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The Easter Rising lasted only a few days - but its effects are still felt today. History shapes the way our world is - and you can find out more with The Open University.

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Jim Moore: Darwin was driven by different things at different times, just like all of us. He was complex; he changed; he became more conservative generally speaking as he got older, but if you mean what drove Darwin to become an evolutionist, one has to say it has to be something as powerful as the forces that were ranged against evolutionists.

When Darwin is less than 30 years old, he comes back from travelling around the world – most of it was on land, not at sea – but he gets home, and within weeks, probably a few months, he’s become an evolutionist. Why does he do that? It’s a bad career move, and in our new book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and I say that that powerful drive that overcame the social stigma of being an evolutionist was Darwin’s radical belief in the unity of all life.

That common descent unites every species, the human race as well as all races of animals and plants, and that leads him to a powerful image that was part of the ideological foundations of the anti-slavery movement. The notion of a family tree of humanity for traditional Christians rooted in Adam and Eve as the father and mother of humankind. Darwin takes it a step further and unites everyone and says that it’s our arrogance to believe that we’re not related to animals; it’s the arrogance of the slaveholder lording over his slaves whom he likes to regard as another species.

Charles Darwin. Image: Jupiterimages Corporation.

Ben Valsler: This may well have been the driving force but still, it was a long time before he published. It was a long time before these ideas actually made it out there. Was there a tempering force as well that made him look for all the right evidence and made him make sure he could prove this before he would publish?

Jim: Darwin kept his thoughts to himself to begin with. He was in the process of becoming involved in the Royal Society as secretary of the Geological Society of London. He was welcomed to the inner sanctum of elite natural history. His sponsors were Cambridge clergymen, professors; he had a grant from the Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, a huge amount of money to publish his Beagle research. He was a young man on the make. He was pushing all the right buttons, he was going all the right places, and yet he carried this terrible secret in his private notebooks. He needed a theory, and he began calling his speculations ‘my theory.’

That was his project, ‘my theory,’ and towards the end of 1838 he works out what we now call natural selection. By 1839, when he’s getting married and having children, he’s developed that, and he knows within three years – he leaves London, he takes shelter in the countryside – he knows he’s onto something really big. It’s going to change the course of the history of science if he can convince people.

Now, at that stage you don’t go public. You take every precaution that’s necessary to convince people beforehand that what you carry with you is true. It’s not disreputable; it’s the answer to the mystery of the diversity of life on earth.

So, he commits himself for the next 17 years, that’s sort of 20 years in all since he devises natural selection, to answering in advance every conceivable objection that the heavyweights of science in his day could bring against what he’s doing, and that leads him into huge research projects. And finally he gets around to putting pen to paper and he plans a huge book, maybe a half million words in three volumes which no one would read, and in the middle of all of that, you know, he gets outed by this guy named Wallace, everyone knows this story, Darwin has to condense his work into something which he entitles On the Origin of Species.

Ben: Do you think the pressure of having these other younger researchers formulating very, very similar theories based on very similar principles, Wallace was looking at series of islands much like Darwin had, do you think this forced him to make some concessions in his work?

Jim: Darwin was not aware that Wallace was working on a theory, until the paper arrived in June 1858. Darwin felt safe in his non-competitive ecological niche as a theoriser of evolution. He knew that all the other theorisers were discredited or spoke ill of. He wasn’t like them. He wasn’t telling anybody what he was like. He still believed he had an inside track on natural selection.

Now, what did he do with that theory once he knew that Wallace was onto the same thing? He believed Wallace was onto the same thing. Darwin read the paper in haste; we can all see now that they are not talking about the same thing in the same way – Wallace rejects the selection analogy for example. Absolutely basic analogy with domestic animal breeding, Wallace absolutely rejects it, always rejects it. So there’s a fundamental difference between Darwin and Wallace to begin with.

I can’t see that Darwin gives up anything. I’d have to think about it for a while before I gave you a technical answer, but it seems to be that what Wallace says and does over the next 10 to 15 years makes Darwin more attached to what he always thought. Wallace did push him hard, and Darwin said once, “It terrifies me to disagree with you,” and that was public hyperbolae, but this unprepossessing sort of guy, who left school when he was 13, he didn’t go to Cambridge. I mean he would have, Wallace would have joined The Open University and he’d have got a fine PhD, had there been an Open University in 1840.

