May 2017 – BOS

Creativity: Africa’s new gold?

By Ana Alacovska and Thilde Langevang.

Cocoa, precious minerals and crude oil ceased to be Africa’s only natural resources. Creativity is ‘the oil of the 21st century’ (Ross, 2008). Creativity and culture are nowadays intensely hailed by global development institutions as ‘a wonderstuff’ (Ross, 2008)—the magical passkey to Africa’s sustainable development—poised to propel inclusive growth, cultural diversity and job creation especially for young people, peripheral communities and women. Under the auspices of the UN agencies such as UNESCO, UNDP and UNCTAD, the bold and buoyant discourses of cultural and creative industries are enthusiastically embraced throughout the continent: creative industries will help Africa ‘leapfrog’ into emerging high-growth global economies (UN Report on the Creative Economy, 2008, 2013); African creative industries will ‘unleash’ growth potential (UNIDO, 2013); creative industries are ‘Africa’s sleeping giant’.

Such upbeat narratives of creative industries provides the much-desired antidote to Afro-pessimism. In conjunction with the optimistic stories of ‘Africa on the rise’, creative industries promise to make over the negative image of Africa marked by poverty, war and diseases, and replace it with entrepreneurial drive, coolness, hipness and success. ‘Agenda 2063’, the African Union’s strategic framework for the continent’s development optimistically bets on the creative industries to engender future Pan-African ‘self-awareness, well-being and prosperity’. The creative policy craze trickles in global media as well. Young and hip African creative entrepreneurs – from ballet dancers, fashion designers and poets, to photographers, architects and game developers – prominently grace media stories across platforms.

But what is the current state of African creative industries and can they really deliver on their promise? Can creative industries lead to sustainable development? Can African countries straightforwardly import and implement a creative industries model developed elsewhere?

The marriage between culture and development has been for long a political ‘dream ticket’ (Pratt, 2014). The initial (UNESCO-driven, 1982) cultural policies envisaged development to be delivered via cultural resources (for example, national identity to be promoted through folk songs or health-related knowledge to be disseminated via community theater). In contrast, the current creative industries policies aspire to directly drive the development processes through job creation, environmental sustainability, and social cohesion on par with the other industries, despite the fact that the creative industries defy the traditional models of ‘industry’ in terms of modes of value creation, labour organization, supply chain management or IP regulation. Yet such high-flying promises may fall short of empirical support. While Africa may boom with creative talent the continent so far has not been able to profit much from it. Currently Africa’s share of the global trade in creative products remains marginal and in terms of employment creation we know little about how many people the creative industries actually employ, who they employ and under what conditions. Apart from the eulogizing creative industries discourses sparsely do we understand the actual lived dynamics of the allegedly newly-fangled creative, inclusive or sustainable jobs, in Africa’s creative industries.

To question the sustainable development potential of creative industries becomes ever more relevant if we bear in mind the findings about equality and diversity in those industries in the Global North. Current scholarship casts doubts on creative industries’ progressive, sustainable and inclusive potential. Such studies vehemently criticize the image of creative industries as cool, creative, egalitarian and meritocratic (Gill, 2002). Creative work is precarious, involving insecure, unpaid and irregular employment. Study after study demonstrates that women are severely underrepresented, victimized and discriminated against in the creative industries in the Global North (see the contributions to the latest special issue of Organization entitled Diversifying the Creative: Creative Work, Creative Industries, Creative Identities (Finkel et al., 2017) as well as contributions to the special issue on Gender and Creative Labour by Conor et al., 2015). Class, race and ethnic inequalities are rampant in the music and publishing industries in the UK (O’Brien et al., 2016). People with disabilities are even further systematically excluded and disadvantaged in the film and television industries (Randle and Hardy, 2017).

Given such a state of affairs, the answer to whether creative industries can lead to sustainable development in Africa can be neither rushed nor divested from future rigorous and systematic research-based understanding of the cultural, social, economic, historical and technological specificities of African creative industries, in all their elusiveness, peculiarities, definitional hurdles and ambivalences.

Ana Alacovska is Assistant Professor and Thilde Langevang is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at CBS. Alacovska researches the creative/cultural industries, creative work and cultural production, while Langevang’s research areas are in business and development studies with a particular focus on youth, entrepreneurship and micro- and small enterprises in Africa.

