral cooperation around resilience, debt, agriculture and trade sustains the regulatory conditions. But most importantly, we develop ways of deciding what matters, and what to do about it, that are themselves satisfying processes to be engaged in. As many contributors to this book have suggested, this could include newly emerging forms of deliberative democracy such as citizens’ assemblies and the like. Organizations adopt deliberative practices suited to the scope, pace and inclusiveness appropriate to their business –​and all three of these criteria will

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necessarily be more expansive than hitherto (another aspect of good growth). This will be worked out in the space known as the commons, between organizations, communities and states, where shared meanings and values actually take hold. Who will lead this, and how? Well it’s already happening in the myriad adaptive innovations within local and national government, companies, sectors and communities. Systems thinking sometimes becomes systemic improvement, often without too much leading. Watch out instead for other verbs –​ listening, cooperating, experimenting, giving. Growth is dead, long live growth.

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SIXTEEN

Innovation and Responsibility Richard Owen

As I write, it is late April. Spring this year is warm, anxious, sunny and uncertain. It is unusually quiet in our village. The constant ebb and flow of commuter traffic has stopped: it has been like this for weeks since the lockdown. There is much less pollution, the skies are bluer than normal. There is a path near our small, terraced house that goes down to an old wood covered in a sea of bluebells. We are allowed one walk outside a day, not to be taken near others. This path, like all others now, is measured strictly in units of two metres. But the path is rarely busy, so I can follow it down to the wood. Standing in this sea of blue, it is hard not to reflect on the duality of nature, on its ability to be both deadly and sublime. Today the death toll from COVID-​19 is almost 800. I  feel powerless, calm, vulnerable. In a week or two, this wood will have changed, the blue will be gone. But nothing will have changed. The crisis will not have passed. We will still be confined and isolated. The feeling that each next step will be taken in an ocean of uncertainty will remain. Not all crises cause change. About 17 years ago, I survived a category four hurricane. Hurricanes of this magnitude are extremely dangerous. We were living in Bermuda at the time and had two very young children. The islands took a direct hit. Bermuda is tiny, the remains of a long-​extinct volcano, isolated in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean about 600 miles from the nearest landmass and with only a fragile coral reef for protection. Our children were thankfully too young to understand what nature was about to unleash. The emergency

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radio station went dead two hours into the storm and there was no contact with the outside world. The night that followed was terrifying. I remember most stepping outside the morning after the hurricane passed. It was warm, sunny and eerily calm. We would have no power or water for a month. But deep inside me that morning was a feeling of certainty that things would return to normal. And slowly they did, in fact surprisingly quickly given the devastation that had been wreaked by the storm. In a week or two, the fallen trees had been cleared. I went back to work. We had a street party with our neighbours when our electricity had finally been reconnected. It had been dark and stormy, but the crisis had passed and, months later, seemingly little of consequence had changed. But this crisis feels different. It feels as if things of consequence will happen, that we are on the brink of change. That some things will vanish and new things will take their place. Everywhere there is talk of us entering a ‘new normal’. But what will that ‘new normal’ be? Crisis, legitimacy and change The future is contingent, uncertain and unpredictable. We may be able to accurately predict the tides, or predict the path of a hurricane, but can we really predict how our lives might change after this pandemic? When we were hit by the hurricane in Bermuda, I was working as a scientist evaluating the impact of pollutants on coral reefs, hoping to do something –​however small –​to help protect our fragile planet. But as time went on, I came to realize that more scientific knowledge in itself does not necessarily catalyze action and change, important though that knowledge is. I did a PhD related to climate change, so I guess I should have worked that out a long time ago. I began to ask questions about what does cause change in organizations and institutions, how that change happens, and what drives or hinders it. A journey that would leave me washed up on the

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shores of innovation and organizational studies. There is no way I could have predicted that. It turns out that organizational theory has lots to say about crisis and change. It tells us that during periods of relative stability change happens, but it is often slower, more incremental, more insidious. Vested interests push back at major disruption to the status quo. There are tweaks slightly to the right or left. Then a crisis happens. Just look at history, whether one thinks of the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant or the global financial crash of 2008. Crises of this scale and magnitude create sudden shocks that puncture the fragile equilibrium, jolting organizations and throwing existing institutional arrangements up into the air. The pieces do not necessarily fall back into place. The place itself can change beneath the pieces. Things vanish, and new things take their place. Crises can create critical juncture moments, serving as trigger events to which organizations and institutions1 may choose, or be forced, to respond. But why is that? The clue lies in the concept of legitimacy, which is intimately bound up with concepts of organizational and institutional change. There are lots of ways of defining legitimacy, but at its heart I suggest it can be thought of as the degree to which there is cultural or societal support for something. Organizations and institutions that have the luxury of complete legitimacy are those that are beyond question (about, for example, what they are, what they do and what they stand for). The completely legitimate organization or institution doesn’t need to change. Why would it? If it isn’t broken, it doesn’t need fixing. Crises break things. The act of breaking starts with questions. Questions that relate to the performance, or efficiency of current organizations and institutions, or their purposes, or the values that underpin them, or a combination of all these. In the UK, where I  am writing, these include:  why could we end up having the largest death toll in Europe? Should governments and their public health agencies have been

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better prepared? Should they have heeded the lessons learned from previous pandemics, such as H1N1 ten years ago? And other reports since? Were they slow to lock down? Why was there insufficient personal protective equipment for frontline health workers? And for care workers? Why were care homes forgotten about? Why was there so little capacity for testing for the virus and why did it take so long for frontline staff to get access to testing? Why was the NHS left so under-​resourced for so long? Perhaps if you live in South Korea, or Germany, some of these questions may have less relevance: perhaps the legitimacy of your institutions feels, well, if not unquestionable, then at least on firmer ground. But in the UK, a country where trust in government, and science and expertise, was already on very shaky ground before the pandemic struck, things are different. We are experiencing a crisis caused by a virus that follows a Brexit crisis from which we are yet to surface, which itself follows a financial crisis that we had hoped we were finally emerging from but look like re-​entering again, only this time it will be even deeper, an economic shock not encountered for hundreds of years. One could be excused for asking questions. Crises then can create legitimacy challenges that in turn can create the potential for change, setting the cat among the pigeons. What follows is dissonance, contestation and even conflict about what should have been done and what is now appropriate, acceptable or desirable. But organizational theory also tells us that this is not in itself enough to create substantive change. Incumbents, and particularly those who have a stake or vested interest in the status quo, can buttress their positions, deflecting and resisting change, sometimes displaying stubborn resistance. They have too much to lose. Or they can be canny, responding in ways that are entirely symbolic. One way to do this is known as ‘decoupling’, ensuring that a new way of doing things is isolated or marginalized from the organization at large, which continues with business as usual. So, while crises are important because they cause legitimacy challenges

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and get people talking, in themselves they are not enough. Something else is needed. Entrepreneurship and innovation In organizational studies research, there is a special place for what are called ‘institutional entrepreneurs’. There is lots of discussion relating to them about their capacity to act within networks of power, about agency over structure. The important point thing to know is that they are good at coming up with ideas, shaking things up, convincing others that their ideas make sense and turning their ideas into reality. They clear the ground and seed it for innovation as a future-​creating phenomenon. Those entrepreneurs who emerge in and after a crisis, and the sorts of innovations they set in motion, are key for the type of change that will occur, and the sort of future we will all end up with. We should keep an eye on them. Institutional entrepreneurs are interesting folk. They tend to be enterprising individuals who are sufficiently motivated (that is, they have sufficient interest) to overcome the sometimes rigid organizational and institutional structures and norms that coalesce during periods of stability. They are good at testing new behaviours and encouraging others to behave accordingly. Adept at persuasive argumentation and political negotiation, they challenge the status quo, presenting an alternative, better future. As advocates they can articulate a case for change and mobilize people and resources to make that change happen. They are particularly good at critical reflection, imagining themselves outside the structures that bind, looking in from outside at engrained ways of thinking and established ways of doing things and offering innovative ideas for a way out, a way forward. And they offer these in a compelling way. If they operate in a culture that encourages experimentation and risk taking and one that has resources to support them, there is a good chance they will succeed in turning their version of the future, or at least a version of their version, into a reality.

