Geoff Mulgan sketches the way different disciplines affect our thinking

Geoff Mulgan has a fascinating article which explores how different disciplines try to make sense of the world. This is an issue which has long intrigued me.

This section sketches how existing disciplines look at organisations and institutions of 
all kinds  — what they see and highlight, and how they think. 

Economics: incentives, markets & efficiency Economics offers some of the most 
systematic frameworks for thinking about institutional design. Its central contribution 
is the analysis of incentive structures: institutions reliably produce the behaviours 
they reward, not the behaviours they intend. This distinction helps to explain many 
institutional failures. Economists warn of principal-agent problems  — when those 
who run institutions (agents) have interests that diverge from those they serve 
(principals)  — and of information asymmetries, where different parties know different 
things, enabling gaming and capture. Public choice theory adds a sobering corrective 
to idealism: public officials and bureaucrats are self-interested actors just like anyone 
else, not benevolent social optimisers. Institutions must therefore be designed as if 
populated by ordinary, self-seeking people. Regulatory capture  — where regulated 
industries come to dominate their regulators  — is a perennial hazard to guard against. 
The economics of collective action highlights why voluntary cooperation fails in the 
provision of public goods: free-rider problems mean that without compulsion or clever 
incentive design, public institutions will be underfunded and underused. 
Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-winning work on ‘governing the commons’ demonstrates, 
however, that communities can self-organise effective institutions without either markets 
or states when rules are locally designed and enforced. Cost-benefit analysis, 
market-design techniques, and the insights of the growing field of mechanism design 
are practical tools that economists contribute to institutional architects. 
What might we want more of from economists? We could hope for better understanding 
the full range of economic organisations, from mutuals and coops to DAOs; 
better understanding ecosystems of organisations, and coupled systems (e.g. where 
states intervene in crises, for example, to enable business to thrive); better understanding 
the economics of intelligence design in organisations, and trade-offs of investment in 
observation, memory, creativity etc; and better use of economic history and economic 
sociology, as there is relatively little cross-pollination between the different strands of 
economic thinking. 

Psychology: behaviour, bias & motivation Psychology shows that the humans who 
populate and use institutions are not the rational maximisers that economics often assumes. 
Cognitive biases  — systematic errors in judgment documented by behavioural economists 
such as Kahneman and Thaler  — profoundly affect how institutions are used. 
Anchoring, availability bias, status quo bias, and loss aversion all shape how citizens 
and officials respond to institutional rules and defaults, though others have convincingly 
shown the blind spots and errors of this approach, emphasising instead the effects of 
systems and why some of these apparent biases are in fact quite rational (for example, 
in the work of Gerd Gigerenzer and Piero Luigi Sacco). Nudge theory, drawing on 
behavioural insights, argues that the architecture of choices within an institution matters 
enormously. Defaults, framing, salience, and social norms can steer behaviour far more 
cheaply and effectively than coercion or financial incentives. The UK's Behavioural 
Insights Team ("Nudge Unit") has demonstrated this across tax compliance, pension 
enrolment, and public health, though there are many sceptics and critics (some captured 
in the recent book by Nicholas Chater and George Loewenstein). 
Motivational psychology distinguishes intrinsic from extrinsic motivation, warning that 
over-reliance on financial incentives can "crowd out" the professional pride, civic duty, 
and intrinsic satisfaction that actually drive much public-sector performance.  
Organisational psychology highlights the importance of psychological safety  — the 
belief that one can raise concerns without punishment  — for institutional learning and 
error correction. Trauma-informed design is emerging as a framework for institutions 
serving vulnerable populations, ensuring that procedural experiences do not re-traumatise 
those who need help most. What might we want more of from psychology? 
One priority is more non-WEIRD psychology (to use Joseph Heinrich’s formula), 
for example, understanding family businesses or different state forms around the world. 
We could benefit from a better grasp of cognitive processes in organisations, including 
error, collective mental illness, illusions, and more insight into the psychological 
dynamics of organisational failure and collapse  — what happens when people lose faith. 


Computer science: systems, data & digital infrastructure Computer science brings 
a systems-thinking perspective to institutional design, treating institutions as information
-processing architectures. Concepts from software engineering  — modularity, abstraction, 
versioning, and testing  — translate surprisingly well to institutional design. 
Modular institutions with clearly defined interfaces between components are easier to 
reform, audit, and upgrade than monolithic ones. Computer science focuses on decisions 
and information  — inputs, processing, memory, decisions, and learning, and concepts 
such as updating (from the overlap of neuroscience and computer science). 
Digital public infrastructure is now one interesting foundational idea, pointing to the 
potential for protocols and stacks to guide design. Another key frame is data, with 
institutions designed around data governance from the outset: who collects what, on 
what legal basis, with what retention periods, subject to which rights of access and 
correction. The GDPR framework and the open data movement represent competing 
institutional logics  — protection versus transparency  — that must be consciously 
balanced. Algorithmic decision-making raises new questions. Some concern standards 
and how these are set. Another concerns institutional accountability. 
When an institution delegates decisions to an algorithm  — in welfare benefit allocation, 
sentencing recommendations, or credit scoring  — traditional accountability mechanisms 
(appeal, judicial review, parliamentary scrutiny) struggle to function. 
Explainability, auditability, and contestability must be built in from the start. 
Cybersecurity is an institutional design challenge, not merely a technical one: 
institutions are attacked through their people and processes as much as their systems. 
Platform governance — how digital platforms moderate speech, allocate attention, and 
set rules  — has itself become a major domain of public institutional design. 
What might we want from computer science? One obvious priority is better theories 
and practice of how the human and computational combine  — computer science has 
been surprisingly slow to absorb broader insights about how intelligence functions in 
the real world. Linked to that is better orchestration of evidence on AI in organisations, 
and understanding organisations as assemblies of human and machine intelligence. 
This will become increasingly vital for the work of design. 

Business studies: strategy, management & performance Business studies  — 
encompassing strategy, management, and operations  — contribute practical tools for 
institutional design, though they must be applied with care in public contexts. There 
are many frameworks from business, ranging from platforms to franchising and licensing, 
multi-divisional and matrix structures. Strategic management frameworks like SWOT 
analysis, stakeholder mapping, and theory of change help institutions clarify their purpose 
and map the environment they operate in. The discipline of defining a clear mission 
and refusing mission drift is one of business's most transferable lessons. 
Performance management offers both promise and peril. Key performance indicators 
(KPIs) can focus attention and enable accountability, but "teaching to the test" 
 — Goodhart's Law  — means that measures become targets and cease to be good 
measures. The NHS and education systems have provided cautionary evidence of 
how league tables and targets distort behaviour. The balanced scorecard approach 
attempts to address this by measuring multiple dimensions simultaneously. Supply chain 
thinking and operations management apply to public service delivery: institutions must 
design workflows, manage queues, reduce bottlenecks, and build resilience into their 
delivery systems. Lean management, adapted from manufacturing, has been applied to 
public administration to reduce waste and improve flow.  Leadership studies highlight 
the importance of institutional culture  — "the way we do things around here"  — 
as a determinant of performance that resists top-down reform, often providing detailed 
insights (e.g., in the work of Mintzberg). Change management frameworks (Kotter, 
ADKAR) offer structured approaches to institutional reform. What might we want from 
business studies and schools? We could certainly benefit from a better understanding 
of emerging practices; new patterns of licensing and franchising; and the different 
approaches of the social economy. Tools such as the business model canvas could be 
usefully adapted to institutional design. 

