The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

ISBN-13: 9781451644746

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: 09-27-2016

Pages: 304

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

Gillian Tett chairs the editorial board, US, for the Financial Times and writes columns for the world’s leading newspaper covering finance, business, and the political economy. She has been named British Journalist of the Year, Columnist of the Year, and Business Journalist of the Year in the UK and won two Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing awards in the US. She speaks regularly at conferences around the world on finance and global markets and has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University. Tett is the author of Saving the Sun: How Wall Street Mavericks Shook Up Japan’s Financial World and Made Billions, Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe, and The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers.

Read an Excerpt

The Silo Effect
“Every established order tends to make its own entirely arbitrary system seem entirely natural.”

—Pierre Bourdieu1

IT WAS A DARK WINTER’S evening in 1959 in Béarn, a tiny village in a remote corner of South West France. In a brightly lit hall, a Christmas dance was under way. Dozens of young men and women were gyrating to 1950s jive music. The women wore full skirts that swirled around them, the men sharp, close-cut suits.2 On the edge of the crowd, Pierre Bourdieu, a Frenchman in his thirties with an intense, craggy face, stood watching, taking photographs and careful mental notes. In some senses, he was at “home” in that dancehall: he had grown up in the valley many years earlier, the son of peasants, and spoke Gascon, a local dialect of French that was impossible for Parisians to understand. But in other senses, Bourdieu was an outsider: as a precociously brilliant child, he had left the village two decades earlier on a scholarship, and studied at an elite university in Paris. Then he traveled to Algeria, serving as a soldier in the brutal civil war, before becoming an academic.

That gave him an odd insider-outsider status. He knew the dancers’ world well, but he was no longer merely a creature of this tiny environment. He could imagine a universe beyond Béarn and a different way of arranging a dance. And when he looked around at that hall, with that insider-outsider vision, he could see something to which his own friends were blind. In the center of the hall, there was light and action: the dancers were doing the jive. That was the only thing that the villagers wanted to watch, or would ever remember from that night. Dance halls, after all, are supposed to be all about dancing. But “standing at the edge of the dancing area, forming a dark mass, a group of older men look[ed] on in silence,” as Bourdieu later wrote. “All aged about thirty, they wear berets and unfashionably cut dark suits. As if drawn in by the temptation to join the dance, they move forward, narrowing the space left for the dancers . . . but do not dance.”3 That part of the hall was not what people were supposed to watch; it was being ignored. But it was nevertheless present, as much as the dancers. “There they all are, all the bachelors!” Bourdieu observed. The people in that hall had somehow divided themselves and classified each other into two camps. There were dancers and non-dancers.

But why had that separation occurred? Bourdieu had received a clue to the answer a few days earlier, when he met up with an old school friend. At one point, the man had produced an ancient prewar photo, depicting their classmates as children. “My fellow pupil, by then a low-ranking clerk in the neighbouring town, commented on [the photo], pitilessly intoning ‘un-marriageable!’ with reference to almost half [the pictures],”4 Bourdieu wrote. It was not intended as an insult, but as a description. Numerous men in the village were finding it impossible to find wives, because they had become unattractive—at least as culturally defined by local women.

This “unmarriageable” problem reflected radical economic change. Until the early twentieth century, most of the families around Béarn were farmers, and their eldest sons were typically the most powerful and wealthy men, as they inherited the farms according to local tradition. Eldest sons were thus considered catches for local women, particularly compared to the younger sons who often had to leave the land in search of a living. But in postwar France, the pattern had changed: agriculture was declining and the men who could leave the farms were seeking better paid jobs in town. Many young women were moving to the cities in search of work. The older sons, who were tethered by tradition to the farms, were being left behind. On a day-to-day basis, the villagers did not articulate that distinction. But the classification system was constantly being expressed and reinforced in a host of tiny, seemingly mundane, cultural symbols that had come to seem natural. To the villagers in Béarn it seemed obvious that 1950s jive music, full skirts and tight male suits, were a cool, urban phenomenon; if you could dance, that signaled that you were part of the modern world, and therefore marriageable.

What really intrigued Bourdieu, though, was not just why this economic change had occurred, but why anyone accepted this classification system and the unspoken cultural norms. This distinction between marriageable and unmarriageable men—or people who could or could not jive—had not been imposed in any formal manner. Nobody had conducted a public debate on the matter. There were no official rules in 1950s France that banned farmers from doing the jive or stopped them from learning the dance steps, buying a few suits, and just jumping into the ring. But somehow those men were banning themselves: they had voluntarily placed themselves in a social category that indicated they “could not dance.” And the implications for those men were heartbreaking. “I think of an old school friend, whose almost feminine tact and refinement endeared him to me,” Bourdieu observed, noting that his friend “had chalked on the stable door the birthdates of his mares and the girls’ names he had given them” as a sad protest against his “unmarriageable” state and lonely life.5

So why didn’t the men protest against their tragic state? Why not just start dancing? And why didn’t the girls realize that they were ignoring half the men? Why, in fact, do any human beings accept the classification systems we inherit from our surroundings? Especially when these social norms and categories are potentially damaging?

