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Leading academic to warn of deepening crisis of trust in UK institutions

Besi Besemar October 19, 2013

Frank Furedi
Frank Furedi

Leading sociologist Frank Furedi will this weekend launch a stark warning that UK’s public institutions will face more severe crises of trust – such as those currently afflicting the BBC, NHS (from Mid Staffs to the Jimmy Savile scandal) and police (post Plebgate) – unless they make a concerted bid to regain a sense of their own authority.

Speaking at London’s Battle of Ideas festival this weekend (October 19-20 ), Professor Furedi will argue that the “continuous calls for openness, inquiries, transparency and accountability” in the face of revelations over abuse of power has left some of Britain’s most important institutions to outsource their authority rather than critically confront the causes of internal disarray.

Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, will claim:

“Unmasking authority has become a fashionable enterprise that resonates with popular culture. Those who hold positions of responsibility and of power – politicians, parents, teachers, priests, doctors, nursery workers – are ‘exposed’ continually for abusing their authority… Consequently even those who are formally in authority hesitate about openly exercising their influence. In numerous businesses and public institutions those in positions of responsibility are often far too ready to adopt the now widely practised custom of outsourcing authority to consultants and experts. They rely on the language of ‘research shows….’, ‘experts say…’ or ‘the science concludes’ rather than on their own authoritative voice.“

In his new book Authority: a sociological history (to be launched at the Barbican on Sunday October 20) Furedi counsels against this outsourcing, but also notes that when authority exists in a feeble form, individual freedom is also compromised because so many institutions attempt to compensate for their lack of authority “through rule making, inventing procedures and micro-managing personal life.”

Furedi argues this will backfire because:

“When institutions rely on formal processes such as codes of conduct and transparency they can rarely act authoritatively since these rules are not based on an explicit moral and philosophical system of meaning. That is why rule making inexorably leads to more rule making. The less western culture can affirm authority the more dependent it becomes on the formalising and professionalising of daily life”.

Furedi also notes the irony that this can create even less accountability. If those in authority hand power over, there is a danger of creating a new breed of expert whose authority is considered above question, such as Lord Justice Leveson, victims of abuse, whistle-blowers and campaigning celebrities.

Furedi concludes:

“Those who reject some form of authority as illegitimate frequently embrace others as acceptable. For example, so many critics of the teachers’ authority over the class room invite us to serve as ‘mentors’, ‘facilitators’ or ‘role models’ to children. Similarly, in a world where the clergy is sometimes denounced for its authoritarian and abusive behaviour, or the victim that is often endowed with moral authority…although authority can be undermined it cannot be quite abolished.”

Rather than seek to safeguard against such abuses through further regulation and transparency, Furedi instead calls upon society to seriously debate both the purpose of authority and the institutions who wield it, arguing that in its absence we are seeing the ‘unravelling of public life’ and a resulting ‘moral disorientation.’

Furedi is one of 400 speakers at the Battle of Ideas, an annual festival of public debate taking place at London’s Barbican on October 19-20, organised by the Institute of Ideas.

For more information CLICK HERE:  www.battleofideas.org.uk

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