Organisational studies: structure, culture & learning Organisational studies is 
perhaps the most directly applicable discipline to institutional design. It examines how 
formal structures (hierarchies, matrices, networks), informal cultures, and professional 
norms interact to shape what institutions actually do  — as opposed to what their 
charters say they should do. A central insight is the distinction between formal and 
informal organisation. The real institution is always richer, stranger, and more interesting 
than the org chart. Informal networks, professional identities, subcultures, and tacit 
knowledge determine how rules are interpreted and whether change takes hold. 
Reformers who attend only to formal structure routinely fail because they leave 
informal systems untouched. Institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell) explains why 
organisations in the same field tend to become structurally similar over time  — 
a process called isomorphism  — through coercive pressures (regulation), mimetic 
pressures (copying successful peers), and normative pressures (professional standards). This helps explain why new institutions tend to resemble 
old ones even when designed to be different. Learning organisation theory (Senge, Argyris) distinguishes single-loop learning (fixing errors) from double-loop 
learning (questioning the assumptions that produced the errors)  — the latter being 
essential for institutions operating in complex, changing environments. 
High-reliability organisation research examines how nuclear plants, air traffic control, 
and aircraft carriers achieve very low error rates in high-stakes environments, with 
lessons for institutional design around safety and resilience. 

Culture theory and grid/group analysis (drawing on the work of Mary Douglas and 
Michael Thompson) suggests that all real organisations are compromises between 
hierarchy, individualism, egalitarianism, and fatalism, and all tend to fail if any becomes 
too dominant. What might we want from organisational studies? More interest in 
design as opposed to analysis; better quantitative methods to understand ecosystems 
of organisations, patterns of birth and death, and evolution; and more engagement with 
technology, which is still often missing from much academic work. 
Political science: power, legitimacy & governance Political science is concerned with 
the most fundamental questions of institutional design: who has authority, from where 
does it derive legitimacy, how is power checked, and who is included in or excluded 
from governance? These questions precede all technical choices about structure 
and incentives. Political science tends to focus on the specific conditions in which 
new institutions are formed and how these reflect the power of different interests. 

Constitutional design  — the architecture of separation of powers, federalism, and rights  — establishes the environment in which public institutions operate. Institutions that are not embedded in a coherent constitutional framework are vulnerable to capture, abuse, and collapse. Checks and balances are not bureaucratic friction to be minimised; they are the technology by which power is kept accountable. There is also a strand of work on pluralism: how democracy requires counters to what Robert Dahl called ‘closed hegemony’ that drowns out competing voices. Legitimacy theory distinguishes input legitimacy (is the institution democratically authorised?), throughput legitimacy (are processes transparent and participatory?), and output legitimacy (does it deliver results?). New public institutions require attention to all three dimensions. Electoral politics shapes institutional incentives profoundly: short electoral cycles, partisan pressures, and ministerial churn all undermine institutions' capacity to pursue long-term goals. Independent institutions  — central banks, statistical agencies, regulatory bodies  — represent an institutional design response to this problem, trading democratic immediacy for credibility and continuity. Deliberative democracy theory argues for designing institutions with genuine public participation and structured deliberation, not mere consultation. Citizens' assemblies, as used in Ireland and the UK, are an emerging institutional form that has produced politically durable outcomes on otherwise intractable questions. There is also a long strand of work in political science which emphasises difficulty: wicked problems, irrational processes, impossible jobs and intractability, with some claiming that there are long-run trends towards ungovernability in conditions of permacrisis. These theories often struggle to explain the long history of policy successes and can be ahistorical, ignoring past periods that saw multiple crises simultaneously, and they are not so useful for the practical work of institutional design. What might we want from political science? More curiosity to learn from other disciplines and interest in the options for design, as well as more precision on the role and limits of path dependence; more engagement with the ways that technologies shape the options for policy and administrative design. 

History:  evolution, path dependence & failure History is the laboratory of 
institutional design, providing the empirical record from which all other disciplines draw 
their examples. Its central methodological contribution is a warning against 
overconfidence: almost all new institutions fail in ways their designers did not anticipate, 
 and history is littered with earnest institutional experiments that produced catastrophic 
unintended consequences. Path dependence is one of history's most important 
conceptual contributions. Institutions acquire constituencies, vested interests, 
and embedded practices that make them extraordinarily difficult to change even when 
their original rationale has evaporated. The QWERTY keyboard and the gauge of 
British railway tracks are classic examples; in public life, the survival of institutions 
long past their useful life  — from parliamentary procedure to welfare eligibility rules 
 — follows the same logic. Design choices made early become almost impossible to 
reverse. Conversely, many long-standing institutions become interwoven with 
everyday life and mentalities. The comparative historical record reveals recurring 
patterns of institutional success and failure. Successful institutions tend to have 
clear mandates, insulation from short-term political pressure, adequate resourcing, 
and mechanisms for self-correction. Failed institutions typically suffer from mandate 
overstretch, underfunding, capture by narrow interests, or loss of public legitimacy. 
The history of welfare state construction, colonial administration, post-conflict 
state-building, and development banking all offer rich and often cautionary material. 
A distinctive contribution has come from economic historians who tend to take a very 
different view from economists, often putting much more emphasis on the roles 
institutions play. The Nobel Prize for economics in 2024 was awarded to Daren 
Acemoglu and colleagues for their detailed account of the role of institutions in 
shaping national prosperity and routes to societal success. 
These emphasise the unlikelihood of these paths (though, as indicated earlier, 
they offer few clues to current design). Finally, history reminds institutional designers 
that the "problems" they are addressing are rarely new. Someone has usually 
tried before. Understanding why previous attempts failed is the most reliable 
preparation for doing better. What might we want more of from history? 
Better integration of quant and qual methods to study long-term patterns, including 
understanding of punctuated equilibrium, using cliometrics, etc., and interest in 
the reappearance or revival of organisational forms. 

Law: rules, rights & accountability Law and legal studies provide the constitutive 
framework within which all public institutions exist: without legal personality, mandate, 
and powers conferred by statute or constitution, there is no institution at all. 
The first contribution of legal thinking is therefore foundational  — getting the 
enabling legislation right matters enormously. Vague statutory mandates invite 
mission creep and judicial challenge; overly narrow ones prevent adaptation to 
changing circumstances. Administrative law is the branch most directly concerned 
with institutional design. Its core preoccupations  — procedural fairness, the duty 
to give reasons, proportionality, judicial review, and the rule against bias  — 
are not merely legal technicalities but embody deep principles about how public 
power should be exercised. Institutions designed without administrative law 
expertise routinely create decision-making processes that are procedurally 
defective, generating litigation and eroding legitimacy. 
Rights-based frameworks  — drawn from constitutional law, human rights 
instruments, and equality legislation  — impose substantive constraints on what 
institutions may do and affirmative obligations about how they must treat those 
they serve. Designing institutions to be rights-compliant from the outset is far 
cheaper than retrofitting them after adverse judgments. Regulatory law 
contributes to the concept of enforcement pyramids: effective compliance 
is achieved not through maximum punishment but through graduated responses 
that deploy persuasion, warnings, civil penalties, and criminal prosecution in 
ascending order of severity. Legal pluralism  — the recognition that multiple 
overlapping legal orders (state law, customary law, religious law, professional norms) 
simultaneously govern behaviour  — is critical when designing institutions for diverse 
or international contexts. The enforcement pyramid concept, in particular, is a 
practically important idea that pure economics or political science tends to miss. 
A legal perspective helps to explain the striking isomorphism of organisational forms. 
What might we want more of: lessons from new legal forms. And more imagination 
in how law could be evolved, for example, for transnational organisations, or the use 
of blockchain and other technologies. International relations: norms, regimes & 
global governance International relations, or IR, offers insights that matter even 
for purely domestic institutions, because no institution operates in isolation from 
global pressures, norms, and interdependencies. It adds the ecosystem perspective
: how does this new institution fit within the wider architecture of existing bodies, 
and how will powerful actors exploit any gaps or inconsistencies between them? 
It also introduces the constructivist insight that institutions don't just change behaviour
  — over time, they change identity and preferences, which is a much deeper and 
more durable form of influence. Its most direct contribution is the study of 
international institutions themselves — the UN, WTO, IMF, WHO, and hundreds 
of other bodies — as a rich empirical laboratory of what makes supranational 
governance work or fail. Regime theory examines how international regimes 
(sets of principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures) emerge, 
persist, and decay. The conditions for regime formation  — concentrated 
benefits, clear rules, credible enforcement, and shared understanding of the 
problem  — translate directly to domestic institutional design. 
Liberal institutionalism argues that institutions reduce transaction costs, 
provide information, and create focal points for cooperation that would otherwise 
be impossible; these mechanisms operate at domestic as well as international scales. 
Constructivism contributes a focus on norms and ideas: institutions do not merely 
constrain behaviour, they constitute actors' identities and interests over time. 
International human rights norms, for instance, have gradually reshaped what 
states believe they are entitled to do to their own citizens. 
This socialisation function of institutions  — their capacity to change, not just 
channel, the preferences of those within them  — is easily underestimated in 
purely rationalist frameworks. IR also contributes to the analysis of institutional 
fragmentation and forum-shopping: when multiple overlapping institutions govern 
the same domain, powerful actors exploit the gaps and inconsistencies between 
them. Coherent institutional architecture  — at domestic and international levels  
— requires deliberate attention to how new institutions fit within the existing 
ecosystem. What might we want more of? IR has largely lost interest in options 
for the future and the design of new institutions for space, oceans, AI, and warfare, 
or the organisation of global intelligence. 

