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

Gillian Tett oversees global coverage of the financial markets for the Financial Times, the world’s leading newspaper covering finance and business. In 2007 she was awarded the Wincott prize, the premier British award for financial journalism, and in 2008 was named British Business Journalist of the Year. Tett is the author of Saving the Sun: How Wall Street Mavericks Shook Up Japan’s Financial World and Made Billions and The Silo Effect: Ordered Chaos, the Peril of Expertise, and the Power of Breaking Down Barriers.

The Silo Effect 1

THE NONDANCERS

How Anthropology Can Illuminate Silos

“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...