‘It is…no exaggeration to think that a society (or the state of a society) may be defined by the character of the tests it sets itself, through which the social selection of people is conducted, and by conflicts over the more or less just nature of those tests.’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005:32)
The Apprentice is a ‘reality’ show. Week by week the contestants battle alongside and against other candidate apprentices in business tasks – for instance selling fish, designing ads, or running a laundry. In the ‘balloon debate’ format typical of such shows, one by one and episode by episode the wannabe apprentices are removed from the game – denied the winner’s opportunity to earn a ‘six figure salary’ and become the master’s apprentice. One winner remains. He or she will be the Apprentice.
Each episode is followed by a reflective post-rejection inquest sister show (The Apprentice: You’re fired). The loser is interviewed and asked to give an account of his or her actions. A panel of experts picks over the episode, reframing contestants’ and judges’ decisions, justifications and mistakes. Via The Apprentice and its attendant formats the BBC is broadcasting (for the 7 million-plus viewers weekly) a highly successful and dramatic representation of the business world, and staging attendant debates about the values, subjectivities and cultural mores at play in this stylised approximation of ‘the City’.
As with most reality TV shows, critical discussion leads rapidly into the terrain of ‘love-it or hate it’. Nor is there any need here to add to the numerous indignant or baffled criticisms aimed at individual participants circulating via press, blogs and in water-cooler conversations. Assessments of candidates’ brash salesmanship, cultural ignorance, poor spelling, arrogant narcissism and rampant materialism are not especially the point. Nor is there any need to admire incidents in the show suggesting creativity or good sense on the part of candidates.
Sir Alan Sugar is not in the dock here either (for once), e.g. for espousing this or that aspect of his ‘no nonsense’ profit-over-people maxims, or for his occasionally ‘old fashioned’ excursions into the politics of gender. The interaction between Sir Alan (the ‘master’’) and the putative apprentices (quaking in their boots or indulging in some unlikely posturing in the face of their failures), is central to our experience of the show. Here however there is no brief (nor any qualification) to join in with the boardroom debates.
Instead The Apprentice and its spin off show are considered on the grounds that they constitute a popular text focused on the formulation and mobilisation of broad cultural engagement with business ethos. The game and its commentary constitute a cultural artefact akin in some ways to the written management texts examined by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) in their analysis of The New Spirit of Capitalism.
Two points of difference are apparent. First The Apprentice is televisual, and it is entertainment – as opposed to being in didactic book form, as per Boltanski and Chiapello’s exemplars. Secondly The Apprentice audience is drawn from a broad range of people, only a few of whom might actively identify with the entrepreneurial-management ambitions rehearsed. Nevertheless the show is of interest as a public-cultural space which opens up thinking (and feelings) about two (complex) objects: business values and the City of London.
The opening shots of the UK series of The Apprentice, backed by Prokofiev’s imposing ‘Dance of the Knights’ from Romeo and Juliet, comprise perhaps the most recognisable credit sequences in UK television. The programme’s incidental music punctuates each episode with (now, after the fourth series) highly resonant snippets, lending drama and affective charge to the business activities depicted. But it is not the sound or sensibilities attached to The Apprentice episodes that are most arresting for inhabitants of East London. The Apprentice offers a particular vision of and for London – and its eastern quarters in particular.
It is commonplace to point out the ways in which cities ‘star’ in novels, film and lately TV. Sex and the City is all about New York, as are Woody Allen’s comedies (Manhattan and Annie Hall in particular). Inspector Morse is more or less a televisual hymn to Oxford. In each case the city-vision provides an ethos. It becomes both set and set up: an interruptive backdrop that at times supports and at others undermines actors’ particular urbanity. This city-envisioning trope has now entered the Reality TV genre. The urban-imagery cut into The Apprentice, like its musical score, drives the sense, the sensibility and the culture of events as they unfold.
