An Auto Ethnographic Analysis of Self as Manager

Leslie Christopher Burke

January 2013

Page | 1

Acknowledgements:

Dr Joe Nason as Course Tutor and Dissertation Supervisor University of Lincoln and strong support.

"…No matter how carefully we plan in advance, research is designed in the course of its execution. The

finished monograph is the result of hundreds of decisions, large and small, made while the

research is underway" (Becker in Gill and Johnson (1991) p.145).

This sums up the guide to dissertations that Joe produced and which is the structural basis for this work.

I also acknowledge that it was a chance meeting with Joe in the village he lives in that planted the seed

that led to the Masters, causing me to understand that the only barrier to success is oneself. Joe was

recommended many years earlier as such a guide by Dr Fred Dobson whose 1998 course appears in the

text as another defining moment. Joe’s academic writings and lectures also proved to be a huge

resource of guidance and his direct support a reservoir of friendship.

Dr David Currie as Course Tutor. University of Lincoln, Guide and producer of academic literature David

was also a strong and forceful catalyst in challenging preconceived notions in groups each week and

particularly on the residential schools over the three years of the course.

Mr Edward McGuiness, Teacher (retired) St John Almond School, Garston, Liverpool. Mr McGuiness has

continued to encourage me for over 40 years to continually seek and understand knowledge and use it

Page | 2

for the general good. To him I owe the knowledge that the most important things in life are often not on

the curriculum.

Mr Paul Taylor MBA. Paul was the first employer in over 40 years of working life who both saw and

enabled an academic dream I was hardly aware of. Without his support I would never have completed

the certificate course or grown to be an effective manager.

Cllr Mrs Sue Burke who constantly supported the dream that became a reality.

Page | 3

Abstract

This work is an auto ethnographic study which is a new form of expression for me which I have found

challenging but immensely rewarding as a medium of expression. It surprised me to learn that there is a

great popularity for this approach and in my research of this field I encountered, leading this approach,

Carolyn Ellis.

The work has been carried out in about the last six months of 2012 using my own home office and

University of Lincoln facilities.

This work has been approached chronologically; looking at my origins and how this has influenced me

and then my working life and issues that have impacted within and outside that process. Throughout I

am reflecting the learning experience of three academic years with the MBA although in real time this

was a period of nearly six years and so included lots of self-learning and reflection outside the structured

course. I also experienced a period when the MBA course was being designed and participated in a year

of first lectures at the then new University of Lincolnshire and Humberside that later became the

University of Lincoln.

Crucially the past is being interpreted using the tools acquired during the MBA course and debates occur

about the scope and extent of the issues to be included. I look through both my lens and also I am

informed by the lens of thinkers I encounter on this journey, many are academics drawn from the

Page | 4

reading lists of the past three years but others have occurred through conversations with tutors and

other fellow travellers on the course or in the other worlds that I live in. I am using myself as a manager

throughout in constructing the narrative. Emerging themes are ones of conflict against harmony and the

use of power in politics sometimes, in the case of my time in Northern Ireland via religion. Emerging

conclusions indicate that issues, positive and negative, I face as a manager and as a general community

leader can be traced back to past events and did not simply occur in their own right.

Page | 5

Contents page

Contents

Acknowledgements:....................................................................................................................................2

Contents page.............................................................................................................................................6

List of Tables and Figures.............................................................................................................................7

Introduction: Setting the Scene and Aims...................................................................................................8

Methodology.........................................................................................................................................12

Chronological Journey towards The MBA and Management Knowledge..................................................16

Chapter 1: Childhood and Family Background...........................................................................................16

Books as Education and Escape - a brake against dehumanisation.......................................................17

The Historic Environment......................................................................................................................21

Chapter 2: Early Education........................................................................................................................27

Chapter 3: Fine Fare Stores First Job.........................................................................................................31

Figure 1: Sweeny’s Generic Strategies...............................................................................................34

The Royal Air Force................................................................................................................................34

Chapter 4: RAF Initial Training and Background.......................................................................................34

Chapter 5: RAF Northern Ireland Three Month Tour.................................................................................39

Figure 2: Northern Ireland Census 2011 Religion..............................................................................40

Figure 3: Adapted Child to Church Adult...........................................................................................41

Chapter 6: RAF Northern Ireland Two Year Tour.......................................................................................45

Figure 4 Impact by Premiership of Irish Issues...................................................................................51

Figure 5: The Radical Weberian view of interests, conflict and power..............................................55

Chapter 7: RAF and the Middle East..........................................................................................................57

Chapter 8: RAF UK Period..........................................................................................................................61

Chapter 9: Stamford, Managing Politics and Engineering..........................................................................65

Figure 6: Team Learning in the context of a wider approach............................................................69

Chapter 10 Lincoln: Managing a European Union Role.............................................................................70

Chapter 11: Lincoln: Managing Youth Services and Red Cross Services....................................................76

Page | 6

Chapter 14: Conclusions............................................................................................................................80

Bibliography...............................................................................................................................................82

List of Tables and Figures

Figure 1 Sweeny’s Generic Strategies

Figure 2 N. Ireland Census

Figure 3 Adapted Child to Church Adult diagram

Figure 4 Impact by Premiership of Irish Issues

Figure 5 The Radical Weberian view

Figure 6 Team Learning

Page 34

Page 40

Page 41

Page 51

Page 55

Page 69

Page | 7

Introduction: Setting the Scene and Aims

My primary aims in writing this paper are:

To understand how my individual history has influenced my management style.

To reflect on the learning that has occurred via the MBA and its impact on my management

approach.

To learn lessons from the past to apply to the present.

This section is about how I decided the extent, scope and breadth of this paper – what aspects of the

last sixty years of life and the forty or so years of work it should properly encompass. I consider the

literary, academic underpinning that I have accessed and the range of writers involved even though

where there is not a direct quote but more a sense of an idea, as occurred with Peddler. “Waking The

Tiger” by Peter Levine is an example where I find inspiration and awareness through a consideration of

the healing nature of trauma. This occurs here and elsewhere.

In order to manage others it is necessary to understand self. For me this approach is a key one enabling

me to learn and develop by understanding how the impact of the MBA learning process has altered my

approach as a manager. What effect on me has occurred when I have encountered people like Peddler,

Saunders, Slack, along with Conners and Smith who talk about the Oz Principle. Manger, Morgan and

Schein, and of course Wickham, all of whom influenced for me MBA course issues and my working life.

This all leads however to more “outside the box” people like Freire, Berne and Levine with his Waking

the Tiger and Barnes with his Flaubert’s Parrot more of which later. Personal explorations then arose

Page | 8

with Orwell, Buffett, Branson, Getty and Rockefeller. For indicative thinking via fiction and biography I

was assisted by reading Momo by Michael Ende and Stephen Fry’s Moab is my Washpot. At least ten

other major figures of this kind occurred throughout the MBA course and have had varying levels of

influence on my thinking.

I have often felt held back by some “force” and one of the many gains of the MBA has been to throw

some light on this phenomenon. A clue for me lies in the discussion of trauma in Waking the Tiger:

Healing Trauma - The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (Levine et al, 1997 p32),

“Unresolved trauma can keep us excessively cautious and inhibited, or lead us around in ever tightening

circles of dangerous re-enactment, victimization, and unwise exposure to danger.” One of the issues to

address is about the ways I have worked as a manager before and after the MBA. I feel the work by

Levine has an intrinsic message for me. I ask myself whether such broad influences implied here go

beyond the world of work. I wonder then about the influence of family upbringing and culture. Another

very serious influence on this work has been that of Carolyn Ellis and I have used her definition

described earlier of auto ethnography to guide me in the form and depth of what is both a story and

academic work, (Ellis, 2004, Pxvii Preface).

This leads me to the question: Should I confine this paper to my career? Would that imply that only

work and its influences and consequences have an impact on my approach to being a manager and not

background, family, upbringing and external beliefs? Both Berne and Fichte have something to say about

how wide the perspective of human interaction is. Berne (Berne, 1964, P14-15) argues that, “As the

complexities of compromise increase, each person becomes more and more individual in his quest for

recognition, and it is these differentia which lend variety to social intercourse and which determines the

Page | 9

individual’s destiny”. This implies a considerable interplay over a lifetime of many different impacts and

relationships both in and out of the world of work, in and out of childhood and adulthood. Fichte

(Burrell et al, 1979, P280 -281) however wants the world understood in terms of the “projection of

individual consciousness”. Husserl, and then Sartre from a phenomenological perspective then see “the

individual as trapped within the mode of existence which he creates”. Ontologically then our

consciousness is projected onto the external world by acts of “intentionality” so creating that world. I

am tempted however by Hegel where consciousness is “subservient to an external pattern of universal

reason which reflects the existence of a universal force or spirit above and beyond the individual. I am

tempted by such a philosophy because my culture growing up in a strongly Catholic community is

apposite to this expression of belief. Here then lies both the advantage of taking on board the whole

corpus of experience, bringing family, faith, community and other “outside of work” issues but also the

danger of elevating aspects of it such as faith out of proportion to the whole. In fact a better approach

might be the more neutral one expressed in a lifeboat shortly after the sinking ship has stranded the

crew with the chaplain in charge. “Reverend, should we row away from the rocks or pray?” said the

crew. “Pray” replied the chaplain “as if God existed but row as if he didn’t”.

Finally, the great danger here is to follow fascinating but irrelevant strands and lose the cohesion that

this paper needs to fulfil its purpose. The development of my home town prior to my birth is relevant to

my development but this is not an analysis of the Irish diaspora or the political and religious conflicts of

post WW1 Liverpool, the interwar years when Moseley’s Blackshirts fought local mainstream political

parties for control. I have had to confine myself to the effects of that environment as I encountered it.

This encounter was mainly through a rich family oral history and the differences between individuals

such as my mother, uncles and stepfather. Into this mix comes the views of teachers, priests and the

Page | 10

books that I have read. Because faith and politics have played a huge part in my life along with an

awareness and fascination with history all of these subjects have informed my journey over the last fifty

odd years. Events before my time have impacted strongly like the First and Second World Wars. That

said I have tried to confine this paper to the most relevant phenomenon possible and tried to balance

views to enable a management perspective.

Page | 11

Methodology

This section is about the tools I will use in the course of this paper. I indicate this when considering

Freire’s use of “dialogue” and “the word” in reflection and action. So I am using his approach to arrive at

a view that explains why I have failed to act for example as a manager, perhaps to better understand

when I should have taken a reflective approach. These tools and other academic sources of thought will

enable me to study interactions and relationships to gradually challenge my and other people's thinking

and actions both as a person and manager of people.

My approach has been to consider the influences that have occurred and affected me during the MBA

three years of action, study and work and relate this to my career and early influences. I use this

approach to define shortcomings, things that have I believe held back my development and ways that I

feel that I have progressed; for example, Freire expresses a primary issue that concerned sometimes my

inability to turn thought into action in an original way. He says that “As we attempt to analyse dialogue

as a human phenomenon, we discover something which is the essence of dialogue itself: ”the

word”(p68). He goes on to describe “the word” as two constituent parts “reflection and action”. I take

this to mean that we need to reflect before acting, increasing a qualitative process and making it more

effective. Prior to the MBA my approach as a manager or leader was sometimes action-based, without

reflection and sometimes reflective but without that transformation into action. Perhaps even more

importantly there was not the underpinning of management theory that is so important when managing

people, processes or systems. This emerged as a reflective thought during the early days of my

appointment as a service manager with the youth charity Rainer. In a conversation during one of my first

Page | 12

one-to-one meetings with the Executive Manager he wondered how I arrived at “safe” decisions. He was

an MBA student himself at that time.

An array of influences of a fairly unreconstructed kind influenced my thinking. Most of my recent

management experience had been in the third sector which seemed to sit perfectly with the influences

of the powerful Roman Catholic Council known colloquially as Vatican II. The relevance of Vatican II at

this stage in my development is that it was one of several influences on my management style that

brought some important underpinnings of logic and historic development however this lacked any

academic rigor or learning that related to management. I read widely during my RAF career about

Church philosophy and that brought me into contact with pre Vatican II theological academics such as

Hillarie Belloc, GK Chesterton and Arnold Lune. This in any case was in conflict with the more

conservative influences of a traditional Irish Catholic upbringing and a twelve year career in the Royal air

Force followed by twelve years in an engineering industry environment. Alongside this process was an

interest in community development, for example, in that era I helped to create a citizens advice bureau.

I also acted for several years as a volunteer trade union education officer arranging weekend courses

and became active in the Catholic Justice and Peace Movement and the Labour Party.