Anthropology: culture, meaning & local knowledge Anthropology is the 
discipline most attentive to what institutions actually mean to the people who 
encounter them, and to the deep cultural assumptions that institutional designers 
unwittingly embed in their creations. Its primary methodological contribution is 
ethnography  — sustained, immersive observation of how institutions function 
from the inside  — which consistently reveals gaps between official accounts 
and lived reality that other methods miss. It asks: "But what does this look like 
from the inside, at ground level, to the people actually living with it? 
The anthropology of bureaucracy (drawing on scholars like David Graeber 
and Akhil Gupta) documents how formal rules are translated, distorted, resisted, 
and repurposed by street-level bureaucrats and citizens. The discretionary power 
of frontline officials  — those who actually deliver institutional outputs  — is far 
greater than institutional designers typically assume, and the exercise of that 
discretion is shaped by local culture, professional norms, and informal hierarchies. 
Cultural translation is a persistent challenge. Institutions transplanted from one cultural context to another without adaptation routinely fail. The history of development institutions imposing Western governance models on societies with different kinship systems, property concepts, and conceptions of authority is a long catalogue of instructive failure. Anthropology insists that local knowledge  — what James Scott calls mētis, the practical wisdom embedded in communities  — must be incorporated into institutional design, not displaced by it. He showed in his classic Seeing Like a State how institutions represent and simplify social reality, always at a cost, and made the case for resisting generalisation and standardisation. Ritual and symbolism matter more than rationalist frameworks acknowledge. Institutions communicate meaning through their architecture, ceremonies, uniforms, forms, and spatial arrangements. These symbolic dimensions shape how institutions are perceived, trusted, and used  — and their neglect produces institutions that are technically correct but culturally alien to those they are meant to serve. What might we want more of from anthropology? Reflection on the limits of lived experience, or how structures shape mentalities, and more collaborative work with disciplines that take a very different view. 

Design: co-production, affordances, systems, and prototypes The study of design 
has provided many insights into how institutions work and could work differently. 
Herbert Simon's "Sciences of the Artificial" distinguished natural sciences 
(describing what is) from design sciences (prescribing what ought to be) and argued 
that administration and policy are fundamentally design activities. He hoped for a 
rational and scientific approach to every aspect of governance, including computation 
and modelling. However, these hopes were not realised.  A few years later, the work 
on wicked problems (Rittel and Weber) problematised this approach, arguing that 
social and policy problems resist the linear, engineering model of problem-solving 
 — they are "wicked" because defining the problem is the problem. 
Public institutions are constitutively engaged with wicked problems (poverty, crime, 
health), and this insight argues against technocratic, blueprint-style institutional design 
in favour of iterative, adaptive approaches.  A later shift moved from design for users 
to design with users and also had clear institutional implications. 
Scandinavian participatory design traditions (emerging from labour movements in the 
1970s) argued that those affected by a system should shape it, echoing ideas from 
philosophy and political science on deliberative democracy (Habermas, Fishkin, 
Landemore) and seeing institutions as forums for structured co-creation of public 
decisions, mirroring the interest in co-production in public services (Ostrom, Bovaird) 
with citizens as active participants in service design, not passive recipients. 
Design absorbed the critique that top-down institutional design systematically excludes 
the tacit knowledge of those closest to a problem. Design also provided useful insights 
into the role of symbolic design — the architecture of courts, the rituals of parliament, 
the aesthetics of public spaces, which all communicate authority, accessibility, neutrality, 
 and power: indeed, no institution can be understood separate from the fictions or claims 
 that it makes.  James Gibson's concept of affordances (what an environment makes 
possible or invites) can be applied to institutions: institutional rules and structures 
afford certain behaviours and constrain others  — not through command but through 
the shape of the environment. Behavioural design (Kahneman, Thaler & Sunstein's 
various approaches to choice architecture) is an explicit application: designing choice 
environments to channel behaviour without coercion, connecting to older work in 
political science on how constitutional design shapes political behaviour 
(Lijphart, Tsebelis). Design culture's embrace of prototyping, drawn from civil society 
and software  — building cheap, testable versions before committing — is a corrective 
to the grandiose, irreversible institutional reforms that characterize much political 
change, but is challenging in law-based contexts. It overlaps with experimental 
methods such as the use of randomized controlled trials and policy labs 
(Nesta, MindLab, various government innovation units), which have tried to bring 
this ethos to public sector reform. These suggest the concept of minimum viable 
institutions  — starting small and scaling what works. Design's normalization of 
failure as informative rather than shameful is a genuine cultural challenge for 
public institutions with accountability pressures.   Design has increasingly absorbed 
ideas from systems thinking (Beer, Meadows, Forrester), which is directly applicable 
to institutions: seeing how institutions generate feedback loops  — perverse incentives, 
goal displacement, Goodhart's Law; the role of anticipation in uncertainty; attention 
to second and third-order effects rather than optimizing local components; and the 
concept of leverage points, places in a system where a small intervention 
produces large change  — is highly useful for institutional reform strategy. 
Design has had a significant influence on public administration over the last few 
decades. However, this has primarily focused on services, promoting distinct mindsets 
and ways of thinking. Whereas service design and digital design have developed 
specific methods, there isn’t yet anything quite comparable for institutional design, 
and Herbert Simon’s hopes sixty years ago for a comprehensive approach linking 
design to governance have yet to be realised. 