Photo by Thilde Langevang.

The Society of Spectacle from the Inside Out

By Catarina Pessanha Gomes.

On Wednesday May, 3rd, like millions of people, I distractively watched the last and by far the most unpleasant Presidential Debate of the French elections. The two opponents, Emmanuel Macron, who would become the future President the following week, and the candidate of the far-right Front National, Marine Le Pen, debated heartily but vaguely on several subjects, ranging from security to the future of France in the European Union.

The debate was more of a succession of childish insults in what looked like a theatrical play staging two ill-tempered children supervised by bored but resigned adults (the journalists‘ presence was barely noticeable), rather than an articulated, argumentative discussion confronting two political programs. Filled with sarcastic remarks, dirty games, personal attacks, most of it was a bland confrontation between pre-made, overheard anti-system formulas and the empty, normalized neoliberal remarks.

While the debate was broadcasted in the national television, another spectacle was simultaneously occurring on social media, where millions of internet users were sharing hilarious comments and memes from the debate. Faced with this abysm of representations of something that was an inherent representation in itself, I could only invoke Guy Debord’s major work, The society of spectacle, published in 1967.

According to Debord, the spectacle is the imposition of an external representation between “me and myself”, “me and others” and “me and my world, distorting any direct relationship with lived experiences, separating the individual from its own life, which becomes a passive consumer, a direct and concrete fabrication of alienation.

I am not sure Ryan Broderick, who tweeted the screen capture that is the cover picture to this post, is familiar with Debord’s work. But it is nevertheless a perfect illustration of its criticism of modern politics and their fake spectacular struggles, where forms of power struggles officially contradict each other while forming a real unity, a necessary representation of exposed rivalry necessary to the development of a uniform and homogenous system of representation.

In his comments of 1988, Debord highlights the culmination of the society of the spectacle, the integrated spectacular which represents the culmination of the excesses, the moment where spectacle and reality ceased to oppose, where the spectacle is mixed to all reality. As one internet user on twitter sarcastically said, the internet conversation around the debate reached such a pic of mockery and absurdity that people seem to be talking about the last reality show rather than a debate that could decide the country’s future. When any day of Trump’s presidency looks like the Apprentice with more unexpected plot twists and casting changes, when TV becomes reality, I could not help but wonder if social media add another level of spectacle representing the representation itself or if these remarks constitute the last act of parrhesia in our society, of speaking the honest truth, the whole truth (Foucault, 2001, p.348) which is that all of this is just a huge joke…on us.

Catarina is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Management, Society & Communication at Copenhagen Business School. Her PhD project investigates partnerships between social entrepreneurs and public institutions, with a particular focus on how social entrepreneurship can be institutionalized.

Pic by Ryan Broderick, Twitter

What if unethical behavior is just matter out of place?

By Anna Kirkebæk Gosovic.

It’s always puzzled me why it is that we might share words and concepts but that the meaning we fill into these concepts is very different. Kinda like a hotdog. Danish hot dog makers enjoy to fill it with important hotdog defining ingredients such as remoulade, mustard and pickles, whereas rumor has it that Swedish hot dog makers put a shrimp-mayo substance (the horror) on their hot dogs, and American ones don’t even put ketchup (seriously, just a bread and a sausage?).

Anyways, the point is that Danes, Swedes and Americans all call it a hotdog, although they don’t agree on what it actually consists of, what is right (onions and pickles of course) and what is wrong (shrimp-mayo, obviously). Banal observation, perhaps, but don’t worry – there is a point (also, you have to bear with me, as I’m a brand new PhD student and not yet as clever as the other bloggers).

Schooled as an anthropologist, I recently started my PhD study on how to ensure ethical standards within a multinational pharmaceutical corporation. As a point of departure, and trying to map out how corporations deal with this challenge, I started consulting the literature on business ethics in cross-cultural contexts.

As I read along, I realized that scholars (and companies) actually seem rather sensitive to cultural differences, and that local responsiveness to cultural norms and practices is considered beneficial and even necessary in many aspects of business operations. However, at the same time, within the field of business ethics, what may be otherwise recognized as cultural differences to be respected and responded to, seems here to somehow transform into unethical behavior not to be tolerated.