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They start to create spaces for negotiation. They build advocacy coalitions around them. Constraints on agency relax and new opportunities for innovation as a force for ‘creative destruction’ emerge, benefitting themselves as well as those who share their vision, for whatever reason and whatever motivation. Innovation is a little different to entrepreneurship, although the two are linked. It is often defined as creating new products and services from ideas (for example, inventions) and bringing these to the market. It is that, but it is also about creating other sorts of value, such as social value through various forms of social innovation. I tend to think about it as fundamentally being about creating futures by combining knowledge in novel, sometimes exciting ways. This can be incremental, changing futures in a very small way. But sometimes it can be disruptive and even paradigm-​changing. Although disruptive innovation can emerge at any time, look out for it in the wake of crises. Thinking of innovation as a future –​creating phenomenon in this way also prompts a couple of questions that continuously preoccupy me–​what kind of future do we want innovation to create, how do we engage with those futures in the making, who gets to have a say about what those futures could (or should) be, how do we take responsibility for those futures? And if innovation creates futures by combining knowledge, often from quite different places, what sort of knowledge is being combined, how and by whom, and for what purpose? Innovation is not a linear process. It’s messy, what my colleague John Bessant, a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, describes as ‘knowledge spaghetti’. And you can cook a meal of spaghetti in lots of different ways. Even though we are only months into this crisis, there is already evidence of substantial entrepreneurship and innovation. Medical innovations were inevitable. Here in the UK these include an innovative vacuum cleaner company repurposing to make ventilators for those seriously ill in hospital (a lack of ventilators has been a serious concern in this pandemic). Another innovative collaboration between

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a manufacturer of Formula One racing cars, clinicians and researchers at a UK university has developed an innovative, continuous positive airway pressure breathing aid. Then there are the digital innovations for contact tracing: new digital apps that allow mobile phones to communicate in the background with each other via Bluetooth, tracking where you have been and who you have been in contact with, alerting those who could be at risk. The data, if stored centrally, can be used to map the spread of disease over time so this can be managed more effectively. These I suspect are just the start of a wave of digitally enabled innovations that will infiltrate many aspects of society, from new ways of working remotely to new ways of educating and managing how we move around to ensure social distancing. They are likely to have data –​its collection, storage, manipulation and perhaps commodification –​at their heart, taken forward by entrepreneurs in the private and public realms offering innovative solutions for legitimacy challenges raised by the crisis. The other thing to note about innovation is that it often co-​produces risks, uncertainties and ethical dilemmas with value, in unpredictable ways. It has been shown to have a propensity to become entangled with politics, ethics and values. Entanglements are already starting to appear. An open letter written by over 170 scientists in the UK in response to the proposed development of a contact-​tracing app by the NHS highlighted deep ethical concerns relating to privacy and confidentiality. There is a big debate going on about decentralized versus centralized approaches to app-​based contact tracing, the latter advocated by the UK government (and some others around the globe). This approach logs and stores personal mobile phone data on a central database to create a ‘social graph’ of where you have been and who you have been in contact with. There are questions of trust, privacy, purpose limitation and ‘mission creep’ (see Chapter Ten on artificial intelligence, for example). An overarching concern of the scientists in the letter is the creation of ‘a tool that enables

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data collection on the population, or on targeted sections of society, for surveillance’.2 The subtext here is that in this time of crisis, governments, agencies and companies may get away with things that they would not be able to get away with at other times. Things like surveillance. The world for a while becomes a temporary Wild West, a testbed for disruptive innovation where futures and fortunes can be made while we are distracted and desperate. Some of these innovations will be related to the challenge of managing the virus, others will be only very loosely connected with this purpose, and yet others will slip under the radar while it is trained on the virus. In the fog of war, new futures can be imagined and let loose. Should we be worried? We should certainly be vigilant. In her book on surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes how two crises  –​the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000 and the terrorist attacks of 9/​11  –​were pivotal for the rise and success of companies like Google and Facebook.3 After the dot.com crisis, investors needed Google to turn a profit fast, and its business model changed, from collecting data from its users for the purpose of improving its search engine for them, to using that data primarily to match advertising to users. This ushered in an era of innovation in user profiling, machine learning, predictive analytics, psychographic marketing, continuous online surveillance and billion-​dollar profits. These were aimed at capturing every aspect of our behaviour and experience as inputs for digital supply chains, in turn being used to nudge and shape our actions for commercial profit, or political gain. After 9/​11, the legitimacy challenges raised by this crisis of global terrorism went further, opening up unprecedented spaces for collaboration between ascendant tech firms, the state and intelligence agencies in the name of the ‘war on terrorism’. In this new normal, security trumped privacy, a mutually beneficial arrangement for both state and the tech companies. Compounded by a

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permissive and underdeveloped regulatory environment, Zuboff describes the processes of technology-​e nabled incursion, normalization, habituation and adaptation that have happened since these crises, as forms of corporate and corporate–​state surveillance have gradually become our new normal. Ironically, it was only after a further crisis involving Facebook and a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica that we really took notice. Responsible innovation Crises like the one we are currently living through cause legitimacy challenges, which make space for new forms of entrepreneurship and innovation. What sort of futures are being imagined and created in the name and aftermath of this crisis? What sort of future do we want this innovation to create? How can we engage as a society with these futures in the making, have a say about them, take responsibility for them? These are at the heart of the idea of responsible innovation that I and a few colleagues have been working on for the past decade, since the global financial crisis of 2008. Crises are unprecedented moments for innovation and, associated with this, important moments to ask these questions and seek some answers. In order to do this, we have suggested a need to more systematically embed processes of anticipation, ethical reflection and inclusive deliberation and debate in and around innovation,4 and particularly in and around research in places like universities that is aimed at producing technologies that will shape our collective futures. This might include the use of citizens’ assemblies, people’s councils and other forms of public deliberation discussed elsewhere in the book.5 We need this not only to ensure vigilance, to understand what futures are in the making, but also to support a collective and inclusive discussion about what kind of future we want innovation to bring about in the aftermath of this crisis. A future that I hope

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is more sustainable, more equal, more just. A future in which some things vanish, and better things take their place. At a time of great crisis and tragedy, a time when the pieces are in the air, this is also a moment of unique opportunity, a moment for us to choose where and how those pieces should fall.

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SEVENTEEN

Together into a Future Miki Kashtan

I am one of 7,773,458,922 (and changing faster by the millisecond) affected by the COVID-​19 irruption into our lives; 32,782,280 of us were born this year alone. These numbers are staggering beyond my imagination, and yet our fates are deeply intertwined: to keep ourselves and each other as safe as possible, we are asked to stay apart from one another as something entirely invisible –​a tiny virus –​circles the planet. This book is not about the science of viruses, nor about how to address the pandemic per se from a public health perspective. Rather, it focuses on social, political and economic dimensions of the current world situation with an eye towards what comes after the pandemic. In this chapter, I  look at overarching themes that stand out to me as I make human and social sense of where we are. I focus in particular on how this crisis fits within the larger set of overwhelming crises we are already facing, detecting opportunities for transformation, and looking at how to respond, individually and collectively.1 Overall, like other contributors, I see this crisis as an immense opportunity while also being a dire catastrophe in the making. What crisis makes possible One of the lesser-​known stories of the events surrounding the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 is the rescue of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers via boats in a matter of hours. It happened organically, spontaneously, as any boat that was in the water responded to the call to get people from

