As mentioned in the programme, many organisations are turning to automated call-handling systems, on-line self service systems and other forms of technology to interact with their customers. Customers can find these approaches off-putting at best – and absolutely maddening at worst, particularly when things go wrong. I am sure most of us have had occasions when we are trying to tell our bank, mobile phone operator, utility company or other service provider about a difficulty we are facing – and getting stuck in what seems like an endless loop of recorded messages, menus of options and requests to key in 16 digit customer passcodes!

However, in addition to providing a source of frustration, these systems also have other side-effects that may be even more detrimental for all of us. The increased use of technology, particularly information technology, to automate the customer interface means that increasing amounts of data about our use of services, our movements and our tastes and preferences are stored on databases of both private and public sector organisations.

For example, my local railway station has recently "retired" the gentleman that worked in the car park pay-station for many years. Rather than handing over coins and notes to pay for parking, while receiving a ticket and a cheery greeting from another human being, users of the car park now have the option of going online or sending a message via their mobile phone.

Rather than displaying a printed ticket on the windscreen, the online or phone booking and payment is recorded in the database of the car parking provider, and all cars in the car park are checked against this database. So, what was a previously private matter, where and when I parked my car, has now become an ongoing record in a corporate database. Replicate this over all the customer interactions that are now based on the use of IT and it is easy to see why many people are concerned about the amount of personal data that is held about all of us and hence the increased potential for misuse of that data. UK citizens are already viewed as the most surveyed in the world; data capture as a by-product of de-personalising the customer interface will simply add to this.

The subject of the collection and use of personal data both from consumers and from people in the workplace has formed a basis of ongoing research at the Open University Business School, see for instance Ball, Daniel, Dibb and Meadows (2009). This team of researchers, which have backgrounds in surveillance, information management and marketing, has recently won funding from the Leverhulme Trust to explore what they have termed “new uses of customer data”; that is, uses of data that customers may not be aware of or that firms are being required to undertake, for example, by regulators and law enforcement agencies.

"So, what was a previously private matter, where and when I parked my car, has now become an ongoing record in a corporate database."

 The focus of the work will be firms in the financial services and travel sectors, which is particularly relevant when two of the three guests on the programme are from the travel sector. Both the financial services and travel sectors espouse the benefits of customer relationship management and the related activities of customer profiling and segmentation. For these activities they collect and store considerable amounts of information on their customers, including personal details and a record of all their transactions and purchases. However, as the focus of the research suggests, this data may be used for purposes that are not obvious to those that are providing it and may have unforeseen side-effects or consequences, both for the individual customers involved and for society at large.

As more and more organisations make use of technology to automate their interfaces with their customers, this collection of data will increase. Indeed, as in the case of the use of my station car park, customers may not even be aware of the information about them that is being stored, let alone how it might one day be used.

Find out more

Open University Business School research project Taking Liberties: New Uses of Consumer Data in the UK

Who's watching you work? Surveillance in business

A Report on the Surveillance Society
by KS Ball, D Lyon, D. Murakami Wood, C Norris and C Raab, Surveillance Studies Network.

Democracy, surveillance and 'knowing what's good for you': the private sector origins of profiling and the birth of 'citizen relationship management
by KS Ball, E M Daniel, S Dibb and M Meadows
from Surveillance and Democracy
edited by M Samatas and K Haggerty

Coercion versus Care: Using Irony to Make Sense of Organisational Surveillance
by G Sewell and J Barker
from the Academy of Management Review, Volume 31, Number 4, pages 934-961

About the author

Elizabeth Daniel is Professor of Information Management at the Open University Business School where she undertakes research and teaching in the fields of e-business and information systems. Elizabeth also undertakes consultancy work for a number of blue chip and leading public sector organisations.

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Two millennia ago the great Roman historian and senator, Tacitus, advised the world that in a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous indeed. In the seventeenth century William Shakespeare’s Cardinal Wolsey confided that ‘corruption wins not more than honesty’. A century later Edward Gibbons told us that corruption was the most ‘infallible symptom of constitutional liberty’. And in the last century Mahatma Gandhi declared that corruption ‘need not be an inevitable product of democracy’, while former Prime Minister Anthony Eden thought that corruption had ‘never been compulsory’ and that there was always another way. All these wise sagacious words over the centuries, and yet, pardon me for observing, isn’t the scandal over politician expenses rather too predictable? We should have seen it coming.

Britain is perceived as becoming more and more corrupt according to the anti-corruption group

With increasing sleaze enveloping the Brown Government during 2009 at the peak of the recession, it is worth reminding ourselves of the findings of the corruption league table for nations, as produced each year by Transparency International. Their latest report was published before the scandal broke over the Prime Minister’s advisor’s email crisis in April 2009, before the controversy around MP second home allowances and before the fall out from the politician expenses furore this month.