Take for example the reciprocal systems of dinner invitations, gift giving and thorough social interaction that comprise an inherent part of establishing relationships in parts of South East Asia. This can be interpreted as a cultural practice of creating good business relations. However, in a business ethics context, most (Western) ethical standards do not allow for e.g. gifts or expensive dinners to enter business relations. In these contexts, they do not keep their cultural label as gifts form the context in which they originate. Rather, they get a new cultural label from the context www.buy-trusted-tablets.com of Western ethics as something resembling corruption.

So – how can gifts (which for most of us has positive connotations) suddenly become corruption (which for most of us has negative connotations) when entering a business relation governed by Western principles for right or wrong? The answer might lie with an anthropological classic on purity and danger.
In her famous work on dirt, anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that notions of dirt express symbolic systems within a culture. Efforts to get rid of dirt, she writes, are not governed by an anxiety to escape disease. Rather, we are reordering our environment, making it conform to an idea that we share within our culture of what is dirty and what is not.

In my early years as an anthropology student, one lecturer explained Douglas’ theory like food on the shirt. In my opinion, an amazingly pedagogical way of explaining a basic anthropological theory which I will attempt to repeat:

It’s really rather simple. It’s about food and dirt. Perhaps the aforementioned hotdog should reenter the scene here. The Danish one with all the sauces, of course. While this hotdog is in your hand, it’s food. It’s a mouth watering hotdog just waiting to be eaten. But when you drop some of it (and believe me, you will) onto your shirt, it is no longer food. It’s dirt. Thus, the entire nature of a thing or a concept can change completely according to the context in which it is located and our culturally embedded understandings of that context’s rights and wrongs (hotdog in hand = good, hotdog on shirt = bad).

Douglas introduces the concept of matter out of place, which is a conceptualization of the ways in which we interpret the things we are exposed to and the understanding of where they belong. The hotdog belongs in your hand and not on your shirt. Therefore, when the matter of the hotdog is on your shirt, it transforms its qualities from being a hotdog to being dirt. It’s matter out of place.

Tongue in the anthropological cheek, I find it interesting to ask the business ethics community: What if the same goes for business ethics? What if all the things we consider unethical are merely not conforming to an idea we share within our culture of what is right and what is wrong? What I the logic governing the notion of say, e.g. bribery is similar to the notion of food and dirt: gifts in a local cultural system = good, gifts in a business relation = bad?

And if we try to conceptualize business ethics in this way – what does that do to our understanding of unethical practice? Would that be a move towards moral relativism? Or merely an attempt open up for a more nuanced approach to business ethics where we can also explore the ethical actions that companies take which do not conform to our (Western) understandings of rights and wrongs? Would that dilute the ethical principles of corporations? Or would it break a Western ethical hegemony? Is unethical behavior really just matter out of place? And lastly, is such an approach even manageable for corporations on a practical level?

I don’t know. But I will surely think about it some more.

Anna Kirkebæk Gosovic is PhD student at the Department for Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. She is working on how to ensure ethical standards within a multinational pharmaceutical corporation.

Pic by Pixabay

Are you choosing what you really want?

By Jan Michael Bauer.

The value of individual freedom is rarely disputed within the Western society. However, more freedom is usually accompanied with making more choices, which might not be beneficial to everyone. For instance, the act of choosing itself can be burdensome, particularly when choices are complex and we face a large number of options. More importantly, can we trust that our own decisions are a true reflection of what we really want, if we accept the reality of our cognitive limitations and a manipulative environment?

Our economic system and democracy are both based on the principle that people know what is best for them and their decisions speak through their purchases in stores and their votes at the ballot box. This principle is also at the core of the neo-classical economic model that dominated the field over most of the 20th century. The underlying assumption is that people’s actions within the market place are the result of a well-considered reflection about the best use of limited resources to maximize their own well-being.

Even though this assumption sounds intuitive, it should be no news to most people that we not always act in our own best interest. Too familiar is the feeling of regret about drinking a glass too much on the night before, eating that second piece of chocolate cake or procrastinating instead of getting started with something unpleasant but important. This reality about human decision-making has entered the field of economics over the last decades, acknowledging that people are neither all-knowing nor perfect calculators and that their decisions are influenced by their feelings, worries and believes that not always accurately reflect objective realities.

