Snippets

1. Policy Analysis

Paul Cairney is one of these rare academics who writes well. He has had a policy analysis blog for 12 years which is simply the most comprehensive on the subject there is  He makes the topic as interesting as it actually ought to be.

His latest post refers to an article he’s just written about Covid 19 and health policy-making. I was impressed that, after the obligatory “abstract”, the article was preceded by a “Plain Language Summary” which I understand is a feature of at least this Open Research Europe site. And I also liked that he had teamed up with health and political science academics in at least one foreign university apart from his own, Stirling University.

I should at this stage confess that I was a graduate from one of the first (part-time) Policy Analysis courses run in Britain in the mid 1980s by Lewis Gunn of Strathclyde University – with the emphasis on the rationalistic side of things being challenged by the likes of Charles Lindblom. And I still vividly remember the first time “frame analysis” was presented to us.

But this did not prevent me from presenting an overly rationalistic “stage-approach” when, in 2002, I drafted a Manual for senior Slovak Civil Servants…. If only I had known that, by then, Deborah Stone’s Policy Paradox – the art of political decision-making was into at least its second edition! It remains for me the best read on the subject…although if it's a manual people are looking for Eugene Bardach's Practical Guide for Policy Analysis (2015) is an excellent intro

 

2. Eric Hobsbawm – a Life

Eric Hobsbawm was a brilliant British historian who lived to a grand old age and left us definitive and superbly-written histories of our age which you can access on this post of mine. There’s a nice 1995 profile of him here.

LRB commissioned an hour-long documentary on him which you can view here

3. Leading Questions

Dave Pollard is one of the few bloggers whose posts I generally read in full – always thoughtful, generally provocative. His latest post is typical - professing lack of interest in what people had to say about themselves in CVs or expressions of future hopes – but preferring rather to suggest…… 

six “leading questions” that might evoke some kind of useful sense of who someone is and what they care about - and possibly assess whether the person you’re talking with might be the potential brilliant colleague, life partner, inspiring mentor or new best friend you’ve been looking for. These are the questions:

1.      What adjectives or nouns would you use to describe yourself that differentiate you from most other people? When and how did these words come to apply to you?

2.     Describe the most fulfilling day you can imagine, some day that might realistically occur in the next year. Why would it be fulfilling? What are you doing now that might increase its likelihood of happening?

3.     What do you care about, big picture, right now? What would you mourn if it disappeared? What do you ache to have in your life? What would you work really long and hard to conserve or achieve? How did you come to care about this?

4.     What is your purpose, right now? Not your role or occupation, but the thing you’re uniquely gifted and inspired to be doing, something the world needs. What would elate you if you achieved it, today, this month, in the next year? What would devastate you if you failed, or didn’t get to try? How did this become your purpose?

5.     What’s your basic belief about why you, and other humans, exist? Not what you believe is right or important (or what you, or humans ‘should’ do or be), but why you think we are the way we are now, and why you think we evolved to be where we are. It’s an existential question, not a moral one. How did you come to this belief?

6.     What’s your basic sense of what the next century holds for our planet and our civilization? How do you imagine yourself coping with it? How did you come to this belief?

These are not easy questions, and asking them might prove intimidating or even threatening to some people, which is why in the last post I suggested volunteering your own answer to each question yourself first, in a form such as “Someone asked me the other day… and I told them…”. It’s also why there are supplementary questions to each, to get the person you’re asking started. And the last supplementary question in each group lends itself to telling a story, since that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Even then, some of these questions will stop many people cold, which might tell you something about them right there.

 

4. Britain - and its Union

Peter Oborne may be a right-wing British journalist but he is certainly not typical in his readiness to attack the myths of so many of his ilk – particularly the country’s highly elitist system of power. I have been a great fan of his Triumph of the Political Class since it came out almost a decade ago.  

When therefore he sticks it not only to Boris Johnson and Donald Trump but to the enture media class, you can rest assured you’re in for a great read. And so it is with his Assault on Truth – Johnson, trump and the emergence of a new moral barbarism (2021) which is in epub format.

It’s on Johnson’s watch that the collapse of the so-called UK is becoming final - as this paper from the neutral Constitution Society demonstrates - Britain at the Crossroads - can the British State handle the challenges of devolution?

The Dethroning of Reason

For 60 years we have been arguing about how rational we are….It was 1959 when Charles Lindblom published an article entitled The Science of ‘Muddling Through’  disputing the view that strategic decision-making in organisations did (or even should)  consist of an exhaustive process of optimisation - and arguing instead that strategy was more akin to “a never-ending process of successive steps in which continual nibbling is a substitute for a good bite”.

Lindblom’s writings were more focused on government but “struck a chord” in the business world too. Cyert & March’s A Behavioural Theory of the Firm (1963) explored this idea from a number of angles, but one of the first clear articulations was by Henry Mintzberg in his publication Patterns in Strategy Formation (1978). Here Mintzberg framed the ‘adaptive mode’ in sharp contrast to a ‘planning mode’ which was considered a “highly ordered, neatly integrated [approach], with strategies developed on schedule by a purposeful organisation.”