During this period I encountered Bishop John Jukes with whom I collaborated in a joint Church/Trade

Union Committee that sought to influence the then Thatcher Governments social policies. He

successfully held dialogue with the Prime Minister and members of her Cabinet including the then

Norman St John-Stevas putting Trade Union views that she might otherwise not have listened to. I later

deduced that this also enabled him to support the political interests of the Catholic Church in Britain.

Thinking through the motives behind apparently altruistic approaches by organizations or individuals is

Page | 13

something that I would now tend to do but I was trusting of his approach as a result of a level of

hegemonic conditioning. We later clashed during one of the Eucharistic Conferences of the 1980’s

because I had begun to develop a view that the Church was in denial regarding issues like celibacy and

the ordination of women priests. Bishop Jukes contended that the capitalist system although flawed

was not in its own right immoral and nor should we be opposed to capital and wealth creation as a

system per se. He was later to argue this in the 1990’s as an eschatological reality, that the accumulation

of wealth is OK however he goes on to discuss that it is the use to which that wealth is put that becomes

the issue, (Jukes et al, 1993, P30). I have mentioned the hegemonic conditioning, as I see it, which

caused me to trust, not only Bishop Jukes but also a pre Vatican Catholic world which exerted a strong

control on me through most of the 1970’s. Even as I evolved into supporting the post Vatican II Church I

still feel that levels of control occurred. Nietzsche sums this up here:

“Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another,

and the concept ‘leaf’; is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences,

through forgetting the distinctions; What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and

anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and

embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to

a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which

are worn out …” (Femia, 1987, P46).

It was during four years working with the EU that I first encountered the then new University of

Lincolnshire (now University of Lincoln) for an initial management course with Dr Fred Dobson. This was

a pilot for the MBA. While I had started to understand the elements that can influence us as managers

the course gave some indication that I could become a more effective manager by understanding myself

Page | 14

more and how this management of people and events really works. For example, I was also dealing with

the reality of working with the EU social model which essentially meant seeking to reduce inequalities in

Lincolnshire around issues like housing. The early course persuaded me of the need to analyse this

model and see if I was engaging all of the agencies that might help to make it work. While I did not

complete the course, five years later I did begin the MBA and successfully completed the certificate and

then Diploma stage which began to give me some of the tools that I needed as I progressed towards a

more senior management role. The significant turning point that convinced me to begin and complete

the MBA course was an encounter with Dr Jo Nason where we discussed how academia and reality must

become one to be effective. Learning had to be accompanied by action and universities must not simply

be “sausage machines” that produce automatons. It was at this point that I began to see the need to

gain some of the tools and academic underpinning that I needed to be a more effective manager. In fact

this process and learning/action experience enabled me to perform more effectively in a variety of ways

and to re-evaluate many aspects of my life. I use these changes in my approach as well to look at how I

have evolved not only over the years since meeting Dr Nason but also I looking back over the 40 years

that preceded this in the light of this experience to learn new lessons.

This methodological approach would only work however if I exercised considerable control in order to

minimize extraneous information that would be irrelevant to an effective academic paper. This has

proved a major challenge. Equally the format and auto ethnographic approach has caused me to

evaluate many half-forgotten aspects of my life which came as a surprise. I would join with Stephen

Fry’s choice of opening quote for his first biography: “To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To

write is to sit in judgment on oneself - Ibsen” (Fry, 1997, frontpiece).

Page | 15

Chronological Journey towards The MBA and Management Knowledge

Chapter 1: Childhood and Family Background

I grew up in the post war period spanning the 1950’s and 60’s in a Catholic Irish tradition in a Liverpool

which had largely settled its sectarian differences. There is a considerably body of literature involving

the City’s conflicts in the 1920’s and 30’s between different political and religious traditions which later

informed my understanding of the community that I came from however my main purpose is not to

provide analysis here on that subject or write a history of my native City.

Although my father was an English Anglican who converted to Rome his early death before my birth

meant that I was brought up almost entirely in my mother’s more Irish tradition. Alongside my mother’s

grief over my father’s early death (he was 26) I grew up sensing a loss, an absence of something

everybody else seemed to have. I now see that throughout my life I have sought older company as part

of the need for surrogate fathers. My first surrogate father was my Grandfather who was born in

Ireland in 1882. He was a Victorian and was influenced strongly by that period of history. I was subject

to and invited to participate from an early age in discussions about the political nature of the City by my

Grandfather’s nephew, Jimmy Brind, along with exciting stories about conflict, for example between

the Black shirts and the other parties, often violent in their outcome from the recent past. He was

initially a strong Communist who supported the trade unions. I was also tutored in my Irish background

and believed I was Irish and called Murray (my Grandfather’s name) for some time until primary school.

An important issue that influenced my future development was a sense of rebellion in the people

around me. While my Grandfather was a small “c” conservative who believed that his countries

“rebellion” against the Crown was a mistake he accepted the traditional nationalist view in the end that

Page | 16

Ireland, like America, had the right to be independent. He believed the change had to occur because

“England” had misgoverned there. There was conflict between those who supported Michael Collins, a

pragmatist who had negotiated with the British Government to obtain independence for the majority of

the country of Ireland and Éamon de Valera who insisted on having Ulster too and failed in that

objective. Years later I would be stationed in Northern Ireland and come into conflict with Uncle Jimmy

as a result, also I would see the consequences of “partition” as it came to be called. I think that this was

the first time I encountered people describing countries as if they were people. The general Liverpool

community from a more English point of view felt that Parliament and Westminster were remote and

often got it wrong where Liverpool was concerned. My mother was pro English, anti the local Catholic

establishment but wary of the Police and authority, she overcame this to become a nurse, the first

professional in her family.

Books as Education and Escape - a brake against dehumanisation

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read”. So said Groucho

Marx US comedian with the Marx Brothers (1890 - 1977). A hugely important early development for me

was the discovery of books and reading at about the age of four. My mother was an avid reader and

despite a poor education had a large but sometimes unreliable knowledge gleaned from books. She was

determined that I should read as early as possible and this project was aided by the fact that we had a

library at the end of the road. It seemed almost an immediate process and I was at the age of 5 off in no

time consuming all of the children’s literature in the small library. By the age of eight I was using the

district library and was reading biographies written with young teenagers in mind. As I went from

primary to secondary school I began to read the adult books in my mother’s library. This was an

unconscious but effective way of retaining individuality and not being absorbed into a street culture that

Page | 17

had no books. The new phenomenon of television was reflected in most homes by this point and to my

mother’s disappointment this was a world with fewer books in homes.

Books gave me a world where I could resist dehumanisation but then reality intruded. I failed the 11

plus having a poor grasp of math’s (I latter really welcomed the age of calculators) and I found this a

shock to the system. I also discovered that poor eyesight had also contributed to this huge failure and I

had to start wearing glasses. I believed that I had failed and could have done better with more

application. I was therefore challenged and dehumanised in Freire’s terms by this process of early

selection.

I then went to a Catholic Secondary school which I seriously enjoyed. It was a brilliant opportunity to

meet the teaching staff and some students who could converse on a range of exciting things that I

wanted to know about.

My first school time job was at Garston indoor market and a main “employer” was the second hand

books man. He was very interested in politics, as was I and he began to feed me books such as the Stars

Look Down by AJ Cronin. Now a young teenager I began to appreciate thanks to AJ Cronin that novels

could be as important as biographies and the history books I had now gravitated towards. The Stars Look

Down, I discovered, by its description of the appalling conditions in Britain’s Mines had led to the Mines

Act and the nationalization of the coal mines. He also wrote “The Citadel”. This book shook me by

describing doctors’ practices as business operations in Harley Street where wealthy and initially fit

clients where exploited and treated for bogus illnesses and unnecessary operations. My experience of

Page | 18

doctors was that of my local surgery operated by a kindly couple of elderly doctors who had encouraged

my mother to become a nurse. The book was a contributory factor in the work that helped create the

NHS. This led me to read JB Priestley and a host of other authors whose fiction contained political or

moral messages. Now a whole world opened up but it was not confined to politics and religion. This was

not without its problems. A teacher at secondary school, Mr Edward McGuiness discovered in my desk a

book by the novelist Dennis Wheatley on black magic. When he asked me about having such a book at a

Catholic school I was able to respond by saying that Wheatley reflected Catholic teaching in opposing

black magic. To my surprise he accepted the argument subject to reading the book as research after I

had finished it.

Mr McGuiness was particularly influential in indicating that most people could go further academically if

they wanted to hard enough. He was one of a number of outstanding people operating in a system that

did not expect working class people to do too well outside of trade work if they had not passed the 11

plus exam. If the rule of life was dehumanisation as a norm then Edward McGuiness was the exception

to the rule and I think consciously so. He taught outside the curriculum areas like the twenty-four hour

clock and other ways of using the train service. Just as the eleven plus was a challenge which seemed a

disaster in reality the new environment was actually a gain.

Books then became my university, pleasure and source of friendship in tougher and lonelier times

ahead. My first serious essay set for me by English Teacher Tom Kelly was to seek a piece of work that

spoke of my most important discovery. I responded with an article on the joys of a second hand book

shop that I had discovered behind Lewis’s department store in Liverpool City Centre. It had been there

since before the War as had many of the books stocked. I was able to talk about this book shop as a font

Page | 19

of knowledge that I could afford to access with staff who had the time to talk about their treasures. I no

longer have a copy of the essay but many years later came across something similar and considerably

more advanced in the book Eighty-Four Charing Cross Road which also became one of my favourite

films. This true account tells of a New York writer’s correspondence with a London Bookshop during and

after the War as she orders books and falls in love with them and their “curators”. She reminded me of a

conversation that I had regarding a critique that had fallen below par and the book shop did not want to

order it for me. “What kind of Pepy’s diary do you call this? This is not a Pepy’s diary, this is some

busybody editor’s miserable collection of excerpts from Pepy’s diary, may he rot. I could just spit”,

(Hanff, 1980, P27).

This passion for decent books became my passion and I found this joy among the staff of my book shop

too and with Tom Kelly himself a serious reader of serious books. He and my stepfather taught me that

although books could be great fun and a passport to strange and exotic new worlds they were also a

crucial access to knowledge. He never read fiction but only biographies, his favourite which has been

passed to me after his recent death was the story of Joshua Slocum. Reading it now I came across an

entry that summed up an important aspect of my stepfather, Leslie Curtis: “As for myself, the wonderful

sea charmed me from the first. At the age of eight I had already been afloat along with other boys on

the bay, with chances greatly in favour of being drowned.” My Uncle Les was swimming as soon as he

was allowed in to the local baths and there is a photograph of him as a tiny figure holding a huge

swimming cup surrounded by much taller and older young men. He taught me to swim and also to have

a deep respect and fear for the dangers of the sea. He would love to quote from Slocum: “The next step

toward the goal of happiness found me before the mast in a full-rigged ship bound on a foreign voyage.

Page | 20

Thus I came "over the bows," and not in through the cabin windows, to the command of a ship”

(Slocum, 1900, P9).

Books are still a great friend although they can now be on a Kindle where I can carry large numbers in

my pocket.

The Historic Environment

Politics and nationalism apart the Victorian heritage, although criticised during the 50’s and 60’s as a

grim architectural and stifling moral inheritance, was very much present and made, over my life, a

considerable contribution and influence to my way of thinking. Many local buildings in use were

Victorian and older local people around me like Mr Hughes who I ran messages for and befriended could

remember that era. Mr Hughes’ house, which his mother had decorated, was still a tribute to that first

age of photography and late Victorian decorating and furniture in a “new” house built in the 1930’s. This

caused me to be interested in the Victorians in a passing kind of way but when I began to discover how

much of our “modern” successes such as power generation and photography along with art we owed to

them I began to admire their achievements. An early and important activity for me as a young teenager

was to explore the Walker Art Gallery and having visited again recently I can see how its huge collection

of Victorian Art would re-enforce this environment. They appeared very strongly again when, after

service in the RAF, I became involved in engineering encountering the work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel

among others and realising that their inventions were very much still in use. I even discovered during

the 1980’s news of an engine in India still in use that had been built in the Stamford town factory I had

worked in the 1880’s. Later still they became a link back to those people, now gone, such as my

Page | 21

Grandfather and Mr Hughes and a time of apparent national greatness. This may explain the

rehabilitation of the Victorians by my generation. Jeremy Paxman describes the feeling in his childhood

in a similar fashion adding “they shrouded the legs of pianos in case the turn of a piece of wood might

trigger lascivious thoughts” (Paxman, 2009, p6). Paxman goes on in his book to praise the Victorians and

express the view that their demise in popular respect in his childhood was due in his opinion to jealousy

that they had done a better job than the generation running things in the 1950’s and 60’s.