The Apprentice liberally deploys wide angle helicopter shots and iconic vistas to cast, or perhaps to recast a particular conception of the East End. As Jonathan Freedland puts it in a recent review: ‘London never looked so good’ (Freedland: 2006 ). This is Boyer’s (1995). ‘figured city’ writ large. The Canary Wharf tower looms imposingly in the credits and throughout the show; an iconic reminder, seemingly waiting to catch our eye in moments when we might pause for thought. The implication is that Sir Alan, flanked by his trusty aides Margaret and Nick, might occasionally look out across the infamous blue-white under-lit boardroom table1 from the heights of the (panopt-)iconic tower: pondering judgement and justification.
Those who take pleasure in myth-busting enjoy the fact of the matter, which is that the real Amstrad offices (Sir Alan’s corporate headquarters) are in less glamorous Brentwood – in suburban Essex, geographically and architecturally some way off from Canary Wharf and its silver-smoke-mirror-sky lines. The spectacular urban development obsessively featured in the show was designed to stand monumentally in opposition to the old landscape of an East London whose history lies primarily in manufacture, the docks and other activities concerned with processing industrial products. The opening credits of The Apprentice – as helicopter shots span river and skyline – are a reminder that the new city is geographically close to the old one; yet week-by-week the show itself ritually explores the distance dividing the new city from its various pasts.
Pitched between light entertainment and familiar reality-documentary formats, The Apprentice stands as a meaningful examination of ‘the business world’. Verisimilitude and educational content are not to the fore (Huber 2008; Hird 2007). But in amongst the reality genre-staples – idiocy, rows and tears – there is something else. The format invites reflection: justification and the elaboration, in theory and practice, of competing ‘scripts’. Versions of ‘business’ are hinted at. Differing ethos becomes personified in candidates; in Sir Alan, too; and with understated gravitas, in his ‘eyes and ears’, the experienced mentor/auditors Nick and Margaret. From within the series values begin to crystallise, emerging across the boardroom table and during tasks; between statements, judgements and justifications. Unstable and partial as these emerging scripts are, something engaging is transacted across the screen.
The show assertively draws out a ritual sense of interplay between business, personal triumph, and, more often than not: failure. Sugar’s finger-pointing catch phrase, ‘You’re fired!’, has entered workplace and playground – uttered usually with a comedic irony that nevertheless is charged (in a minor way) with the anxiety of living in Robert H Frank’s ‘Winner-take-it-all-society’ (Frank and Cook 1996).
The Apprentice, understood as cultural site for disputation on the business of ‘the City’, its ethos and justification of activities, is of a piece with the contemporary urge to enervate the world of business; to efface abstraction and to make ‘the City’ live and breathe. ‘Creativity’ (or the inspirational city) has been one strategic watchword deployed to close the gap between the office2 and the imagination (though Sir Alan gives short shrift to creativity’s ‘hippy-ish’ and ‘romantic’ tendencies). The Apprentice takes another route to enliven us. It stages the business world, melodramatically playing upon the emotional labour of controversy and justification. It serves as a means to activate engagement, overcoming the sense of disconnection between commerce and culture.
In 1998 Peter Mandelson, then secretary of state for Trade and Industry made the following claim in a speech to the CBI:
‘We want a society that celebrates and values its business heroes as much as it does its pop stars and footballers. So we must remove the barriers to enterprise in this country. Reward risk taking. Encourage innovation and creativity. Seek to emulate the successful formula of the United States' dynamism and enterprise.’ (Mandelson 1998)
Mandelson was cheered by those in the hall. More widely his plea for an Americanisation of British scepticism regarding commerce was treated with suspicion – and even ridicule. However, Mandelson was giving voice to a significant anxiety. Enterprise and business – for all the wealth and success attaching to them – seemed to lack credibility (if not, at the time, credit). Writing at broadly the same juncture, Boltanski and Chiapello make the following point:
‘It seems to us scarcely open to doubt that at an ideological level…capitalism will face increasing difficulties, if it does not restore some grounds for hope to those whose engagement is required for the functioning of the system as a whole.’ (Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: xliii)
As Mandelson (1998) put it, ‘The creation of an enterprise culture in Britain requires not only a government that backs it, but also workforces that are committed to it, and believe in it.’