This was an incredibly bright and underused talent, you know, and Darwin knew that. You know, they were socially chalk and cheese, and yet this guy was dorking him, and Darwin took preventative measures, hedging about his theories to make sure, obvious example is sexual selection, Darwin is so goaded by Wallace, because Wallace doesn’t believe that male competition and female choice causes sexual dimorphism in nature.

Darwin expands his work on sexual selection so two thirds of his book, on ‘The Descent of Man’, and Selection in Relation to Sex is the rest of the title, two thirds of that book is about birds and bees and pigeons and furry mammals before he ever gets to humans. Typical Darwin, he has to do the whole panoply of nature to prove that sexual selection is right and (brackets) Wallace is wrong.

Ben: And finally, what was it about Darwin that means that he stands out now? There were other people researching similar things that may not have hit exactly the same theory, but Darwin really was the man that stands out as being the father of evolution.

Jim: Evolution needs a father, as Steve Jones would say. Newton is pictured by Blake’s geometer outside the British library on Euston Road - unfairly perhaps. You think of Einstein. You think of Einstein as a brain, you know. You might think of Freud as being something really slippery. But Darwin’s a grandpa! He has a beard. He has a big family. He’s wealthy. He lives in the country. He’s contented. He cut the image of what it was like to be a gentleman of science in his day, and he still does.

Darwin is cuddly. Apart from the fact that this old man is not reliable with children because he teaches them falsehoods, some people say, this old gent is like anybody’s grandpa. You could really warm to the guy.

Now I’ve studied Darwin for many, many, many years, and I’m not particularly enamoured of him. The more I’ve got to know him, I suppose the more I’ve got to know anybody, the less I’ve been enamoured of him.

Listen to the whole programme, originally broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live, March 2009.

Find out more

Explore the reality behind the man and his theories: Darwin

Watch Jim Moore talking about his discovery of Darwin’s motivation

The Enron sign.
Picture © STANANDLOU, used under Creative Commons licence.

Accounting is a framework for evaluating resource allocation and management in organisations. It is not objective reality, whose methodologies and methods lead to optimal and efficient outcomes. This would only be the case if we lived in a world of efficient markets in which all prices equated to values. This world would correspond to the Arrow-Debreu Theorem, named after the two Nobel prize-winning economists, in which all market exchanges are matched by underlying contingent commodities within a general equilibrium framework. Differences in time and place, and thus transaction costs, are not a consideration within this framework, so the accounting profession is stuck between the Charybdis of efficiently measuring values of organisational assets and the Scylla of differences in the time and place in the transactions of these values through market exchange.

Some siren voices may claim that the profession deserves everything it gets given scandals like Enron and the recent financial crisis, as well as the tax avoidance schemes which reached their zenith in the UK in the 1970s. However, accounting isn’t the agency of these outcomes, it’s the result of unintended consequences and perverse outcomes of the structure of regulation and regulatory changes. The ingenuity of ways in which regulations can be bypassed and turned into market opportunities is manifold and legion, but you cannot regulate away creativity and innovation, unless one starts to distinguish between good and bad parts of this human condition. So, what is the distinction between good and bad creative accounting? The length of a piece of string or when the ‘perps’ get caught? As for tax avoidance schemes, well we could ‘eat the rich’, and then send the accountants and other ‘creatives’ like management consultants and advertising agencies to another galaxy on the pretext of the earth exploding, but then financial products would be created on the transactions in human flesh and ‘marked to market’ at, say, Smithfield, the meat market in London. Getting rid of one form of accounting and its creative variants would then just generate others. The creative frontiers for accounting are set by the statute and international standards. These frontiers are really thresholds, the negotiation of which can lead to deviant behaviour – which is perhaps also one of the properties of the human condition.

The question of organisational deviancy is one that arises from why firms appear to spend so much time, energy and resources in managing property. The fundamental reason is that land is both a fixed and variable form of capital and gives rise to a set of uses and values, and most of our net worth is tied to property. At the philosophical level, John Locke developed the genesis of the idea of property rights as the foundation of the modern liberty. In the hands of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, these rights are the basis of sustainable economic development. So property matters.