The whole period of my childhood and adolescence was pervaded by the aftermath of the Second World

War. The physical environment was one of bomb sites in many local streets where the Luftwaffe had

either deliberately bombed the civilian population or missed strategic targets like the Docks or Gas

Works hitting nearby houses instead. A bomb had fallen on the Gas Works but had failed to explode

giving the Bomb Disposal Unit led by Temporary Lieutenant Harold Newgass time to defuse it. This is still

widely reported today locally. (http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/

2010/12/01/garston-gas-works-bomb-hero-remembered-70-years-on-92534-27746841/ Liverpool Daily

Post accessed December 2012). Although my own mother and stepfather were evacuee’s my father was

a sailor and had been torpedoed. My Grandfather worked on the docks throughout the War and most of

the adults that I encountered had a story to tell from their war. Even more interestingly, one of my

contacts, an “old” man I befriended and ran messages for had been a sailor at the Battle of Jutland

during the First War, this was John Hughes mentioned earlier. My “Step Uncles” had served as soldiers

during the invasion of Germany and then as occupiers and my first camera was a Zeiss Icon with a

bellows design exchanged with a German Officer by my Uncle for cartons of cigarettes. A health

difference in that period was the lack of general awareness that cigarettes were dangerous. Later when

my mother became a nurse she warned against smoking but did not stop herself dying as a result of lung

Page | 22

cancer at a comparatively young age. I can remember older doctors still smoking during a consultation

well into the 1970’s.

A significant issue that emerged again and again was the sense that the community had been for a long

period under real threat of invasion and such was the reluctant reverence for Winston Churchill as the

“saviour” of Britain that I have studied him over my lifetime in some depth. People’s admiration for

Churchill was reluctant because Liverpool tended to be Labour and Churchill’s Conservative past was not

appreciated always. While in the early 50’s and 60’s there was a sense of relief that Britain had survived

this was replaced by apprehension regarding the Soviet threat. I think that some sense of this insecurity

communicated itself to me and my generation.

There was a genuine and widespread belief also that we perhaps would not survive as a human race

given the proliferation of nuclear weapons in evidence. A significant piece of learning for me that

summed up this period was in the book “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. I was to read this when about thirteen,

so in 1965, and it had a profound effect on me. It later emerged again during the MBA Diploma stage as

material for one of my essays. Written in 1948 (Orwell simply reversed the last two digits of the year) it

described, as I saw in my mind, a world in which Soviet Russia had conquered the world and then split

into three opposing factions. Equally you could describe the three powers as corruptions of

contemporary (in 1948) Russia, America and China. At this stage in my life I would have rejected that

assertion seeing the US as the country that had saved my own during World War Two; I was conditioned

in my own way. Orwell perfectly describes a form of hegemonic conditioning that enables constantly

changing alliances while protecting the Stalin type leader, Big Brother, from all error. “Doublethink

means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both

Page | 23

of them” (Orwell, 1949, P223). Big Brother really works when considering Stalin who was given the

equally chilling nick name of Uncle Joe. A further, I think deliberate, parallel can be found in the

application of doublethink when, as regularly occurred, the external enemy changed and at that stage

everybody forgot the old enemy and believed only in the new one, and that this new enemy had always

been the one we were at war with. In fact this actually happened during the Second World War. At the

start of the War in 1939 the British Communist Party decided on the instructions of the Soviet Union to

oppose the war using its influence in the trade union movement and local government to obstruct

wherever possible the war effort. According to the Communist Party Archive (an academic reference

site) an honourable exception to this was the Party Secretary at the outbreak of war Harry Pollitt. He

was later to become very well known to me because of another book which hugely influenced me

regarding a journalist working for the Daily Worker (The British Communist Party Newspaper) who

converted to Catholicism (Douglas Hyde). Harry Pollitt was his ultimate boss and widely, at times

reverently, referred to. In the archive it is stated “Though Pollitt took some time to establish his

authority, by the mid-1930s he functioned as de facto party 'leader' and a sort of tribune of the anti-

fascist left. How telling it was that when his tenure was interrupted in 1939 on account of his resistance

to the Comintern's anti-war line, no other party figure attempted to combine these functions. Pollitt was

therefore able to resume his old responsibilities with the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941”.

(http://www.communistpartyarchive.org.uk/collection.php?cid=CP-IND-POLL&keywords= accessed

December 2012).

Elsewhere in Kevin Morgan’s work on Pollitt he tells the story of Pollitt launching the Party against

Germany on the eve of Chamberlain’s declaration of war against Germany. Within a few weeks Moscow

instructs the Party to conform to its Soviet view and get rid of anyone who is opposed to it. This is

Page | 24

confirmed by Morgan: “only Pollitt and Campbell finally voted against the anti-war policy” with Pollitt

and Campbell then “both relieved of their duties, as Party Secretary and Editor of the Daily Worker

respectively” (Morgan, 1994, P108). All of the rest of the then quite influential British Communist Party

decided to believe that the War was a capitalist plot against the Soviet Motherland. In June 1941 with

the German attack on the Soviet Union the same people, with hardly a pause for breath, believed, in an

Orwellian fashion that this was now a war against fascism. It is worth remembering that at this period

the Communist Party had 10,000 members and about 300 councillors with a handful of MPs. Today

starting with the Russian invasion of the then Czechoslovakia and following the fall of the Soviet Union

itself the party has virtually disappeared.

In seeking to understand how my Individual history has influenced my management style I have

acquired some insights:

The discovery for me in considering this period in my life is that I have absorbed the thinking of a much

earlier historic age. Learning to read at an early age and becoming a huge consumer of written material

created a desire for more learning and more knowledge. One of the weaknesses I had as a manager I

think comes from this period causing me to expect a similar level of background reading, not

appreciating that every journey is different. Strength though has been to appreciate that people can

have many different interests including art and music which can be a resource for the organisation as

well as a way of valuing people. The tendency to seek surrogate fathers has expressed itself in placing

undue trust in older people without first ascertaining if that trust is well placed.

Page | 25

The learning around conditioning comes in here for me very strongly as something that I encountered

on the MBA course that relates to how I am influenced by my ethnic origins. A strong Irish background in

an environment sympathetic to rebellion and excited about the defeat of Germany brought about a very

local view of life that discounted to an extent national influence. Although outwardly compliant to this

influence I began to gain an interest in the external environment even where it conflicts with the local

one. Churchill starts to emerge for me as a force for good despite his poor local reputation. The effects

of external forces and the hegemonic thinking of another culture, Soviet Communism, become

apparent.

Learning lessons from the past features strongly in this chapter, in fact there is here an early lesson in

understanding people via their history. Without a good knowledge of the environment and its effect

locally on the people living in it I would fail to effectively manage in that environment. The other lesson

is that we are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past if we ignore history. “Those who do not learn

from history are doomed to repeat it” (George Santayana 1863-1952).

Page | 26

Chapter 2: Early Education

Some of my school friends say that by today’s standards the education system I encountered in the

Liverpool of the 1950’s and 60’s was academically unambitious compared to now, but it did not lack

imagination or innovation from my point of view. It was a Catholic Education System at a time when

Catholics still allegedly operated a siege mentality. Others have since said that the Church was

triumphalist and that this was reflected in its education institutions. Just as this is not a history of

Liverpool nor is it a tool for exploring religion as such however in those times, it must be said, religion

had a strong influence on the City and on the world of education. In fact my head teacher, Mr McGarvey

was a hugely committed educationalist. He praised universities as an ideal but fully realized that most

parents felt that it was unaffordable even if an option at all. There was also the fact that the eleven plus

test convinced many who failed it that they lacked the ability to climb the academic ladder to success.

He did talk of a number of bank managers and other old boys who did well. To many of us however this

sounded quite unattainable and most of us expected to work where our fathers worked. Workplaces at

the time would be the Docks, Ford Motor Company, the Gas Works, The Bryant and May Match works

and the Merchant Navy. Interestingly, and well ahead of his time, our English teacher, Tom Kelly,

pointed out that we would have at least five careers in this new world where he saw production as

increasingly automated. As documented later my working life has consisted of the retail sector, the RAF,

engineering, the public sector, the third sector and variations on those themes. Five careers and many

more different jobs.

Page | 27

Most of the teaching staff were Catholics who had served in the Second World War and many were

determined that the war they had fought must this time mean something. This reflected a prevailing

view that the First World War was a waste of life because its aftermath had created a Second World War

from which we had still not obtained a real peace. This was reflected in Martin Gilbert’s slim and mostly

illustrated biography of Churchill where he said Churchill: “called his final volume (of war memoirs)

Triumph and Tragedy” (Gilbert, 1979, P171). This was the triumph of victory over Hitler but the tragedy

of half of Europe occupied by a power he regarded as every bit as bad as Hitler’s regime had been. This

was accompanied however by a sense of optimism that a country that had defeated Hitler with all his

might would progress to be a better place and this was supported by both the beginning of the end of

post war austerity and a different approach to Europe and Germany itself than had prevailed in 1918.

Writing in the 1950’s some ten years before this period in my life Churchill had said that at the Potsdam

Conference “We all deeply feared a united Germany. Prussia had a great history of her own. It would be

possible to make a stern but honourable peace with her”. He went on to describe his hope for a

recreation of the pre First World War Austro-Hungarian Empire and then said, “Thus a United Europe

might be formed in which all the victors and vanquished might find a sure foundation for the life and

freedom of all their tormented millions” (Churchill, 1952, P359-360).

By 1961 as I went from primary to secondary school a peaceful and prosperous West Germany had been

created while the East of Germany and many buffer countries along the Soviet Russian border were kept

under the control of Stalin and his successors. Although something approaching Churchill’s vision did not

occur until the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 (BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/9/newsid_2515000/2515869.stm accessed

October 2012) his words represented a very different view from the reparations arguments of 1918.

Page | 28

The World of Work and Management – 1960’s

Against this background I would receive adult accounts of the world of work. My stepfather began, for

the first time in his life, to earn considerable sums of money. He could afford flying lessons. He had

changed jobs from lorry driving to the delivery of cars which carried a performance bonus and the

means to “hitch hike” instead of using expenses money for trains. My mother’s profession as a nurse

began to receive recognition in the 1960’s and her salary began to rise also in line with that of industrial

workers but importantly also professionals. This was called after a while “Pay Drift” and was allegedly a

result of management incompetence in creating easily exceeded performance systems (Manpower

Services Report, 2006, P11). I would argue also however that what I was hearing about was also

motivated by the desire to make this new post war world “stick” and mean something at least in

material terms.

This experience represents the first understandings of how working environments operate via school or

my mother or stepfathers experiences. Structures begin to emerge and take shape however dimly.

There is a limiting process from my and other parents or grandparents, not one they have consciously

imposed but one we young people created from our perception of an accepted history.

Page | 29

This world is a deliberately created one where the eleven plus system, which operated at that time

diverted young people of eleven years of age into a more labour related and apprentice orientated

system while those who passed the examination received a more academic learning process. This was

part of for me a dehumanising process that reduced my confidence in my academic abilities. That said

my school as a secondary modern comprehensive did seek to provide a higher stream which I eventually

joined but for most of my time at secondary school I was in the middle stream. Friere describes this

process as one of manipulation, keeping social classes in their place. The possibility of climbing out of

this situation is intimated but rarely achieved (Friere, 1970 1996 edition, P128). So this early

environment for me is seen by Friere as a tool of oppression. Krishan Kumar however claims that this is a

natural process for human beings, a “division of labour” that has always occurred back to the earliest

times. He comments that the nineteenth Century industrialisation process of which I was a part, being

prepared for industry even while at school, was a matter of greater focus and complexity than in earlier

times but essentially it was the same process. The difference he highlighted, along with Spencer and

Durkheim, was that the “phenomenon achieved such dimension in scope and volume that it introduced

a new principle of order into society.” Durkham called this “organic solidarity” and contrasted this with

the “mechanical solidarity” found in more primiative cultures where “harsh punishments” held people

under control (Clark et al, 1994, 2004 edition, P14).

A crucial learning point for me here that would inform my future was that information was coming my

way from teachers and family sources that would still be valuable in the future. This could be esoteric,

like Mr McGuiness’s twenty four hour clock or Mr Kelly’s five career’s or it could be a sense that it was

here that I began to trust the Church or people who were Irish in a way that was naïve and would prove

a problem later. I would later be able to analyse these particular issues as ones of conditioning. My first

Page | 30

surrogate father was Catholic, Irish and decent. The false lesson then was that all Church people and all

Irish people could be trusted, that said I met many people in those categories who lived up to my high

expectations too.