Complexity: cybernetics, systems, and the dilemmas of emergence 
The many currents of research on systems, cybernetics, and complexity have had 
much to say about how organisations work, from Stafford Beer, Donatella Meadows, 
and Peter Checkland to Stuart Kauffman.  Much of this work emphasises limits: 
what can’t be known or planned; the virtue of improvisation (making paths by walking 
them), which implies not working too hard to design or specify the architecture of 
organisations; attending to the broader systems within which organisations operate; 
and addressing emergence, non-linearity and contradiction as inevitable in human 
systems, all of which call into question the more rationalist models of organisational 
design and analysis. One stream of work, that of cybernetics from the 1940s onwards, 
emphasised how organisations regulate themselves through negative feedback 
(corrective) and positive feedback (amplifying). This reframed management as a 
process of sensing and responding to deviation, not just commanding. 
Ross Ashby’s law of requisite variety became popular as a frame, arguing that a 
controller must have at least as much variety (or range of responses) as the system 
it governs: you cannot manage complexity with simplistic rules. This theory has 
struggled in practice, since it is perhaps never feasible (and all organisations have 
little choice but to use methods far simpler than the environments they are trying to 
influence). Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model applied cybernetics to organisations 
directly, showing that viable organisations need five nested subsystems 
(operations, coordination, control, intelligence, and identity/policy), with each 
subsystem fractal (and potentially containing all the others). Like Ross Ashby, he 
emphasised amplifying internal diversity to enable learning in ways that match 
the complexity of the external environment.  His ideas also struggled when put 
into practice. Drawing on biology (von Bertalanffy) and later sociology 
(Parsons, Luhmann), systems theories were another challenge to overly reductionist, 
mechanistic views of organisations. These tend to emphasise the ways that 
organisational properties (culture, strategy, innovation) emerge from local interactions 
and cannot be straightforwardly designed top-down; how relationships between 
components matter as much as the components themselves; and how organisations 
can be understood as open systems, open to their environments, exchanging energy, 
information, and resources.  A parallel strand of work looked at organisations as 
sociotechnical systems (for example, the work of Trist & Bamforth at the Tavistock 
Institute), which means that both their social and technical subsystems need care 
and attention. Tavistock researchers also looked at organisations not as logical 
entities pursuing defined goals but as emotional systems driven by unconscious forces. 
At the heart of their practice is systems psychodynamics, the study of how unconscious 
processes shape organisational life, with social structures often serving as defences 
against individually experienced anxiety, guilt, and doubt. 
Wilfred Bion argued that groups simultaneously operate on the conscious level 
(the "work group"), which is focused on the explicit task or goal, and the unconscious 
level (the "basic assumption group"), which is driven by unspoken assumptions and 
emotions. He identified what he called a "hatred of learning by experience", as groups 
unconsciously cooperate to avoid dealing with their real tasks and resist the uncertainty 
involved in learning about themselves. Like some of the other theoretical approaches 
described above, they argued that the best way to understand a system, 
or an organisation, is to try to change it. Senge used several of these traditions to 
feed into his ideas about "learning organisations" that can avoid being trapped in toxic 
or unproductive patterns while the theories of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) 
similarly emphasise self-organising systems of agents following local rules, with order 
arising without central coordination, or even that organisations thrive best on the edge 
of chaos, on the cusp between rigid order and complete disorder. 
Too much control kills adaptability; too little produces incoherence. 
Other relevant tools include the analysis of non-linearity and sensitivity, which show 
how small interventions can have disproportionate effects (and vice versa), which 
undermines linear planning models and highlights the limits of prediction. 
The development of models analysing fitness landscapes provided another way to 
see organisations as continuously adapting to shifting competitive environments. 
What was an optimal strategy can become a trap. 
These many theories have all struggled to generate either falsifiable hypotheses or 
predictions, or much that can be quantified, and some have been hard to 
operationalise without the help of very skilled facilitators. Their other challenge is 
that the emphasis on emergence, and the impossibility of design, clashes with the 
fact that most organisations are in fact designed  — with legal forms, organograms, 
and proposals used to generate funding or investment. Their reality may diverge 
from the plans. But they don’t simply emerge.  However, these theoretical traditions 
are richly suggestive and influenced the development of agile and lean methodologies, 
with iterative, feedback-driven, decentralised, network and flat organisational structures. 
They also encourage organisations to reduce hierarchy so as to increase variety and 
responsiveness and improve organisational learning, with reflexive capacity rather 
than fixed procedures. The key legacy of these traditions is a way of thinking, 
seeing organisations not as machines to be engineered but as living, adaptive 
systems to be cultivated.

GORDON BROWN – a comment

GORDON BROWN – a comment
I have mixed feelings about Gordon Brown – recognising on one hand 
his immense contribution to British politics, particularly as 
Chancellor of the Exchequer in the global financial crisis of 2007 
but never forgiving him for his pretensions to the Prime Minister
-ship. I have recently been rereading Tom Bowen’s Gordon Brown 
– Prime Minister (2004) which starts with an unflattering picture 
of Brown attending an Italian match in Rome with expensive tickets 
bought by Geoffrey Robinson the then rather shady Attorney General 
in Tony Bliar’s government and goes on to rehearse his biography 
leading up to but not including his time as Prime Minister 
(which came in 2007)

Beyond the Crash – overcoming the first crisis of globalisation 
Gordon Brown (2010) is his rather incestuous account of the global 
financial crisis.

Why write a book on the financial crisis? Or perhaps more pertinently, why write another book on the financial crisis when so many accounts of the events of 2007–2010 have already appeared that there may be little appetite for more? My case for writing this account is that I was there. If we do not understand fully the biggest economic shock of our generation, then we are destined to repeat its mistakes. I believe a firsthand account can best illuminate how choices (and mistakes) were made.

My case for writing this now is that the crisis is not yet over. If it is to end with a full recovery, we need to learn quickly the lessons of what went so wrong that the global financial system froze, and we need to come to a firm and shared view regarding what we can do to make things right. So, while some will say this is a book written in (extreme) haste that I will repent of at leisure, it is for me a necessary means of provoking a muchneeded debate about what I believe is the only way to overcome the disastrous economic collapse: coordinated global action. This book is not, therefore, a comprehensive account of the crisis. But it does cover the misjudgments that brought the crisis about and proposes how best they can be overcome. This is my first attempt at a set of recommendations for the next stage of our economic recovery. As I discuss this book’s content with people across the world I will be ready to learn from their knowledge, to review and amend my recommendations, and to update and reconsider my conclusions.

I am neither a finance expert not a trained economist, but fear of making technical mistakes (of which, I’m sure, this book is full) should not silence us altogether when the task before us is so urgent. We are of course summoned to address many great challenges that arise from the global changes that are shaping our twenty-first century lives—combating global terrorism and nuclear proliferation, and in the wider economy itself, curbing the volatility in oil, food, and commodity prices and fighting climate change with the opportunity that I would like to write about later for a transformation in the way our economies consume energy. But in this book, the priority is to address head-on the new and gnawing insecurity that millions now experience in their daily lives. And so my priorities are jobs and justice. This book is a call for the world to achieve together what we now know is possible in the immediate future: to create and save 50 million jobs worldwide and to lift nearly 100 million people out of poverty. We are on an uneven and hazardous journey whose route and destination should not be left to chance, but must be shaped by our common endeavors and by the values we share in common. And for me at least, the oft-quoted phrase I hear spoken and sometimes use myself of “restoring the global economy to full health” cannot be an accurate description of the outcome we seek without its including millions more hard-working families in decent jobs. This is my first draft, a work in progress. But of this I am certain: the basic thesis—that global problems need global solutions and that there must be an alternative to a decade of low growth and lost jobs—will withstand the arguments about culpability for the crisis and the questions about specific recommendations. I, of course, take full responsibility for the contents of this book. Only I am to blame for any mistakes that I have made and that are inevitable in a project of this speed and scope. I did not start to write until the end of May 2010 and completed the work in the fourteen weeks that followed, alongside my work as a Member of Parliament. It would not have been possible to deliver it on deadline without the prior support I had from all those who served with me in government, and I could not even have contemplated it without the amazing and unsurpassable commitment and loyalty of those who are still assisting me today.