There is also the issue of power and prestige concerning property. The management of a mutual society may look down in pride on their provincial locale as they survey it from the heights of their new building. No self-respecting bank in 1980s London was complete without occupying a building with an atrium and an internal galleria. The question of architecture has external and internal dimensions. Externally, the need for signature architecture with a Gehry, Foster or Pei designed building seems central to corporate image. Internally the complex socio-psychological relationships of workers to their spaces cuts across the human resource management, finance and estate management functions. For the latter, maximising personnel in minimum space is rational, but the ebb and flow of movement and work patterns means that open plan or Dilbert-like booths are not optimal solutions. The way in which workers seek to humanise their work spaces suggest that the deep territoriality in all of us isn’t restricted to the home, but the challenge is to manage the challenge that status being often linked to a spatial hierarchy. Many firms claim that employees are their most valuable asset, but if they don’t creatively account for and put their spatial resources where their mouth is, this claim will not stand scrutiny. If you want to stifle workers’ creativity and innovation in solving business problems, then housing them as automatons in a single open space will suffice and no amount of virtual working will change this. There are creative solutions, but these are not cheap as the frontiers between private and public spaces in the workplace are constantly crossed and re-crossed.

At the banal level, accounting for the creative frontiers of managing financial and work space resources is a question of races and riders. The bottom or winning line, however, will only reached when it is recognised that these organisational imperatives are part of complex systems in which creative spaces develop and thrive.

Find out more

Does business have a problem with ethics?

Ethics Bites on Business Ethics

OU courses

Study accountancy and finance with The Open University

About the author

Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

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This is white-collar crime: it involves a £5million fraud case

This is white-collar crime: it involves a £5million fraud case. The main protagonist, businessman and wheeler dealer Matt Crawford, has a chequered past and has come up the hard way, unlike his clearly middle-class partner, Lillian, who is not involved in the case, except through her emotional relationship with him. Lillian is a member of the eponymous, largely affluent, Archer family of local farmers, who also mostly occupy the moral high ground, as well as owning much of it: she is also the widow of a wealthy man. Matt has struggled and, whilst on the right side of the law, was tolerated by the local land consortium, Borsetshire Land, but having transgressed, or at least been caught, he is marginalised. In spite of Lillian’s hopes for leniency, he has been sent to prison; ‘Take them down!’ said the judge and listeners were faced with the speed of sentencing and its finality, however well-off the offender.

Matt and his business partner at TWJ bank, Stephen Chalkman (Chalky), receive custodial sentences, and Lillian is left weeping loudly. Matt not only has the reassurance of her fidelity, but also that of earlier storylines, where characters with much more clearly working-class credentials have been reinstated into the community following release from prison. For example, Susan Carter was imprisoned as a result of protecting her brother, the infamous Clive Horrobin, armed robber and hostage-taker, at an armed raid on the Ambridge village shop. Susan currently manages the shop and post office and plays a key role in the community. However, such stories are haunted by class. Matt was never quite accepted; Susan is just the best of a rough family, a fragile step away from social exclusion.

Soaps often engage with social issues, usually with dramatic hyperbole but The Archers offers some more nuanced, complex coverage. The programme, which has a tradition of dealing with big issues: from racism, the rural economy and economic recession to dementia, family breakdown and sibling rivalry, does not limit itself to rural or agricultural matters. It deals with big issues (Woodward, 2009), such as class, family, kinship, place, diversity and inequality, which intersect in different ways, through the lens of personal experience.

Soap opera can do something to engage with the detail and affect of social phenomena

Soap opera can do something to engage with the detail and affect of social phenomena like white-collar crime in complex ways. As the sociologist C.Wight Mills argued (The Sociological Imagination), this is what sociology does; it demonstrates the powerful interconnections between private troubles and public issues through the sociological imagination. This is an everyday story of the personal and the public and political which has wider resonance and demonstrates, albeit inadvertently, the power of thinking sociologically.

Find out more

• The Big Issues, by Kath Woodward, Routledge, 2009
• The Sociological Imagination, by C Wright Mills, Harmondsworth, Penguin (1970), 1st edition 1959
• Get The Archers podcast
• Serious Fraud Office help The Archers with their inquiries
• Join the discussion on white-collar crime

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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• Localisation economies: which refer to the advantages accruing to firms in the same activity which result from their joint location;

• Urbanisation economies: which are concerned with the range of advantages to the individual firm which result from the joint location of firms in different and unrelated activities;

• Activity-complex economies: these refer to economies that emerge from the joint location of unalike activities which have substantial trading links with one another. In the case of manufacturing, such economies typically occur within industrial complexes.