Page | 31

Chapter 3: Fine Fare Stores First Job

My first real job after leaving school occurred almost as part of a holiday. I had a hobby from about 15

years of age onwards of cycling all over England; one trip was to visit the main Cathedral cities of

England. I now think this was a process of attempting to escape from the home city environment. This

led me to spend some time in one town, long enough to see and apply for an interesting job which I

obtained working for a supermarket chain, Fine Fare Stores. This was my first opportunity to be part of

and observe a working environment. Although the job title said that I was an Assistant Manager

essentially the work could be anything. I started as part of the fruit and veg team and encountered my

first enthusiast, the man who managed that service. I thought that there was a thing called an apple, he

taught me that over 30 varieties existed in supermarkets all over the world but many thousands of apple

varieties existed in general. He would display stock based on his experience of what customers would

find attractive. Conversely I encountered staff who gave their main commitment to hobbies outside the

work environment while doing a reasonable or relatively poor job. In the Journey to the Emerald City the

author’s describe this well (Conners, et al, 1999, P37). A manager describes how her people as

“punching the clock and checking their brains at the door” and how this would frustrate her. She was

also frustrated that they gave huge commitment to their outside interests. Equally she would have

described my Fruit and Veg manager as someone with “High personal investment”. The store manager,

Mr Ireland, encouraged what we would now call a “Culture of Accountability”. The company had

appointed James Gulliver two years earlier to revive and modernize this 1950’s organization

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Fare accessed December 2012) evidence of which I saw in Mr

Irelands talks to staff. I was fascinated to learn that James Gulliver had been promoted from the ranks to

this high position by AB Foods. I used to read the Daily Telegraph in those days and my manager guided

Page | 32

me to read the companies share performance as part of AB Foods which controlled the company. My

inexperience meant that I was not an ideal employee and I was missing home after three or four months

which did little for my performance. At this stage I felt quite dehumanised, I had failed to become a

manager or an effective assistant and because the management structure was not harsh I blamed myself

entirely. I had not learned to value that corpus of experience which enables a more balanced view. I

was however learning early valuable lessons about the cause and effect of systems and then later

personalities. It’s worth noting that James Gulliver, at the end of a hugely successful business career,

lost his final battle via a failed bid for Distillers which was undermined by an illegal share support

operation which led to the jailing of Ernest Saunders in 1990. Reference to Ernest Saunders’ case, via

James Gulliver’s obituary (http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/17/world/james-gulliver-chairman-of-

food-group-dies-at-66.html?sec=&spon= accessed November 2012).

It didn’t take me until 1990 to learn this but one area of confidence that has never been undermined is

my very strong belief that an understanding of history and its lessons is crucial. This is as opposed to the

view that allegedly said “History is bunk”. In fact the view, ascribed to Henry T Ford, was incorrect, he

actually said: "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the

present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today." (Chicago

Tribune, 1916 and http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/182100.html accessed October 2012).

So at this early stage I was learning that people had many skills that could be used in the workplace if

you troubled to understand them and their hobbies and interests.

Page | 33

Later the MBA course would cause me to reflect that activities at a board room level profoundly impact

on the “shop floor”. James Gulliver’s work directly influenced managers like Mr Ireland. The success I

was seeing relates to Clark’s remarks balancing capitalism with a “new stage in human society where

previous explanations of social development no longer apply” (Clark et al, 1994, 2003 edition, P59).

Although I do not benefit from this new society to the extent that I might have opportunities did exist in

this new age with its different kinds of social development. If this where a history article it would be

worthwhile comparing this store with its Dickens emporium equivalent.

The lessons of history here looking back cause me to consider that although Fine Fair appeared to be

doing really well as a modern structure the period in which it existed would over the next decade

undergo those changes which would challenge its approach. By the end of the 1970’s, after James

Gulliver was gone, Fine Fair as an early supermarket with little competition thought it had no need to

innovate beyond what had already occurred. It had reached what Slack would later call the “Caretaker”

stage. “Operations managers are expected to make sure things do not go wrong, rather than provide

much in the way of innovation or creativity” (Slack, 1998 edition,P798). Under Sweeny’s generic

strategies illustrated in the table below, Fine Fair had other choices. It was sold off to Somerfield’s which

survives to this day.

Page | 34

Figure 1: Sweeny’s Generic Strategies

The Royal Air Force

Chapter 4: RAF Initial Training and Background

I served for twelve years in a variety of roles and places and over thirty years later I still regard this as a

pivotal time in my life. I believe that there is no civilian equivalent and civilians find some of the

concepts and issues quite difficult to understand. There are now very few MPs and less Government

Ministers or influential civil servants who have served in the forces. This is important in the modern

context when so many ex-service personnel are homeless for a variety of reasons, many of them

connected to dependency on a formerly more secure way of life.

Page | 35

All of my accepted concepts were challenged at some point during this period. The big change for me in

making the transition from civilian to military life was about accepting a level of control that I had not

encountered before. I am reminded in relating this experience of the recent debates between Bernard-

Henri Levy and Michel Houellecq as chronicled in “Public Enemies “(Levy et al, 2011, P359-360). Here

Levy questions the absence of consciousness (P123 - 124) and debates the dangers of Creationist theory

recently revived in the United States. He says “We are a meeting place of multiple identities, broken,

contradictory, vying with each other, then at peace, then again at loggerheads”. He looks to Rousseau,

Cicero and Kant to describe this multiplicity of conflicting human concerns as against the monolithic

view of a common good, common mind promoted within the RAF. This view impacted upon me as an

organization with a mind of its own that all those involved in must obey. Explanations were given to

explain this, all was a preparation for war and there would then be no time for debate and discussion,

one’s very life might depend on conformity and obedience.

To be fair, The RAF did not condemn openly a latitude of thought, indeed I met and still meet, many

open and intellectually enquiring members of the RAF along with other branches of the British Armed

Forces, it’s just that the thoughts occurred within a context, within an environment that was the subject

of heavy conditioning. (Burrell & Morgan,2004,P46) talk about this when discussing Durkheim’s

“predilection for ‘order’ as the predominant force in social affairs”.

In fact I found this ordered society far from unpleasant and even enjoyed its sense of security. This

experience did lead me to seek or attempt to recreate this comfort zone and sense of “order” in other

organizations later. In reflecting later however I was to discover that this issue of order, conformity and

conditioning is present in many other organizations; I was to encounter it in the trade union movement,

Page | 36

the Labour Party, management organizations and eventually in the wider national and international

community.

I ask myself, was the effect of this requirement to be “ordered” to “dehumanize” me as a consequence?

Right at the beginning of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed” he discusses this issue. Importantly

for me he argues that the state may not be permanent like a person but a consciousness of the matter

of being “dehumanized” is required. So he describes the process as one where once awareness occurs

“humanization is a viable possibility”. “Both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a

person an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion” Freire (p25).

I and others talked at the time about and looked upon the RAF as very like a person rather than the

organization that it was, albeit imbued with many historical traditions. In Epistemological terms we also

trusted this entity with our very lives based on a false knowledge. This trust was based upon an

inaccuracy; it assumed that usually the RAF would not be wrong in where it sent you or in what it asked

you to do. There was an assumption the RAF had your best interests at heart. Jackson et al (p55) in their

chapter on epistemology point out that your trust in a police officer is based on the assumption that he

or she really is a police officer. Similarly it was not accurate to see the RAF as a force for the good of

those serving within it. The RAF defines itself at the present time this way “The Royal Air Force makes a

vital contribution as a force for good in the world by delivering flexible air power wherever it is needed.

The Cold War may be over, but it has left behind a world that is less predictable and, in many places, less

stable. Britain and her Allies are now faced with challenges of many different kinds. The RAF is ready to

meet these challenges.” (RAF Web Site http://www.raf.mod.uk/role/airpower.cfm accessed November

2012). In fact there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this statement and in 1970 when I joined the RAF

Page | 37

there was no contrary statement, the RAF existed as an organization to defend British interests and

statements like the one above predominated. As a side product of this the service organization provided

a career for those involved and for good economic reasons did not unnecessarily endanger this costly

investment that service personnel represented.

So, how did this false premise arise that the RAF was there to “look after you”? What had occurred

during military service to create this inaccurate view or was it a pre-conceived notion that I imported

into my RAF service? Why did this create in me a lack of confidence in later life as a manager or did

something else do that?

It can be argued that the system adopted by the British armed forces to ensure loyalty can also stunt

overall confidence in other areas of development for some people. In fact when I reached the end of my

service I perceived myself to be very confident about the positive impact that I would have on my new

environment.

To understand how my individual history has influenced my management style here is clearer than in

earlier chapters. I did subconsciously adopt the RAF rank and authority system and that adoption was

significantly re-enforced. I remember a particular conversation with my former English teacher Tom

Kelly while on leave shortly after recruit training. I remarked that I could support the RAF recruit training

being fair because most of those joining had made the decision at seventeen plus which at that stage in

my life seemed a mature age (I would be about eighteen at that point). I had learned that RAF

Apprentice training started at sixteen which I regarded as wrong because at such an early age the recruit

Page | 38

training process would be a form of mind control. Tom responded that the Church recruited priests at a

much younger age and also in terms of the sacraments (Communion for example) the age of reason was

taken to be as early as seven years old. I accepted this argument. When I subsequently supervised

people I was subconsciously operating a rank and obedience system little realising that such things do

not come naturally, we are conditioned to accept them or not.

The lesson to learn here was that I had to understand the dangers of conditioning which might be right

for a military situation but could undermine supervision in a civilian role.

Page | 39

Chapter 5: RAF Northern Ireland Three Month Tour

Among the challenges I faced was to serve in Northern Ireland twice. My first tour was for a three

month emergency tour as a soldier and a year later in my trade for two years. As previously discussed I

had come from a city with a strong sectarian past, I was to find that Belfast and the surrounding areas

had a strong sectarian present and although I encountered it at a time of huge prejudice between the

communities it is still a city with a level of sectarianism. The comparatively “moderate” English-based

Catholic faith that I had received seemed completely at odds in terms of its Christian character with the

practices of the Republican and opposing Unionist Movement’s both of which promoted violence

against other Christians. This is not however an analysis of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland but more

about the environmental impact on me and how this effected my development in management terms.

Neither is this an analysis of the Catholic Church or Christian community as such but no story involving

Northern Ireland or indeed any story involving me can be told without reference to faith and the use or

abuse of religion. In the latest Census, mainland Britain states that it is about 58% Christian while

Northern Ireland reports 83% (http://www.nisra.gov.uk/Census/key_report_2011.pdf accessed

November 2012) even today as indicated below.

Area All Usual Catholic Presbyterian Church of Methodist Other Other no % of usual

Page | 40

Residents Church in Ireland Ireland Church in

Ireland

Christian religions religion residents

who did

not state

religion

Northern

Ireland

1,810,863 40.76% 19.06% 13.74% 3% 5.76% 0.82% 10.11% 6.75%

Figure 2: Northern Ireland Census 2011 Religion

In the two years that I spent in the Province I encountered many discussions and events about the

political and allegedly religious conflict from people I deemed to be of good will and seeking to avoid

violence. However in that initial three month tour a particular effect on me was to see the situation in

terms of my own culture and faith. I did not manage this very well, lacking the tools to do so. Following

an initial three month tour in the Province I formed a view that Christianity could not be grounded in

reality and truth because so many of its adherents in Ulster and over the border in the Republic were

breaching its most basis cannons. This led me, over a period of time, to doubt the existence of God. I

now think that I was attempting to relieve an unacceptable feeling of betrayal by seeking, in the regime

of the RAF, a better comfort zone. The Church which had educated me, formed a crucial part of my

social life, friendships and family had apparently abandoned one of its most important tenants revolving

around the sanctity of life. I was also reaching out for a way of understanding the structure and

communities in relation to the Church (I mean all Christian Churches there) that existed around me. In

Eric Berne’s terms I was engaging in a form of transactional analysis and becoming an adapted child but

rather than relating to a real adult I was relating to a perceived Christian Church and withdrawing and

Page | 41

hiding from it or “whining” as Berne puts it (Berne, P 26, 1964). The diagram below describes the

relationship.

Figure 3: Adapted Child to Church Adult

This experience represented an “epiphany" which I remember as a moment which altered the direction

of my life. (Bochner & Ellis, P165-172, 1992). The majority of my peer group had ceased practice of any

religion by this period of my life, out a class of 30 pupils, at this stage I knew of five still interested. Had

someone asked me at this point where my spiritual life was going I feel sure that I would have indicated

a zero response. Statistically it seemed that I would become at least inactive and join the majority of my

cohort. This epiphany did not represent in the end a rejection of spirituality so things did not go in that

direction after my return to England. There was however a profound change in my approach and beliefs.

As I am following a chronological approach I will return to that journey later but the seeds of this change

lay in Northern Ireland. The philosopher George Simmel would have found the conflicts I was

experiencing interesting but not unexpected. He believed that harmony was to a large extent impossible

(Coser, 1965, P12), which was something I would have challenged in that period. After nearly 6o years of

conflict rather than harmony, observed or experienced I am beginning to agree with him that this is a

Page | 42

natural condition of human beings although hopefully not to the extent of the Northern Ireland conflict

of that era. Simmel believed that both harmony and conflict had to occur in all relationships, otherwise

they would not develop. This can lead also to a realization that conflict need not in its self be negative.