The Apprentice programme package is not exactly – or purely – propaganda for capitalism, and certainly not a critique of it. Nevertheless it attempts to perform, or, rather, attempts to address an appetite for ‘an ideological reconstruction [of business ethos] to demonstrate that the world of work does indeed still possess a “meaning”.’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005:29)
The show owes its success in part to the existence of doubts about the world of work, especially a world of work somewhat cut off from the visceral liveliness re-embodied and mythologised on screen (primarily) in Sir Alan and his interactions with acolytes and apprentices. To the candidates and throughout the show Sir Alan (alongside Nick and Margaret) comes to represent a kind of lost ‘past’ and an ideal future. The apprentice will inherit a living legacy of engaged and engaging work – topped off with a good salary. This prize addresses a fantasy on the part of the apprentices’ primarily, but also (and with varying degrees of vicarious dis-identification) on the part of the audience also. This is a fantasy of meaningful, rewarding and sustainably interesting work.
Sections of the audience are sometimes critical of the lengths to which candidates are prepared to go to win. The show trades too on critical speculations regarding the foolhardy desperation or other motives evident in candidates’ decisions to take part in the show. These responses point beyond their targets and hint at dissatisfaction with the contemporary ‘City’ and its ethos; but there is also a kind for admiration for it – admiration which the show makes visible. Similarly, Sir Alan’s harsh judgements may be criticised as abrasive; yet in the intelligibility and concreteness of his positions, the audience recognises a significant and engaging counterpoint to the abstract unintelligibility of contemporary business discourse.
The link to the City and Canary Wharf in particular, merits further consideration. As briefly mentioned, this is not just a programme about people and values. It is also a designation of a place. In particular (in the UK version), the show is connected to Canary Wharf tower, i.e. to the new City. Many of the city vistas pan from Canary Wharf to the Gherkin – the Eastern enclave of London’s financial centre differentiated from, but also linking back to the Square Mile. In a sense the programme is as much about place as it is about people. It enacts a competition between competing versions of the city and ‘the City’.
Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: 24-6) offer a useful typology here (fig 1). They understand the relationship between the various regimes of accumulation in terms of different ‘cities’. Each ‘city’ (as they term it) identifies and is identified in the enactment of specific clusters of ideal typical values – underpinning a kind of regime validating ‘success’. They describe thus ‘cities’ as sites for justification (in terms of an appeal to ethos) of particular values affirming status and worth. The moral ‘architecture’ corroborating value and justification in specific moments makes for the character of ‘the city’.
| Business ‘cities’: criteria for status and justification adapted from Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: 24-6) | ||
| Ethos | “city” | Justification of decisions and judgements made primarily in terms of… |
| Here the ethos depends upon a performative valorising of creativity, authenticity, artistry and so on. Also some valuing of religious purity / integrity etc. | The inspirational city | Authenticity and creativity. The scripts of romantic individualism, non-conformity and ‘zaniness’. To what extent is there evidence of creative risk taking? It is carried credibly. |
| Here status depends on respect for tradition, seniority and on enacting reciprocal dependencies allied to familial and generational structures. The ‘great man’ as elder, sage and protector | The domestic city | Respect for elders and continuity of concern with past values and approaches. To what extent does the candidate offer deference to the knowledge/experience of his elders? |
| Here Status depends on the opinion of others. This is the city of ‘celebrity culture’ or, more soberly, of reputation systems and good conduct dependent upon ‘the community view’. | The reputational city | The standing of the individual amongst members of important reference groups. What do peers, customers and other colleagues think of the candidate? |
| Here status is established via political power. How fully and how well does ‘the great man’ represent his constituency, his team, his firm and so on. | The civic city | The capacity to represent fairly, to subordinate their own views or aims within the task of representing and respecting the formal views of the group he or she might represent. Includes commitment to social justice as a guiding value |
| Here status is marked by wealth and acumen in the provision of commodities in the market | The commercial city | The profit motive. How much money has the candidate made. Was he or she successful in selling profitably? |
| Here status is primarily a matter of professional or other competence including efficiency and the capacity to ‘graft’. | The industrial city | Expertise and technical skill. Was the candidate exhibiting know-how and applying expertise in the delivery of this or that task |
The show (and the reflective after show, where judgement and justification are picked over again and again), together comprise – and make a space for – a ritual enactment of our sense of ‘the city’. The ‘city’ referred to is, variously and at once, a purely thematic concept (e.g. domestic, reputational. commercial etc.) denoting a cluster of values, a specific location-in transition, i.e. the span linking ‘The City of London’ between the square mile and Canary Wharf tower so avidly traced in the show. And, for the audience, the city is also an approximation of an inner world of judgement, as the show affords moments demanding evaluative interventions on the part of viewers mobilising their adherence to this or that city, or, more likely, this or that hybrid combination of ‘cities’: a city of the mind and of aspiration. The show invites the private formulation via public discussion of ‘the good city’.