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the tip of Manhattan Island. No command and control. Not even much co​ordination. Simply people mobilizing to care for others they didn’t even know. The numbers and speed of evacuation exceeded anything ever done before, faster even than Dunkirk in the Second World War. When 95% of the town of Greensburg in Kansas was levelled by a tornado in 2007, those who chose to stay and rebuild the town co-​created a new design that would be the envy of environmentalists. This outcome would be surprising anywhere, and even more so in a town situated in a deeply conservative state. This phenomenon, documented in particular in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, is well known and intuitively understood.2 It explains, also, why three times as many people as was expected responded to the UK NHS request for volunteers: a total of about 750,000 within days.3 Still, the question remains: what is it that in times of crisis allows so many people to tap into care, generosity, and even sacrifice? The companion question is even more significant. Why is it that such behaviour is not the norm? Why is it that the architects who rebuilt Greensburg, in full collaboration with its residents, are unsure that this feat could be reproduced without a natural disaster? As with many complex questions, many factors likely contribute to this phenomenon, and several of the chapters in this book explore aspects of the current expressions of solidarity, generosity and mobilization. One factor I want to highlight, as a seed of opportunity, is that during crises, scripts don’t work and habits are challenged. We are pushed to respond freshly, less conditioned by the social order. Jolted out of autopilot, the future becomes even less known. Deeper patterns become visible, taboo topics open up, and actions that might have seemed impossible are now commonplace. At least in some parts of the globe, the immediate response to the current conditions is reflecting a partial move towards honouring life, interdependence and needs, even as the risk of increased totalitarianism is ever present. This

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change is possible now because ‘business as usual’ is unable to address the crisis. Although this is clear, even to heads of state who otherwise have been and continue to be champions of neoliberalism, an open question remains about what comes after: how to ‘anchor the now increased need for togetherness and cooperation into a compelling new normal that has the robustness to withstand a backlash into capitalist norms when this first Corona wave passes’.4 The pause in business as usual, and the reality of a pandemic that is simultaneously affecting everyone in a world hyper-​ focused on information and technological connectedness, are creating a crack through which something new is visible. This is true even as many suffer immensely, including and not limited to: the ones hit by the disease directly; those who care for them; workers exposed and overworked, whether medical staff, food workers, or others whose jobs have finally been recognized as essential; workers who cannot work from home and whose work isn’t deemed essential, who are in an unprecedented unemployment crisis; and people of the global-​ majority world, many of whom have no access to medical care when the pandemic hits them. Finding purpose within uncertainty My initial reaction  –​once I  grasped the immensity of the situation –​was quite intense. It wasn’t fear, nor personal anxiety (though I am 64 and thus at more risk than many), because I am not afraid of dying. I went into paralysis, as I didn’t see anything that I could do. I was gripped by the prospect of the entire human project unravelling as we tear each other apart. I leaned on my core practices: mourning to bridge the gap between vision and current reality; opening my heart through ongoing celebration of all that is; and resting in the humility of not knowing. I emerged with clarity that it was essential to reassess purpose; to find what was mine to do, and then do it, with no attachment to results.

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This quest led me many places, including revisiting the foundations of what gives my work its sense of possibility. I had to rethink my theory of change.5 Like others, such as Hillary Cottam and Duncan Green, I now question the very concept and context of change itself.6 I discovered that the very idea of linearly defining a goal, and then the steps to take us there, has control strewn all over it. Since the obsession with control, rationality and linearity, central to the patriarchal mind set (as well as the capitalist and white supremacist projects that emerged from it) has brought us superbugs, climate change, war and alienation, I cannot see how that same thinking will get us out of here. Instead, I  have come to see that what I have been doing for years now is not a deficient process I will continue until I have ‘fixed’ it and found a robust enough theory of change. Rather, grounding my choices in the eternal humility of not knowing is my (non-​linear) theory of change, emerging from recognizing that we can’t know a linear path leading to the kind of system change all of us writing for this volume and countless others are longing for. Not knowing means engaging forwards from where we are towards where we want to go rather than backwards from where we want to get to. The classic question of ‘Where do you want to be in five years?’ is a subtle attempt to control the future. Conversely, going from here forwards in the direction of where we want to go, without knowing if we will ever get there, has the quality of shaping and co-​creating rather than controlling. It’s about discernment, integrity and rigour in conditions of inherent uncertainty, using all available information while surrendering to intuition and to the flow of life, and hence with utter humility about results. This, paradoxically, can make us more nimble in our capacity to adapt while living in an eternal question: in this moment, knowing what we know about context, conditions, needs, impacts and resources, with the overall purpose we have, and with the values we hold, what is the most transformative action possible? This question can

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be applied by an individual, a family, a team, an organization, or any other entity committed to change. This process includes living our vision now through the intense practice of aligning means with ends. Simultaneously, it includes moving towards the vision through actions that emerge from the deepest discernment about what next step has a chance of moving in that direction. This practice doesn’t create the change. It only makes us ready and available for non-​linear moments, like the current pandemic, in which the flow of unfolding of what is gets disrupted, creating a sudden enhancement of possibilities. As Martin Parker suggests in the opening chapter to this book, a focus on current action preparing us for seizing opportunities was already present in the Communist Party manifesto. Despite however often we fail to seize the opportunity, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when we didn’t know how to stop the rush of capitalism into the pregnant opening that was hovering for a while, the possibility remains. Will we be ready this time? Will at least some of us collectively turn again towards life and co-​create with it rather than move away from it and attempt to control it? This, in itself, is part of what we can live now in how we orient towards the vision and the change we want to see in this difficult time. This chapter, then, as well as the larger project it is adapted from, is part of my personal answer to these deep questions: part of what I am called to do, now more than ever, is to paint a picture of what I see as possible; what a future aligned with our evolutionary makeup can be; and what we can do, individually and collectively, to increase the chances of getting there. Exploring the potential In broad strokes, both the pandemic itself and the responses to it make visible what was hidden in a variety of areas. The pause, extreme and rare as it is, exposes the unknowability of the future, despite the intense pressure and desire of so many to

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go back to old routines, as if that were ever workable. Because of this inherent uncertainty, what is being exposed lends itself to a transformative potential, co-​existing with potential catastrophic outcomes, in eight different areas, many of which are explored elsewhere in this book, that uniquely focuses on such potential, leaving to others the detailing of what horrors might await us. • Addressing needs beyond market economies. It is now abundantly clear that market economies are incapable of responding to needs just because they exist. Instead, despite mobilization of companies to produce medical equipment, the overwhelming proportion of the response to needs comes from states and communities. This makes possible a conversation that until recently would have been too radical and now is clear: how do we shift from keeping the economy going to directing resources to where they are most needed, as a general principle of living? • Grounding in interconnection and solidarity. Against the deep groove of the dominant framework that holds us as separate from each other and from life, we can no longer escape the reality that we are interconnected –​both within our species and with life as a whole. This is the deepest paradox of COVID-​19: we are made to be apart because we are intertwined; we are together in weathering this well or not. We can no longer pretend that most humans and everything else are just resources to be extracted and exploited for the (very dubious) benefit of the few. None of us is protected. None of us is ‘other’, though some of us are hit more than others, now as before. • Finding systemic solutions to systemic problems. We have been fed a steady diet of self-​sufficiency and of individual capacity as the measure and cause of everything. An overwhelming number of people have lost the capacity to see the systemic context within which we live. Even within this globally fast-​moving event, we continue to

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seek individual solutions. What if, collectively, we saw the possibilities of co​ordinated, systemic responses, especially at the level of resource flow, well past this immediate crisis? What could co​ordination without command and control look like? • Restoring dignity and meaning to work and separating it from sustainability. No matter how much technology we have discovered, how much virtual prowess we unleash, and how much information processing has come to dominate life, there is absolutely no substitute for human hands attending to things and to bodies. We now know which types of work really are essential to attend to needs and which ones are only there to buttress ‘the economy’ and generate empty resources. What would happen if work became redefined in relation to needs? What if all the jobs that David Graeber has called ‘bullshit jobs’ were eliminated?7 What if people’s capacity to feed themselves, their families and their communities, as well as their sense of dignity and meaning, were not dependent on their work being socially valued within a paradigm of scarcity and competition? • Accepting our vulnerability to consume less. We’ve been taught that amassing resources is both the measure of our value and the most reliable way to ensure our safety and wellbeing. As the virus cracks through political, social, cultural, national and economic lines of human separation, the vulnerability of those of us who have been living in relative privilege is made abundantly clear. At one and the same time, we learn that we need far less than we ever imagined to sustain ourselves and to attend to our wellbeing, and that no amount of resources will ever protect us from being biological, death-​bound creatures. How do we, individually and societally, resist the pull to go back to the ‘normal’ we all know is costly for all of us spiritually, for most of us materially, and for the entire web of life on what the astronomer Carl Sagan called our ‘pale blue dot’?