My environment then in Northern Ireland at that point was that of a soldier, protecting installations and

married quarters, accompanying vehicles as an armed guard to and from Belfast and patrolling in

vehicles around the immediate area. I mainly encountered other service personnel, civilians working on

the RAF Station or people from the local village. This caused a transition to occur; I began to see

Northern Ireland through the lens of a particular group of people. Previously I had seen Northern Ireland

as the lost province of the republic which Éamon de Valera, according to family teaching, had contrived

to lose during negotiations with Winston Churchill leaving this part of Ireland British. In fact this was a

considerable simplification and when I began to discuss these views with colleagues who were born in

Ulster I found that a different folklore existed for them where brave Ulstermen fought and obtained the

right to remain British. As my interest in Northern Ireland and the Republic grew I was to discover that

neither story was quite true. This was an early lesson in understanding that when we use other people’s

lens to see something then it is someone else’s perception that we are sharing. I did not see my own

presence as part of an occupation but more a policing effort to keep the two sides apart and this was yet

another lens, that of the picture being presented to the British public and service personal.

Following this period I returned to England and entered the world of photography and the uses it could

be put to deployed in satellites and high flying aircraft even balloons. Although my work was interesting

my mind was still angrily wrestling with the issues I felt my Northern Ireland experience had raised. This

led me into many discussions and much reading over a period of a year or so. The RAF and Liverpool

Page | 43

became worlds where I explored people’s views on spirituality and the use of power on the threshold of

an age that will probably be described as a humanist one, in fashion at least. As a result of my

discussions I came into conflict with a strong childhood and adult mentor (my Grandfather’s nephew

Uncle Jimmy) who felt that my time in Northern Ireland was as part of an occupying force and that

British troops had been used to undermine Irish independence. We debated this hotly and briefly fell

out. Eventually we agreed an understanding that although the British Army had responded to the

conflict in a well-meaning way deadly force had been used by all three sides. As considered earlier, I had

seen my role and that of the forces as part of a policing action. Here was the proposal that our forces

had become by 1972 another tribe with its own interests to promote. This was the first time I began to

see my own organization and actions as part of another tribe in Northern Ireland.

This view of conflict was to be much more common later in the Iraq War (also called the Second Gulf

War). There is a perfectly legitimate view that I began to hold that if you subject a peace keeping force

to enough violence if it is military in nature then it will begin to respond militarily and protect itself. The

mission may then change. We now know that the Army deployed undercover agents, used entrapment

techniques and targeted hard core republican leaders as well as hard core UDA leaders. I began to

realize that what I had taken for a religious conflict, a hangover from the Reformation or the “plantings”

of the 18th Century to create a “British” Georgian Ireland was no such thing. This was the interplay of

politics, power and the acquisition of territory on both sides of the Irish Sea and both sides of the Irish

border. I began to doubt my move away from the beliefs that I had held but found it difficult to

reconstruct a trust in the Church. It was at this point I learned that I was being posted back to Northern

Ireland in my trade for a standard tour of duty (usually three years).

Page | 44

It was from this experience that I began to appreciate in later life as a manager that I needed to

understand why people behaved in the way that they did and understand the history that led to

personality and work patterns.

The learning the MBA would later give me puts into perspective the huge influences that the Church and

family and now the RAF had while I sought to understand an apparently familiar environment which was

in fact alien.

The lessons for the future here was to always analyse the apparently familiar and be prepared to

discount past assumptions and look afresh at the situation. This was a country where history was used

to explain and justify anything. My love of history was an Achilles heel in this context and this was when

I began to learn the importance of an intelligent interpretation of history judged against the background

of the times under consideration.

Page | 45

Chapter 6: RAF Northern Ireland Two Year Tour

The new tour in Northern Ireland proved very different for a number of reasons. In the year I was awre

of a number of false dawns in the peace process had come and gone but there was a sense in

Government that if the participants promoting peace remained independent of the Republicans and the

Unionists then change was possible. Within the military there was a level of cynicism although some

relief that attention was shifting after a number of incidents where innocent civilians, a number included

very young people, had been injured by Army fire. For me this had an unexpected consequence.

After some soul searching I had attended the nearby Catholic Church a few Sundays and this had

brought me news of the Peace Movement as an ecumenical organization mainly of Christians from both

sides but also Jewish and non-believers as well. This seemed to me to challenge my existing perception

that Northern Ireland could only be sectarian. While I wanted to explore this, although not on direct

military duties, I was still a soldier and did not want to compromise my colleagues or breach security. I

asked the question of my NCO who sent me for a chat with an officer who talked to the chaplain.

Interestingly the RAF saw it as a religious freedom versus security issue rather than simply a security

issue per se. They also saw it as policy to support the peace movement that was coming from the

churches. As a consequence I attended an ecumenical conference where people of many difference

faiths came together to promote a solution to the conflict. The learning experience for me was that

people could entertain the idea of new systems to solve an (as they saw it) ancient problem. This despite

the fact that the very people working up the solutions were themselves the product of the conflicting

tribes that had created the problem. I was also dealing with a need to redefine my own spirituality

Page | 46

which had changed over this year from a passive Catholic one to an active Christian belief. I had yet to

decide if I could, in all conscience, remain part of the Catholic Church.

To return to the issues of Ireland however I was fascinated and at first puzzled until the common driver

of change began to emerge. The thing that had caused the current troubles had been a decision by the

Catholic community to seek full civil rights. The lack of rights rested on a range of problems. Edward

Heath whom I feel sought to govern Northern Ireland by implementing social reform as Prime Minister

remarked, “Those who have never visited the Province cannot appreciate the bitter tribal loathing

between the hard-line elements in the two communities springing from an atavism which most of

Europe discarded long ago” (Heath, P421, 1998). Ted Heath went on to argue that for fifty years the

Unionists had discriminated against the Catholic community until in 1969 the Civil Rights Movement was

defensively formed as a consequence by the Catholics. The clue was in the name. In my discussions in

the 1970’s with the Peace Movement people I discovered that the Civil Rights Movement had sprung up

to mirror the work of Dr Martin Luther King in the United States. Another interesting discovery was that

many of the activists for peace that I met were Protestant although the majority were Catholics. At that

time in 1969 the Minister of Defence was Dennis (now Lord) Healy. He wrote later “Although violence

had been increasing in Northern Ireland since the previous October, the Government still hoped that

political reforms would restore tranquillity. In mid-August rioting caused the army chiefs to see me

about the threat to law and order, which was increased by the grossly anti-Catholic bias of the B-

Specials, the Protestant auxiliary police” (Healy, P342, 1990 edition). Healy went on to abolish the B-

Specials and won support among Catholic’s as a result. Like Heath later he commented on the “atavistic

sectarianism of the two communities”. He also highlighted something I noticed too, both sides could

recognize each other even down to the Catholic or Protestant part of the City people came from. By

Page | 47

accent and phrases they could identify the “religion” or tribe. This realization that Northern Ireland and

its troubles was about a political conflict, a play for power by an oppressed people was to moderate my

line about the failure of religion. Religion had not failed, people in authority had failed to respect each

other and they had held positions of sectarianism in order to have better jobs than their fellow citizens.

Most of those ordinary people who held a sectarian line did so however as a consequence of

conditioning rather than for reasons of personal gain.

As my position moved towards one more sympathetic to the Catholic community I sought advice from

my former English Teacher, Tom Kelly. Tom was one of the few members of staff in my secondary school

who openly admitted to being a Conservative supporter. All of my time in Northern Ireland was during

the premiership of Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath whom I regarded as a reasonable person.

The policy he pursued of social reform was not greatly different from that of Harold Wilson his

predecessor. As Leader of the Opposition Ted had supported Harold Wilson’s decision to deploy troops

to Northern Ireland. Although policy did not therefore seem predicated on party politics I thought it

would be reasonable to ask an English Catholic Conservative for a balanced view. Tom Kelly had another

advantage over others also in that he was several generations English and not strongly influenced (as

was I) by an immediately Irish past. What was the Unionist case for persecuting the Catholics I asked?

Interestingly he raised the question of patriotism and trust. Ulster was part of the British state or Great

Britain as he put it which was entitled to ask for loyalty and support for the nation from its citizens.

Ulster Catholics had never supported the province and therefore could not be trusted. I found this a

harsh view but it held some logic and perhaps explained why Westminster had not intervened until late

in the day to reform this place.

Page | 48

Northern Ireland had a huge impact on my life and the formation of experience because I lived and

worked there however it is often disregarded when the troubles are absent as a minor and anachronistic

vestige of an earlier age. In fact its impact was present throughout my lifetime and much earlier. To test

this view I looked at milestones in the premierships during my RAF service until the Peace Agreement

under Tony Blair and the growing Unionist rebellion occurring now as illustrated in the table below. This

is roughly based on a model found at http://www.fergys.co.uk/Blogs/BritPMs.php accessed December

2012 which I have added to. I have highlighted the Northern Ireland impact below. I also looked at the

72 premierships that there have been and found eight milestones in all before 1964. In contrast major

events occurred in all of the premierships that followed and as a partial result of the murder of Airey

Neave DSO OBE MC MP a major policy change occurred under Thatcher.

Page | 49

66 1964 1970James Harold

Wilson

1965 Rhodesia declared unilateral independence under Ian Smith

1966 Pound Sterling devalued

1969 Capital punishment abolished

1969 Minimum voting age reduced to 16

1969 Founded the Open University

1969 Maiden flight of Concorde

1969 Troops sent into Northern Ireland

1969 Date, place of birth and maiden names added to Death Certificates

Laws on gay persons and obscene publications liberalised

67 1970 1974 Edward Heath

1971 Decimalisation coinage

1972 Bloody Sunday British Army Fire on Crowd

1972 Stormont Parliament abolished for Direct Rule

1973 Abolition of restrictive voting rules against Catholics

1973 Miners' strike and the "3 day working week"

1973 Britain joined the EC

68 1974 1976James Harold

Wilson1983 Became Baron Wilson of Rievaulx

69 1976 1979 Leonard James

Callaghan

Presided over a monetary crisis which needed a rescue by the IMF with a

strict incomes policy

Allowed no go areas and the building of walls between communities in

Northern Ireland

1978 The "Winter of Discontent" widespread strikes mainly in public

services

1979 Shadow Northern Ireland Minister Airey Neave MP murdered by

Page | 50

IRA

1979 Lord Mountbatten and two children murdered by IRA

70 1979 1990Margaret

Thatcher

Britain's first woman Prime Minister

1979 Resolved the Rhodesian crisis leading to the foundation of Zimbabwe

Highest Unemployment since 1930’s

1982 Falklands War

1984 Brighton Bombing

1990 Introduced the unpopular "Poll Tax" in England and Wales (Scotland

in 1989)

Reversed the policy of state ownership and presided over a period of

denationalisation, deregulation, reform of Trade Unions, tax cuts and the

move towards a market economy in the public sector

1994 became Baroness Thatcher

71 1990 1997 John Major

1991 Abolished "The Poll Tax"

1991 Devised the Citizens Charter

1991 Invasion of Iraq following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait

1992 Sterling crisis led to leaving the ERM

1993 Established the Northern Ireland Peace Process

1994 Created the National Lottery with the proceeds going to charity

1994 Channel Tunnel opened

72 1997 2007 Anthony

Charles Lynton

Blair

1997 Bank of England made independent of Government

1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland

1999 NATO attacks on Kosovo and Serbia

2001 Terrorists attack the New York Trade Centre

Page | 51

2001 Afghanistan War

2002 Euro introduced (but not in the UK)

2003 Invasion of Iraq

2005 Suicide bombers attack London

2005 Civil Partnerships recognised

2007 Stormont, the Northern Ireland Parliament, restored

2007 Signed the Brussels Reform Treaty extending EU powers

73 2007 2010 Gordon Brown

2007 Signed the Lisbon Treaty

2008 Collapse of Banking System

2008 Withdrawal of active British troops from Iraq

2008 MP's expenses scandal, leading to the enforced resignation of the

Speaker

2009 Lisbon European Union Treaty approved by all member states

2010 Restoration of policing governance to Northern Ireland

74 2010 David Cameron

Joint administration with the Liberal Democrats

State Collusion in murder in NI “shocking” says PM

2012 Unionist Rioting in Belfast over reduced hoisting of Union Flag

Figure 4 Impact by Premiership of Irish Issues

Airey Neave was not one of the usual run of the mill Tory MP’s but a war hero who had used his ability

to plan effective strategy’s to escape from the German’s and help others do the same (Airy Neave Trust

http://www.aireyneavetrust.org.uk/about-us accessed December 2012) . He had enabled Margaret

Page | 52

Thatcher to capture the leadership of the Conservative Party which would have profound consequences

for the post war consensus between Government and people. During my time in Northern Ireland

however this was yet to occur.