Sir Alan, for his part, appears to judge primarily in terms of the ‘commercial city’ – with some deference to ‘the industrial city’, and is widely criticised for a narrow conception of what really counts in business and for an overly mercantile morality. Critique aside, Sir Alan is enacting an important ritual task in the cultural performance – presenting a version of the old to expose and test emergent and ‘new’ scripts. As Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 put it:
‘The spirit of capitalism is transformed to respond to the need to justification by people who are engaged in the capitalist accumulation process at a given moment, but whose values and representations, inherited as a cultural legacy, are still associated with earlier forms of accumulation.’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005:21)
The drama of the show then comes from a clash of generations and a clash of ‘cities’. This clash is interesting in the context of the credit crunch since as Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) suggest, the world of work has become somewhat abstract. It is at a remove from the sets of activities associated with previous regimes of accumulation, i.e. it is disconnected from established ‘cities’ i.e. the instituted regimes of accumulation and legitimation governing economic activity. Whether or not this is the case, the credit crunch is widely understood to be a consequence of city-workers losing touch, geographically, morally and technically with ‘runaway’ trends in global markets working in a city that has itself lost touch with ‘fundamentals’. Thus:
‘The deregulation of credit markets, their decompartmentalisation, and the creation of ‘new financial products’ have multiplied the possibilities of purely speculative profits, whereby capital expands without taking the form of investment in productive activity’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005:XXXvii)
This observation tallies up with a specific sense of the credit crunch and pervasive feelings about a disconnection between Canary Wharf (and the city that it represents) and ‘the real economy’. In this context we are reminded that there ought to be a moral element in the institutional landscape of the city, as well as an economic and and architectural one.
The Apprentice’s sorcery lies here. There is magic in the ethos of business entrepreneurship, of tooth and claw failure and success, of horse sense and canny living-on-your-wits deal-making as celebrated in the show. The mythology of industrial-commercial business success embodied in the figure of Sir Alan Sugar has little or nothing to do with the financial services industries which occupy Canary Wharf. The Apprentice seems to let us look inside the boardroom, to see for ourselves. Yet audiences also know that they are seeing nothing and nowhere of the kind. The Apprentice in all its dissimulation promises access to some kind of fascinating and appalling ‘primal scene’. We would rather Sir Alan’s boardroom were true than acknowledge what we really fear – that there is nothing intelligible there at all.
The popularity of the show seems to point to an intuition that something is rotten in the heart of the contemporary city. The abstraction, disconnection and disorientation evident through and around the credit crunch point also to a credibility crunch. The popularity and engaging controversies of The Apprentice – and the love/hate relationship with Canary Wharf and its imagined inhabitants, unreal as any reality TV show might be, has nevertheless a certain truth attached to it. There is a desire for business to become intelligible. There is a desire for appropriate and sustainable regimes of justification to warrant and monitor status, behaviour and reward. There is a desire to hold to account and, when failure is absolute and indefensible, there is a desire for a position from which to utter: You’re fired!
Dr Iain Macrury is Director of the London East Research Institute
© 2009
Speculation makes for more efficient markets with lower transaction costs, so condemnation of speculation as wasteful should be tempered.
Michael Savage
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