Reviews
A selection of comments and reviews
Reviews of Stephen Riley's book Barsteadworth College: How Workplace Bullies Get Away With It (Paperback)August 2010
From Professor Ken Westhues of Waterloo University, Ontario:
Dear Stephen,
I've just finished reading your novel and hasten to send you a word of appreciation. I plan to write a review of it, probably along with another academic mobbing novel I've ordered but have not yet received, P. J. Vanston's Crump. I've informed Vanston of your book. You're probably aware of his book, but if not, I imagine you would find it of interest.
I'll copy this email to Gary Namie, with many thanks to him for suggesting you let me know about your novel. I can understand why he was drawn to it, because it is a hard-hitting illustration of what he and a colleague, in a deeply insightful article published this year, call "the communal character of workplace bullying" ( http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/589/413 ). Namie's research focus and mine are a little different. Like you and lots of other people, he would describe as bullying what happened to your protagonist, Daniel Ripley. In defense of that description, your portrayal of Ripley's nemesis, Stella Jobby, for sure captures what the word bully means, and as Ripley's encounter with Bill Bulwark confirms, her rotten behaviour is not situation-specific, instead an attribute of personality that surfaced in her previous job. Still, in my view, the word mobbing is a more precise descriptor of the devastation Ripley underwent, since it was not just Jobby he was up against, but the clique or gang you capture precisely in your diagrams on pp. 74 and 157 -- a gang that is joined by the weak director of the school, Frank Fuller, and then, after Ripley files a grievance, by officers of the central administration, notably Aileen Dimley (a very believable hack) all the way up to Silas Beasley. In my view, the source of Ripley's humiliation, what eventually drove him round the bend, was no single individual, not even Jobby, but the combined weight of the collective. After all, probably the single most humiliating line inflicted on Ripley, the one about his penis needing botox, was spoken not by Jobby but by her partner in wickedness, Linda Froggatt.
Whether the process be called bullying or mobbing, you do a fantastic job of setting down in black and white what it involves. The events you chronicle crop up in case after case in my files. I especially appreciated your description of the "ritual humiliation" (I'm glad you used those words, they're right on) in the end-of-term team meeting where Jobby twists the student's complaint about her into a complaint about Ripley. The force of the event is that it is staged in front of his co-workers. It's the public nature of the shaming that gives it its power, as Froggatt knows full well when she smirks and asks, "Have you noticed how power is moving from you to us?" I served as expert witness this spring in a professor's suit against his university. That professor had been similarly bushwhacked by a surprise collective shaming at a faculty meeting. I myself had that experience long ago here at Waterloo, and chills still travel my spine when I remember it: http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/westhuestomacd930308.pdf
One little thing that struck me about Ripley's story is the point on p. 94 that all four of his main persecutors, Jobby, Froggatt, and their lackey husbands, had gone to private schools. One of my colleagues in the research on mobbing, Joan Friedenberg, has hypothesized that academics from backgrounds of modest means, nonelite parentage, are more likely to be mobbed. She has made that hypothesis on the basis of observations in the US. I suspect there's even more support for it in the UK.
There are many, many more parts of Ripley's story that resonate with the findings of my own research: mobbers' projection of their own failings onto the mobbing target, the naive target's inability to believe what is happening to him and his premature belief that the wolves have been called off, the "bullying diary" and the emails to Jobby and Fuller as means by which the target tries to keep his own head straight, a sexualized workplace (what William L. White has called "the incestuous workplace") and the breakdown of boundaries between public and private as a wellspring of mobbing episodes, the higher likelihood of mobbing in disciplines "with ambiguous standards and objectives, especially those (like music or literature) most affected by postmodern scholarship" ( http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/unkindlyart.htm ). I'll hope to expand on these points in my eventual book review.
A final (for now) word of appreciation: the account of Ripley's breakdown on pp. 194ff is painfully well done. To write so poignant and truthful a depiction of the deep pit of psychiatric injury, one has to have been there. Thank you for writing it. As soon as I finish this email, I plan to send an email to a professor in the US who has been writing to me for months about his experience of ongoing humiliation in his school, and his deteriorating emotional state. I'm going to suggest to him that he get hold of your book pronto and take it to heart. I'm pretty sure he's going to be deeply grateful that you set your story down in black and white. Your novel may help him escape what happened to Ripley.
