The
final chapters of my book are four in number – ”the voice of
praxis in administrative reform”; ”the process of change”;
”taking back control” and the Inconclusion. You can
read the 74 pages here. A
couple of these consist of posts from some years back and need a
tighter rewrite to make it clearer what I’m trying to say. The
”process of change” is essentially an annotated list of books
about change – preceded by an attempt at classifying the different
genres into which they fall.
The
(rare) Voice of Praxis in administrative
reform (ch 6)
Introductory
Remarks
Go
to the ”management” section of any bookshop and you will be
overwhelmed by the number of titles – with pride of place generally
given to the profiles of the latest management ”heroes” whose
habits we are enjoined to follow.....Despite
the best intentions of academics
like Mark Moore to
encourage leadership in
the public sector,
almost no leader
there has followed
suit. Clearly they are too busy to write books.....
As someone who has straddled the worlds of politics,
academia and consultancy, I am disappointed by the sparseness of the
consultants’ contribution to the literature. Clearly they keep
their powder dry for those who pay them! But the public have a right
to know with what sort of insights these highly-paid wizards earn
their money - and
This
part therefore attempts the difficult task of entering the minds of
the tiny number of consultants who have actually written seriously
about their metier. I focus on Chris Foster, Jake Chapman, Ed Straw
and Michael Barber. A
few of the academic have taken time out to train senior officials –
eg Matt Andrews at Harvard and I therefore include their musings in
this chapter.
The
Process of CHANGE (ch 7)
“Life
is flux,” said the philosopher Heraclitus. The Greek philosopher
pointed out in 500 BC that everything is constantly shifting, and
becoming something other to what it was before. Like a river, life
flows ever onwards, and while we may step from the riverbank into the
river, the waters flowing over our feet will never be the same waters
that flowed even one moment before. Heraclitus concluded that since
the very nature of life is change, to resist this natural flow was to
resist the very essence of our existence. “There is nothing
permanent except change,” he said.
As
the new millennium got underway I
produced an “Annotated
bibliography for Change Agents”
which
represented the short notes I had made about the range of books my
new assignment in countries recently liberated from communism
required me to become familiar with – viz
the
challenge of transitioning to new systems of accountability and
public management, European systems of local government, different
civil service systems, the nature of organisations and the management
of change. This
updated version
focuses less on the governmental aspects of change and more on the
intrinsic issues of change – as it affects individuals,
organisations and societies. It
argues that the
subject has been hugely compartmentalised in the past century and
more – with scientists focusing on technology; psychologists on the
individual; economists on the organisation; and sociologists and
others on
society as a whole. Very few have tried to integrate these
perspectives – although a few attempts have been made very
recently.
At
one level, we are told that the pace of change has never
been as great. But then we read this
passage (by Keynes)
written a hundred years ago
… any
man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the
middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and
with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond
the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his
morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such
quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early
delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the
same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new
enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion
or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he
could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good
faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any
continent that fancy or information might recommend.
He
could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means
of transit to any country or climate without passport or other
formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a
bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient,
and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge
of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon
his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much
surprised at the least interference.
But,
most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal,
certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further
improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and
avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism,
of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and
exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were
little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared
to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of
social and economic life, the internationalization of which was
nearly complete in practice.
But
the technology we had expected in the 1960s to arrive in our lifetime
has not materialised – such as teletransporting and flying cars.
Change had
perhaps stalled? My personal
introduction to this
subject came in the 1960s –
with the Penguin
Specials
of “What’s Wrong with Britain?” but crystallised in the
stunning 1970
Reith Lectures by Donald Schon on “Beyond the Stable State”
of which I have vivid memories listening to
on my parents’ radio.
From
that point on, I was hooked into the importance not only of change
but of organisations – with the focus being more practical than
academic. In 1968 I had become a councillor representing working
class people in a shipbuilding town and about to assume managerial
responsibilities for a new Social Work agency when the UK was at the
start of what became the ravages of de-industrialisation. Donald
Schon caught the mood of the times very well when he wrote in 1971
We’re
experiencing a general rather than an isolated or peripheral
phenomenon. The threat to the stability of established institutions
carries with it a threat to the stability of established theory and
ideology, because institutions like the Labour movement, the Church,
social welfare agencies, all carry with them bodies of theory, ways
of looking at the world, and when the institutions are threatened,
the bodies of theory are threatened as well. Most
important, when the anchors of the institution begin to be loosened,
the supports that it provides for personal identity, for the self,
begin to be loosened too. We’ve lost faith, I think, in the idea of
being able to achieve stable solutions to these problems.
Why
is the treatment of change so compartmentalised?
We
use the concept of “change” all the time but there seems to be
surprisingly little
written about it as an all-embracing concept.
The literature
on change
is, of course, immense but is divided very much into several
completely separate fields which,
curiously, seem
totally uninterested in each other - dealing with
the individual, the
technical, the
organisational and the societal
respectively
the
first field draws on psychology and tends to be interested in things
like stress;
the
second focuses on the technological aspects – and how they
are commercially exploited
the
third focuses on the management of change aș
organisations react to the technological changes (with
companies, the public sector and the NGO field receiving different
treatment);
the
last field is interested in collective challenges to power
which often go under the label of “social change” but has also
attracted the interest of scientists exploring the world of
complexity
Taking
Back Control? (ch 8)
Introductory
Remarks
I
haven’t had a chance so far to explain the quote on the front page
of the book
We've
spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are
solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic
not management processes.