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• Blurring the distinction between public and private spheres. As so many of us around the globe are suddenly at home, we find ourselves with housemates, partners, children, or parents for longer hours (see Chapter Five). In times past, and in parts of the world still now, home was a site of production, not just of consumption and reproduction. Women never faced the decision to be with their children or go to work, because children were around while work was happening, often in community. Children didn’t get packed into rooms with only children their own age for many hours. What is the opportunity for integration, for blending, for changing the nature of work, for changing the lives of children and adults, that this enforced separation from the public sphere is inviting us to imagine? • Re-​engaging with the full range of our emotions. This crisis is bringing up intense emotions, including raw fear and panic, grief for what brought us here and what lies ahead, anger at how the situation is handled, shock at the speed of spread, and curiosity about how it will unfold. We have been trained to suppress and ignore our emotions as part of the larger paradigm of controlling anything ‘unruly’ in life. Can we envision a way of being that aims to listen to, integrate and learn from the full range of our emotions? The entire Western civilization project is based on elevating ‘rationality’, narrowly defined, above anything else. Having a future, to my mind, rests on being able to reclaim the fullness of our biological, embodied, feeling, needing and caring selves. Now is the time, individually and collectively, to do just that. • Finding collective wisdom to move into a future for all. Our modern way of living has shown us three fundamental ways to make decisions: competitively, each for ourselves regardless of cost to others; through market mechanisms that are skewed in the direction of those with enormous amounts of resources; and through the power of governments, imperfectly if at all deemed to represent the

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will of the people, with more or less state violence to enforce those decisions. None of these mechanisms works well to reach wise decisions that care for the whole, including humans, other forms of life, and the future of the planet. Could this time be an opportunity to dramatically expand collaborative decision-​making processes that mobilize the wisdom that comes from integrating divergent perspectives, through mutual influencing, into creative paths forwards? This possibility would, to my mind, be the ultimate positive outcome if we indeed manage to emerge from this pandemic and the many crises that gave rise to it, that are exacerbated by it, or that are specifically created by our responses to it. Overall, I see this crisis as the first opportunity in centuries, if not millennia, to change course, precisely because the entire machinery that keeps it all going has ground to a halt, on a global scale. This pandemic is inviting us to abandon the disastrous path of scarcity, separation and powerlessness focused on controlling life and death. We have some time during which to restore our place within life, conscious beings capable of celebrating its messy preciousness and of surrendering to death as part of life, before ‘business as usual’ takes over again. Individually and collectively, can we find flow, togetherness and choice as we accept our interconnectedness with each other and with all that lives? As we consider how to engage with life after COVID-19, we can let the anonymous biblical author remind us: we have been given the choice between life and death, and we can choose life.

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Notes Chapter One  1

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Angelou, M. (1993) ‘On the pulse of morning’, The New York Times [Online], 21 January. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/21/us/theinauguration-maya-angelou-on-the-pulse-of-morning.html Bret Stephens in The New York Times wrote a chastening ‘look back from 2025’, in this vein: ‘Covid-19: a look back from 2025’, The New York Times [Online], 3 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/opinion/coronavirusfuture.html Runciman, D. (2020) ‘Too early or too late?’, London Review of Books, 2 April, pp 7–​9. Eisenstein, C. (2020), ‘The coronation’, charleseisenstein.org [Online], May. Available at: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/ See, for example, Gibson-​Graham, J.K., Cameron, J. and Healy, S. (2013) Take Back the Economy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; Parker, M. (2018) Shut Down the Business School, London: Pluto Press. Roy, A. (2020) ‘The pandemic is a portal’, Financial Times [Online], 3 April. Available at: https://​amp.ft.com/​content/​10d8f5e8-​74eb-​11ea-​95fe-f​ cd274e920ca Huge thanks to Paul Stevens for his encouragement, Miki Kashtan for her comments, Carol Jarvis for the Maya Angelou quote, and all those at Bristol University Press who helped this book to happen so quickly.

Chapter Two  1

2 3

Figueres, C.  and Carnac, T.  (2020) The Future We Choose, London:  Manilla Press, p 168. https://​strongerstories.org Rosling, H., Rosling, O.  and Rosling Rönnlund, A.  (2018) Factfulness:  Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World –​and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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5 6

7 8

9

10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17

18

19

Business Roundtable (2019) ‘Statement on the purpose of a corporation’, [Online], 6 September. Available at:  https://​opportunity.businessroundtable. org/ ​ w p- ​ c ontent/ ​ u ploads/ ​ 2 019/ ​ 0 9/ ​ B RT- ​ S tatement- ​ o n- ​ t he- ​ P urpose-​ of-a​ -C ​ orporation-w ​ ith-​Signatures-​1.pdf; Financial Times New Agenda, [Online]. Available at:  https://​aboutus.ft.com/​en-​gb/​new-​agenda/​?segmentId=58faf1a5-​ 41a3-​0485-​e2b0-​f045491b585a; The British Academy (2018) Reforming Business for the Twenty-​First Century: A Framework for the Future of the Corporation, London: The British Academy. Available at:  www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/​publications/​ reforming-​business-​21st-​century-​framework-​future-​corporation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv-1W4LSf9o Lovelock, J. (2000) [1979] Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (3rd edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.youtube.com/​watch?v=76xYy2KNzGM Kuennssberg, L. (2018) ‘“No magic money tree”’, BBC News [Online], 18 June. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​politics-​44524605 The Globalist (2005) ‘Tony Blair on globalization’, The Globalist [Online], 5 October. Available at: https://www.theglobalist.com/tony-blair-on-globalization/ Carson, R. (2012) Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin Company. Meadows, D. (1972) The Limits to Growth, New York: Universe Books. GDP as a measure of busyness, which is not necessarily the optimal measure of success: Lanchester, J. (2014) How To Speak Money, London: Faber & Faber, pp 134–​5. Quote Investigator (2012) ‘William Gibson? Anonymous? Apocryphal?’, Quote Investigator [Online], 24 January. Available at: https://quoteinvestigator. com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/ Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow, London: Allen Lane. https://​bcorporation.net/​about-​b-​lab www.fourthsector.net/​for-​benefit-​corporations Raworth, K. (2017) Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-​Century Economist, London: Random House. Boffey, D. (2020) ‘Amsterdam to embrace “doughnut” model to mend post-coronavirus economy’, The Guardian [Online], 8 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/amsterdam-doughnutmodel-mend-post-coronavirus-economy PA Media (2020) ‘There is such a thing as society, says Boris Johnson from bunker’, The Guardian [Online], 29 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2020/mar/29/20000-nhs-staff-return-to-service-johnson-says-fromcoronavirus-isolation

Chapter Three  1

Klein, N.  (2007) The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Allen Lane.