I continued to attend Church events around the peace movement and meet and talk to local people. An

unintended consequence of this posting was to enable for me a dual view. While I felt that eventually

Northern Ireland should become part of the rest of Ireland I had gained by experiential learning a view

that in reality the IRA was as great a threat to that unity as the Unionists. Many Republicans among the

people I met did not want the IRA and their violence and believed that if the North became linked to the

Republic the next IRA target would be Dublin.

By the time I left Northern Ireland my spiritual and cultural beliefs had undergone a transformation.

Retelling this story in an ethnographic form has raised some internal feelings for me and memories of

inner conflict. It has reminded me that I felt and feel strong emotions in relation to the violence of those

times and the role played by the Republican and Unionist Paramilitarys. It seems OK for example to

describe the death of an IRA or UDA victim as a murder rather than a political assassination. There was a

point where I wondered if expressing these emotions was acceptable in an academic work. Carolyn Ellis

had something to say about this: “I think you have to be emotional to do good ethnography, since

fieldwork almost always is an emotional experience” (Ellis, P110, 2004). Although emotions remain I

have over the last nearly 40 years rationalized a level of my emotions regarding Northern Ireland and as

a result my spiritual approach and also changed through further experiences of Northern Ireland as a

civilian later on. As Levine remarks “When a young tree is injured it grows around that injury. As the

Page | 53

tree continues to develop, the wound becomes relatively small in proportion to the size of the tree”

(Levine, P33, 1997).

During this period the debate occurred on membership of what was to become known as the European

Union. I followed the heated political discussions on television and in the newspapers as we all prepared

to vote on whether we should stay in the EU. This was the first time I had seen the structures of the

political parties disappear for a brief period. Tony Benn, then emerging on the left, shared platforms

with Enoch Powel universally recognised as a quite right wing politician. The arguments occurred around

sovereignty which I found puzzling then. All of my experience so far with the RAF had shown Britain to

be closely bound to NATO and culturally allied to the United States. As I discuss in the next Chapter the

Suez Crisis had proven that Britain had only limited power when confronted by a super power, even an

ally, like the United States. Economically with the decline of Britain’s power in the Commonwealth and

elsewhere in the world I could not see a future for Britain outside of alliances with other countries.

There was also the sense that we needed to provide a political and economic aspect to NATO which the

EU could provide. I cannot recall anyone suggesting that this was not a political debate. Interestingly I

did not take account of any local statements in Northern Ireland. I voted for membership with fairly

little hesitation.

I experimented during this period by joining a folk group called the Copper Kettle. This was a new

opportunity to relate with people from Northern Ireland who had joined the RAF but had been allowed

to tour as a band in their off duty periods. I was to visit Catholic and Unionist areas of rural Ulster and

found this to be a way of relaxing but also understanding through its music the story of Ireland. Ireland

was the last haunt of the story teller and although both the music and storytelling are incidental to the

Page | 54

main narrative it’s worth noting that I found both sources powerfully moving. I think, just as books had

earlier helped to humanise me in a difficult situation so learning to sing and participate in the melodies

of this Ireland of two cultures and two histories was a similar process and learning as well as comforting

thing.

This period of my history influenced my later management style by introducing some fairly frightening

levels of reality. Political decisions, however well meaning, could lead to death or serious injury on the

ground. Later in management team meetings I would relate potential changes that might make an easier

life for managers but could undermine vulnerable young people on the ground. An example of this was a

proposal that we reduce management involvement in a call out process. Let staff make more decisions

during off duty hours. I believed that this could impact on the quality of decision making at night but

also cause managers to become distanced during the day by being less informed about the whole

culture of the organisation and the real people who lived within it.

The MBA learning speaks to this subject via Berne. His analogy to crime is applicable here, “There seem

to be two distinctive types of habitual criminals: those who are in crime for profit and those who are in it

primarily for the game (Berne P117 1964). Elements of the paramilitaries at this stage literally did

perform bank robberies and make profits but that’s not my point or Berne’s. I now think that whatever

their sincerity the paramilitaries were in a game that had become justification in its own right. Those

wanting a profit were more ideologically driven. To use Berne’s phrases again, the Peace Movement

would be “rescuers”, rather like reformed alcoholics who would point out the error of their ways to the

other sides. On the impact of preparing to vote on EU membership the MBA learning leads me to think

about the way power occurs. A Weberian view is expressed in the following table from Burrell.

Page | 55

Interests Places emphasis upon the dichotomous nature and

mutual opposition of interests in terms of broad socio-

economic divisions of the ‘class’ type within social

formations as a whole, which are also reflected in

organisations in the middle range of analysis.

Conflict Regards conflict as a ubiquitous and disruptive motor

force propelling changes in society in general and

organisations in particular. It is recognised that

conflict may be a suppressed feature of a social

system, not always evident at the level of empirical

reality.

Power Regards power as an integral, unequally distributed

zero-sum phenomenon, associated with a general

process of social control. Society in general and

organisations in particular are seen as being under the

control of ruling interest groups which exercise their

power through various forms of ideological

manipulation, as well as more visible forms of

authority relations.

Figure 5: The Radical Weberian view of interests, conflict and power

So the Weberian view might reflect the way the debate on the EU has occurred in terms of reasons why

people feel opposed to continued membership. Nonetheless the EU is an organisation with interests and

Page | 56

conflict although I would argue now that power is exercised through the Council of Ministers and the

Parliament and is more diluted than opponents appear to realise. As Burrell puts it, “All three lines of

development will seek to build upon the core concepts of totality, structure, contradiction, power and

crisis” (Burell et al, P388 – 389, 1979, 2005 edition).

The lessons drawn from this period for me today are:

Seek to understand that I need to regularly look “outside the box”.

Go back to source when making decisions.

Consider a forward analysis about how decisions taken now by me as a manager can impact in

terms of interest groups and the development of groups.

Page | 57

Chapter 7: RAF and the Middle East

My next posting was for nine months to a radar station off the coast of Muscat and Oman on an island

called Masirah. This was followed by time in Salalah and Cyprus. While I was experiencing this very

different world the one I had left behind in Northern Ireland had begun to slip deeper in to violence with

savage behaviour in all the tribes to each other. My knowledge became filtered via the BBC World

Service or occasionally Voice of America along with out of date copies of the Daily Telegraph. I don’t

think that I ever encountered a Guardian newspaper during my whole sojourn in the Middle East. There

were no international TV services at that time and no internet to provide another view.

The experience of discovering that my childhood faith had been childishly easy to lose caused me to

want to know the truth about my religion and its background. In Northern Ireland I had discovered that I

was a Christian, but although in an ethnographic work that is important as part of the story and impacts

emotionally on how I saw things it is the impact on my eventual development as a manager that is

critical. So, I wanted to know how Christian my inherited church was and how much a part of my

makeup as a person this represented. I no longer wanted to be the result of the social engineering I had

seen in Northern Ireland or the tribal conditioning of my home environment. I wrote to Tom Kelly with

this in mind. Once again because he was an English Catholic rather than part of my Irish background as I

saw it. I was very interested now in exploring Christianity and in seeing where that would take me. He

posted out English authors who supported Catholicism usually from a more academic rather than

emotional or pious perspective. Chief among them was Arnold Lunn along with GK Chesterton and

Hilaire Belloc. Around this time I obtained a copy of the Koran and read this along with my grandfather’s

Page | 58

bible which usefully had “guidance notes” to tell me the “correct” interpretation of scripture according

to the Church during his time.

Although the Island of Masirah had no female service personnel two women lay preachers were

stationed there and this enabled me to explore a perspective different again from the one I was

experiencing. They were not sectarian but they were puzzled by the Catholic Church and struggled to

see it as Christian. I also became aware of the politics of the region. The island had a school and I met

several of the teachers along with the spiritual leader, they were all Muslims. The teachers were

Egyptians and proudly boasted that President Anwar Sadat and Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser who he had

succeeded him some years earlier had sent them out to educate the Arab world. Nasser was familiar to

me as the leader who, with US support, had humiliated Britain, France and Israel, forcing a retreat from

the Suez Canal that had been captured. Nasser had nationalized the Canal. Sadat has stayed in my mind

as the architect of peace with Israel, signing the Camp David accords in 1977 for which he was later

murdered. (Journal: History Today http://www.historytoday.com/historical-dictionary/s/sadat-anwar-al

accessed November 2012).

However, fresh in my mind at the time was President Sadat’s daring attack on Israel known today as the

Yom Kippur War a few months earlier. He was so completely defeated that he changed track and began

the journey he is now so famous for towards peace. The RAF had gone on quite a high level of alert as

we wondered if the US and Soviet Union would militarily clash defending their respective Middle East

clients; Israel for the Americans and Egypt for the Russians. I now see Nasser and Sadat’s decision to

send teachers out to the rest of the Middle East (except Israel) as a form of cultural action. “Cultural

action either serves domination (consciously or unconsciously) or it serves the liberation of men and

Page | 59

women” (Freire P 160 1970). Freire talks here about cultural synthesis which operates on social

structures, in this case pupils and their parents to bring about change. Nasser had been a teacher at the

Egyptian version of Sandhurst where I think the idea of using teachers was born. Although intelligent I

found the teachers that I met had little concept of objectivity and quite happily used their vocation as

one that promoted Egypt above the countries that they taught in. I learned from these observations

and discussions that power could be exercised by providing an innocuous service that then gives access

to clients or others that you would want to influence.

The contribution here to my management style has been to underline the need for reflection, to take

time out to understand and engage differing philosophies or issues. I discovered, for example, that great

chunks of the Koran had been lifted straight out of the Christian/Jewish Bible. I had time in Masirah to

read, reflect and discuss.

The MBA learning here is that objectivity is a fluid concept. I expected teachers to be objective because I

felt their calling was to fill pupils with a joy of learning. Some would say that that is not the role of

education, that it is a sausage machine knocking out a sameness of people to do a routine job without

thinking too much beyond what they are told. Arguably the Egyptian teachers were an instrument of

conditioning for a new Arab world. I found the ego state scenario applied to organisations useful here.

The point is made that organisations can have “patterns of belief, etiquette and rules that correspond to

the Parent ego state, in this case the teachers are managers obtaining a negative adapted child ego-

state that is compliant because their real employers have so arranged this (Stewart et al, 1987, P280).

Page | 60

The lessons for me today are to always reflect on the authenticity of the message I am receiving even

though it comes from a source I might be conditioned to trust. Those entrusted with teaching may well

have a career agenda, a political position or themselves be conditioned, as the Egyptian teachers were

to promote a particular state or organisation. As we discuss elsewhere this is not peculiar to the Middle

East, The Communist party of Great Britain similarly operated via a level of conditioning during the

Second World War.

Page | 61

Chapter 8: RAF UK Period

After this period in the Middle East I was posted to 16 MU RAF Stafford a supply depot and then my final

station at RAF North Luffenham, another Radar Station near Stamford in Lincolnshire.

At RAF Stafford I experimented with working in my spare time as a forces broadcaster. I created a

program format that allowed classical music, film music and some folk music. The first two later became

the format for Classic FM radio.

While at Stafford I encountered Father William Russell, at the time he was the oldest military chaplain in

the British Armed Forces. He spoke very knowledgably about the impact of the modern world on the

people of Uganda where he had been a missionary before the Second World War. Uganda was very

much under discussion that year following a recent rescue mission where Israeli Special Forces had

rescued Israeli hostages held in Uganda at Entebbe Airport. Father Russell spoke of the breakdown in

economic activity following Idi Amin’s military coup which had cost the country its economic viability as

it switched to defence spending rather than maintaining, for example, cotton production and tourism. I

showed an interest in the emerging world of computers as a tool and the RAF therefore posted me after

a relatively short time to RAF North Luffenham near Stamford in Lincolnshire and gave me an admin role

working with the early data input and retrieval machines. At that time small units in the field would

access huge data storage devices that filled several large hangers at RAF Hendon. The processing power

and level of those early computers is now contained in a modern PC such as the machine that I am using

to create this paper.

Page | 62

Now that I was back in communication with the media of television and daily newspapers and not

reliant on the BBC World Service my interest in Northern Ireland returned and I followed events there

with considerable interest. I was later as a civilian to play a role again in Northern Ireland affairs.

I developed an interest in youth and organized a youth club, many years later I was to become a youth

support worker and manager in that youth field, this was my first experience in working with teenagers

as an adult.