JR
Saul
John
Ralston Saul
is a true original – one of the very few who has chosen to carve
out his own life of choice, In 1992 he published a blast of a book
called “Voltaire’s
Bastards – the Dictatorship of Reason in the West”
- which I found at the time simply one of the most brilliant books of
the decade. Years
later, when I started my blog, his words were still in my mind and
used for the first-ever masthead quote. I chose the quote, I suppose,
because of a certain ambivalence about the managerial role I’ve
played in the final 20 years of my working life.
Feeling
the Tension?
For
the first 22 years of my adult life, I had been a (fairly scholastic)
politician - for the next 22 years an apolitical adviser. It’s
perhaps only in the past decade that I’ve been able to go back to
being truly “my own man”.
In
1973 or so – based on my experience of working with community
groups and trying to reform a small municipal bureaucracy – I had
written a pamphlet called “From Corporate Management to Community
action” (sadly no longer available) which reflected my
disillusionment with the technocratic fashions of the time.
In
1977, in what is, I grant you, a rather long and technocratic article
entitled Community
Development – its political and administrative challenge,
I drew on my reading of the previous decade’s literature (UK and
US) about urban politics and community power to challenge the
validity
of the “pluralist” assumptions underpinning our democratic
practices.
The
article looked at how community grievances found voice and power and
were subsequently dealt with by political and administrative
processes. I wasn’t a Marxist but the sort of questions I was
raising seem now to indicate a greater debt to that sort of analysis
than I was perhaps aware of at the time, I wasn’t just saying that
life chances were unevenly distributed – I was also arguing that,
from an early age, those in poor circumstances develop lower
expectations and inclination to challenge systems of authority. And
the readiness of those systems to respond was also skewed because of
things like the “old boy network”.
The
piece explored the functions which political parties were supposed to
perform under pluralist theory – and found them seriously wanting.
And then I became a consultant!
Do
we expect too much from our institutions?
On
Thinking Institutionally was
a
little book published
a decade ago by Hugh Heclo, now a retired American political
scientist with form for an interest both in political institutions
and in European aspects of political culture. I remember his name
vividly from the 1970s from his
superb anthropological study of the British budgetary process The
Private Government of Public Money which
he wrote jointly with that great doyen of political analysis (and of
the budgetary process) Aaron Wildavsky.
Heclo’s
later book looked at our loss of respect for institutions. Way back
in the 60s, Penguin books had published a series of popular
paperbacks with the
series title “What’s Wrong with…….?”
– in which virtually all British institutions were subjected to a
ruthless critique. When I was in Germany for a couple of months in
2013, I noticed a
similar rash of titles.
And France has been flooded in recent years by the literature on its
doom…..
I
like a good critique like anyone else – but we’ve perhaps reached
the point when critical analyses of our institutions has destroyed
our trust in institutions. A few years ago the Britain “expenses
scandal” hit the political class – was it a coincidence that this
happened just when the global economic crisis required some
determined political action?
For
whatever reason, trust in our institutions – public and private –
has sunk to an all-time low. This is the issue with which Heclo’s
book starts – indeed he gives us a 5 page spread which itemises the
scandals affecting the public, private and even NGO sectors in the
last 40-50 years – arguing that mass communications and our
interconnectedness exacerbate the public impact of such events.
“The
past half-century has been most unkind to those discrete cohering
entities, both formal and informal, that "represent inheritances
of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations."
Today, people almost universally denigrate institutions, including
those of which they are members.
Attacks
on institutions come from our hyper-democratic politics but stem from
the Enlightenment with its unshakeable confidence in human reason;
its subsequent obsessive focus on the self; and, latterly, its belief
that an institution has no value beyond that which an individual can
squeeze from it for personal gain
The
last 60 years has seen a process which designates institutions as, at
best, annoying encumbrances and, at worst, oppressive tools of the
past. Students are taught to believe what they like and express
themselves as they see fit. Even people understood to be
conservatives—at least in the way we conceptualize political
ideology today—assail institutions. Free market economics places a
premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle innovation
and entrepreneurship
But
institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie
us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and
institutionalize trust. They give our lives purpose and, therefore,
the kind of self-satisfaction that only the wholesale rejection of
them is supposed to provide.
How,
then, do we protect and promote them?
Inconclusion
In 1975 Samuel Huntington and others published (for the Tripartite Commission)
a report entitled “The Crisis of Democracy” which was a diatribe against the
hoi poloi and our aspirations. It reflected the contemporary mood of fatalism
and helped prepare the neoliberal onslaught which has been inflicted on us
for the past four decades and to which there has been no real answer.
What passes for the left seems to have accepted that individualism is here
to stay – with Richard Wolff’s “Democracy at Work – a cure for Capitalism”,
Thomas Pikety’s “Time for Socialism” and Jeremy Gilbert’s “Common Ground –
democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism ” (2014) and
“21st century Socialism” (2020) being honourable but rare exceptions .
What seems very clear is that progressives need to give much more thought
to human nature if we have any chance of convincing the electorate of our
programmes. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind – a hopeful history would be a
good start.
Democracy has very much been in retreat since I wrote that first book with
a similar title in 1977 with the Thatcherite attack not only on trade unions
but all possible challenges to corporate power. And the populism we’ve seen in
the last couple of decades has given new energy to that attack.
The saving grace has been the new discourse about direct democracy and citizen juries – at least in western Europe.
But central Europe and the Balkans remain disfigured – with oligarchic elites
consolidating their power.