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Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It, New York, NY: Penguin Books. Rosenberg, M. (2003) Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, Encinitas: Puddledancer Press. Dinerstein, A. (2015) The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope in the Twenty-​First Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kashtan, M.  (2015) Reweaving Our Human Fabric:  Working Together to Create a Nonviolent Future, Oakland, CA: Fearless Heart Publications; Gough, I. (2017) Heat, Greed and Human Need: Climate Change, Capitalism and Sustainable Wellbeing, Cheltenham and Camberley: Edward Elgar Publishing. Bloch, E. (1986 [1959]) The Principle of Hope, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Engler, P.  and Engler, M.  (2017) This is an Uprising:  How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-​First Century, New York, NY: Bold Type Books.

Chapter Four  1

2

3 4 5

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Follett, M. (1940) Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, New York, NY: Harper. Dewulf, A., Gray, B., Putnam, L., Lewicki, R., Aarts, N., Bouwen, R.  and van Woerkum, C. (2009) ‘Disentangling approaches to framing in conflict and negotiation research: a meta-​paradigmatic perspective’, Human Relations, 62(2), 155–​93. https://​restorativejusticeontherise.org/​dominic-​barter-​of-​restorative-​circles https://​mikikashtan.org The Ladder of Inference was first developed by Chris Argyris and included in Senge, P.M. (1994) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, London: Transworld. Senge (1994); Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Five  1 2

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4

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Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. Bachelard, G.  (1994 [1958]) The Poetics of Space:  The Classic Look at How we Experience Intimate Places, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Stern, C. (2020) ‘Battle of the celebrity abodes’, The Daily Mail [Online], 23 April. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8250101/Twittersroom-rater-grades-celebrities-politicians-Skype-setups.html Shortt, H. (2015) ‘Liminality, space and the importance of “transitory dwelling places” at work’, Human Relations, 68(4), 633–​58. Bachelard, G.  (1994 [1958]) The Poetics of Space:  The Classic Look at How we Experience Intimate Places, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Morrison, S. (2020) ‘Just because you’re working from home doesn’t mean your boss isn’t watching you’, Vox [Online], 2 April. Available at: https:// www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/2/21195584/coronavirus-remote-workfrom-home-employee-monitoring

Chapter Six  1

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Garcia, T. (2020) ‘Amazon’s 175,000-worker hiring spree suggests strong firstquarter sales despite COVID-19, analysts say’, MarketWatch [Online], 28 April. Available at: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-175000-workerhiring-spree-suggests-strong-first-quarter-sales-despite-covid-19-analystssay-2020-04-27 ILO (International Labour Organization) (2020) ‘COVID-​19 and the world of work:  impact and policy responses’, ILO Briefing Note [Online], 18 March. Available at:  www.ilo.org/​wcmsp5/​g roups/​public/​-​-​-​dgreports/​-​-​-​dcomm/​ documents/​briefingnote/​wcms_​738753.pdf ILO (2020). Leslie, J.  and McCurdy, C.  (2020) ‘The economic effects of coronavirus in the UK’, Resolution Foundation [Online], 1 May. Available at:  www. resolutionfoundation.org/​app/​uploads/​2020/​04/​The-​economic-​effects-​of-​ coronavirus-​in-​the-​UK-​fast-​indicators-​6th-​ed.pdf ONS (Office for National Statistics) (2020a) ‘Coronavirus (COVID-​19) related deaths by occupation, England and Wales: deaths registered up to and including 20 April 2020’, ONS [Online], 11 May. Available at:  www.ons.gov.uk/​ peoplepopulationandcommunity/​healthandsocialcare/​causesofdeath/​bulletins/​ coronaviruscovid19relateddeathsbyoccupationenglandandwales/​deathsregistered uptoandincluding20april2020 TUC (2018) ‘1 in 9 workers are in insecure jobs, says TUC’, TUC News Listing [Online], 10 May. Available at: https://www.tuc.org.uk/ news/1-9-workers-are-insecure-jobs-says-tuc ONS (2019) ‘Low pay and high pay in the UK: 2019’, ONS [Online], 29 October. Available at:  www.ons.gov.uk/​employmentandlabourmarket/​peopleinwork/​ earningsandworkinghours/​bulletins/​lowandhighpayuk/​2019 The Trussell Trust (2020) ‘Food banks report record spike in need as the coronavirus pandemic unfolds’, The Trussell Trust [Online], nd. Available at: https://www.trusselltrust.org/food-banks-report-record-spike/ Lawrence, F. (2020) ‘UK hunger cr isis: 1.5m people go whole day without food’, The Guardian [Online], 11 April. Available at: https://www. theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/11/uk-hunger-cr isis-15m-peoplego-whole-day-without-food?CMP=Share Bell, K. (2020) ‘Universal credit – emergency boost needed to help people through coronavirus’, TUC Blog Listing [Online], 6 April. Available

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at: https://www.tuc.org.uk/blogs/universal-credit-emergency-boostneeded-help-people-through-coronavirus Slaughter, H. and Bell, T. (2020) ‘Crystal balls vs rear-​view mirror: the UK labour market after coronavirus’, Resolution Foundation [Online], 7 April. Available at: www.resolutionfoundation.org/​publications/​crystal-​balls-​vs-r​ ear-v​ iew-m ​ irrors ONS (2020b) ‘Coronavirus, the UK economy and society, faster indicators: 30 April 2020’, ONS [Online], 30 April. Available at:  www.ons.gov.uk/​ peoplepopulationandcommunity/​healthandsocialcare/​conditionsanddiseases/​ bulletins/​coronavirustheukeconomyandsocietyfasterindicators/​30april2020 McQuaid, D. (2020) ‘Does COVID-​19 discriminate?’, HR Review [Online], 1 April. Available at: www.hrreview.co.uk/h ​ r-n ​ ews/d​ iversity-n ​ ews/​perhaps-​covid-​ 19-​does-​discriminate/​124995 Women’s Budget Group (2020) ‘Easing lockdown: potential problems for women’, Briefing from the UK Women’s Budget Group [Online], 4 May. Available at: https://​wbg.org.uk/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2020/​05/​Easing-​lockdown-​.pdf ONS (2020b). https://www.fairworkconvention.scot; Living Wage Foundation (2019) Living Hours: Providing Security of Hours Alongside a Real Living Wage, London: Living Wage Foundation. ETUC (European Trade Union Confederation) (2020) ‘Short time work measures across Europe’, ETUC Briefing Note [Online], 8 May. Available at: https://www. etuc.org/sites/default/files/publication/file/2020-05/Covid_19%20Briefing%20 ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Short%20Time%20Work%20Measures%2030%20April.pdf] Marra, M.  (2019) ‘Economics of a four-​day working week:  research shows it can save businesses money’, The Conversation [Online], 11 November. Available at:  https://​theconversation.com/ ​economics-​of-​a-​four-​day-​working-​week-​ research-​shows-​it-​can-​save-​businesses-​money-​126701 Baska, M.  (2020) ‘Half of workers expect to work more flexibly after lockdown, survey finds’, People Management [Online], 6 May. Available at: www. peoplemanagement.co.uk/​news/​articles/​half-​workers-​expect-​work-​more​flexibly-​post-​lockdown-​survey Slaughter and Bell (2020). Standing, G.  (2017) Basic Income:  And How We Can Make it Happen, London: Pelican. Andersen, T.M., Holmström, B., Honkapohja, S., Korkman, S., Tson, S.H. and Vartiainen, J. (2007) The Nordic Model: Embracing Globalization and Sharing Risks, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, Helsinki: Taloustieto Oy. Available at: https://​economics.mit.edu/​files/​5726

Chapter Seven  1

www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​av/​uk-​52111389/​coronavirus-​minimum-​wage-​heroes