Through a new friend I was beginning to cast a critical eye on the RAF rank system and beginning to

chaff at my perceived lack of freedom. My friend, Tony Hilditch, was to produce a dissertation on the

exercise of authority within the RAF and he contributed to an increasingly heated debate on this subject.

The Dutch armed forces had increased service personal’s civil rights while the British view was that such

changes would impede service efficiency and in any case the Secretary of State for Defence acted as the

soldier’s representative it was said. While I have earlier recalled a feeling of dehumanisation in relation

to what I saw as “RAF conditioning” Tony’s dissertation subject and the fact he could write it made me

feel quite liberated. I began to engage in some education again, taking subjects like maths where I felt

that I had failed in this subject at the eleven plus point. I also took basic exams in history with

government studies to try and underpin the things I had learned with some educational basis. I felt that I

was finding an ability to become “humanised” and more in control of my life.

Page | 63

As the 1980’s approached the Conservative’s in opposition returned to an earlier model and removed

Ted Heath who had provided a strong level of reform during my time in Northern Ireland. During that

period he had also succeeded in bringing the UK into what was to become the European Union. They

now turned to Margaret Thatcher and this caused me some concern. She was known to take her

economic policies from Sir Keith Joseph, a strong proponent of abandoning the post war consensus and

the Keynesian economics which in my perception had prevented the crisis Western economies had

faced in the 1930s. There were equally compelling arguments that laid economic mismanagement and

poor control at the door of Keynes and the trade unions. My concern however was for my family at

home in Liverpool should Mrs Thatcher ever come to power and this concern proved to be well founded

in the event.

This period in my life laid the foundations for an interest in economic affairs. Britain was passing through

a period of economic uncertainty that I had partially missed while being abroad but was now apparent

in this time of rising unemployment.

I think that this period informs my management style by giving me more coherent, information-based

approaches and also the sense that we can try new things and entertain challenging ideas.

Thinking forward to the MBA I think the learning here is to be prepared to rethink management

structures and see if they are still fit for their current purpose. On reflection I think that the RAF had its

management structure about right for the job it was doing. The point of Tony Hilditch’s dissertation that

the British military needed a democratic basis is still the subject of debate today. Changes have occurred

Page | 64

in reducing discrimination based on homophobia or gender discrimination for example but the level of

workers’ rights Tony and others wanted have not occurred. It is arguable that positive changes have

been the result of a litigation culture.

The lessons from this period seem to me to be about the fact that we need to be ready for change and

that it really is that great constant in the universe. The destruction of Ted Heath’s policies and approach

might now seem a distant irrelevance, evidence of Enoch Powell’s intimation that all political careers

end in failure (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Enoch_Powell accessed December 2012) but it was what

we now call change management on a grand scale. I think recognising that change can be positive if

handled well and the workforce or team are engaged as agents of change is important. The change in

Northern Ireland and economically in the depressed areas of the UK brought about high levels of

dislocation and unemployment. My lesson to learn and apply now then would be about preparation and

intelligent forecasting.

Page | 65

Chapter 9: Stamford, Managing Politics and Engineering

In 1982 I had completed my twelve years of RAF service and took up a post at Mirrlees Blackstone Ltd, a

diesel engineering company founded in Stamford during the Victorian period in 1889. I became a

supervisor of a group of workers in a chemical cleaning bay for about five years and during this time was

involved in my first and only strike. Although I would regard strike action now as a last recall, at that

time, given the low wages it seemed the right thing to do. In fact it took several years to recoup the loss

in wages. I had my first experience as a press officer for the union during the strike and gave my first

radio interviews and also became a negotiator helping to build the bridges that would help to take us

back to work. Still with Mirrlees Blackstone I then became an assistant metallurgist working for Dr Chris

Holt the Chief Metallurgist. Chris strongly drew on his academic background and was a strong proponent

of colleges and universities being a vital part of the world of engineering. I took an NVQ in metallurgy

successfully and found the subject interesting enough to occupy me for the next five years. This was not

enough however to fill something of a void and I became involved with local politics, the trade union

and a campaign to establish a citizens advice bureau.

Personal issues had an impact in this period; I became married but sadly like many young married

couples we lost our first child. I mention this because some events truly do impact on the way you

develop through life. Positively, eight years later we had a son now aged twenty-two.

Page | 66

As part of the local community I began to build a large range of contacts and during this period twice

stood for Parliament in the local area. I was also elected to the Town Council and had my first taste of

being accountable to the public and how to give speeches in public. I mention this part of my life

because it led eventually to my work with the European parliament and also enabled me to receive

training in areas like how to manage meetings, how to appear and speak on TV and the radio and how to

interact with the general public. I put this training into practise. All of these skills would help me to

emerge from feelings of dehumanisation and gain confidence. The enthusiasm this generated in me did

cause conflicts in the local political party who were not used to being in the public eye so much and I

learned many lessons then about handling conflict which stood me in good stead later on. As this story is

primarily about a learning and developing process within the context of my story this has some

relevance mainly that all of these things prepared me so that I began to think I could one day have a

role in middle or senior management.

Towards the end of my Stamford period the new leader of Lincolnshire County Council asked me as a

local community leader to begin promoting the idea of a university for the County which I did. This

involved visiting neighbouring towns like Market Deeping and Spalding raising expectations and

challenging the concept that only quite rich people go to university. The institution I was promoting is

today the University of Lincoln.

My manager strongly encouraged me to look upon metallurgy as a potential career. Apart from

photography my skills-set from the RAF did not translate very well into civilian life and experience had

not yet taught me the simple lesson that everybody needs a trade or profession. This was not just a

simple issue of paying the rent but more about obtaining self-worth. I had existed in a hugely structured

Page | 67

organization for many years. It began to dawn on me though that in civilian life, and probably in the RAF

too the structures could be very different from my perceived reality. The role people could have could

also be misleading. One part of the company, Engine Construction for example, could have more

influence than the Cleaning Bay. This might be because one was perceived to be more central to the

profit and strategic aspect of the firm or it could be based on the personality of the manager. So the

ontology of Mirrlees Blackstone’s organizational structure was important to me because I had come

from this world of perceived absolutes to a less obviously absolute one. My belief in structure as an

absolute was wavering. As Norman Jackson and Pippa Carter point out. “we are constantly making

decisions on the basis of what we consider, or believe, to be real, even if we are not conscious of doing

so” (Jackson et al, 2000, P37).

This was my first opportunity to exercise supervision in the workplace and I found this more difficult and

complex than I had imagined it would be. The production line system set the pace and it had not

changed for many years. Work colleagues were resistant to change and often when management

proposed changes the local supervision circumvented the process and so little change occurred. That

said the lines produced were sufficiently profitable until about 1994 when overseas aspects the

company, now bought out by BTR, took over production transferring the factory process nearer to

where sales occurred in India.

I learned many lessons here about how not to manage. Change management was often neglected for

crisis management and I had to learn that what the RAF called management did not work in civilian life. I

learned to adopt natural leaders within the workforce and work with them to keep production flowing

and build in incentives. The incentive in this case was crude and involved extending overtime. The

Page | 68

company was happy to balance low wages compared to its rivals with a promise of secure employment.

This largely worked coupled with some weekend working. Often however, despite good quality

products, order times would not be met. Of course I was only seeing one aspect of the company, my

own corner but many different cultures had evolved in the different departments. Using Hardy’s gods’

concept, the assembly work including my own was primarily “flow and copy patterns (which) tend to

require Apollo cultures” (Have et al, 2003, P92). Apollo is evidently the god of steady-state and in

Hardy’s world workplaces need a diversity of gods and management must reconcile them. Development

was Athena and sales, which I interpret as Asterix situations, was Zeus and Dionysus. Hardy’s conclusion

unfortunately proved correct when he surmised that corporate mergers undermined the motivation of

people working in such an environment which is what occurred.

The learning under the MBA course here applied to this world to understand the importance of training.

Managers and supervisors often learned “on the job” without reference to much formal training. Even

“Team Learning” would have improved the situation and perhaps brought the company a more long

term competitive edge with orders being met more frequently. Team Learning as part of a wider

management model would have enhanced also I believe a sense of purpose and a greater inclination to

work together on the solution of problems through a shared vision as in Have et al’s “Shared visions

emerge from personal visions, deriving energy and fostering commitment as they evolve” (Have et al,

2003, P78 – 79).

The diagram below reflects the Team Learning approach as part of a wider organisational concept.

Page | 69

Figure 6: Team Learning in the context of a wider approach

(Have et al, 2003, P 79)

The key lessons to learn for today would be about building effective workforce cohesion and ensuring

that the different cultures within the organisation were unified by a common corporate philosophy that

actually meant something people could feel some loyalty towards.

Page | 70

Chapter 10 Lincoln: Managing a European Union Role

With the closure of Mirrlees Blackstone Ltd I was free to look at a new career. I had helped Veronica

Hardstaff to become a Member of the European Parliament on a voluntary basis as her election agent

and was subsequently offered the role of organising her local operation as her UK Agent along with Joan

Guy, a colleague I had worked with politically who would work with the voluntary sector but we had

many overlapping roles. Joan also had a role working with the commercial sector including the National

union of Farmers in the Constituency. Full time secretarial and admin support was proved by Patience

Gibb and Sue Burke with support from a number of volunteers. Kerry Haig began as a cleaner and

became an admin assistant and is now a solicitor. She was a good example of how our work helped

many people move on to better things because we believed in staff development.

The Constituency approximately covered traditional Lincolnshire, so Grimsby and Cleethorpes were

included but not Stamford. An office was established in Lincoln on my recommendation. Incidentally

this meant that we left Stamford the year before I was due to be the Mayor of that town. I mention this

because, as we prepared to leave, I had many conversations with people who saw being Mayor as the

pinnacle of their councillor career or would imagine it to be so if they had been councillors. They could

not conceive of a career which placed another non-council job with little glory above that. There is a

lesson here about the incentives that inspire people to engage in community affairs. While I recognise

this is as good an incentive as any I also found that the community could lose good representatives after

they had had this “reward”. After being mayor there was nowhere else to go. Some of the ways local

Page | 71

government worked led to the reorganisation of the council structure which would impact on

Lincolnshire and other places later but the mayoral system was left alone.

What has changed is the perception that councillors are managers and so should be subject to the

setting of personal development plans, one-to-one interviews with their leader and the acquisition of

personal performance indicators. This process began, during this period with the decision by Labour in

opposition to abolish the committee system and bring in cabinet government. The system came from

Total Quality Management (TQM) approaches strongly favoured by Tony Blair’s administration. Not all

the aspects of TQM as discussed by Slack are yet present in cabinet government but many are,

incentives include the possibility of being a portfolio holder (head of department) or a Chair of an

important subject area, these roles usually carry a fiscal gain now but are certainly prestigious (Slack,

1998, P787).

This work in the European Office was very new to me and also involved liaising with Veronica’s European

Parliament staff member Rachel Jones and to share the taking of groups to Strasbourg across the

Western European continent, stopping at important points that illustrated the need for the

development of the European story. I was also involved in working with local authorities to generate EU

and other funding into Lincolnshire. This was a serious opportunity to shape the operation of a small but

crucial part of the Lincolnshire infrastructure. This was also, as we approached 1995, the beginning of

the age of the office PC, email and web sites.

Page | 72

One of the most important organisations in the constituency was the Lincolnshire County Council which

had a spending power of a million pound a day. For the first time in its history it had passed out of

Conservative control and become a coalition council led by Labour with Liberal Democrat support. Many

of the leading figures on the County Council who had never been in power before held discussions with

Veronica and I about ways the County could interrelate with European Union bodies. I also had similar

discussions with District Councils during this period of different political colours and none.

I learned at this stage that I was in a management rather than a party political role. We had discussions

with Members of parliament in the constituency too and I tried to forge a common agenda with these

disparate groups. It was interesting to note that conflicts emerged between local authorities and

between Members of Parliament of the same political party to the same extent as could be said for

those with different backgrounds.

While our office developed on Lincoln High Street a building was emerging up the road on Brayford Pool

which one day we were invited to go and see. I was away but Veronica went and met the Queen as she

opened the University of Lincolnshire.

One of the issues I wanted to tackle was how we could measure the operation of the office against

public expectations or a performance indicator of some kind. We set various standards, letters to be

answered in a certain time, interviews when requested to be offered speedily but these things were not

dynamic.

Page | 73

Drawing on Slack we would today be looking at a process that set expectations and goals and then

measured our ability to meet those expectations. Slack identifies the crucial element here as finding the

quality gap and connecting or bridging that gap (Slack, 1998, P639). A consultant known to the office

came in and carried out a mapping exercise which identified us as an effective office delivering on the

things that we should.