The Court Politics of the Blair Presidency is a lecture given in 
Australia by academic Rod Rhodes in 2005

The lecture covers five topics. First, I document briefly the long-standing claim that post-war Britain witnessed expanding prime ministerial power and the growth of the UK presidency. Second, I turn to the most recent manifestation of this trend - the tales of a Blair Presidency. This story makes three main claims: that there has been a centralisation of coordination, a pluralisation of advice, and the personalisation of elections. Obviously, I draw on the work of academic colleagues, especially where they cite interviews, but I concentrate on the views of practitioners. I rely on the obvious sources of prime ministerial, ministerial and civil servant autobiographies, diaries and memoirs as well as official publications. Many claim there are problems with the evidence of practitioners. As Anthony Mughan (2000: 134) remarks ‘for every “insider” … assertion that prime ministerial government has arrived in Britain, it is possible to find the counter-assertion that cabinet government remains the order of the day’. Such inconsistencies are the puzzle. I compare the several stories and show there is much inconsistency and contradiction. This divergent evidence highlights the paradox between presidential claims and the governance narrative. So, third, I explore the governance paradox - even as people tell tales of a Blair presidency, they recount also stories of British governance that portray it as fragmented and multipolar. In particular, I argue New Labour appears to accept key tenets of the governance narrative. Innovations like joining-up and the reforms at No. 10 recognise the weakness of the centre and fuel claims of the Blair presidency. But New Labour ignores the other half of the governance narrative that stresses interdependence and cooperation, not command and control. So, claims of a Blair presidency founder on policy-making and implementation deficits. Fourth, I argue this paradox reveals the distorting influence that the Westminster Model still exerts on many accounts of British politics. It acts as a smokescreen for the changes in executive politics. Finally, I conclude that Blair is locked into the court politics of Westminster and Whitehall and to complex patterns of domestic and international dependence. The prime minister wins, loses and draws as one might expect given the volatile nature of high politics. Prime ministerial practice is equally varied. And the best way to understand this volatility and variety is through decentered studies of the beliefs and practices of politicians and civil servants

Global Statesman – how Gordon Brown took New Labour to the world David Webber (2017)

Despite its focus upon the hand of Gordon Brown in the design and setting of New Labour’s international development policies, Global Statesman is not a biographical account of Brown’s political career. Given his unparalleled position in modern British politics, it is hardly surprising that a number of books are already in print concerning his life and his politics. There are four main dimensions to the literature that focuses upon the life and political career of Gordon Brown.

• the biographical;

• domestic policies as Chancellor;

• what a Brown premiership might look like;

• his brief tenure as prime minister, focusing specifically upon his management of the global financial crisis, including his own assessment of it, and the personal role that he played in dealing with the ‘first crisis of globalisation’.

Each of these accounts – perhaps with the notable exception of William Keegan’s text, and Brown’s own book – focuses upon the sphere of domestic policymaking; paying little attention to Brown’s concern for global poverty, and the role that he carved out for himself in the institutions of international finance to address this. Despite Brown’s obvious concern for poverty both at home and abroad, international development in these accounts is treated as an ‘extra-curricular’ activity, receiving little more than a chapter or in some instances just a few pages of coverage. This, of course, reflects to a certain degree the relatively minor importance afforded to international development in British politics more generally, and the extent to which other events, particularly during

Brown’s premiership, overtook this area of policy. However, to neglect the issues of global poverty when discussing the personality and politics of one of the most powerful and influential figures in the modern era is to ignore an integral part of Brown’s political economy, and one of the very reasons he pursued a career in politics. Unlike other accounts of Gordon Brown, this book does not draw upon clandestine interviews or off-the-record briefings but rather the very public pronouncements of policy made by Brown and his colleagues. While this might diminish the sensationalism and subterfuge that appears in other accounts, it does enable the book to make a more factual, detailed and balanced assessment of the actual policies designed and implemented by Brown during his time as shadow Chancellor, Chancellor and finally prime minister.

In the preparation of this manuscript, thousands of speeches and statements made by senior New Labour offi cials either in Parliament itself or at other events elsewhere in Britain and across the world were read or listened to. Of all of these speeches, it was Brown who, by some distance, delivered the majority. Not only does this reveal the seriousness that he, more than any other senior New Labour figure, afforded matters concerning poverty and development, it also demonstrates just how infl uential Brown was in designing and implementing this and other areas of government policy. These statements were subsequently scrutinised for both context and content before being woven together to form a narrative of development that could be examined in the light of Brown’s own vision of development. It is this book that, based upon this discourse analysis, provides the critical assessment of the political economy of Brown’s vision to deliver a more socially and economically just world. In pursuing this line of inquiry, this book proceeds by mapping out the strategic terrain that Gordon Brown and New Labour were faced with during the final stages of the party’s modernisation and ascent towards government.

For Gordon Brown, his commitment to addressing global poverty was borne out of a childhood spent growing up in his father’s manse in Kirkcaldy and driven by a deep compassion for the most vulnerable in society. Brown’s childhood experiences as a Presbyterian ‘son of the manse’ imprinted upon him the virtues of Christian socialism and instilled in the future Chancellor, prime minister and leader of the Labour Party a burning desire for social justice.

Political Memoirs Andrew Gamble (1994) demonstrates, somewhat caustically, the dangers of that brand of memoir.

The Deal is an excellent BBC series aired in 2002 with 
David Morrisey and Michael Sheen which demonstrates the power 
of their friendship

Gordon Brown – power with purpose James Macintyre (2026)

“My Scotland, Our Britain” traces the origins of modern social provision to

Scotland’s demands for the abolition of the Scottish Poor Law and its

replacement by a British welfare state. Contrary to conventional wisdom,

Brown argues that the concept of ‘sharing’ across the UK was not an

English imposition but in fact a Scottish invention. Brown’s book provided

the basis for his many speeches in those months following the

announcement of the referendum, when Brown spoke at universities and in

schools, at pensioner forums, to a range of faith and other groups, including

Carmelite nuns and the Royal British Legion, across towns and villages the

length of Scotland.

Yet he sensed that the message was not getting through, because it was

overshadowed by a campaign that was effectively led by the Tory

government which, Brown felt, was inadvertently playing into the hands of

the nationalists who were pitching the argument as England against

Scotland. ‘What was getting through, loud and clear, was that the people of

Scotland wanted change. And here was the irony: each pro-union party had

a strong devolution programme, with detailed proposals about additional

powers for the Scottish Parliament over taxation, employment, social policy

and welfare. The problem was that nobody had heard about the proposals or

had any idea that if they voted No, new powers would be delivered.’

The cross-party, unionist Better Together campaign was often chaotic,

which helps explain the dramatic narrowing of the polls, from a year before

the vote, when the ‘No’ side was twenty points ahead, to the two sides being

broadly neck and neck as the poll approached. Speeches were frequently

composed at the last minute, the Liberal Democrats were accused of not

pulling their weight and the press operation was weak, while the ‘Yes’

campaign was three times as active on social media compared to the ‘No’

team. Over the summer of 2014, however, the articulate shadow foreign

secretary Douglas Alexander was called in to boost the unionist cause. The

safe pair of hands that was Alistair Darling fronted the Better Together

campaign, and helped to bring in funds – including from the revered authors

J. K. Rowling, an Edinburgh neighbour of Darling, and C. J. Sansom –

while the then political operator and now MP Blair McDougall helped to

run it. Alexander scripted interviews and worked on general messaging and

advertising designed to reach out to Scots still wavering over their

momentous decision.

But Gordon Brown continues to practice his "moral leadership" as is indicated in 
his latest article in The Guardian 

FOUR MORE FASCINATING BOOKS TO WHET YOUR APPETITE

 Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics ed G Munck and R Snyder 

(2007) A brilliant book which focuses on the writings of a range of work from 
people such as Almond, Barrington Moore, Lipjart, Skocpol and Linz

Understanding Socialism Richard Wolff (2019) A short (145 pp) book which 
superbly demonstrates the power of the concept