A POSTWAR DANCE HALL in Béarn lies a long way from Bloomberg’s City Hall, in terms of geography and culture. Marriage strategies do not have much in common with banks. But in another sense, French peasants and New York bureaucrats are inextricably linked. What these two worlds share in common—along with every society that anthropologists have ever studied—is a tendency to use formal and informal classification systems and cultural rules to sort the world into groups and silos. Sometimes we do this in a formal manner, with diagrams and explicit rules. But we often do it amid thousands of tiny, seemingly irrelevant cultural traditions, rules, symbols, and signals that we barely notice because they are so deeply ingrained in our environment and psyche. Indeed, these cultural norms are so woven into the fabric of our daily lives that they make the classification system we use seem so natural and inevitable that we rarely think about it at all.

Insofar as anyone can tell, this process of classification is an intrinsic part of being human. It is one of the things that separate us from animals. There is a good reason for that: on a day-to-day basis, we are all surrounded by so much complexity that our brains could not think or interact if we were could not create some order by classifying the world into manageable chunks. The seemingly trivial issue of telephone numbers helps to illustrates this. Back in the 1950s, a psychology professor at Harvard named George Miller studied how short-term memory worked among people who operated telegraph systems and telephones. This research showed that there is a natural limit to how many pieces of data a human brain can remember when it is shown a list of digits or letters.6 Miller believed that this natural limit ranged between five and nine data points, but the average was “the magic number seven.” Other psychologists subsequently suggested it is nearer to four. Either way, his conclusion also contained a crucial caveat: if the brain learns to “chunk” data, by sorting it into groups—akin to the process of creating a mental filing cabinet—more information can be retained. Thus if we visualize numbers as chunks of digits we retain them, but not if they are a single unbroken series of numbers. “A man just beginning to learn radiotelegraphic code hears each dit and dah as a separate chunk. [But] soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters and then he can deal with the letters as chunks . . . [then] as words, which are still larger chunks, and [then] he begins to hear whole phrases,”7 Miller explained. “Recoding is an extremely powerful weapon for increasing the amount of information that we can deal with.”

This process applies to longer-term memory too. Psychologists have noted that our brains often operate with so-called mnemonics, or mental markers, which enable us to group together our ideas and memories on certain topics to make them easy to remember. This is the neurological equivalent, as it were, of creating files of ideas inside an old-fashioned filing cabinet, with colorful, easy-to-see (and remember) labels on the topic. Sometimes this processing of clustering is conscious. More often it is not, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman has noted.8 Either way clustering ideas into bundles enables us to create order and arrange our thoughts. “You can’t think or make decisions, let alone create new ideas . . . without using a range of mental models to simplify things,” argue Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny, two management consultants. “Nobody can deal with the many complicated aspects of real life without first placing things in such boxes.”9

This need to classify the world, however, does not just apply to our internal mental processes. Social interaction requires shared classification systems too. This, after all, is what a language is at its core: namely a commonly held agreement between people about what verbal sounds will represent which buckets of ideas. However, societies or social groups have cultural norms too, which shape how people use space, interact with each other, behave, and think. A crucial part of those shared social norms—if not the central element of a “culture”—is a commonly held set of ideas about how to classify the world, and impose a sense of order. Just as our brains need to classify the world to enable us to think, societies need to have a shared taxonomy to function. Back in the seventeenth century, the French philosopher René Descartes observed “I think, therefore I am” (or, to cite what he actually wrote in Latin and French respectively, “cogito ergo sum,” or “je pense, donc je suis”).10 But it is equally true to say “I classify, therefore I think and am a social being.”