Predictably irrational

It is now well-established in economics that people sometimes behave in a seemingly irrational way and that these deviations from the rational choice are systematic and therefore predictable. For instance, people are more likely to pay a bill on time if they fear a late fee, rather than the prospect of an early payer discount of similar monetary value. A simple change in the wording of two mathematically similar choices does influence our decisions. Such biases can often be explained by the so-called dual process theory and attributed to people’s limited cognitive resources resulting in an inability of carefully evaluating each of our decisions in daily life.

Most people are unaware that their choices are subject to such systematic irrationalities, but given the sound scientific evidence, we can be quite certain that people are often myopic, overconfident, or loss avers – just to name a few from a much longer list. Even when confronted with these scientific insights, it is not easy to accept that we have such biases which deem us irrational. This is however important as these biases are not only in the way of our long-term well-being, but make us susceptible to manipulation. If the way a choice is presented to us affects our decision, the person deciding the way of presentation (sometimes named choice architect) has the ability to influence our choice.

Phishing for Phools

If we accept that people are susceptible to influence, tend to make bad decisions under stress, and can be fooled, we might not be surprised that some people aim to exploit those weaknesses to make profits. A notion highlighted by “Phishing for Phools”, a recent book by Nobel Prize-winning Economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. They argue that the free market, despite all its contribution to today’s prosperity, is a place for profit oriented individuals to fish for fools and where those prevail who capitalize best on exploiting human weaknesses. Food choices are an excellent example where companies try to seduce us with their tempting products and benefit from our failure to stick to a healthier diet. Fishing in the political landscape might not be much different from the market place. With the additional help of technology, marketers and campaign managers can make increasingly use of behavioural insights to promote their product or candidate.

What can be done?

Therefore, it is essential that people obtain a deeper understanding of their own psychological weaknesses and receive guidance how and when we are most likely to be manipulable. Even though it is impossible to be constantly aware of all the hooks surrounding us, education about our cognitive biases might help avoiding at least some of them in the market place (e.g. by reading Dan Ariely’s work).

Additionally, about 180 governments worldwide, the European Union and many international organizations enrich regulation with behaviour insights by acknowledging the multiple caveats of human decision-making. Behaviorally informed policy aims to create a choice architecture where people naturally gravitate towards decisions most likely in their own long-term interest. Working as a counterforce against commercial influence, regulation can also help consumers to make informed decisions by mandating the disclosure of important information presented in a simple and meaningful way.

Designing such policies, however, requires a detailed understanding of the relevant processes involved into human decision-making. As part of the EU research project Nudge-it, we aim to increase the knowledge specifically about food choice, which might translate into novel policy tools and help tackling the obesity epidemic.

Jan is assistant professor at the CBS Department of Management, Society and Communication. His main research interests are in the fields of health economics and consumer behaviour. As part of the Nudge-it Project, he currently focuses on decision-making and fostering healthier food choices.

Pic by Windell Oskay, Flickr

Business integrity, ideas and developments in the ASEAN way

By Luisa Murphy.

As a former employee of the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division, I worked on corruption cases involving companies accused of both collusion and bribery. However, when these cases crossed borders, enforcement of US laws became particularly challenging. It also raised questions about the relevance of US Federal laws in regions of the globe such as Asia where different ‘national business systems’ (Witt & Redding, 2014) prevail. Today, through my PhD studies on the institutionalization of CSR, I find myself considering some of these same questions informed from the vantage point of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Corruption in ASEAN

As with other areas, the ASEAN region has not been immune to the effects of corruption involving national, regional and transnational actors. One need look no further than the recent UK Rolls-Royce bribery scandal (which was settled for £671m) and moreover, implicated Thai Airways for taking bribes. The front page scandal involving the discovery of $1 billion dollars in Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s personal bank accounts which was allegedly taken from the state investment fund 1MDB has also directed attention to the region.

