Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

My journey, and an entire notepad scribbled with notes and names and dates to prove it, transported me back to an unlikely place: communist Poland under martial law in the early 1980s. I recalled six hours I’d spent on hold one afternoon, waiting to place an international call. Was I now up against the same kind of behemoth? The sense of helplessness, the gut-wrenching frustration and mounting anger—it sure felt the same. I couldn’t help but wonder about the fates of so many others whose situations were more dire than my own.

Exasperated, I tried to fix my problem the old-fashioned way. Hoping to appeal face-to-face to a physically present person, look him in the eye, and establish a sense of trust just as I would have in the old Poland, I walked into a local Bank of America branch. I was greeted by Charles. We were joined by Bob, who called in Ronald, the bank manager. All were sympathetic and eager to assist. But what could they do? Only get on the phone and call into . . . the same phone tree. Shrugging their shoulders, they apologized for their ineffectuality.

Even Bank of America’s CEO claims to be helpless. At a 2012 shareholder meeting, Brian Moynihan faced protests and outrage for years of shoddy lending and unresponsive service as people struggle to refinance their mortgages. Moynihan’s response: “You can call us, and we will figure it out.” He urged people to try a toll-free number, “eliciting laughter,” as Bloomberg News reported. 1

Feeling victimized by bureaucracy is something we’ve all experienced, especially in recent years. (My point is not to single out Bank of America, or any other institution. The people I talked with tried to help, but they were constrained by their own system.) I was reminded of the exasperation that often typified encounters with the state-owned economy and bureaucracy in Eastern Bloc countries when one was trying to obtain scarce gasoline or meat or curtains or a favorable place in a years-long queue for a state-owned apartment or a passport to travel abroad. And yet, upon reflection, it seems to me that the systems prevailing today in the West and beyond are, in some ways, even harder to navigate than the ones I lived with and studied in communist Poland as an anthropologist in training.

Even under communism, with its quintessentially big, bad bureaucracy, many citizens found a way out, albeit far from an optimal one. The surest way to secure essential, yet formally hard to get, goods and services was to work through trusted family and friends, calling up favors in a long chain of reciprocal obligations. The key to success was informal information : knowing—or being able to find out through informal networks—whom to approach and how and where to intervene. Success elicited, in the psyche, both shame in lowering oneself to less-than-honest and sometimes even humiliating behavior and pride in one’s ingenuity in having beaten the system. But in today’s corporate and government bureaucracy, the human psyche is scarcely part of the equation. For how would we even know whom to approach to exchange a favor with or to butter up? I certainly couldn’t crack the Bank of America goliath, although my problem was eventually resolved after I pointedly explained to customer-service representatives the similarities between the old Eastern Bloc and Bank of America bureaucracies. One representative, unsettled by that comparison, went to herculean lengths to locate someone in the company maze who could tackle the problem.

What does my run-in with an all-too-common bureaucratic morass have to do with unaccountability? My story (and surely you have at least one, too) aptly illustrates an insidious reorganization of power that has occurred with such startling speed over the past several decades that most of us have barely paused to consider the implications.

But we must.

First up, government and corporate organizations. Whatever bureaucracy we’re trying to navigate or is impinging on our lives, we’re constantly hitting a brick wall. From organization to organization, this technology-driven, partly outsourced, too-big-to-fail structure is more difficult to deal with than the bureaucracy of old. The problem is not simply inefficiency or bad management. Such impenetrable organization means that it’s almost impossible to put your finger on, ultimately, who is responsible or accountable for what—if anyone is. This sets up the perfect environment for the new corruption.

Citizens in supposedly transparent democracies—no conspiracy needed—are now subject to unaccountable organizations and institutions in a way I haven’t witnessed since Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa was still an outlaw activist. Under communism, the reasons for the public’s lack of trust were clear: the system delivered only minimally in economies where shortages were the norm; to live a more than marginal life in material terms required finagling. 2But my experience with communist bureaucracy is that it was easier to maneuver than a Bank of America–type bureaucracy.

THE BUCK STOPS . . . NOWHERE

The erosion of the public trust goes to the very core of society: our corporate and governmental organizations. Many are structured, in effect, to be unaccountable and to discourage the public trust.

Take my encounter with Bank of America. Did I mention that the charge that wreaked such havoc was a $13.69 bill and that it was for a credit protection plan ? That is, the package I had purchased to alert me to any problems with my credit actually upended it.

This new unaccountability is born of the interaction of several factors over several decades, notably new information technologies and checklist-type “accountability” systems, with developments like contracting out and outsourcing also playing a part. The result is a greater disconnect among “silos”—units or milieus in the same organization or structure. My Bank of America story, while relatively benign, encapsulates the dynamics of many such organizations.

What has been called “structured unaccountability” pervades the modern-day organization. 3That organization is 180 degrees removed from the formal bureaucracy famously described by German sociologist Max Weber at the beginning of the twentieth century. Weber’s bureaucracy is legal —it follows the rule of law; rational —the organization has goals that it attempts to realize; and impersonal —a client’s ability to achieve a goal doesn’t depend on his or her personal relationship with a bureaucrat in it. 4Weber’s bureaucracy could be mapped; but try mapping a Bank of America-type structure. The esteemed sociologist was, of course, charting the ideal organization. Bureaucracy in the real world often falls short; a disjuncture looms between its prescribed principles and actual practices, as studies the world over show. 5

Yet today, interactions of the digital age have disconnected the bureaucrat from the client in ways Weber couldn’t have imagined. The new-world bureaucracy is organized into discrete information universes with essential bits of information separated from each other, treading in a sea of digital routines. Employees are trained to know only what’s in their own tiny silo. In the Bank of America example, Carol in Ohio in the so-called credit analysis department had never heard of the cancellation numbers or station numbers that I had been assigned by another Bank of America unit. The information given by one division may be flat wrong according to another, which may not even be authorized to communicate beyond its bounds. So one unit can send you a letter but isn’t authorized to dispatch it to another division in the same company. The larger picture of institutional knowledge and memory is obscured, if not obliterated.