The blog was
ten years old last autumn – making it one of the longest-running
(english-speaking) blogs of its kind. It first saw the light of day
as "Carpathian Musings"
because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few
winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise
description of its source.
The blog was
therefore, for 5 years or so, called “Balkan
and Carpathian Musings”.
But neither the
word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when
they are googling on the topics the blog deals with - such as "the global financial crisis", "organisational reform", "social change", "capitalism" - let alone "Romanian culture", "Bulgarian painting", "transitology"etc....
So clearly the blog needed a name which better expresses its content and objectives. I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…
So clearly the blog needed a name which better expresses its content and objectives. I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…
Let’s be clear,
I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no
illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website)
is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”…..Not perhaps so
much of my writing – but of the insights
of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out
and whose significance I’ve both recognized and wanted to pass on……Two crucial
but not necessarily connected factors!!
So, let me try to explain why, for the past few
months, I’ve been running with the title “Exploring No-Man’s Land”. The images of
battlefields this summons up are quite deliberately chosen.
First, an
accident of birth had me straddling the borderland of the West and East ends of
a shipbuilding town in the West of Scotland – with class, religious and
political tensions simmering in those places.
Then political
and academic choices in my late 20s brought me slap into the middle of the
no-man’s land between politicians and different sorts of professional and
academic disciplines.
Then, when I
was almost 50, I became a nomadic consultant, working for the next 25 years in
ten different countries
I was the son of a Presbyterian Minister (or
“son
of the manse” as we were known) and received my education in a state school
which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic
Tradition……now, sadly, much traduced.
It would have been easier for my parents to
send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but, as home
was a manse (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End”, that
school was fee-paying. And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated
taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation
who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and
apartments in the centre and east of the town.
Thus began my
familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience
of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether
the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual
discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to
straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.
When I became a young councillor in 1968
(for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself similarly torn I
developed loyalties to the local community activists but found myself in
conflict with my (older) political colleagues and officials.
And I felt this particularly strongly when I
was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the
miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the
prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and
wife-beating……..
The collusion between the police and my
legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt”
and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I
was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was
rarely disturbed to sign search warrants!
And, on being elevated a few years later to
one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish
relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized
Departments with massive budgets and manpower.
It was at that stage that I developed a
diagram for my students to make sense of the “conflict of loyalties” to what I
saw as 4
very different pressures (audiences) to which politicians are subjected
–
- local voters
(if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);
- the party
(both local and national)
- the officials
(and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;
- their conscience.
Politicians, I argued, differ according to
the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of
these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to
the 4 types which could be distinguished – “populist”; “ideologue”,
“statesman”, “maverick”.
The effective
politician, however, is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn
exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important
truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable
and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.
And I would
make the same point about the different
professional and academic disciplines.
Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will
see from the table below which looks only at seven academic disciplines
The core
assumptions of academic subjects
Discipline
|
Core assumption
|
Most Famous exponents (not necessarily
typical!)
|
Sociology
|
Struggle for
power
|
Durkheim, Max
Weber, Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills,Robert Merton, Herbert Simon, A
Etzioni, Ralf Dahrendorf
|
Economics
|
Rational
choice
|
Adam Smith,
Schumpeter, Keynes, P Samuelson, M Friedmann, J Stiglitz, P Krugman
|
Political science
|
Rational choice
(at least since the 1970s)
|
Robert Dahl,
Gabriel Almond, David Easton, S Wolin, Peter Hall, James Q Wilson, Bo
Rothstein, Francis Fukuyama
|
Geography
|
??
|
Mackinder,
David Harvey, Nigel Thrift, Danny Dorling
|
Public management
|
mixed for
traditional bodies - rational choice for New PM
|
Woodrow
Wilson, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt, Guy Peters, G Bouckaert,
|
anthropology
|
shared meaning
|
B Malinowski,
Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris
Shore, David Graeber
|
Political economy
|
draws upon
economics, political science, law, history, sociology et al to explain how
political factors determine economic outcomes.
|
JK Galbraith,
Susan Strange, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Geoffrey Hodgson, Yanis
Varoufakis,
|
And, of course,
each of these seven fields has a variety of sub-fields each of which has its
own specific “take” even before you get to the eccentricities of individual
practitioners – let me remind you of this table about 10 sub-fields in Economics which I used in a recent post
Pluralism in Economics
Name
of “school”
|
Humans….
|
Humans act within…
|
The economy is…..
|
Old
“neo-classical”
|
optimise
narrow self-interest
|
A
vacuum
|
Stable
|
New
“neo-classical”
|
can
optimise a variety of goals
|
A
market context
|
Stable
in the absence of friction
|
Post-Keynes
|
use
rules of thumb
|
A
macro-economic context
|
Naturally
volatile
|
Classical
|
act
in their self-interest
|
Their
class interests
|
Generally
stable
|
Marxist
|
do
not have predetermined patterns
|
Their
class and historical interests
|
Volatile
and exploitative
|
Austrian
|
have
subjective knowledge and preferences
|
A
market context
|
Volatile
– but this is generally sign of health
|
Institutional
|
have
changeable behaviour
|
Instit
envt that sets rules and social norms
|
Dependent
on legal and social structures
|
Evolutionary
|
act
“sensibly” but not optimally
|
An
evolving, complex system
|
Both
stable and volatile
|
Feminist
|
exhibit
engendered behaviour
|
A
social context
|
Ambiguous
|
Ecological
|
act
ambiguously
|
Social
context
|
Embedded
in the environment
|
This is an excerpt only –
the full table is from Ho-Joon Chang’s “Economics – a
User’s Guide” but can be viewed at diagram at
p61 of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the
experts; Earle, Moran and
Ward-Perkins (2017)
Please
understand, I’m not trying to confuse – rather the opposite….I’m trying to
liberate!
Once we become
aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world suddenly
becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the particular
lens we use to make sense of it all…
I remember the
first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team
test. And The Art
of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out different
types of strategic
thinking..
Here’s another
example - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/01/framing-capitalism.html
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