 The City of London is a classic example of activity-complex economies at play. Financial firms and associated business services crowd together in the Square Mile and its environs in order to benefit from external and internal economies of scale and scope. Economies of scale that are internal to the firm include spreading a larger output over existing productive capacity, and differentiation of products or services from existing production platforms. External economies of scale and scope include the ability of firms to draw on specialised pools of local labour; and, to exploit different markets because of transport and technology infrastructure. Agglomeration economies are thus at the heart of the dreaded ‘c’ word – clusters – one of the topics of the latest BBC/Open University broadcast of The Bottom Line. The other topic is the future of television.

It’s reasonable to ask, “What on earth has the clustering of firms in the same locale got to do with the future of television?” Well, for many commentators the future of broadcast media is multi-platform. The advantage of multi-platform production, as in any industry, is the ability to exploit external and internal economies of scale and scope; in other words, the capacity to create activity-complex economies. Whether they’re in Euclidean space, cloud computing or cloud cuckoo land makes no difference; clustering concerns the co-location of business activities. The paradox is that in this supposed age of the ‘death of distance’, the dominance of clustering in real geographical space prevails.

The most frequently cited example of a cluster is Silicon Valley in California, the heartland of web-based companies and venture capitalists from where two of the guests of the current programme were drawn. In the 1980s, it was ‘Third Italy’, the region of Emilia Romagna in which small textile firms co-located and gave rise to the Benneton phenomenon, among others. Clusters are nothing new and the academic literature is informed by reference to the work on ‘industrial districts’ of the economist Alfred Marshall, who examined the characteristics of industries in 19th Century England, in particular their locational advantages. The conflating of clusters with industrial districts does a serious disservice to Marshall and his disciples. The celebrity academics and management consultants who have been significantly advantaged by their promotion of an increasingly elastic concept overlook one key fact. Many firms in the same sector are often blithely unaware of the immediate location of competitors, as countless surveys have demonstrated. This is especially true of small and medium sized enterprises: the basis of Marshall’s original ‘industrial districts’. It is the very elasticity of the concept of clusters and the lack of empirical evidence that weakens its claims as the universal panacea for economic development, as the economic geographers, Ron Martin and Peter Sunley perceptively note, “The cluster literature is a patchy constellation of ideas, some of which are important to contemporary economic development some of which are either banal or misleading.” One important issue that’s overlooked in the discussions of clusters is the bounty of nature. London became a global financial centre because its topography allowed it to be become a port; Hollywood initially attracted film makers because of its natural light. Similarly, the bounty of technology has created the television and Internet ages, but what sustains different forms of clusters is their underwriting by the state.

The question of the future of the televisual age is an important one, but one that can lead to debates that are both banal and misleading. Almost since the day John Logie Baird first demonstrated his new device, the television has been the hearth in the home that families cluster around. Whether that connected cluster we commonly know as the Web will change the locale of our emotional and social hearths and heimats is a future question but one that has contemporary resonance. For many, the Internet will replace television as the dominant medium of choice, but as the Chief Executive of the UK-based Channel 5, the other guest of the programme, pointed out, the two are complements and not substitutes. The most ubiquitous contemporary technology is the mobile phone, which has a visual function that allows the user to access television programmes. The Internet and associated technologies may be the medium of transmission but they are not the message.

In the present day, television has become a product and a process that generates its own cluster of activities because technology and social (and business) practices create external and internal economies of scale and scope: a basic condition for the development of clusters. The multi-platform of broadcast media has joined the pantheon of activity-complex economies and agglomeration around a hearth is no longer restricted to family viewing of the Billy Cotton Band Show or Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday evening. In 1979, the Tubes sang “I really love my television” on the track ‘TV is King’ and, like geography, reports of its death have been very premature. Clusters have been around much longer than television but the future of these connected and networked phenomena is still assured as their natural and technological bounties lead us through the millennium.

Find out more

The following Open University courses will help you explore these subjects in greater depth:

Managing 1: Organisations and People

Understanding Cities

Understanding Media

Film and Television History

About the author

Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

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“We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.” - Leonardo da Vinci.

Yes, underfoot is the soil I want to talk about, which one of my professors fondly refers to as The Book of Nature. He would say, “Open The Book of Nature and read… here and there a chapter might be incomplete or you may not understand, but you can always learn about the past, the present and the future.” Indeed, my limited reading has found a lot of interesting chapters…

What is soil?