But while the act of classification is universal, the way we do it is not: different societies use a wide range of classification systems to organize the world. These vary even when dealing with issues that seem to be universal, such as natural phenomena. In theory, the way humans experience colors should be consistent. We all live in the same universe, with the same spectrum of light, and most of us have similar eyeballs (except for individuals prone to color blindness). But in practice, human societies do not classify colors in the same way. For decades Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, worked with Paul Kay, a linguist, to study how languages around the world described the color spectrum.11 They found at least seven different patterns: some groups in Africa seemed to divide the world into merely three color buckets (roughly, red, black, and white), but some Western cultures used five times as many categories. That finding prompted Caroline Eastman and Robin Carter, two cognitive anthropologists (or people who work in a subset of the discipline analyzing culture and the mind), to conclude that while the color spectrum may be a universal, the way we classify it is not. “Colors can be represented as a grid showing a variation of wavelengths (hues) and brightness,” Eastman and Carter wrote. “Each color term represents a region on this grid containing a focal point which is generally agreed to be described by that color term. [But] although there is general agreement on the foci both across cultures and within cultures, there is much less agreement on the boundaries.”12

The way that other parts of the natural world are classified varies as well. Birds are found almost everywhere around the world. But some cultures consider birds to be an animal, and do not differentiate between birds; others make precise distinctions. The English word “seagull,” for example, is not a category that translates easily into other languages. Similarly, different animal categories can have different associations in different places. Jared Diamond, for example, has looked at how different cultures around the world define their fauna and flora. (Diamond sometimes defines himself as an “environmental anthropologist,” which is a another subset of the discipline.) He points out that while the concept of a “horse” is associated with meat in France, and a “cat” viewed that way in China, those categories of animals are not classified as “edible” in a place such as America.13

The taxonomy of social relationships varies even more. Sexual reproduction is universal. However, anthropologists and linguists have discovered at least six different systems for “mapping” kin in different societies around world (in cultural anthropology courses at universities these are known as the “Sudanese,” “Hawaiian,” “Eskimo,” “Iroquois,” “Omaha,” and “Crow” systems). There is even greater variation in how societies organize their space, define jobs, imagine the cosmos, organize economic activities, or track time. In some cultures, “cooking” is classified as a uniquely female job, performed by women inside the domestic sphere. But in suburban America, when cooking entails a barbecue and meat, it is often classified as a “male” pursuit. Similarly, in Jewish culture, Saturday is classified as a holy day; however, in Muslim culture it is Friday, while in Christian cultures it is Sunday. In many non-Western societies—such as tribes in the Amazon—there is no sense of a seven-day week at all, far less a weekend. So too with dance. Numerous societies have rituals for dancing. However, in some societies dancing is classified as a religious activity. In others it is considered profane, or the very opposite of sacred. In some places, men do not dance with women, but in other cultures the whole point of dancing is that men and women should dance together. The only element that is absolutely common to all these diverse situations is that wherever and however people dance, eat, cook, arrange their space or family lives, they tend to assume that their own particular way of behaving is “natural,” “normal,” or “inevitable”—and they usually consider that the way that other people dance (and classify the world) is not. This variety illustrates a simple, but crucially important, point: the patterns that we use to organize our lives are often a function of nurture, not nature. That makes them fascinating to analyze. And one person who had a particularly interesting perspective on them was the man who stood watching the dancers—and nondancers—in the Béarn hall, namely Pierre Bourdieu, one of the fathers of modern anthropology.

BOURDIEU NEVER SET OUT to be an anthropologist. He spent the early years of his life assuming that the best way to make sense of the world—if not the only way—was to study philosophy. It seemed a natural assumption, given that he came of age in postwar France, at a time when philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre commanded extraordinary popular prestige. “One became a philosopher [then] because one had been consecrated and one consecrated oneself by securing the prestigious identity of a ‘philosopher,’ Bourdieu explained.14 And Bourdieu was hungry for an identity. He was born in 1930 in Denguin, a tiny hamlet close to Béarn, and his father was a sharecropper-turned-postman who never completed his education. At the age of eleven Bourdieu won a scholarship to attend a boarding school in Pau, a city down in the valley. But it was a scarring experience. As a rural peasant in a sea of wealthier, urban children from Pau, Bourdieu felt inferior. “I think that Flaubert was not entirely wrong in thinking that ‘someone who has known boarding school has learned, by the age of twelve, almost everything about life,’”15 he observed. “I lived my life [at boarding school] in a state of stubborn fury . . . caught between two worlds.”

In an effort to fit in, he excelled at his lessons and played rugby with ferocious passion; the sport was wildly popular in South West France. But French society was a stratified, class-ridden place, where people were classified into groups though numerous subtle signals, embedded in language, demeanor, culture, and posture. Bourdieu felt an outsider and he constantly rebelled against the ferocious discipline. “The old seventeenth century [school] building, vast and rebarbative, with its immense corridors, the walls white above and dark green below, or the monumental stone staircases . . . left no secret corner for our own solitude, no refuge, no respite,”16 he recalled. “The adult man who writes this does not know how to do justice to the child who lived through these experiences, his times of despair and rage, his longing for vengeance.”