Introduction

Chapter I A Brief History: How Socialism Got to its Here and Now p9

Chapter 2 What ls Socialism? p27

Chapter 3 Capitalism and Socialism: Struggles and Transitions p41

Chapter 4 Russia and China: Major Experiments in Constructing Socialism p55

Chapter 5 Two Anti-socialist Purges: Fascism and Anti-communism p87

Chapter 6 Socialism's Future and Worker Co-ops p109

ln this book's lntroduction we referred to socialism as a yearning for something better than capitalism. As capitalism has changed and as experiments with socialism have accumulated - both good and bad - socialist yearnings, too, have changed. However, a bizarre disconnect surfaces as capitalism's gross dysfunction during and since its 2008 crash brings socialism again into public discussion. Large numbers of people debate the pros and cons of socialism as if what it is in the 21st century were identical to what it was in the 20tn. ls it reasonable to presume that the last century's two purges, the Cold War, the implosion of the USSR, and the explosive emergence of the People's Republic of China inspired no critical reflections on socialism by socialists themselves? No. The remarkable lack of awareness of new and different definitions of socialism since 1945, their elaborations, and their implications reflects the fact that sustained engagement with socialism was taboo in the US for decades. That people are now mostly unaware of socialism's evolution in theory, practice, and self-criticism over the last half century is therefore no surprise. The taboo against socialism resulted in a mass retreat from engaging with developments in socialism and connecting these developments to the problems of modern capitalism. Socialism rather became one of two things in the minds of most. On the one hand, many politicians, academics, and media pundits portrayed socialism as coinciding with Soviet efforts to subvert global capitalism. Socialism for such people meant moving from private to state-owned and -operated workplaces and from market to centrally planned distributions of resources and products. These same people equated opposing capitalism with opposing democracy and freedom. This equation was then repeated endlessly in an effort to make it "common sense." On the other hand, socialism was the name adopted by Western European - and especially Scandinavian – "welfarestate" governments, which aimed to regulate markets comprised still mostly of private capitalist firms. This led many people to associate socialism with robust public spending and government intervention in the marketplace. Consequently, socialism was viewed as more or less extreme, depending on whether it involved state-owned and -operated firms with centrat planning at one end or merely welfare-state policies with market regulation on the other.

Ch 7 Conclusion p127

Global Statesman – how Gordon Brown took New Labour to the world David 
Webber (2017)

Placing increased emphasis upon ‘competition, supervision and the right conditions for growth’, Brown knelt at the altar of the market as the only means through which poverty and underdevelopment might be addressed. Under Brown’s close watch, many of New Labour’s international development policies adopted precisely the self-same neoliberal doctrine preached by the ‘post-Washington Consensus’. This revised orthodoxy, still based upon the principles of free trade and private investment that lay at the heart of the original Washington Consensus, now required national governments to put in place a much more robust and transparent regulatory framework.

This ostensibly new set of political and economic reforms would promote both stability – so as to reduce the exposure of countries to the financial crises that had, since the start of the 1970s, punctured the global economy – and growth. If investors could be made to feel more confi dent that their capital would be ‘safe’ in a particular country, they would be more likely to scale up their investment and contribute more towards the economic growth of that country and, concomitantly, its development. Crucially, insofar as Gordon Brown was concerned, although an anti-poverty agenda provided the pretext for his appeal for a ‘new economic architecture’ (as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5), it was, in reality, his own general growth theory that informed this framework.

The Global Casino – how Wall Street gambles with people and the planet Ann 
Pettifor (2026)

President Roosevelt was explicit about these enemies of democracy. In a famous speech in Madison Square Garden in 1936, he explained that his administration had to ‘struggle with the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. ‘They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We now know that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.’

Government by organised money has become unbearable for human society. Financial markets that dictate high prices of unaffordable services essential to humanity – services like water, housing, energy, health and education – have triggered powerful political reactions. Society has turned to strongmen, dictators and authoritarians for ‘protection’ from markets. The reasoning, as Karl Polanyi explained in 1944, is straightforward: government by markets could not exist for long before ‘annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man [sic] and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness’. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, he continued. But whatever measures it took – for example, the election of Donald Trump, who promised protection from Chinese and Mexican markets – impaired those markets, disorganised industrial life and endangered society in other ways.

If society is to restore stability to the economic system, to manage climate breakdown and the power of the fossil interest, then we must first transform, regulate and manage the Global Casino. Only then can we hope to build a fairer and more stable world order. 

What Is to Be Done?

This book is about seeing, and paying attention to, the international financial and monetary system and its role in accelerating the exploitation of people and the extraction of the earth’s precious finite assets. We must base our comprehension and understanding on this simple reality: the globalised financial system is man-made and designed to be remote and unaccountable. Its design is intentional. The ultimate hidden truth of the world, David Graeber wrote, is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. Like the divine right of kings, it is a system that can and will be transformed. How can we change a system that economists systematically ignore, one whose governors are determined to evade public accountability? First there must be widespread understanding of the international financial system and of the fact it is designed and governed to serve the interests of the wealthy –the 1 per cent. Only with that understanding will we be able to organise, to once again redesign the system to serve all of society and the ecosystem.

We know that can be done because it has been transformed before, in the blink of an eye. The system was redesigned, reregulated and even transformed both before and after the Second World War. And again in 1971 when President Nixon unilaterally, and virtually overnight, dismantled the global Bretton Woods system and launched what came to be known as ‘globalisation’. Another catastrophic global war would inevitably lead to radical change. But we need not accept that inevitability. I believe that with wider understanding, political will and radical action, the system can be transformed and remade. This book is mainly concerned with the first aim, throwing light on the invisible, globalised financial system, its evolution over the past century and its powerful masters. I then outline the impact of the financial system on pensions, food, energy and housing, as well as on the climate. Finally drawing on the wisdom of economists and historians, I propose ways in which the international financial system can be transformed and made subordinate to the interests of society and the ecosystem. Scientists and the UN have warned that if human civilisation is to survive, we must cut greenhouse gas emissions and restore stability to the global climate system. Such a worthy aim is futile and delusional until we, the people, take back control, taming and subordinating the money system to serve the interests of both the biosphere and humanity, not just, as at present, the interests of wealth. 

INTERESTING TIMES

Such is the title of Eric Hobsbawm's fascinating autobiography 

Interesting Times – a 20th century life Eric Hobsbawm 2002

That is what an autobiography can do. In one sense this book is the flip

side of The Age of Extremes: not world history illustrated by the

experiences of an individual, but world history shaping that experience, or

rather offering a shifting but always limited set of choices from which, to

adapt Karl Marx’s phrase, ‘men make [their lives], but they do not make

[them] just as they please, they do not make [them] under circumstances

chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given

and transmitted from the past’ and, one might add, by the world around

them.

In another sense the autobiography of a historian is an important part of the construction of his or her work. Next to a belief in reason and the difference between fact and fiction, self-awareness, that is to say standing both in one’s body and outside it, is a necessary skill for players of the game in both history and the social sciences, particularly for a historian who, like myself, has chosen his subjects intuitively and accidentally, but ended by bringing them together into a coherent whole. Other historians may pay attention to these more professional aspects of my book. However, I hope others will read it as an introduction to the most extraordinary century in the world’s history through the itinerary of one human being whose life could not possibly have occurred in any other.

History, as my colleague the philosopher Agnes Heller put it, ‘is about what happens seen from outside, memoirs about what happens seen from within’. This is not a book for scholarly acknowledgements, but only for thanks and apologies. The thanks go above all to my wife Marlene who has lived through half my life, read and criticized all chapters to good purpose and who tolerated the years when an often distracted, bad-tempered and sometimes discouraged husband lived less in the present than in a past he struggled to put on paper. I also thank Stuart Proffitt, a prince among editors. The number of people whom I have consulted over the years on questions relevant to this autobiography is too large for acknowledgement, even though several of them have died since I began. They know why I thank them.

My apologies also go to Marlene and the family. This is not the autobiography they might have preferred, for, though they are constantly present, at least from the moment when they entered my life and I theirs, this book is more about the public than the private man. I should also apologize to those friends, colleagues, students and others absent from these pages, who might have expected to find themselves remembered here, or recalled at greater length. Finally, I have organized the book in three parts. After a brief overture, the personal—political chapters 1—16, roughly in chronological order, cover the period from when memory begins — in the early 1920s — to the early 1990s. However, they are not intended as a straightforward chronicle. Chapters 17 and 18 are about my career as a professional historian. Chapters 19—22 are about countries or regions (other than my native Mitteleuropa and England) with which I have had associations for long periods of my life: France, Spain and Italy, Latin America and other parts of the Third World and the USA. Since they cover the entire range of my dealings with these countries, they do not fit easily into the main chronological narrative, though they overlap with it. I have therefore thought it best to keep them separate.

