how much, exactly, is my jobworth?
the great ism of our times
(Programming note! If you liked “The Unaccountability Machine” and you got a book token for Christmas, spend it on “The Score” by C Thi Nguyen. I haven’t seen an advance copy or anything, but I met the author at a conference and he’s extremely funny and clever. I will be trying to promote the book to as many business podcasts as possible, because I very much think that this is a case in which the dead hand of academic analytical philosophy may have robbed the world of one of its greatest management consultants)
Any way … this is a bit of a generalised call for help, on a phenomenon which is absolutely ubiquitous, clearly very economically and politically important, but as far as I can tell unstudied. I’m hoping some of you guys know different. I am talking about the phenomenon of “careerism”.
I have a few stock things to say when I’m in a meeting and want to sound clever without accidentally saying something the boss might disagree with. “How do they do this in other countries”? is always a winner, for example. But “of course, this is all actually going to be decided on the basis of career risk” is even better when the opportunity arises - everyone immediately agrees, and you look not only extremely wise but also attractively cynical and even slightly subversive.
It’s one of those things, like “no matter what your performance review said, your bonus will be equal to your boss’s guess of what would get you to leave, minus epsilon”. It’s clearly empirically true, easily provable from axioms of rationality, but somehow it’s outside the rules of the game to mention it too much. Careerism, and in particular the desire to avoid career risk, is hugely important.
But as far as I can tell, it has only been studied (and studied to death) in one particular niche context. Which is the context of active fund managers, who face downside career risk if they underperform the index, which is not symmetric with the upside from outperforming it. A large amount of empirical finance brain cells have been devoted to demonstrating that this happens - fund managers tend to “hug the index”, and generally to make decisions based on their personal risk aversion to the effect of investment performance on their personal income, rather than the risk aversion appropriate for their clients’ portfolios.
My response to that literature (“well, duh”) is probably a bit unfair, but it’s frustrating that this doesn’t seem to have been studied in any other context (particularly contexts of government and civil service decision making, where I would really like to cite some classic work rather than writing 10,000 words myself). Any ideas?
All of my IT experience has been in the private sector, except for one project when I worked for IBM and I was sent to the Department for Work & Pensions. That was in 2005. It was a highly educational time, but far from enjoyable. I was shocked by the client's attitude towards risk and accountability. Their managers happily took decisions I knew would wreck the project (if I were to comply) but protect their careers. I wrote about it here. I see that when I wrote it I did not mention IBM or the DWP, but I'm retired now, so what the heck.
https://clarotesting.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/the-last-straw-the-project-that-convinced-me-to-resign/
On a wider note I've seen similar situations play out elsewhere in large corporations, though never quite as extreme as at the DWP. I occasionally had to give dual advice to executive management when I was an IT security manager; this is what you should do to protect your career, and this is what you should do based on the risk to the corporation we have identified and agreed upon. They were not necessarily the same. Sometimes it was better for a manager to make a loss on the account and annoy the client rather than turn a profit and keep the client happy. I've worked as an IT auditor in an excellent internal audit department for a major insurer. It was part of our job to detect, expose, and challenge such dysfunctional situations.
From Gemini, very similar to many things you've already covered:
The idea that civil service behavior is primarily driven by the desire to minimize career risk—often termed "blame avoidance" or "risk aversion"—is a central pillar of Public Choice theory and modern public administration.
While several works touch on this, the two most "standard" academic sources that define this perspective are Christopher Hood’s The Blame Game and R. Kent Weaver’s foundational paper on blame avoidance.
1. The Modern Definitive Work: Christopher Hood
Book: The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy, and Self-Preservation in Government (2011)
Christopher Hood is the leading scholar on why modern bureaucracies seem obsessed with "covering their backs." He argues that in an era of high-intensity media and political scrutiny, the primary incentive for a civil servant is not to achieve the "best" outcome, but to ensure that if something goes wrong, the blame cannot be pinned on them.
Key Concept: Negativity Bias. People (voters and politicians) react far more strongly to a single failure than to many successes. Therefore, civil servants prioritize avoiding a "minus" over achieving a "plus."
Three Strategies of Self-Preservation:
Agency Strategies: Creating complex organizational structures or "arms-length" bodies so it’s unclear who is actually responsible for a decision.
Policy/Operational Strategies: Relying on "protocolization"—strictly following rigid rules and checklists so that even if the outcome is bad, the bureaucrat can say they "followed the process."
Presentational Strategies: Using "spin" or "drawing a line" to distance oneself from a crisis.
2. The Foundational Paper: R. Kent Weaver
Article: "The Politics of Blame Avoidance" (1986)
Before Hood, R. Kent Weaver crystallized the theory that politicians and bureaucrats are motivated more by the desire to avoid blame than by the desire to claim credit.
The Argument: Since "voters are more sensitive to out-of-pocket losses than to equivalent gains," the safest career move for a public official is "The Good Soldier" approach: keeping a low profile and avoiding any policy that has a identifiable "loser," even if it has a high collective "gain."
3. The Classic Organizational Model: Anthony Downs
Book: Inside Bureaucracy (1967)
Downs provided the first rigorous economic model of how individuals behave inside a government department. He categorized bureaucrats into types, most notably "The Conservers."
The Conserver: This is the "standard" mid-to-late career civil servant. Their primary goal is convenience and security. Because they cannot "profit" from a successful innovation (unlike a private sector CEO), but they can be fired or demoted for a visible failure, their rational choice is to resist change and minimize any activity that carries career risk.
4. The "Satisfying Superiors" Model: Gordon Tullock
Book: The Politics of Bureaucracy (1965)
Tullock, a co-founder of Public Choice theory, argued that because there is no "market price" to measure a civil servant's success, the only way to get promoted is to please your superior.
The Impact: This creates a "telephone game" where information is filtered as it goes up the chain. Subordinates hide risks and failures to protect their careers, meaning the top of the hierarchy often makes decisions based on sanitized, "safe" information that doesn't reflect reality.