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8 9 10 11 12 13

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Kale, S. (2020) ‘“People are so thankful”: how delivery drivers became the new emergency service’, The Guardian [Online], 25 March. Available at: https://www. theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/people-are-so-thankful-how-deliverydrivers-became-the-new-emergency-service TUC (Trades Union Congress) (2016) Living on the Edge:  The Rise of Job Insecurity in Modern Britain, Economic Report Series 2016. London:  TUC; Mexi, M.  (2020) ‘The furture of work in the post-​Covid-​19 digital era’, Social Europe [Online], 1 April. Available at:  www.socialeurope.eu/​ the-​future-​of-​work-​in-​the-​post-​covid-​19-​digital-​era Smith, S. (2014) Promoting Cooperatives: An Information Guide to ILO Recommendation No. 193 (revised 2nd edn), Geneva: International Labour Organization. The ideas in this chapter are based on union-​coops:uk –​A Manifesto for Decent Work by the authors, a report to be launched on 2 July 2020. www.ica.coop/​en/​cooperatives/​cooperative-​identity Bird, A. (2015) ‘We need to update the co-operative principles’, alexbird.com [Online], 11 March. Available at: https://www.alex-bird.com/ why-we-need-to-update-the-co-operative-principles/ www.indycube.community www.ipse.co.uk www.it-​cooperative.com www.webarchitects.coop https://smartbe.be/fr/ Klein, N.  (2007) The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Allen Lane. CECOP (2013) Business Transfers to Employees under the Form of a Cooperative in Europe: Opportunities and Challenges, Brussels: CECOP.

Chapter Eight  1

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We prefer to think of food ‘scapes’ in order to avoid the mechanistic connotations of food ‘systems’. Jackson, P. (2015) Anxious Appetites: Food and Consumer Culture, London: Bloomsbury. Loopstra, R.  (2020) Vulnerability to Food Insecurity since the COVID-​1 9 Lockdown: Preliminary Report, The Food Foundation [Online]. Available at:  https://​foodfoundation.org.uk/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2020/​04/​Report_​ COVID19FoodInsecurity-​final.pdf Goodman, M.K. (2016) ‘Food geographies I: relational foodscapes and the busy-​ ness of being more-​than-​food’, Progress in Human Geography, 40(2), 257–​66. Friedmann, H. and McMichael, P. (1989) ‘Agriculture and the state system: the rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present’, Sociologia Ruralis, 29(2), 93–​117.

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Patel, R. and Moore, J.W. (2017) A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Gibson-​Graham, J.K. (2008) ‘Diverse economies: performative practices for “other worlds” ’, Progress in Human Geography, 32(5), 613–​32. Wheeler, A.  (2020) COVID-​19 UK Veg Box Report, The Food Foundation [Online]. Available at: https://f​ oodfoundation.org.uk/w ​ p-c​ ontent/u ​ ploads/2​ 020/​ 05/​Food-​Foundation-​COVID-​19-​Veg-​Box-​Scheme-​report.pdf Cloke, P., May, J. and Williams, A. (2017) ‘The geographies of food banks in the meantime’, Progress in Human Geography, 41(6), 703–​26. Willis, R. (2019) ‘Citizens’ assemblies and citizens’ juries: what happens next?’, 16 May [Online]. Available at: www.rebeccawillis.co.uk/c​ itizens-​assemblies-​and-​ citizens-​juries-​what-​happens-​next Gibson-​Graham, J.K. and Roelvink, G. (2010) ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode, 41/(S1), 320–46.

Chapter Nine  1

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Access to Cash Review (2019) Access to Cash Review:  Final Report [Online]. Available at: www.accesstocash.org.uk/​media/​1087/​final-​report-​final-​web.pdf Brignall, M. (2019) ‘UK banks hit daily by IT failures halting payments, says Which?’, The Guardian [Online], 4 March. Available at: https://www. theguardian.com/money/2019/mar/04/uk-banks-hit-daily-by-it-failures-haltingpayments-says-which Scott, B.  (2018) ‘Cash in the era of the digital payments panopticon’, in I. Gloerich, G. Lovink and P. de Vries (eds) MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Scott, B.  (2019) ‘Gentrification of payments:  spreading the digital financial net’, [Online]. Available at:  https://​longreads.tni.org/​state-​of-​power-​2019/​ digital-​payment-​gentrification UK Finance (2019) UK Cash and Cash Machines Summary 2019, London: UK Finance. Evidence provided for the ‘The future of cash post COVID-​19’ webinair BrightTALK, 21 April 2020. Nationwide (2020) ‘Month one of lockdown: Britain takes in 430 million home deliveries as nation adapts to life indoors’, Press Release, 27 April. The Telegraph and The Daily Mail ran stories claiming official World Health Organization advice to avoid cash, accompanied by images of money handled by Chinese citizens. Angelakis, E., Azhar, E.I., Bibi, F. and Yasir, M. (2014) ‘Paper money and coins as potential vectors of transmissible disease’, Future Microbiology, 9(2), 149–​261. Froud, J., Tischer, D. and Williams, K. (2017) ‘It’s the business model… Reframing the problems of UK retail banking’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 42, 1–​19.

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Link (n.d.) ‘Statistics and trends’, [Online]. Available at: www.link.co.uk/​about/​ statistics-​and-​trends House of Commons Library (2020) Bank Branch and ATM Statistics, Briefing Paper No. CBP08570 [Online], 30 January. Available at: https://c​ ommonslibrary. parliament.uk/​research-​briefings/​cbp-​8570 Leyshon, A., French, S. and Signoretta, P. (2008) ‘Financial exclusion and the geography of bank and building society branch closure in Britain’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33, 447–​65. Tischer, D., Evans, J.  and Davies, S.  (2019) Mapping the Availability of Cash, Bristol: Personal Finance Research Centre, University of Bristol. Evans, J., Tischer, D.  and Davies, S.  (2020) Geographies of Access to Cash, Bristol: Personal Finance Research Centre, University of Bristol. Nelms, T.C., Maurer, B., Swartz, L.  and Mainwaring, S.  (2017) ‘Social payments: innovation, trust, Bitcoin, and the sharing economy’, Theory, Culture & Society, 35(3), 13–​33.

Chapter Ten  1

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Lipton, Z.C. (2016) ‘The mythos of model interpretability’, ArXiv:1606.03490 [Cs.LG] [Online], 10 June. Available at: http://​arxiv.org/​abs/​1606.03490 McQuillan, D.  (2015) ‘Algorithmic states of exception’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–​5),  564–​76. Available at:  https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​ 1367549415577389 Fry, H. (2018) ‘Diagnosis on demand? The computer will see you now’, Horizon, BBC Two. ONS (Office for National Statistics) (2020) ‘Coronavirus (COVID-​19) related deaths by ethnic group, England and Wales: 2 March 2020 to 10 April 2020’, ONS [Online]. Available at: www.ons.gov.uk/​peoplepopulationandcommunity/​ birthsdeathsandmarriages/d​ eaths/a​ rticles/c​ oronavirusrelateddeathsbyethnicgroup englandandwales/​2march2020to10april2020 Mbembé, J.-​A .  and Meintjes, L.  (2003) ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15(1),  11–​40. Mitchell, A.  (2015) ‘Posthumanist post-​colonialism?’, Worldly [Blog], 26 February. Available at:  https:// ​ worldlyir.wordpress.com/​ 2 015/​ 0 2/​ 2 6/​ posthumanist-​postcolonialism Waltner-​Toews, D., Biggeri, A., De Marchi, B., Funtowicz, S., Giampietro, M., O’Connor, M., Ravetz, J.R., Saltelli, A. and van der Sluijs, J.P. (2020) ‘Post-​ normal pandemics: why Covid-​19 requires a new approach to science’, Discover Society [Blog], 27 March. Available at: https://​discoversociety.org/​2020/​03/​27/​ post-​normal-​pandemics-​why-​covid-​19-​requires-​a-​new-​approach-​to-​science