Britain is perceived as becoming more and more corrupt according to the anti-corruption group. As examples Transparency International referred to Britain’s ‘wretched and woeful record’ in prosecuting business executives for paying bribes to foreign politicians and officials to win contracts, the plethora of political scandals about ‘cash for honours’ and the government’s decision to drop the investigation into allegations that BAE paid bribes to Saudi royals. These events contributed to a significant increase in the perceived level of corruption in Britain, with a corresponding fall from 12^th to 16^th place in the world corruption rankings between 2007 and 2008. This is the UK’s worst performance since 1995 when records began.

The survey, which focused upon how we are perceived by people in other countries, revealed that Denmark, New Zealand and Sweden shared top spot, followed by Singapore, Finland and Switzerland, with Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Burma and Somalia in the bottom five of 180 nations. The higher the corruption perception score, the lower the perceived degree of corruption within a country. In global terms it seems Britain compares relatively well but there are obvious grounds for improvement, even more so now that the world media have feasted on the slow seeping of allegations about the conduct of not so ‘honourable’ Members from all parties.

Britain’s ‘wretched and woeful record’ in prosecuting business executives

Remarkably, since Britain signed an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development global anti-corruption treaty in 1997, we have prosecuted only one person for bribing an official from another government. The Department of Business defended the government’s record in February this year, explaining that twenty bribery cases were currently being investigated following the only solitary successful prosecution in September 2008.

Is it therefore surprising that a government so reluctant to prosecute corruption turns a blind eye to failures of its own, even though, as MPs painfully keep repeating, they were only following guidelines; guidelines of course they themselves set. The herd instinct can have dangerous repercussions where integrity and honesty are questioned.

National media have been rightly appalled at the scale of the exposed expense racket. Whether it be to claim for second homes close to their first home, in one case a mere 100 yards from the second property, or to conveniently change the status of homes to suit their financial best interests, or make claims for repairs and maintenance on properties owned outright by a third party, MPs have badly exceeded the spirit of the guidelines. They have endorsed Gibbons but taken no notice of Eden’s warning.

But I was more concerned about claims for more everyday items, those items which you and I can only purchase with our own salaries.

These items include:

• Five pence for a carrier bag from a supermarket
• Christmas tree decorations
• Light bulbs
• Bin liners
• Lavatory seats
• Tampons
• Chandeliers
• Remembrance Day wreaths
• Lawnmowers and lawnmower repairs
• Moat maintenance
• Swimming pool cleaning
• Dog food
• Dog enclosure
• Chauffeurs
• An ironing board
• Slotted spoons
• Comics
• Nappies
• The removal of moles from a lawn
• Pipe repairs under a tennis court
• Sky sport subscriptions
• A pram
• Hanging baskets
• An IKEA bathrobe
• Mock Tudor beams
• Food when the Commons is no longer sitting
• Council tax discounts
• Coat hangers
• Sachets of mulled wine
• A mousetrap
• A lemon
• A wooden spoon
• A plug

Not to mention the John Lewis shopping list of Plasma television sets, furniture and fittings. Seriously, I ask you, since when is having a clean moat vital in order to be an effective Member of Parliament? And consider the other side of privilege - pensioners struggling on benefits or injured UK soldiers in hospital having to pay to watch television.

According to the Independent, Labour MPs have just been sent an email from the parliamentary Labour party informing them that media reports suggesting that ‘MPS are generally claiming excessively’ are not true. Some experts tell us the expense rip off is because we now have a ‘professional’ politician at Westminster. But I think this insults the integrity of many professionals working in Britain.

What seems clear is that the rising scandal over expenses damages the integrity of our political system. As Transparency International warned us last year we had already begun to slip down the corruption credibility league. I can imagine we may sink without trace once this lot is sorted out. If I were you check the Transparency International website next February and see where Britain has come in 2009. Out of the top thirty is my bet. For a Government obsessed with league tables this CPI league table is one the Government will want to hide from view.

By then of course we might have an ‘independent’ panel assessing all MP claims or a different system to fund second homes but something in what Ghandi told us persuades me that the next generation of MPs may find a way round even the most zealous of watchdogs. Give them a moral compass and they still would want to claim for it.

It gives me no pleasure at all to reflect that while many of these MPs may indeed lose their seats in the General Election of 2010 because of excessive expense claims a few will get to keep those lavatory seats we have paid for.

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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Lord Laming's review of children's services in England, announced on 12^th March, concluded that child protection issues in England had not had ‘the priority they deserved’ and that many of the reforms brought in after Victoria Climbie's death in 2000 had not been properly implemented. Laming referred to Social Work as a ‘Cinderella service’.

I think this is an intriguing metaphor, and worth exploring further. In the Cinderella folk story the heroine has attributes that are unrecognised and lie hidden, and after a period of brutality from those who are supposed to be caring for her, she unexpectedly achieves success and emerges from obscurity. Why might elements of this plot be so meaningful in relation to contemporary feelings about social workers?