Eric Hobsbawm

London, April 2002

The Age of Hobsbawm Emil Chabal (2026) For those who don’t want to read 
Richard Evan’s Eric Hobsbawm – a life in history (2019) 

ABOUT THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

This is a  blog about the  social sciences 

A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books ed Cecile Vidal et al (2023)

The purpose driving this work is to reread 101 books, published since the Second World War, that have left their mark on how the social sciences have been built, year after year, in France and around the world. In so doing, we shall encounter countless objects of study, names, tenets, and debates. We shall witness the birth of concepts now central to how we apprehend and intervene in the social world. We shall follow solidly woven lines of thought and look on as others fray and fall apart. From the cultural diagnosis of Theodor W. Adorno to the gender trouble introduced by Judith Butler, from the long time frame of Fernand Braudel’s “Mediterranean” to Randall Collins’s analysis of micro-situations of violence, from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s kinship systems to Anna Tsing’s mushroom growing amid the ruins of capitalism—this book portrays the discontinuous, multifaceted endeavor of the social sciences while showing it to be a pursuit sustained by a common effort and project.

Strikingly, no one has addressed this challenge before. It is as though the social sciences, despite being constituted as such for nearly a century and a half, still struggle to grasp what confers their unity. To portray their development, they have relied on discipline-specific retrospectives and anthologies rather than focusing on how they conjointly drive a movement that is central to contemporary thought. And it is precisely this whole, composed of many different fields, that we seek to capture. For, in addition to being connected by intellectual dynamics, transfers, and debates, these disciplines share a common position vis-à-vis the life sciences and, above all, partake in a common project—adding to the collective reflexivity of contemporary societies and furthering our critiques of ethnocentric bias.

This emancipating project is, to our minds, the crucial element. If the social sciences merit the energies expended on them, it is because they increase our collective capacity to view our societies and their institutions in a denaturalizing light. The movement by which they tirelessly explore the infinite variety of human practices, via the methods and techniques they have devised, is in fact related to their capacity to peel away the veneer of obviousness overlaying our behavior and reveal that a form of necessity, yet equally of arbitrariness, influences our collective organization. This is the emancipating effect of the social sciences—an effect they could not relinquish if they wished to. In studying human life in all its diverse manifestations, the social sciences bring to light its foundations, which, though biologically determined, are fashioned perhaps primarily by sociohistorical forces.

Doing Social Science

Paying tribute to this emancipating effect entails exhibiting the shape it takes in each book presented. It also demands that we address not just a specialist readership but all those who appreciate the social sciences for the knowledge and freedom they bring. But making these books simpler and more accessible does not imply forgoing discussion of their technical dimensions, particularly the place held by the (at times difficult) problems of method in the debates driving the social sciences. Any attempt to erase what makes them more than simple statements about the social world would belie them. Our discussion thus necessarily covers investigation protocols, data-gathering techniques, critical analysis of sources, and tools for comparison and analysis, taking in, as a corollary, the production of concepts and theoretical frameworks. This technical aspect is what “disciplines” each social science, based on established procedures for investigation and reflexivity. These dimensions also relate to the fundamentally collective nature of working in the social sciences (even when the undertaking crystallizes around a name) and to the existence of research communities, whose development and autonomy of judgment undergird advances in knowledge. In addition to focusing on what these books state, it is thus important to further examine how they ground what they say. It is likewise important to pay attention to how each partakes in a series of research debates preceding it, often modifying the parameters and subsequent course of these debates, which amounts to raising the issue of the cumulative nature of knowledge in the social sciences. We have called on some of the leading specialists currently working in France and elsewhere in the various disciplinary fields and objects of study. They go over how the publication of each book represented an event in its field, explain the effects the book produced on scientific debate, and specify where the interest lies today, without immuring each book from the living context of research or enshrining it as a museum piece cut off from any scientific tradition or collective undertaking.

This approach is intended as a dual tribute to the social sciences community. First, in bringing these books and researchers together, we wished to emphasize intergenerational solidarity. From the Second World War through to the present day, each new generation of researchers has received from the preceding one the technical and intellectual training without which they would have been incapable of producing their own works. This solidarity, however, is not merely a matter of acknowledging this legacy: rather, it entails appropriation through critique, carrying the legacy forward by building up a distance from predecessors’ thought and approach, thereby opening up new vistas. Second, by calling on so many authors, we also wished to profess our vision of the social sciences as a unified whole. Such a vision is currently imperiled by the ongoing trend toward specialization, in which researchers in the social sciences are increasingly viewed as mere “experts” on a given question or domain. This reveals the full extent of the changes to research practices over the past seventy years, illustrating how the advent of mass higher education and, more recently, the managerialization of research output have radically altered what it means to be a researcher in the social sciences, affecting career training, the processes of intellectual consecration, investigation practices, the transmission of research techniques, publication modes, and even the very ethos of the researcher and associated professional ideal. But the interdisciplinary solidarity that we hold dear has not disappeared. A hundred or so researchers have recognized our approach as their own, and the existence of this book may be viewed as an act of resistance, an assertive reminder that the social sciences form a unitary endeavor. Further, this book can be seen as proof that such a project still makes sense to many of us, at a time when other approaches to scientific work—promoting the fragmentation of research fields, emphasizing individual strategies and expertise—are being paraded as a universal model. No doubt projects such as ours will garner ever more support in the future, as the need is felt to move beyond the dynamic of hyper-specialization that bleeds all reflexivity dry and turns the social sciences away from their emancipatory project. 

Better than a Pantheon

It took an institutional event to trigger the opportunity to profess this unitary and emancipatory vision and to tackle this challenge—namely, the seventieth anniversary in 2017 of the creation of a new department devoted to “economic and social sciences” at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE). As is widely recognized, the department’s creation in 1947 was of major scientific importance in France at that time. It is equally acknowledged that this was the kernel of the institution that developed and then acquired autonomy in 1975 as the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), where the editors of this book work. This fortuitous occasion to go back over the previous seventy years of the social sciences was the germ whence this book grew.

Our readers will thus better understand why we settled on the period 1947–2017. But we still need to explain how we went about our undertaking—that is, how we selected, chose, and prioritized such and such a book. To tackle this obviously irresoluble problem, the five editors met on numerous occasions in 2016. During these meetings, our group engaged in fierce discussions. Although we had fixed the objective of drawing up a list of 100 or so books published since 1947, new and “indispensable” books kept on coming and asserting their right to be included. It was only very gradually, painfully, that we whittled down our list to 101 titles, rather than 100, which is too neat, too tidy a number. The figure also invites others to continually reopen and enrich this selection and, as far as possible, lessens the impression inherent to this type of project that the works listed are somehow the “best.”

There was never any question in our minds of restricting our selection to an abridged series of canonized authors, supposedly equating to some golden age of the social sciences around the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, it was a matter of following the social sciences as an ongoing endeavor, characterized by its ups and downs, surprises, and fluctuations in intensity. We decided that each year was to be represented, and no author, however influential, was to appear more than once. We also opted to follow these disciplines through to the present day while remaining alert to the difficulties occasioned by lacking the requisite distance to pick our way surely through the most recent output. Lastly, we wished to limit imbalances between disciplines, between French and non-French authors, between men and women, and between historical periods and cultural areas, though our selection is obviously marked by the social conditions of research—mostly male, mostly European and American—during the period under consideration and by our project having been carried out at the heart of a French institution. So, this work is not a little pantheon. It is less monumental and less fettered. Our readers are invited to circulate freely among the books, not to admire them. Nor is it the result of a selection that could be described as objective, as if criteria could exist wholly detached from the sociohistorical situation of those choosing. We have no such radical conception of objectivity. It is clear to our minds that our choices are necessarily situated.