Technically defined, soil is a "natural body comprised of solids (minerals and organic matter), liquid, and gases that occurs on the land surface. It is characterized by distinguishable horizons and or the ability to support rooted plants in a natural environment".

In a much more ecological way, it is the basic structure that supports life’s primary producers, i.e. plants. It does this as a result of its unique capability to act as a reservoir of nutrients/water and then to supply those intermittently to the plants - very much like a prudent bank.

This is not the soil’s only role; it also acts as a foundation for infrastructure and as a cornerstone in the health of ecosystems, for example, by locking pollutants and harbouring ultimate decomposers. As such, it is considered as one of the three most vital natural resources, alongside air and water.

Why care for soils?

Knowledge of the soil's physical, chemical and biological make-up is important for various disciplines. For example, nutrient levels are important for crop production, soil shear strength is crucial for engineering construction, and its structure could also be a deciding factor for football pitches! It also has more exotic uses, such as a beauty accessory (see the intricate hair-styling of the Hamer of Ethiopia, for instance).

In addition to their functional roles, soils have been part of our life and culture in many ways. A recent book, Soil and Culture by Edward R. Landa and Christian Feller, pays tribute to their impact from visual arts to religion and from archaeology to disease and warfare, and as a further example, many states in the U.S. have a specific soil that is legislatively established as a ‘state soil’, just like a state bird or flower.

What is the status of soils today?

Like most of earth’s resources, soils in all parts of the world are under threat. From the physical problem of compaction to erosion, and from salinity to pollution, are increasingly degrading our soils, with negative effects on ecosystems, economy and human health. In addition, global warming threatens to release carbon trapped in soil's organic matter, exacerbating climate change and having grave consequences for life on earth.

What's being done?

As the concern on soils has come to the forefront of public awareness, national and international bodies are moving towards legislation and action. For example, the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) recently published a revised strategy on soils.

Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, explains the importance of caring for soils.

Take it further

Educate yourself and others with the Soil Science Educational Resource.

Join surveys, for example, the OPAL national soil and earthworm survey.

Support those who are working to improve soils situation, such as the Soil Association.

Open University courses

Neighbourhood nature

Environment: journeys through a changing world

Other links

BBC Life

British Society for Soil Science

International Union of Soil Sciences

European Union Soil Thematic Strategy

About the author

Dr Yoseph Araya is a plant ecologist and associate lecturer at the Open University. He works on the biology and conservation of South African fynbos vegetation. Environmental education and the role of the public in research is one of his key interests.

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The criminal law is preoccupied with individuals who do wrong, and with ideas of personal responsibility. The growth of corporations has been rapid in the last century (there are now over two million companies in England and Wales), but the criminal law has taken a while to catch up and adapt its principles accordingly. Worldwide, of the 100 most wealthy and powerful economic units, 49 are countries but 51 are corporations. 

Although, in the past, companies could do a great deal that hurt people, the law could not do much to affect the companies. For the early part of its history, the company lay outside of the criminal law. "It had no soul to damn, and no body to kick," observed Lord Thurlow, the eighteenth-century Lord Chancellor. The Catholic Church used to excommunicate very early forms of corporate bodies that had done wrong but that practice was declared contrary to Canon law by Pope Innocent IV at the Council of Lyons in 1245.

Hoodies – the least of our worries?
[Image: © 2008 Jupiterimages Corporation]

Public tolerance of corporate crime has sunk notably in recent times. A great deal of evidence now suggests that white-collar crime is phenomenally harmful. Worldwide, more people are killed at work and through industrial practices each year (2 million), than are killed by war. Corporate fraud, commercial pollution of the air and water, crimes relating to food hygiene, trade descriptions, pensions, securities, and health and safety all widely affect the public.

The costs and agonies of corporate crime are huge when compared with those of ordinary crime

The costs and agonies of corporate crime are huge when compared with those of ordinary crime. When a couple of criminally reckless workmen illegally dump asbestos waste, they might seriously endanger several local residents, but when an international company continues to expose thousands of people to the lethal dust over many decades the harm is on a different scale. Graffiti and train seat vandalism are belittled by the scale of toxic material illegally poured into rivers each year. 20,000 people fall victim to criminal assaults resulting in serious wounding but 30,000 are seriously injured at work each year.