At seventeen, Bourdieu escaped by winning a scholarship to the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris to study philosophy. After graduating with a high mark, he embarked on a postgraduate research program to explore the epistemology (or knowledge system) of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another revered early-twentieth-century French intellectual giant, who worked as a phenomenological philosopher. But then his life took an unexpected turn. In 1955, at the age of twenty-five, Bourdieu was called up to perform military service. Usually, elite students just served as officers in pleasant rural locations. But when Bourdieu was summoned, a bloody civil war had started to loom to the south. Although France had ruled Algeria for over a hundred years, Algerian rebels were demanding independence. Bourdieu told his military superiors that he strongly opposed the Algerian War on principle, since (like many young French intellectuals), he loathed colonialism. The army punished him by assigning him to the front line. “I first landed in the Army Psychological Service in Versailles, following a very privileged route reserved for students of the Ecole Normale,” he explained. “But heated arguments with high-ranking officers who wanted to convert me to [support] “L’Algérie Française” [French-run Algeria] soon earned me a reassignment.”17

In the summer of 1955 Bourdieu traveled south across the Mediterranean on a boat, in a military unit “made up of all the illiterates of Mayenne and Normandy and a few recalcitants.”18 On the ship he “tried in vain to indoctrinate my fellow soldiers” to oppose the war. But the soldiers already had a strong set of prejudices about Algeria and deeply held views about how the Algerians should be classified. “Even before setting foot in Algeria, they had acquired and assimilated the whole vocabulary of everyday racism [with] extreme submissiveness towards the military hierarchy,” he lamented. Isolated, Bourdieu spent months in a desert town called Orléansville, defending an ammunition dump against guerrilla attacks, before being reassigned to Algiers, the capital.

As the war escalated, Bourdieu doggedly worked on his doctoral project out of a tiny bunk room in a military garrison in Algiers. Academic reflections offered one welcome escape from the horrors of a war that Bourdieu considered unjust. But he steadily became disillusioned with philosophy too. Back in the rarefied, safe, intellectual atmosphere of Paris, Bourdieu had believed—like many young French intellectuals—that the abstract philosophy of thinkers such as Sartre or Merleau-Ponty offered the perfect key to understanding the world. But amid the horror of Algerian War, it seemed ridiculous to think that abstract philosophy alone could explain real life. By late 1955 Algerian rebels were not just mounting attacks on ammunition dumps, but slitting the throats of French military personnel and civilians. The French army was using brutal tactics to fight back. They staged house-to-house raids, arrested thousands of suspected rebels, tortured captives, bombed villages, and resettled tens of thousands of people, out of their mountain villages into sterile, quasi-camps. So Bourdieu changed tack, and decided to write a book about real life in Algeria, instead of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty. “[I wanted] to tell the French people . . . what was really going on in a country of which they knew next to nothing . . . in order to be some use, and perhaps also to stave off the guilty conscience of the helpless witness of an abominable war.”19 And to do so, he turned to a discipline that was just starting to become fashionable, due to the writings of French academic Claude Lévi-Strauss: the world of anthropology.

TO SOME PEOPLE, BOURDIEU’S interest in anthropology might have seemed baffling. Anthropology has often been considered a strange discipline: difficult to define and for outsiders to understand. It is simultaneously everywhere in modern intellectual thought, but nowhere. The word comes from the Greek (anthropos literally means “the study of man”) and the first recorded example of somebody trying to study human culture in a systematic way probably appears in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus in 450 BC. (When he wrote about the battles between the Greeks and Persians, Herodotus devoted a considerable amount to an analysis of the cultural differences that he saw, comparing and describing them as distinct social systems and patterns.)20 Then, during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the concept of anthropology reappeared when men such as David Hume declared a desire to “study the nature of mankind.”21 But in the nineteenth century, this endeavor turned into a full-fledged academic discipline. “When anthropology was born, shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century, two factors, above all others, determined its form,” as Ernest Gellner, an anthropologist, notes. “Darwinism and colonialism.”22 The nineteenth-century elite in Europe and America felt a need to understand the “alien” peoples that they were encountering in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (usually because they wanted to control them, tax them, or convert them to Christianity, or all three). Meanwhile, the emergence of Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution was sparking a passionate debate and interest in the question of what it meant to be human. Just as biologists and zoologists were trying to understand how the animal kingdom evolved, historians and social scientists became interested in studying how “primitive” peoples had developed over the centuries into “advanced” societies. One facet of this inquiry revolved around the physical evolution of humans. Another, though, focused on the social and cultural evolution. “The European and North American conquests of extensive regions previously inhabited only by simpler societies inevitably inspired the idea that these populations could be used as surrogate time machines,” Gellner notes. “Anthropology was born out of an intense curiosity about the past, about human origins.”23