Thus, it is no secret then that the ASEAN region, in common with others around the globe, suffers from corruption issues and that this presents a major challenge to its socio-economic development. For instance, in 2015, Transparency International reported that ‘rampant corruption across the region threatens to derail plans for economic integration’ (Transparency International, 2015), while 7 out of 10 countries in ASEAN ranked 40 or under (100 is a perfect score) in Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index. As a result, international, regional and national organizations have rallied together to confront these issues. And although the region still may be experimenting with different approaches, there appear to be a few distinctive ASEAN strategies which are taking hold and may very well, provide informative lessons for the future. A recent conference in Singapore organized by the ASEAN CSR network (a regional hub and leader on CSR issues which connects international, regional and national networks), brought a few takeaways to the forefront.

Triggering business integrity

Elements of hard law may be an important tool in inducing adherence to international soft-law frameworks such as the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC)’s 10th principle on Anti-Corruption, Goal 16.5 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the ISO37001 anti-bribery management system among others. For instance, one company executive who participated in the Singapore conference captured the applicability of hard law enforcement approaches in relation to other CSR issues e.g. health and safety standards, by noting that workers in one country in the region didn’t take compliance seriously until they were fired for not wearing safety hats. This resulted in ‘triggering’ compliance with health and safety standards thereafter. In the case of Singapore, prohibitions such as littering in public places, jaywalking or chewing gum on the street have been particularly effective in engendering behaviors which need not be enforced in the long-run. Thus, an approach which utilizes elements of hard law in conjunction with binding international frameworks such as United Nations Convention against Corruption and the UK Bribery Act as well as regional frameworks (e.g. ASEAN 2020) may be an effective means to trigger adherence to soft law frameworks in the future.

Culture as an opportunity and not an excuse

Corruption is not necessarily an ASEAN region cultural problem per se and certainly many positive aspects of the regional culture can be harnessed to fight corruption. While gift giving in the form of bribes may have previously been (or in some cases currently) is a ‘cultural norm’, it can also be argued that many companies operate with a spirit of business integrity. Although, it would be naive to say that the ethos of business integrity is inherent in every company, behavior and culture are different, and issues of corruption may be related to governance issues or other factors rather than ‘culture´ itself. Notwithstanding this, cultural norms such as the fear of ‘losing face’ have reportedly been successfully employed in efforts to pressure CEOs into implementing anti-corruption initiatives. The Thai Collective Action Coalition (CAC) is one such example of a private-sector initiative which has been particularly successful in combating corruption in Thailand, perhaps because it reportedly operates with a mindset which utilizes international frameworks such as Transparency International’s UK (TI-UK) Adequate Procedures Checklist while tapping into ASEAN cultural norms of e.g. ‘losing face’ to ensure that Thai CEOs join the initiative. Therefore, energies in the future might focus on norms which are counter to corruption rather than daunting conceptualizations of assumed ‘cultures’ of corruption.

Youth and SMEs as engines of business integrity

Finally, approaches to combating corruption are increasingly focusing on youth and SMEs and using them as indicators for progress on the issue. In the ASEAN context, this has meant mobilizing and providing resources which can contribute to business integrity among the youth population and also small and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs). While this may seem like a ‘no brainer,’ ASEAN countries and international organizations are still clarifying their approaches. For instance, whether there will be enough ‘trickle-down’ from top-down approaches which deliver e.g. training via multinational corporations (MNCs) or whether a bottom-up approach is necessary is still being debated. Moreover, while the youth of many ASEAN countries have good intentions, they are often derailed due to economic or familial concerns. For instance, a 2014 Transparency International report indicated that while honesty is more important than wealth to 94% of the youth in Vietnam, 41% are “willing to lie for the sake of family income or loyalty to family.’ (Transparency International, 2014). Despite these figures, we should remain optimistic given the integration of youth into CSR activities and the overall focus on reaching SMEs in the region (topics for another blog).

In conclusion, only time will tell how ASEAN triggers business integrity, uses culture as an opportunity and mobilizes youth and SMEs in the battle against corruption. I, for one, see promise in these developments and ideas which might just become part of the ASEAN way.

Luisa Murphy is PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School and supported by the VELUX Endowed Chair in Corporate Sustainability. Her research examines the governance of corporate social responsibility. She brings a human rights and business background from the University of Oxford and legal experience from the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice.

Pic by Transparency International Indonesia