Networks, networks everywhere....

In “The Square and the Tower”, Niall Ferguson admits that, as an historian, his focus had been written archives and that official documents rarely mention the informal processes. The “operating system” in which he operated was the world of power and of hierarchy. It was his work on biographies of people like Warburg the banker and diplomat Henry Kissinger which alerted him to the significance of networks. The book is therefore an act of contrition – to make amends for his failure to pay proper tribute in his earlier books to the importance of networks.

It’s an easy read – with none of its 60 chapters being longer than 5-6 pages.

It reminded me of my reaction, in the early 1990s, when a new word entered our vocabulary – “governance”. I remember very vividly the scorn I poured on the word at the time. Why, I muttered, did we need a new word when “government” had served us well for at least a couple of centuries. And, if there was something new around, it was clear that most people didn’t appreciate the difference and were using the words interchangeably.

But that didn’t prevent me from using the phrase “good governance” in 1999 in the subtitle of my little book about public administration reform In Transit – notes on good governance

So let me take you on a tour of an intellectual idea whose origin, I would argue, can be traced back to the 1960s. an earlier post referred to the community action of that period first in America and then the UK – which led to the new fashion in the 1970s for “participatory democracy”. This may have been a manipulative tool for government but it led to the notion that citizens were not just bundles of trouble and expense but also sources of ideas - from whom organisations could learn, if they cared to.

Indeed the thesis of the part-time MSc I did in the early 1980s was on “organisational learning” – anticipating (in a sense!) the work of Peter Senge.

That, of course, was the decade of Thatcherite managerialism and privatisation when the private sector’s energies, skills and insights were also sought inside government for wicked issues such as urban regeneration and training 

Whatever happened to public administration? Governance, governance everywhere was a famous article by H George Frederickson which appeared in 2004 and traced the first use of the word to Harlan Cleveland who argued as far back as 1972 that -

The organisations that get things done will no longer be hierarchical pyramids with most of the real control at the top. They will be systems – interlaced webs of tension in which control is loose, power diffused and centres of decision-making plural

“Governance” in other words is “networked government” – best exemplified in Rod Rhodes’ 1996 article “The new governance – governing without government.

Rhodes is the British political scientist who first noticed that western government were being “hollowed out” – although privatisation in some ways has replaced what were previously state functions with new regulatory ones. But for the “policy networks” of this new political science  literature, we might read also “lobbying” and commercial penetration of the state..   

That was also when another article appeared which isn’t referenced in Ferguson’s copious notes but which helps place the idea of networks in a far more insightful context than Ferguson’s book – namely Tribes, institutions, markets, networks – a framework for societal evolution by David Ronfeldt (RAND Corporation 1996). It's an important article which argues that each form is necessary – one does not replace the other….With a great table of which I have selected some excerpts -

Comparison of the 4 models

	Tribe/clan	institution	market	Network
Key realm	Family/culture	State/government	economy	Civil society
Essential feature	Give sense of identity	Exercise authority	Allow free transactions	Share knowledge
Key Value	Belonging	order	freedom	equality?
Key risk	Nepotism	corruption	exploitation	Group think
identity	Solidarity	sovereignty	competition	Cooperation
Motivation	Survival	rules	Self-interest	Group empowerment
structure	Acephalous	hierarchical	atomised	Flat

All this reminds me of some other typologies - 

In the early 20^th Century, Max Weber had considered that the fundamental question of our time was why people were prepared to obey those with power and suggested that we granted legitimacy to those endowed with “traditional”, “charismatic” or “rational-legal” authority.

Etzioni (1975) also identifies three types of organizational power: coercive, utilitarian, and normative, and relates these to three types of involvement: alienative, calculative, and moral

Charles Handy and Roger Harrison had a 4 part typology – but as it focused only on different types of managerial system (or cultures) it will not detain us here.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas developed what she called the “grid-group” typology, consisting of four very different “world views” – what she calls hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist. This came to be known as “Cultural Theory”

I came across Mary Douglas’ theory only in 2000, thanks to public admin theorist Chris Hood’s “The Art of the State” which uses her typology brilliantly to help us understand the strengths, weaknesses and risks of the various world views. I was delighted just now to find his book now fully accessible on the internet – just click the title and then click the appropriate button again. 

I am aware of only one book-length study which compares and contrasts these various models “Way of life theory– the underlying structure of world views, social relations and lifestyles” – a rather disjointed dissertation by one, Michael Edward Pepperday (2009) which I was able to download a year or so ago but whose introduction is here.

I can't quite explain the fascination this sort of analysis has for me....It clearly has something to do with needing to tie things up in neat packages.....

Those wanting to know more can read this post which might encourage them to have a look at this short article “A Cultural Theory of Politics” which shows how the approach has affected a range of disciplines.
Grid, group and grade – challenges in operationalising cultural theory for cross-national research (2014) is a longer and, be warned, very academic article although its comparative diagrams are instructive