what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, November 17, 2014

Things Look Up in Romania; and time to challenge managerialism

Drive down to Sofia at the weekend – escaping the last-minute frenzy of the Presidential Election which, against all odds (not least the brazen corruption of the so-called social democrats PSD) went to an ethnic German who has ruled the city of Sibiu very competently for the past decade.
Political labels don’t mean anything in Romania – the entire system has been corrupt until the judicial system started to work a couple of years ago and to jail scores of politicians…
That story deserves a wider hearing – but the Iohannis victory should be a further boost to “normalising” forces in the country although, inevitably, there are some unsavoury elements in the alliance which supported him.
The PSD candidate was the present Prime Minister who commands a strong parliamentary vote. Sadly, therefore, the scene seems set for yet more mutual aggression – with Iohannis’ disarming personality being one possible saving grace….

Over the weekend I got caught up in a variety of reading material – initially the 2003 The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence which I will comment on shortly.
The author, Carol Craig, has been head of the Centre for Confidence in Glasgow for some years and writes interestingly on her blog about change issues as well as directing to interesting sites such as one called After Now which contains thoughtful papers about modernity and its sustainability – as well as one on the hidden power of paradigms   

She is also editor of a new series of short publications called Postcards from Scotland – one of which (“Letting Go”) challenges the aggressive management style which has become the norm in the past couple of decades and gives a couple of great references – a long paper Performance Management and workplace tyranny produced by a Strathclyde Professor for the STUC – and a  2009 paper by a group of American management gurus entitled Moonshots for Management which takes strong issue with the direction of management.

Two other important papers caught my eye - Democratic Wealth – building a citizens economy – which seems to be one of the rare “alternative” manifestoes we need these days.
And something called the Life After Europe project
I’ll try to make sense of these for you…..

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