One of the first men who blazed a path on this intellectual road was James Frazer, a nineteenth-century Scottish intellectual. He collected extensive data on myths and legends from around the world, and collated these into a highly influential book, The Golden Bough, which explored how human consciousness and culture had moved from being “primitive” to “civilized.” Numerous other anthropologists took a similarly evolutionary approach. But at the turn of the century Franz Boas embarked on a similar project with the Native Americans. Boas had started his academic career as a botanist, but during a trip to the Arctic he became fascinated by how the Eskimos classified snow, and dove into cultural anthropology instead. He then switched his attention to the Native Americans, gathering artifacts and material about their customs and “primitive” minds, which he plotted into groups. But then he floated a striking idea: maybe it was wrong to assume that humans always evolved in a social sense along a single path. Perhaps culture should be studied on its own terms.

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, this antievolutionary idea spread: anthropologists gradually moved away from their earlier assumptions that non-Western cultures were always inferior, or less developed than the cultures of Europe or America. They could not always be squeezed into patronizing historical models.

Bronislaw Malinowski exemplified this shift. An ethnic Pole who was born in the former Austro-Hungarian empire, he studied at the London School of Economics, he started his academic career doing old-fashioned anthropology, studying the indigenous people of Australia. Then, when World War I broke out, he realized he could be interned in Australia as an enemy national. To avoid that, he headed for the Trobriand Islands, near Papua New Guinea, and ended up staying there far longer than expected due to the war. As a result, instead of just swooping in and out, gathering artifacts, which would later be analyzed from the comfort of a faraway library, he ended up pitching his tent among the Trobriand villagers and living there for many months. That enabled him to watch the villagers for an extended period, as a fly on the wall, leaving him convinced that it was quite wrong to label the Trobriand Islanders as “primitive.” On the contrary, Trobriand culture had a certain beauty and rhythm of its own that needed to be understood in its own terms. This was epitomized by a ritual known as the Kula, which involved the elaborate exchange of shells between different islands. To a casual observer, this practice might have seemed quaint, bizarre, and pointless, particularly since the shells did not appear to have any immediate value or use. However, Malinowski pointed out that the Kula was not just a sophisticated and elaborate system, but it had a crucial social function, since the exchange of shells not only defined who was in the social group, but also created ties of obligation and trust linking the archipelago.

In 1922 Malinowksi published a book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, that described his findings.24 It changed the discipline. Around the world, young anthropologists started to conduct what they called “participant observation” and “ethnography,” or the process of watching the people they studied and then writing thick descriptions. British anthropologists such as Evans Pritchard went to Sudan, and John Radcliffe-Brown went to the Andaman Islands, Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist, went to Polynesia, and Ruth Benedict went to Australia and then studied Japan. Clifford Geertz, another American luminary, went to Bali, and Maurice Bloch left France for Madagascar. And as this new breed of anthropologists conducted their research, the discipline of anthropology effectively split into two. One stream, known as “cultural anthropology” in America (or “social anthropology” in Europe) looked at culture and society; the second stream, called “physical anthropology,” studied human evolution and biology. Initially, these endeavors had been entwined. But when anthropologists started looking at social systems in the present, the study of human evolution began to seem less connected to modern culture, and some anthropologists started to find more affinity with other disciplines, such as linguistics.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, is a case in point. He started his career as a linguist and philosopher, in the classic French intellectual style. But Lévi-Strauss (like Bourdieu) eventually tired of abstract musing. “Since I was a child, I have been bothered by, let’s call it the irrational, and have been trying to find an order behind what is given to us as a disorder,” he later observed. “It so happened that I became an anthropologist . . . not because I was interested in anthropology, but because I was trying to get out of philosophy.”25 In the late 1940s he became fascinated with myth and legend. He believed that if you analyzed myths around the world, you could understand how human cognition worked. His theory, called “structuralism,” posited that the human brain has a tendency to organize information in patterns, marked by binary oppositions (not dissimilar to how computers code data), and these patterns are expressed and reinforced in cultural practices, such as myths or religious rituals. It was a theoretical construct that did not draw directly on much participant observation of the type that Malinowski had pioneered. However, Lévi-Strauss supported his argument with extensive data drawn from communities around the world, and when he published his ideas in the 1950s in books such as The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Tristes Tropiques, and The Savage Mind,26 the