I don’t think it was explicit, nor consciously in the mind of Lord Laming, but anyone who knows Cinderella will remember that this girl was the daughter of a man who remarried the ‘wicked stepmother’ who already had her own two daughters – the ‘ugly sisters’ of pantomime fun.

In modern parlance, she was abused daily and deemed to be no better than the cinders she was forced to sit in.

So this story has resonance in relation to the recent child abuse cases that we have become so familiar with in the media. I wonder if Laming had in mind more than just the idea that Cinderella is a good metaphor for how social workers are treated (under resourced and under-recognised). Did his choice of metaphor also imply that every day social workers must confront difficult and quite often very dangerous people, people who, like Cinderella’s stepmother, abuse and threaten children but who are experts in covering this up?

Cinderella rises above her ghastly situation, to marry the prince and live happily ever after. But there is no fairytale intervention for social workers, who must routinely deal with people whose minds, actions and ways of relating to others seem incomprehensible. Likewise and more importantly, there is no easy, failsafe way of preventing the most extreme forms of child abuse. To understand why, we have to understand something about the complex nature of the work that social workers routinely do.

when deeds are ‘evil’ it relieves us from the burden of further explanation

The notion of ‘evil’, which trips off the tabloid tongue so easily – and which was applied so readily to the child killers of Jamie Bulger – brings us to a halt in our understanding of what social workers have to face. This is because when deeds are conceptualised as ‘evil’ it relieves us from the burden of further explanation, even to our mostly secular contemporary minds. Evil is a coded way of stating the incomprehensibility of something. Even if governments seek to understand the causes of crime, to use Tony Blair’s famous phrase, large parts of popular opinion do not want to.

Among Lord Lamings’ findings was that ‘there had been an ‘over-emphasis on process and targets’, resulting in a ‘loss of confidence’ among social workers, who were overstretched and undertrained’ and that ‘progress was being “hampered” by an ‘over-complicated... tick-box assessment and recording system’. Many social workers concur, arguing that the emphasis on data-entry and record keeping has meant that less and less time is actually spent building relationships with family members that in itself is the key to detecting child abuse:

In his earlier report into the death of Victoria Climbié, Laming noted that parents were hostile and workers were frightened to visit their homes; and that ‘apparent or disguised cooperation from parents often prevented or delayed understanding of the severity of harm to the child, and cases drifted’. The latter was also a factor in the Baby P case, where the mother was adept at simulating compliance with social workers. Because of a lack of critical supervision that would have forced hard questioning of evidence, the social worker was allowed to assume that the mother was committed to improving her son’s care even though injuries occurred whilst he was with her.

Research shows that most people who abuse children over long periods are dedicated to disguising what is happening. It’s also clear that social workers along with doctors and police find it exceedingly difficult to confidently identify child abuse and torture. Their work is fundamentally interpretative, under conditions of extreme pressure and anxiety. In confronting a suspected child abuser a fierce, aggressive denial is normally the response. Are they rightly or wrongly accused? Whose version of reality is correct? Upon what basis do you make a judgement, which has serious consequences, especially when breaking up a family is now considered to be the last resort?

We are very familiar with popular narratives in film and television where we as the audience are held in suspense, not knowing for some time if the hero is actually a villain. As his actions slowly become more risky or mores suspicious to others we start to see, through their eyes, that s/he is not as first appeared. But we expect social workers to straightforwardly ‘know’ when child abuse is happening and being covered up and when it isn’t.

At the same time, social workers who act to remove a child from its parents because of suspected or known abuse are all too frequently accused of representing the overbearing power of the state, interfering in the private sphere of sacred family life. Social workers are vilified when children are removed from their parents because it is unthinkable that parents could intentionally harm their children and when this happens, social workers represent the flaunting of the unthinkable under our noses.

It seems therefore that social workers can’t ever win. Unlike others of their colleagues who care for children colleagues in the public sector such as doctors, nurses, police and teachers, who may at times achieve heroic status, social workers are the object of perpetual social anxiety and aggression. So perhaps there are obvious reasons why they will never be loved by the public. If we barely understand the nature of their work and would rather not understand it (we certainly seem unable to realise that they do succeed in keeping most children safe, day after day) that is because on behalf of us all they must not only directly encounter extremely distressing and terrorising human behaviour but also make life and death decisions in these circumstances.

If we who are not social workers find it hard to ‘think the unthinkable’, that mothers and fathers can intentionally harm their children, then we should remember that social workers in the field of child protection are confronted with having to think this every day. Inevitably, if they are under extreme pressure due to unfilled posts, lack of supervision and overloaded cases, their capacity to do this thinking is undermined. If they are not enabled to do the work of social work properly and with an emphasis on quality – with good, critical and experienced supervisors, time to develop relationships with children and families seen separately as well as together – social workers and the children they protect will never emerge from a Cinderella status.

Further reading

An interesting article by Eileen Munro of the London School of Economics argues that the reforms made in the wake of Laming’s report on Victoria Climbié’s death have weakened the quality of social work.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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