By that stage, I had ten years of political experience as an elected Councillor under my belt. First in the shape of the community action I encouraged - inspired by the work of not only of Saul Alinsky but of the anarchist thinker Ivan Illich whose Deschooling Society I would frequently call into play. And then, in 1971, came the chance of some managerial responsibility when I became (for 3 years) a Chairman of the new Social Work system then being established in Scotland….

It was a tension I not only recognised but celebrated in a paper I wrote for the Local Government Research Unit I had set up in 1971 – “From Community Action to Corporate Management”

In 1980, James Quinn published Strategies for Change in which he studied how companies actually went about formulating strategies. He found that they proceeded by trial and error, constantly revising their strategy in the light of new learnings, which he called “logical incrementalism”. Critics felt this sounded suspiciously like just having no strategy, but Quinn strongly denied this, arguing that there were great benefits to formalising the process.

In 1985, Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent, Mintzberg honed his views on what he now called Emergent strategy. He playfully argued that strategies should grow initially like weeds in a garden, not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse. That the process can be over-managed and

 “sometimes it is more important to let patterns emerge, than to force an artificial consistency upon an organisation prematurely”.

 Mintzberg contributed more than anyone over the years to this idea, later referring to it as “The Learning School”

At this time I had enrolled in the country’s first (part-time) course in Policy Analysis – at Strathclyde University and led by Lewis Gunn – in which Lindblom figured as a major character. Indeed my thesis was on “organisational learning” – just a few years before Peter Senge’s seminal “The Fifth Discipline” (1990)

The “Policy and Society“ journal devoted a special issue in 2011 to Lindblom’s “Incrementalism at 50” and the debate continues as you can see in “Policy Failure and the Implementation Gap”. 

Indeed the growth of Behavioural Economics since the millennium was at one stage the most promising evidence that we were developing a more balanced view of the role of reason (click the phrase and, from p219, you will get a 25 page list of the most popular books on the topic!).

But then fake news came into the picture – and we quickly lost any remaining sense of what was real; and to scorn anything that smacked of rationality. Kurt Andersen is one of many who would argue that this is the inevitable consequence of post-modernist thinking

William Davies’ “Nervous States – democracy and the Decline of Reason” has just come into my hands and looks an excellent analysis of how feelings seem to have taken over our mind.  

Changing the Beast – being part V of a series

In certain circles, to be accused of trying to reform – rather than transform – capitalism has long been one of the gravest criticisms. Not only this accusation but the very distinction has, however, always seemed a bit ridiculous. What would “transformation” actually mean? And who on earth could be attracted to the notion of wholescale nationalisation and associated bureaucratic power – to say nothing of even worse scenarios?? 

Temperamentally, I grant you, I’ve always been an incrementalist – rather than a revolutionary – influenced first by Tony Crosland’s 1956 revisionist “The Future of Socialism”; then, at University, by Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” and, in the early 80s, by Charles Lindblom – who got us all to respect incrementalism.
  
Although Margaret Thatcher kept assering that capitalism was the only way – or, in her own words, “there is No Alternative”, a mantra which soon attracted the acronym TINA – we have, since the end of the Cold War, become familiar with the “Varieties of capitalism” literature. Eased into it by Michel Albert, with later work by the likes of Crouch, Hall and Soskice being much more academic and, often, impenetrable

By the turn of the millennium the message seemed to be that Capitalism takes various forms; is constantly changing; and will always be with us. But increasingly, people were wondering whether it was not out of control. Pages 57-66 of my Dispatches to the Next Generation plot the increasing dystoptic aspect of book titles

But a few years back, something changed. It wasn’t the global crisis in itself but rather the combination of two things – first the suggestion that the entire engine of the system (profitability)was reaching vanishing point; and, second, a sudden realisation that robotization was a serious threat to even middle-class jobs.

Now the titles talk of the new phenomenon of “post-capitalism” 

Paul Collier’s book – “The Future of Capitalism – our present anxieties” to which I have devoted 4 posts – touches only very briefly on the second of the changes. But I recommend the book for its rare moral – rather than technocratic - tone and for it being the first book I can remember which takes as its starting point the concerns of ordinary people and tries to identify practical policies which might actually deal with issues such as the decline in social trust

Essential follow-up reading

I realise the previous reading list was too long. The following are they key bits of writing I would recommend for those who want to know more

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..(google sample only)..reviewed here

Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011). A short, overdue assessment of the relevance of Paul Hirst’s ideas - more than a decade after his death

Associationalism for 150 years – and still alive and well in Denmark; Kaspersen (2002)

Communitarianism Revisited; Amitai Etzioni (2015) The father of the modern movement revisits the issues

Those curious about the “Varieties of Capitalism” literature and able and willing to subject themselves to the torture of academic writing can skim one of the following..

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/db5f/97bbe6f769bdf8ca138a89bd090f35e3a39d.pdf

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~phall/VofCIntro.pdf

http://web.unideb.hu/jkapas/pdf/Kapas_varieties%20of%20capitalism.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328807093_Rhine-and_Anglo_Saxon_Capitalist_Models_and_the_1960-1993_Automotive_Industry_in_Germany_and_the_United_States/link/5be427cc92851c6b27af5c67/download

https://jeremygilbertwriting.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/psychedelic-socialism.pdf