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.
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