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Funtowicz, S.O.  and Ravetz, J.R. (1993) ‘Science for the post-​n ormal age’, Futures 25(7), 739–​5 5. Available at:  https:// ​ d oi.org/ ​ 1 0.1016/​ 0016-​3287(93)90022-​L Stengers, I. (2010) Cosmopolitics I (trans Robert Bononno), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D.  (2016) ‘Tentacular thinking:  Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, e-​flux [Online], September. Available at: www.e-fl ​ ux.com/​journal/​ 75/​67125/​tentacular-​thinking-​anthropocene-​capitalocene-​chthulucene

Chapter Eleven  1

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OECD (n.d.) ‘Resilient cities’, OECD [Online]. Available at: www.oecd.org/​ cfe/​regional-​policy/​resilient-​cities.htm Selasi, T. (2014) ‘Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local’, TED Talk [Online]. Available at: www.ted.com/​talks/​taiye_​selasi_​don_​t_​ask_​where_​i_​m_​ from_​ask_​where_​i_​m_​a_​local/​discussion Oliver, T. (2020) ‘The age of the individual must end –​our world depends on it’, The Guardian. Retrieved May 7, 2020, from https://w ​ ww.theguardian.com/​books/​ 2020/​jan/​16/​the-​age-​of-​the-​individual-​must-​end-​tom-​oliver-​the-​self-​delusion Raworth, K. (2017) Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-​Century Economist, London: Random House, p 11. Raworth (2017), p 25. Raworth, K.  (2020) ‘Introducing the Amsterdam City Doughnut’, Exploring Doughnut Economics [Online]. Available at: www.kateraworth.com/​2020/​04/​08/​ amsterdam-​city-​doughnut Ministry of Employment and Social Security, Spain (2017) ‘The social economy, a business model for the future of the European Union’, Madrid Declaration [Online]. Available at:  www.lavoro.gov.it/​notizie/​Documents/​2017-​05-​23-​ DICHIARAZIONE-​MADRID-​English-​Version.pdf; www.socialeconomy. eu.org, page 4. Social Economy Europe (2018) The Future of EU Policies for the Social Economy:  Towards a European Action Plan, Brussels:  Social Economy Europe. Available at: www.interregeurope.eu/​fileadmin/​user_​upload/​plp_u ​ ploads/e​ vents/​ Webinars/​Social_​Enterprises_​12-​03-​2020/​The_​Future_​of_​EU_​policies_​for_​ Social_​Economy_​Towards_​a_​European_​Action_​Plan.pdf, page 4. Dubb, S. (2016) ‘Community wealth building forms: what they are and how to use them at the local level’, Academy of Management Perspectives, 30(2), 141–​52. Lumpkin, T. and Bacq, S. (2019) ‘Civic wealth creation: a new view of stakeholder engagement and societal impact’, Academy of Management Perspectives, 41(4), 383–​404. Fox, S. and Macleod, A. (2019) Bristol and the SDGs: A Voluntary Local Review of Progress 2019, Bristol:  Cabot Institute for the Environment, University of

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Bristol. Available at: www.bristol.ac.uk/m ​ edia-l​ ibrary/s​ ites/c​ abot-i​ nstitute-2​ 018/​ documents/​BRISTOL%20AND%20THE%20SDGs.pdf, page 49. Gama, K., Rautenbach, V., Green, C., Gonçalves, B.A., Coetzee, S., Fourie, N. and Sastry, N. (2019) ‘Mapathons and hackathons to crowdsource the generation and usage of geographic data’, Paper presented at the International Conference on Game Jams, Hackathons and Game Creation Events (ICGJ), San Francisco, CA, 17 March. www.brusselshelps.be Wirth, T. and Rach, S. (2019) Participatory Design of People-​Centered Cities: Exploring a Future Research Agenda, Rotterdam: DRIFT. Available at: https://​drift.eur.nl/​ app/u ​ ploads/2​ 020/0​ 1/W ​ orking-P ​ aper-P ​ articipatory-D ​ esign-o ​ f-P ​ eople-c​ entered-​ Cities-​PDPC.pdf

Chapter Twelve  1

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This chapter draws extensively from the Invasive Others conference I was privileged to attend on 20–​21 April 2016 at the New School in New York. The conference resulted in a special issue of the journal Social Research 84(1), published in spring 2017. I am grateful to Miriam Ticktin for inviting me, and to the Transatlantic Mobilities Network for our ongoing conversations that have informed my thinking. Winton, A.  (2020) ‘Migrants abandoned  –​ lockdown at the Mexican-​ Guatamalan border’, Migration Mobilities Bristol [Blog], 19 May. Available at:  https://​migration.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/​2020/​05/​19/​migrants-​abandoned-​ lockdown-​at-​the-​mexican-​guatemalan-​border Phelan, A.  (2020) ‘COVID-​1 9 immunity passports and vaccination certificates: scientific, equitable, and legal challenges’, The Lancet [Online], 4 May. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/​S0140-​6736(20)31034–​5. The ‘hostile environment’ is a set of legally mandated immigration enforcement measures implemented by non-immigration social actors including landlords, employers, university lecturers, health workers etc. They are designed to make life as difficult as possible for illegalized migrants with a view to making them leave the UK. Connor, P.  and Passel, J.  (2019) Europe’s Unauthorized Population Peaks in 2017, Then Levels Off, Washington, DC:  Pew Research Center. Available at:  www.pewresearch.org/ ​ g lobal/ ​ 2 019/ ​ 1 1/ ​ 1 3/ ​ e uropes- ​ u nauthorized-​ immigrant-​population-​peaks-​in-​2016-​then-​levels-​off Ruhs, M.  (2013) The Price of Rights:  Regulating International Labour Migration, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Martin, E. (1990) ‘Toward an anthropology of immunology: the body as nation state’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, 4(4), 410–​26.

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Wallace, R., Liebman, A., Chaves, L.F. and Wallace, R. (2020) ‘Covid-​19 and circuits of capital’, Monthly Review, 72(1). Available at: https://​monthlyreview. org/​2020/​05/​01 Parasecoli, F. (2017) ‘Global trade, food safety, and the fear of invisible invaders’, Social Research, 84(1), 183–​202. Hupert, N. (2017) ‘Who’s invading whom? Zika and intergenerational public health’, Social Research, 84 (1), 83–​105. Bordenstein, S.  and Thies, K.  (2015) ‘Host biology in the light of the microbiome:  ten principles of holobionts and hologenomes’, PLoS Biology, e1002226. Available at: https://​doi.org/​10.1371/​journal.pbio.1002226 Brown, N. (2019) Immunitary Life: The Biopolitics of Immunity, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedman, M. (1982) Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p xiv.

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From George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Book VIII: Finale. Agamben, G. (2005 [2003]) State of Exception, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press [Italian edition Stato di eccezione, Turin: Bollati Boringhiere Editore]. Goleman, D.  (2000) ‘Leadership that gets results’, Harvard Business Review, 78(2), 4–​17; Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z. (2016) Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader, San Francisco, CA:  John Wiley & Sons. Eliot, T.S. ([1925] 2002) ‘The Hollow Men’ in Collected Poems, 1909–1962, London: Faber & Faber. For a fuller discussion on how strong, decisive leadership results in members deskilling themselves and leads to passivity and a childlike dependence on the leader, see Gemmill, G. and Oakley, J. (1992) ‘Leadership: an alienating social myth?’, Human Relations, 45(2), 113–​29. Spillane, J.P. (2006) Distributed Leadership, San Francisco, CA:  Jossey-​Bass; Greenleaf, R.K. (2002) Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. For a typical example, see Robson, D. (2020) ‘Covid-​19: what makes a good leader during a crisis?’, BBC [Online], 27 March. Available at: www.bbc.com/​ worklife/a​ rticle/2​ 0200326-​covid-​19-​what-​makes-​a-​good-​leader-d​ uring-a​ -c​ risis Agamben (2005 [2003]), p 6. Klein, N.  (2007) The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Allen Lane. Stacey, R.  (2001) Complex Responsive Process in Organizations:  Learning and Knowledge Creation, London: Routledge.

