Attitudes to business & industry

Abstract

All over the world, it seems to me, it is becoming recognised that attitudes towards business, industry and work, are crucial determinants of a community's prosperity. It also seems that every country puts its own twist on the topic. It has to be recognised that the complex of attitudes towards business, meaning, largely, free‐enterprise manufacturing, although important, is not the sole determinant of prosperity. Some countries are favoured by good fortune denied to others. Global situations change to the extent that some countries suddenly find their assets of more value than they were at an earlier stage. For instance, in comparison with France, England is over four times more densely populated; France can feed itself and provide a surplus of food for export. In the Common Market it has found the means of marketing the surplus, or a large part of it. Britain can scarcely feed half of its population, and to feed the rest of it has to exchange the products of its factories for food. These same factories have to import the majority of the raw materials they process, which means that, as a nation, we have to allocate even more of our factory production to exchange for these raw materials. To Britain, for reasons such as these, the production of her factories is crucial to the attainment of any reasonable standard of living. Now, these basic economic facts are not secret: in some form or another they are well‐known to Mr Average Citizen, certainly to Mr Average Teacher or Mr Average University Lecturer or Professor. There is, however, in British society, this immense paradox: that, Japan apart, out of all the advanced nations Britain is the one most dependent for prosperity on the success of her industry and business and yet large sections of her populace have attitude sets which can accurately be described as anti‐business: they are not merely critical of business but are actually hostile. Putting it bluntly and again, with the arguable exception of Japan, that nation most in need of a pro‐business attitude set has the least favourable one. The problem is not new nor is the recognition of it. For as long as I can remember this feature of British life has been a recurrent talking point. Men like Lord Bowden, Principal of UMIST, who move freely between education, industry and government, have made it the central theme of their public utterances for a generation and more. But I can see no improvement, for all their effort. The attitude is most pronounced and is most serious in the world of education where it comes to a head. It is most serious because it ensures that every generation of young people is impregnated with the disease at an early age, before it can have the opportunity of judging for itself. Lord Bowden has, over the years, explained how this estrangement between the worlds of business and education can be traced back to the circumstances in which the industrial revolution came about in Britain. The Industrial Revolution owed nothing to the universities or to men formally educated in the traditional institutions. At that time the universities were at their lowest ebb and such educated men as contributed to industrial and technological innovation were the products of the dissenting academies, which no longer exist. The universities and industry started off at loggerheads and remarkably little has happened since to heal the wounds. British universities were unbelievably hostile to the establishment of departments of business and management: it was not until the late 1960s that this started to change with the establishment of university management departments and business schools. The importance of the universities in this connection stems from the fact that in Britain the universities set the standard, the pace and the very ethos of education not only for themselves but for all levels below. In other countries it is different: in the USA, for example, the dominant influence in schools is the local community. From the universities the attitude has spread to all branches of education with the possible exception of some technical colleges, though not all. But it appears in other quarters as well: the public pronouncements of Britain's present Chancellor of the Exchequer, as with those of most of his Cabinet colleagues, show the most appalling ignorance of the most elementary facts of business. We start our study of this problem facing Britain with a demonstration of the attitude in operation. By kind permission of the editor of Times Educational Supplement, we reproduce an article published in that journal, dated 16 April 1976. The author is Professor Maurice Peston, Professor of Economics at Queen Mary College, University of London. We follow this by comment upon it by Professor C H Dobinson, who first called our attention to Professor Peston's article. We invite readers to contribute to this study either by commenting on these two articles or by independent contributions dealing with other aspects.

Citation

WELLENS, J. (1976), "Attitudes to business & industry", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 8 No. 6, pp. 224-225. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb003545