First, our choices are situated in time, for it is necessarily from where our disciplines now stand that we have scrutinized their pasts, looking for works that have come down through the years, standing out as “noteworthy” or “remarkable,” even as “foundational” or “representative” of a current they themselves did not envisage. But rather than engaging with the works of the past from the standpoint of our expectations, we have reconsidered them from theirs—thus arguments that have become selfevident are rehearsed afresh with the novelty they had when formulated.

Second, our selections are situated in space, for our enterprise, conducted in a French research establishment, which assumes a standpoint toward the global history of the social sciences (no doubt a very different one from that our American colleagues would have assumed if asked to draw up such a list). However, we considered the importance attached to the selected titles in places outside France and Europe. Thus, though clearly “situated,” our approach is driven by a constant effort to decenter it in both time and space.

Clashes and Choices

Our overall line led us to embrace a certain number of deliberate choices. The first and main such choice is to adopt the standpoint of the social sciences rather than of a particular discipline. That does not mean championing some flat, bland vision of the social sciences. Rather, we profess a more structured vision, drawing notably on the history of the EPHE economics and social science department and what it owed to the Annales school.1 We are mindful of what Jean-Claude Passeron has called the “epistemological indiscernibility”2 of the three disciplines underpinning the social sciences—history, anthropology, and sociology. Around this base is a constellation of other disciplines with fundamentally different epistemologies—law, linguistics, philosophy, the history of art, literary studies, economics, the cognitive sciences, and so on. The whole interest of their interaction with the three underpinning disciplines springs, of course, from this difference. Admittedly, placing certain disciplines at the center and others on the periphery is in itself controversial. Clearly, the way in which the social sciences figure the relationships between their constitutive fields sparks clashes. Additionally, while these three disciplines are the main force behind the social sciences, it is only conjointly, not singly, that they impart this drive, drawing on the exchanges, theoretical debates, and questionings issuing from the surrounding disciplines grounded in another epistemology and affecting them. One has only to think, for example, of the emblematic role played by linguistics in the 1960s.

A second deliberate choice, which is important to us, is to honor a particular form of scholarship—namely, books published under the author’s (or authors’) name. Changes currently favor the article and, to a lesser extent, chapter in a joint volume from a conference or colloquium. For its part, the world of publishing encourages social science researchers to produce brief essays, textbooks, and other “contributions.” All these formats have their merits, meeting the requirements of different publics while adding to the production and raising the profile of the social sciences. But historically, the publication of books has assuredly been central to building the social sciences, and it is the main means by which they have forged their reputation with the general public. Our choice to privilege books as the preeminent form of scholarly output explains why a certain number of important works—particularly articles—do not figure on our list, and nor do specific journal issues, dictionaries, or encyclopedias. This place granted to books does not issue solely from one of the essential differences between the social sciences and the natural sciences (in which the seminal format is the article). It also expresses the tie linking them—from the outset —to the world of the literature.3 The social sciences have an irreducibly hermeneutic and narrative dimension that stems not solely from their object of study (human activities and their historical transformations) but also from the type of labor they require, which entails framing reality as an enigma, seeking to “speak true.” This demands, or should demand, that none shirk the task of voicing and being mindful of the issues involved in describing and categorizing reality. Here once again, not everyone will agree. Within our little editorial group, for that matter, the literary question gave rise to lively debates—and the place accorded to matters of form, the feeling that the “essay” is an inherently dignified genre, or the belief that the effort involved in writing is central to all thinking, did not always emerge victorious. Claiming that one format of scholarly output has primacy, or denouncing how it is treated by our epoch, necessarily figures among the issues at stake in clashes within the highly diverse world of research and could not transpire in a different light.

Which History of the Social Sciences?

In offering a renewed, updated, and internationalized perspective on the major (together with some lesser known) works in the repository of knowledge built up by the social sciences, the panorama we sketch allows us to gauge changes in these sciences, together with the directions in which they have evolved. This book assumes these constraints and, thanks to its collaborative nature, is strongly placed to set out these discontinuities and attendant effects of convergence and densification, thus highlighting the major lines of change. One of the lines of change—perhaps the most flagrant, and in no way a discovery, but with a notable inflection over the decades studied here—is the curve traced by structuralist thought, from its emergence just after the Second World War through its domination in the 1960s, followed by its supposed decline. Did the social sciences, under the aegis of the idea of structure, manage to demonstrate their unity to themselves and triumph awhile, before researchers, naturally given to critique, set about dismantling this unifying belief? Some such nostalgic and disillusioned vision is hawked in accounts that abridge the social sciences to what they are held to have been in the 1960s—some “golden age” corresponding to that of their “great names.” But the path we follow allows us to see things differently and to recognize in the very critique of structuralism (commencing in the 1970s and flourishing as of the 1980s), in its reappraisals and rereadings, a renewed expression of the unity of the social sciences. This critical movement borrows from one discipline to the next such similar schema (emphasizing agency, refusing totalizations, paying attention to situational constraints, etc.), makes methodological recommendations that so frequently converge, and operates on such a scale that we are fully entitled to view the phase on which the social sciences embarked thirty or so years ago in a different light. This view is no longer based on the idea of decline or crisis—characterized by dispersal, fragmentation, and powerlessness even—but on the conviction that this phase exhibits a multiform yet common effort to move beyond the limits of the structuralist enterprise and to take further the goal of denaturing the social world. Starting in the 1990s, on most university campuses around the world involved in teaching and practicing the social sciences, the common language across disciplines tended to center on the idea of “social constructs,” which emerged as the most significant marker of these sciences’ contribution to public debate. From there, we may trace a second evolution, relating to the importance acquired by feminist studies, together with colonial, subaltern, and postcolonial studies. Feminist studies appeared in the late 1940s, and the others surfaced during the 1950s. It was only during the 1970s and the 1980s, however, that they genuinely took off in English-speaking academia.

It took a while for them to reach France, where they were received critically. Yet here, too—though admittedly in the central disciplines of the social sciences rather than in the fields organized into “studies”—they sparked renewed interest in matters of sex, gender, colonization, empire, and domination, steering research in the social sciences toward rehabilitating the “agency” of the dominated. In this case, no doubt more than others, the social sciences show how they are united around a common project to increase reflexivity within societies: In enabling subjects to denaturalize traditional relations of domination, the transformations to these societies gave feminist, subaltern, and postcolonial arguments an everexpanding audience and reach. In return, social science methods have been profoundly modified: confronting hitherto unsuspected practical difficulties, they now seek to better “symmetrize” the point of view of the dominant and the dominated and to avoid importing the prejudices of the dominant enswathed within their conceptualizations and research procedures.

Let us mention one final evolution, which arguably lies at the heart of how we experience the contemporary world: the change in how the social sciences apprehend humanity as a whole and the limits of our planet. Here, it is the questioning of the nation-state that is the crucial element. Constructivist thought once again played a prime role here, making it possible to flush out the overly naturalizing aspects in the conceptions that the social sciences (often unconsciously) favor for apprehending such entities as “nations,” “societies,” and “ethnic groups.” Hence the effort to “deconstruct” these notions and conceive of the realities they overlay as performances rather than as givens. Hence, too, the devising of innovative instruments, primarily methodological, to successfully vary the scales of analysis for apprehending phenomena and for thinking of social activities in terms of “networks,” without being hidebound by the preexisting blueprint afforded by social groups and borders. This is the viewpoint from which to understand the singular importance that, since the 2000s, the social sciences have attached to the dynamics of capitalism, the loss of state sovereignty, the failures in regulating (and thinking about) the ecological crisis, and the depletion of natural resources—all of which require us to extricate our analysis from a viewpoint centered on nation-states. Here, once again, the social sciences show how they are connected to evolutions in the societies within which they develop. By taking globalization as their object and conceiving of their task within this movement, they summon us to be mindful of the sociohistorical conditions engendering them and assert their genuinely political role.

Cyril Lemieux, Laurent Berger, Marielle Macé, Gildas Salmon, and Cécile Vidal