The main key performance indicator was Veronica who set a high standard for herself and trusted her

team to deliver which largely they did.

Veronica decided that some management education would be useful and I was asked to attend the early

equivalent of today’s MBA certificate course as a taster and guinea pig. Dr Fred Dobson led the course

and gave me my first inklings about an academic view of management as a science that could have a

level of analysis and definition. The primary area of work was based on transactional analysis and talked

about ego states, stroking and discounting. All are definitions of human development and behaviour and

I found the session’s quite fascinating (Slack, 1998 P4 - 5). Unfortunately the timing was wrong because

after a month or so we began to face a crisis that would undermine the whole operation.

By now Tony Blair’s New Labour Government had come to power and set about its election pledges.

Substantial change and a major engineering of policy delivery were in hand in virtually every area of

Page | 74

Government including relations with the European Union and Labour Members of the European

Parliament.

While many areas of important public service received much needed funding and modernisation a major

issue for this Government which it shared with all its predecessors back to Ted Heath was how to relate

to the European Union. While the Government was dealing with this it encountered another problem.

The Labour MEP’s (Members of the European Parliament) were largely not of Tony Blair’s New Labour

project.

It was decided after various conferences and discussions that the Labour MEP’s would demonstrate the

effectiveness of proportional representation. I participated in the planning and reported to the Veronica

and the party centre that we would lose 40% of our MEP’s under the form of PR being evolved. The

short list and allocation process was centrally controlled and although Labour actually lost 50% of its

MEP’s during its most popular period those lost were mainly “old” Labour, among the casualties was

Veronica. Such was the need to control deeply based in the administration there was very little

mourning for those who had served well and honestly but failed to be in fashion.

This period was the first where I received some academic underpinning to my early knowledge of

management and so contributed to my later management style in that way. I also learned from the way

that the Government controlled both the Labour MEP’s, Westminster and during the death of Princess

Diana the monarchy too that there were other management tools that were process-based and

Page | 75

effective. The MBA relationship, unbeknown to me had actually started and I was developing a taste for

this exploration of academia.

The lessons of this period were to understand that old organisations can be renewed and be changed.

This was endemic to the period and largely positive. The other lesson for me from this past experience

was to be more questioning about the very nature of organisations. Burrell argues that organisations as

such do not really exist and are just, “the subjective construction of individual human beings” (Burrell et

al, 2005, 260). This means that an organisation can change dramatically depending on who populates it.

The Labour Government was radically different from its Wilson/Callaghan predecessor.

Page | 76

Chapter 11: Lincoln: Managing Youth Services and Red Cross Services

After the closure of the European Office I was free to become a councillor again and was asked to stand

for election for the County Council which I successfully did and served for eight years entirely in

opposition and under a New Labour Government. A year or so after the election I applied to become a

support worker with a youth charity called Rainer. After nearly thirty years working in either the RAF or

industry or the EU I had wanted to do work on the ground with young people who had real issues.

During my time with Veronica I had encountered many third sector organisations doing serious work

among many different groups and I felt that I had a role to play. On the County Council I was specialising

in youth and community cohesion.

After a year working on the ground and learning to work with transitional youth from 16 to 25 I

managed to bring to the service support from a variety of the contacts I had built up which culminated

in the opening of the first youth advice centre with funding. I and my manager, Liz Holditch (now Liz

Straddling) had argued that opening a specialist advice centre for youth would enable early intervention

among vulnerable young people and this proved to be the case saving many hundreds of thousands of

pounds. More importantly this system saved hundreds of young lives in the County. With Liz I also

achieved the prestigious Matrix Award for the Youth Advice Service in Lincoln.

After eighteen months I was promoted to the senior management team with responsibility for the Youth

Advice Service. I then began bringing together my various contacts to talk to them about the role of my

Page | 77

new organisation. An important contact was Government Minister John Prescott whose department

was responsible for “Supporting People” funding. This funded a range of services including the youth

services I helped to manage. I briefed Mr Prescott having known him when working for Veronica and he

asked me to meet him with my boss to put “meat on the bones”. My new manager, Paul Taylor, was the

Chief Executive of Rainer Lincolnshire and had, like me, a background in politics as well as management.

He had created the organisation and subsequently persuaded Rainer to bring it into its own charity.

Another Minister in another year was Yvette Cooper who was Housing Minister from 2005 to 2008.

Yvette, who became interested in our operations after Paul produced a booklet to which I made a

contribution, contributed a quote. The booklet detailed Rainer’s work in Lincolnshire and elsewhere and

she agreed to launch it at Labour Conference.

Paul and I evolved a partnership relationship which came out of his evolving management abilities and

political achievement’s. Without relinquishing managerial control Paul none the less empowered me as

a manager to achieve significant successes for the service. He also had a good relationship with the Area

Manager who supported our work completely. Paul had led a department as a County Councillor in the

Labour led administration and so had become used to exercising power and decision making at a

political level. He had learned through politics how much could be achieved by networking and

persuasion providing it could be backed up and it subsequently rewarded our backers with results. He

had also completed the Certificate and Diploma levels of the MBA course at the new University of

Lincoln which influenced his approach to the work environment.

In this period I learned about team development, staff appraisals, training and how to operate within

the charity.

Page | 78

I began at last to feel that I had become “humanised” and was realising my potential as a manager and

in many other ways.

I also worked with other members of the senior management team on a number of projects and was

allowed to use my media knowledge to promote the local operation. Paul and I also branched out and

supported the Racial Equality Council and placed managers on a number of other strategic bodies.

Our success rate measured in young people not re-offending was about 70% and our work was deemed

to be a success.

Paul then felt that we needed to further build our reputation and recalling our previous success

obtaining Matrix for the Lincoln Youth Advice Service he asked me to obtain the award for the whole

Lincolnshire service. Awards are useful things, I recalled when with Blackstones we had obtained quality

awards for our work. Slack talks about ISO 9000 but the same remarks apply to the Matrix award, “they

are intended to assure purchasers of products and services that they have been produced in such a way

which meets customer requirements” (Slack, 1998, P787). I was pleased to find that the process raised

standards across the organisation especially around reportage. We had a good workforce generally but

they tended to place “paperwork” second to client care. This process helped people see that by good

reportage we could justify and evidence the service and keep it funded.

Page | 79

Paul was surprised to learn that I had no degree and sent me onto both the Certificate and diploma

stages of the MBA.

The service flourished for some seven years until Rainer absorbed a few other charities and became

Catch 22. Paul left for new challenges and almost immediately the service began to experience funding

shortages and began to implement redundancies of which I was one. This coincided with the start of the

current economic crisis under Gordon Brown’s administration. Most of the management team which

had run this operation left and Catch22 eventually lost the contract to Framework. I was just beginning

my Diploma stage of the MBA and so funded this myself along with the Masters. Ironically my main

thesis produced was on the origins of the economic crisis the blame for which, along with most

economists, I attributed to the Hedge Fund Banks collapse triggered by the Lehman Brothers scandal.

Around the same period I lost my seat on the County Council due to the unpopularity of politics in

general during the parliamentary expenses scandal. A year later I was elected to the City Council and

became the Children and Young Persons Advocate and Chair the internal Equality and Diversity Group

with the Leader, Chief Executive and councillors.

Page | 80

Chapter 14: Conclusions

As I began so I start this conclusion with a quote from Carolyn Ellis whose writings have guided much of

my approach to ethnography as a medium for and in this paper, “I use my ethnographic eye to gather

information“, “I think like an ethnographer and write like a novelist” (Ellis, 2004, P348).

This has created a new but enabling style for me. It has helped me to see the effects on my thinking of

the MBA course and the knowledge acquired. I have been able to apply to my life the thinking I have

encountered in both a textual way but also experientially.

My aims have been to:

To understand how my individual history has influenced my management style.

I have encountered significant cause and effect situations: I had not realised the effects of having

surrogate fathers or other long term effects emanating from the death of my own father. Some

aspect of the ripple effect of this event I believe caused me to feel dehumanised along with external

intrusions like the eleven plus made me feel challenged and unsuccessful. This clearly changed as I

developed patterns of success

To reflect on the learning that has occurred via the MBA and its impact on my management

approach.

Taking a chronological approach has enabled me to understand the things that have influenced my

management style and approach, influences from the RAF for example, seeing both sides,

Page | 81

management and shop floor in industry and experiencing the job as a youth support worker and as a

manager.

To learn lessons from the past to apply to the present.

This has caused me to initiate an analysis of my working life with the aid of the tools contained

within the MBA learning process and the academic underpinning that is part of the wider reading

that I have carried out.

The process has been cathartic and sometimes painful but it has enabled me to better understand

the process that has been the MBA and the need for managers to better understand the tools that

they can access. There has also been an unexpected gain, the opportunity to understand the lessons

of life that are there to be seen when we journey back to look.

Page | 82

Bibliography

Abraihim M (September 17th 1996), New York Times Obituary for James Gulliver accessed November

2012 (http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/17/world/james-gulliver-chairman-of-food-group-dies-at-

66.html?sec=&spon=)

BBC News Web Site, Fall of Berlin Wall:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/9/newsid_2515000/2515869.stm,

accessed October 2012.

Berne E (1964) Games People Play, London, Penguin Books.

Bochner, Arthur P. & Ellis, Carolyn (1992). Personal narrative as a social approach to interpersonal

communication. Communication Theory, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

British Communist Party Archive (http://www.communistpartyarchive.org.uk/collection.php?cid=CP-

IND-POLL&keywords=) accessed December 2012 Regarding Harry Pollitt.

Burrell et al. (1979, 2004 edition) Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis, Aldershot: Ashgate

Publishing Ltd.

Churchill, Winston S, The Second World War, Volume 5, Closing The Ring, 1952, Cassell and Company

Limited, London.

Clark H, Chandler J, and Barry J, (1994, 2003 edition), Organisation and Identities, Thompson Learning,

London.

Conners R and Smith T, (1999) Journey to the Emerald City, New York, Prentice Hall Press.

Page | 83

Cosser, L.A. (1965), Georg Simmel, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Ellis C (2004) Ethnographic I, Lanham, MD, USA, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

Ende M (1985 Edition) Momo, , St Ives, UK, Puffin Books.

Femia Joseph. V., (1987) Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary

Process, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fine Fare Foods Wikipedia Site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Fare) accessed December 2012

Friere P (1970, 1996 edition) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London, Penguin Books.

Fry, Stephen, Moab is my Washpot, 1997, Hutchinson, London – front piece.

Gilbert, Martin, Churchill, A Biography, 1979, Park Lane Press, London.

Gill J et al, (1997) Research Methods for Managers, London: Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd.

Hanff, Helene, Eighty-Four Charring Cross Road, 1983, Nelson Doubleday, New York.

Have, ST, Have, WT, Stevens, F, Van Der Elst, M, Pol-Coyne, F, Key Management Models, 2003, Prentice

Hall, London.

Healy, D. (1990 edition), The Time of My Life, Penguin, London.

Heath, E, (1998), The Course of My Life, Hodder & Stoughton, London.

History Today Journal http://www.historytoday.com/historical-dictionary/s/sadat-anwar-al accessed

November 2012

Jackson N & Carter P (2000) Rethinking Organisational Behaviour, Harlow, Pearson Education Ltd.

Jukes, J. (1993), God and the Marketplace, London: IEA Health & Welfare Unit.

Page | 84

Levy et al, (2011) Public Enemies, New York: Random House.

Levine. P.A. et al, (1997) Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, Berkley, California, North Atlantic Books,

Kindle Edition.

Liverpool Daily Post Accessed December 2012 Report of bomb disposal expert Harold Newgass battle to

defuse a parachute mine which fell onto the Garston gas works.

(http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2010/12/01/garston-gas-works-

bomb-hero-remembered-70-years-on-92534-27746841/).

Manpower Services Report, An assessment of the causes of pay drift in UK organisations, 2006, Incomes

Data Services, London.

Morgan, Kevin, Harry Pollitt, 1994 Paperback Edition, Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Nason, J (issued 2011) Dissertation Guidance, University of Lincoln, Business & Law School.

Neave Trust Airy http://www.aireyneavetrust.org.uk/about-us accessed December 2012

Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, 1989 edition, Penguin, London.

Paxman, Jeremy, The Victorians, 2009, BBC Books, Ebury Publishing, London.

Powell Enoch Speech Accessed December 2012 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Enoch_Powell

Royal air Force (10/12/12) RAF Web Site http://www.raf.mod.uk/role/airpower.cfm.

Slack N, et al (1998 Edition), Operations Management, Prentice Hall, Harlow.

Slocum, Joshua, Sailing Alone Around the World, 1900, The Century Company, New York.

Stewart I and Joines V, TA Today, 1987, Russell Press Ltd, Nottingham.

Page | 85

Page | 86