Finally, let me say I googled your name and found the website of your art. If I complimented you on all those circles, it wouldn't mean anything, because with respect to art, I'm really dumb. Even so, I'm wishing you much success in your work. Many years ago, I interviewed a famous Newfoundland artist named Christopher Pratt. He told me that after he finished his schooling in art, I think it was at Glasgow, he returned to St. John's and took a job teaching art in the university there. He was assigned a Tuesday night class that first term. At the first meeting he undertook to ask the students why they had enrolled in the course. One lady answered, "My husband bowls on Tuesday nights and I didn't have anything else to do." Pratt was so dismayed, so he told me, that he fled to his parents' cottage in rural Newfoundland (elite parentage, of course) and abandoned his teaching career then and there. I hope that now that you're free of academic nonsense and pointlessness, your success as an artist will in due course be a match for Pratt's.
Thanks and kind regards to you, as also to Gary Namie,
Ken Westhues
Kenneth Westhues
Professor of Sociology
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario N2L3G1 Canada
519.888.4567, ext 33660
http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/
*****
By M G Willock (Manchester, England)
July 2010
Published on Amazon: see 'Links'
'Workplace Bullies' - was not a very appealing title and the cover didn't make me rush to read it. But once I opened the pages and started to get to know Dan I couldn't put it down. It was funny, shocking, interesting and frightening to think that prolonged bullying can happen to intelligent, strong, confident and articulate people, and others would sit back and allow this to happen. This is a good book to read, and in addition should be read by anyone who works in HR for a lesson of how not to behave. But above all a very enjoyable read.
Rating (out of 5 stars) 5 stars
*****
"Shine Through All the Spheres" Nolia’s Gallery, Great Suffolk St., London, SE1 - Winter 2006
Review by Melody Austin: Published in 'A-N Magazine - Reviews Unedited'
Within ‘Shine Through All the Spheres’, Stephen Riley experiments and plays with material and matter. This body of recent paintings explore the notion of both limitation and liberation. All of these works employ the static symbol of a circle as a vessel for the abstract and figurative. His technique is both mediated and random, relying on the reaction of the materials to create a form of alchemical imagery. The tactile nature in many of his works erupts from the canvas in places and has an immediacy and sensuality in texture. Riley’s paintings are hybrid and fecund, his use of a glowing lava stream of colour is intensely visually seductive. The paintings are reminiscent of landscapes of earthly, alien and even microbiological nature. There is a restlessness and vitality, to the process, he explores the subtleties of surface and depth, dripping, dragging and investigating, questioning and experimenting, exploring his own inner cosmology. Through exploiting the volatility of paint, his works are immediate, of the moment, a record of motion, colour poured onto canvas, to settle, congeal and react.
I entered the gallery on a bleak evening and was struck by the intensity of colours, abundant, vibrant and overblown. The paintings have a crystalline brilliance, a glow that suggests an opulence and mysticism. His spheres almost appear to float, the luminosity of the colours create an atmospheric sublime almost seeming to point towards the sky.
Riley’s resolution to utilize the archetype of the circle suggests Mandalas, the eastern symbol employed as kind of self-protection intended to guard against the outside world from entering into the inner psychic space. The magic circle as a charm is an archaic emblem still found in folklore used as a means of objectification of unconscious images. Riley places self-imposed boundaries through his choice of format, a square constraining a circle. This has parallels with Jungian theory the square representational of earth and the circle is attributed to the spirit – a union of opposites. This powerful minimal geometry acts as his personal gateway.
Predominately, Riley’s paintings are abstract, but within the body of work he has included imagery, figurative and representational, which read as ciphers, they subvert and make one question their significance but still form part of the solution to a strategy for which the outcomes are unpredictable. He employs an almost divinatory process which allows the circle to be reinvented again and again.
Melody Austin
Director of The Art Works Studios and Gallery
Poole
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Comments on:
"Shine Through All the Spheres"Winter 2006
“As ever, thought-provoking and fundamentally humane” – Dr Iain Wilkinson; University of Kent - sociologist and award-winning author.
“Fantastic works” – Alex Komori
“A great achievement…palpably pulsating!” – Paul Finnegan; sculptor and academic.
“Look forward to seeing more. Best exhibition this year anywhere!” – no name provided (sadly!)
“Great show...no beginning and no end” – Gail Olding; artist and lecturer.
“Amazing paintings…you should be charging far more for them!” – Catherine Regler; international fashion designer.
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Stephen Riley
Contemporary Fine Art
Abstract Painting