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Solnit, R. (2009) A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Gaggiotti, H.  and Simpson, P.  (2015) ‘Should we teach students to theorize? Classical Greek philosophy and the learning journey’, in C.  Mabey and W. Mayrhofer (eds) Developing Leadership: Questions Business Schools Don’t Ask, Los Angeles, CA: Sage, pp 178–​88.

Chapter Fourteen  1

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IEA (International Energy Agency) (2020) Global Energy Review 2020, Paris: IEA; Hepburn, C., O’Callagan, B., Stern, N., Stiglitz, J. and Zenghelis, D (2020) Will COVID-​19 Fiscal Recovery Packages Accelerate or Retard Progress on Climate Change?, Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Working Paper No. 20-​02, Oxford: University of Oxford. IEA (2020), p 3. Boden, T., Marland, G.  and Andres, R.  (2017) Global, Regional and National Fossil-​Fuel CO2 Emissions (1751 –​2014), Oak Ridge, TN: Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Myllyvirta, L. and Thierot, H. (2020) 11,000 Air Pollution-​Related Deaths Avoided in Europe as Coal, Oil Consumption Plummet, Helsinki: Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Available at:  https://​energyandcleanair.org/​wp/​wp-​ content/​uploads/​2020/​04/​CREA-​Europe-​COVID-​impacts.pdf IEA (2020), p 4. Hepburn et al (2020). Granqvist, H.  and Grover, D.  (2016) ‘Distributive fairness in paying for clean energy infrastructure’, Ecological Economics, 126, 87–​97, p 91. Hepburn et al (2020). Georgieva, K.  (2020) ‘Managing Director’s opening remarks at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue XI’, International Monetary Fund [Online], 29 April. Available at:  www.imf.org/​ e n/​ N ews/​ A rticles/ ​ 2 020/ ​ 0 4/ ​ 2 9/​ sp042920-​md-​opening-​remarks-​at-​petersberg-​event Simon, F.  (2020) ‘Green Deal will be “our motor for the recovery”, von der Leyen says’, EURACTIV [Online], 29 April. Available at:  www. euractiv.com/​section/​energy-​environment/​news/​g reen-​deal-​will-​be-​our​motor-​for-​the-​recovery-​von-​der-​leyen-​says Hepburn et al (2020). Nolden, C. and Stua, M. (2020) ‘Carbon dating –​getting together to reduce carbon emissions brings hope in a world that doesn’t care’, Mint Magazine, 13, 19–​21; Weischer, L., Morgan, J. and Patel, M. (2012) ‘Climate clubs: can small groups of countries make a big difference in addressing climate change?’, Review of European Community and International Environmental Law, 21(3), 177–​92.

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Chapter Fifteen  1

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Lord, B.  (2014) Art and Energy:  How Culture Changes, Washington, DC:  The AAM Press. Wallace-​Wells, D. (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth, London: Allen Lane. Le Quéré, C., Jackson, R.B., Jones, M.W., Smith, A.J.P., Abernethy, S., Andrew, R.M., De-​Gol, A.J., Willis, D.R., Shan, Y., Canadell, J.G., Friedlingstein, P., Creutzig, F. and Peters, G.P. (2020) ‘Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID-​19 forced confinement’, Nature Climate Change [Online], 19 May. Available at: https://​doi.org/​10.1038/​s41558-​020-​0797-​x Hickel, J. (2019) ‘Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance’, Real-​world Economics Review 87, 54–​6. Kennedy, R.F. (1968) ‘Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968’, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum [Online]. Available at: www. jfklibrary.org/​learn/​about-​jfk/​the-​kennedy-​family/​robert-​f-​kennedy/​robert-​f-​ kennedy-​speeches/​remarks-​at-​the-​university-​of-​kansas-​march-​18-​1968 ONS (Office for National Statistics) (2018) ‘Household satellite account, UK: 2015 and 2016’, ONS [Online], 2 October. Available at: www.ons.gov.uk/​economy/​ nationalaccounts/s​ atelliteaccounts/​articles/​householdsatelliteaccounts/2​ 015and2 016estimates#methodological-​improvements Gayle, D. (2016) ‘Daily commute of two hours – reality for 3.7m UK workers’, The Guardian [Online], 18 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ money/2016/nov/18/daily-commute-of-two-hours-reality-for-37m-uk-workers

Chapter Sixteen  1

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If you are wondering what the difference is between an organization and an institution, you could think of it like this: a school is an organization, education is an institution. https://​drive.google.com/​file/​d/​1uB4LcQHMVP-​oLzIIHA9SjKj1uMd3erGu/​ view Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, London: Profile Books. Stilgoe, J., Owen, R. and Macnaghten, P. (2013) ‘Developing a framework for responsible innovation’, Research Policy, 42(9), 1568–​80. Available at:  doi.org/​ 10.1016/​j.respol.2013.05.008 For an example of a study that puts this thinking into practice, see Rogers, Y., Balestrini, M., Hassan, C., Creus, J., King, M. and Marshall, P.E. (2017) ‘A city in common: a framework to orchestrate large-​scale citizen engagement around urban issues’, in G. Mark, S. Fussell, C. Lampe, M.C. Schrafel, J.P. Hourcade, C. Appert and D. Wigdor (eds) (2017) Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May, 2282–​94. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1145/​3025453.3025915

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Chapter Seventeen  1

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This chapter is adapted from the first in a series of blog posts still in the making as this book goes to print. You can find the original, and links to subsequent posts, one for each of the eight areas addressed later in the chapter, at: https://​thefearlessheart. org/​apart-​and-​together-​responding-​to-​opportunity-​in-​extreme-​times Solnit, R. (2010) A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, New York, NY: Penguin Random House. NHS England (2020) ‘NHS volunteer responders: 250,000 target smashed with three quarters of a million committing to volunteer’, NHS [Online], 29 March. Available at:  www.england.nhs.uk/​2020/​03/​250000-​nhs-​volunteers https://​ www.england.nhs.uk/​2020/​03/​250000-​nhs-​volunteers Emma Quayle, personal communication, http://​emmaquayle.net I am grateful to Paul Kahawatte, a contributor to this volume, and to Mariam Gafforio, for many conversations about theory of change. With their insistence, theory of change became a major area of inquiry and conversation that pushed me to more rigour in my exploration. Cottam, H. (2018) Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships between us and Revolutionise the Welfare State, London: Virago; Green, D. (2016) How Change Happens, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It, New York, NY: Penguin Books.

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“A collection of thought-provoking, desperately needed essays, guiding thinking towards a better future for all. It’s a call to action which needs to be heard in the corridors of power.”

Edited by Martin Parker

David Sproxton, Aardman Animations

Katherine Trebeck, Wellbeing Economy Alliance

“A very timely and important book. We owe a duty to those who have suffered and died from COVID-19 to use the opportunity to rethink how we organize our society. Martin Parker has gathered a diverse and insightful range of experts to help us do just that.” Henry Leveson-Gower, Promoting Economic Pluralism

What might the world look like in the aftermath of COVID-19? Almost every aspect of society will change after the pandemic, but if we learn lessons then life can be better. Featuring expert authors from across academia and civil society, this book offers ideas that might put us on alternative paths for positive social change.

Martin Parker is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Bristol and lead for the Inclusive Economy Initiative.

LIFE AFTER COVID-19 EDITED BY MARTIN PARKER

“This timely collection brings together a rich range of perspectives to shed light on the critical questions of our time – how do we truly build back better and what is ‘better’ when so much needs to change?”

LIFE AFTER COVID-19 The Other Side of Crisis

A rapid intervention into current commentary and debate, Life After COVID-19 looks at a wide range of topical issues including the state, co-operation, work, money, travel and care. It invites us to see the pandemic as a dress rehearsal for the larger problem of climate change, and it provides an opportunity to think about what we can improve and how rapidly we can make changes.

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