Part of the problem has been gaining evidence against companies, not just in respect of particular cases, but also to assist in charting the extent and nature of corporate crime. A Bureau of Corporations was set up by Theodore Roosevelt in America, in 1903, with the purpose of marshalling public opinion against various corporate malpractices. The Bureau was to investigate companies and also to maintain an inquiry on an industry-wide level. The Bureau, though, was disbanded after a very short time because of the need to obtain election funds from some of the largest corporations.

We should be more worried about crooks with clean finger nails, quiet voices and white collars than we should about chavs in hoodies

National research I have conducted over a five-year period, produced evidence that 60 per cent of commercially-related deaths are caused by profit considerations taking priority over safety. It also suggested that prosecutions for corporate manslaughter should be running at the rate of one a week instead of one a year. If we are concerned about crime that hurts and robs ordinary people, we should be more worried about crooks with clean finger nails, quiet voices and white collars than we should about chavs in hoodies.

Find out more

• OpenLearn: The meaning of crime – free learning material from The Open University
• Punishment and corporate crime
• Discuss white-collar crime

About the author

Professor Gary Slapper is Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. He is the author of various books on English Law, and corporate crime, and has written about Law for The Times for fifteen years.

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The most well-known passage of Charles Dickens’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities, seems an appropriate starting point to discuss private equity, one of the topics of the latest BBC/Open University The Bottom Line broadcast. Belief and incredulity appear to characterise our present epoch of financial booms and crashes, during which private equity firms are painted as the pantomime villain in capitalism’s triumph and fall: asset strippers in name and deed.

The relationship of Dickens’s tale of London and Paris, at the time of the French Revolution, to the financial centre of the City of London seems metaphorical and real. Joseph Addison had described London as an “Emporium for the whole earth” a century earlier, and in the emporium that is the global financial entrepôt of today, private equity firms are as much a part of its landscape as the trader of the 17th century. In the late 20th century, the leitmotif of the City of the furled umbrella and the bowler hat gave way to the yuppie and the mobile phone; the gentleman giving way to the player. For some commentators, these changes represented a revolution whose genesis rested on private equity firms and their ilk.

Businessmen shaking hands.
photo © copyright Jupiterimages Corporation

Private equity firms operate on the basis of buying and selling a portfolio of companies to extract returns of 20 per cent on their investment over a three-to-seven-year period. They institute cost cutting and disposal of parts of companies in order to sweat the assets they have invested in. For defenders of private equity firms, they create long-term value. For critics, they are the manifestation of the UK-based asset strippers of the 1970s; Jim Slater, John Bentley and ‘Tiny’ Rowland amongst others, whose activities were called the “unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism” by the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath. The language of private equity activities are, in this view: a climate of fear; downsizing; the casualisation of work and so on. This litany is universal to these firms, whether expressed in the English or any other linguistic form. For the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, entrepreneurship represents the revolutionising of the economic structure which enables new activities to be born, phoenix-like, from the ashes through the process of “creative destruction”.

It is the important question of language that formed the second topic of The Bottom Line discussion. English is claimed to be the universal language of business, with its own cross–national dialects, so that knowledge of other languages is deemed not to be as important as it once was. But language is like football, the rules of the game may be pretty much the same but the variants are as numerous as the array of cities in the world. It is a linguistic truism to say that language affects the way in which one thinks. Knowledge of local customs may be useful upon introduction to a client, but knowledge of the rudiments of the local language is an important part of business engagement and sustainability. For example, in China, saying yes to a question does not signal agreement but rather that the speaker has been heard. These are important considerations for companies that engage in international transactions. It can be argued that globalisation will only be completed if the law of one price operates. That is, all prices in the world converge with the only differences being accounted for by transport and administration costs. Similarly, if English became the first language of everyone in the world it would become truly global.

Capitalism, as Schumpeter and others remind us, is a revolutionary system in which “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…” Private equity is part of that system and provides a vehicle for “revolutionising the conditions of production.” A single global language would be part of that revolution, and if that is not generally understood then change does need to be made. Blaming private equity firms and hedge funds for the financial crisis is a bit like Canute blaming the Moon for his failure to control the tides. There are compensations with more than two cities and more than one language in the world which makes us all richer, whether materially or culturally. The globalists, in whatever guise, make us all poorer as heterogeneity is sacrificed for homogeneity.

Find out more

Sovereign wealth to the rescue

Faith in fakes? Travels in hyper-mobility

OU courses

Financial strategy

Making a difference

Capacities for managing development

Beginners’ Chinese

About the author

Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

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