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

My role in the Networking of society

Niall Ferguson is not normally an author whose imperialist histories would interest me but I hadn’t heard of his latest (?) title The Square and the Tower – networks and power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018) and was intrigued to find out what a historian had to say about networks – particularly when its intro brought back memories of my own involvement in the early days of the “networked society”.

“The Square and the Tower” claims to present “a new historical narrative, in which major changes—dating back to the Age of Discovery and the Reformation, if not earlier—can be understood, in essence, as disruptive challenges to established hierarchies by networks.”

Social networks “have always been much more important in history than most historians, fixated as they have been on hierarchical organizations such as states, have allowed,” and never more so than in modern times.

The first “networked era” followed the introduction of the printing press in Europe in the late fifteenth century.

The intervening period, from the late 1790s until the late 1960s, saw the opposite trend: hierarchical institutions re-established their control and successfully shut down or co-opted networks. The zenith of hierarchically organized power was in fact the mid-twentieth century—the era of totalitarian regimes and total wars.

And, we might add, of large corporations such as General Motors…

The second such era—our own—dates, according to Ferguson, from the 1970s, and the pace of change has accelerated along with new communication technologies. A review in the New York Review of Books tells us that -

Niall Ferguson believes that until recently networks have been neglected by historians, who prefer to study institutions that leave well-preserved and accessible archives. He confesses that he has only recently come to appreciate that his own books “were also books about

networks.”

For many years the British-born financial historian, chronicler of the Rothschild banks, television broadcaster, and prolific journalist had been “casual” in the way he thought about networks. When writing about the career of Sigmund Warburg, he had in his mind’s eye “a vague diagram that connected Warburg to other members of the German-Jewish business elite through various ties of kinship, business and ‘elective affinity.’”

Yet it did not occur to Ferguson to “think in a rigorous way about that network.” He had yet to adopt “formal network analysis.” This book, he writes, “is an attempt to atone for those sins of omission.”

Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock was amazingly prescient in 1970 about what the winds of technical change were about to bring; and Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy (1981) confirmed this. Both books repay close study…..

It was in 1976 or so that my involvement in a research project made me aware of my own role as a networker – just (in a sense) as Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain’s philosopher tutor made him realise he had been speaking prose for most of his life.

I had become a community activist in the late 1960s - inspired by Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals which was, astonishingly, written in 1946 but became a bible for activists during the American War on Poverty of the 1960s.

My elevation in 1971 to the chair of a new social work agency which had been given an important preventive role by the Labour government of 1964-70 gave me a profile at a Scottish level – to which I owed my selection in 1974 to one of the top positions in the new Strathclyde Region covering half of Scotland’s 5 million people.  The “Born to Fail?” report exposing the scale of poverty in the West of Scotland had appeared the previous year - and a few of us managed to make this issue the central strategic one for the massive new Region.

The research project I referred to earlier was managed by a branch of the famous Tavistock Institute (one which, perhaps curiously, deal with operational research) and very much focused on the negotiations which took place as the Region initiated rounds of discussion not only with its own departments such as Police, Education and Social Work but the housing authorities, health boards and even universities and teacher training bodies – in an effort to try to gain support for a new social justice strategy which brought citizen activists together with officials and politicians (and local budgets) to determine a better future .

I’ve described this work in Case Study in Organisational Development and Political Amnesia – and am pleased to say that the Scottish government continues this work to this day…..

Networks have primarily been of interest to sociologists – with sociometrics mapping the influence of key individuals in systems and Manuel Castells being the guru of the subject with his writing about “the network society”. But economists such as Paul Ormerod have also been active – with his Positive Linking – how networks are revolutionising your world (2011)

Although the management of change became very popular in the 1980s and 1990s – as you can see from this Annotated Bibliography for change agents I did on the subject - it was 2000 before a little book The Tipping Point by journalist Malcolm Gladwell made everyone fully appreciate the significance of networks and the different roles played in the diffusion of fashionable products or ideas….You can read the book in full here

In the next post, I’ll have a look at how other intellectual disciplines such as political science have tried to deal with the idea of networks

The wider context of Rule of Law

Those interested in the latest developments of the serious Romanian crisis now unfolding (with the President now out of office until a referendum on 27 July decides his fate) are best briefed here. And it's good to see Der Spiegel producing a good article on how the situation is being viewed in Germany.
All I know is that none of the hot air being expended makes a damn bit of difference to the people who live in villages such as mine here in Brasov County. Everyone still has their couple of cows, pigs and a dozen hens - and ensures that the hay is collected. True I have water from the municipal system - but most of my old neighbours draw their water from a natural source they themselves tapped 40 years ago - and need the state system only for the delivery of their mail; the small primary school and a badly maintained road.
And the EC has been a disaster here - trying to kill the systems on which they live and subsidising the disastrous carbuncle of a guest house being completed on the hill opposite - an eyesore which will simply take money from the older people who offer charming b and b (cazare) experiences in their old houses.

Those who think that such declines in political systems are to be found only in the East should read the latest UK Democratic Audit.

And those who want a wider view of trends in Rule of Law might listen to the latest UK Reith Lectures which, this year, are being delivered by the globally-renowned, right-wing historian Niall Ferguson - supposedly on this theme. I've listened to the first and a bit of the second but, so far, can't find much about rule of law. It seems rather to be about

• the extent to which governments have  broken with the contract (I didn't know we had) with future generations
• the scale of indebtedness (Japan and UK in particular)
• the importance of institutions 

I'm hoping it sparks a debate. I’m no fan of Niall Ferguson  but he did make an important point when he suggested that there should be an additional criterion used in policy impact assessments – effect on future generations. This was part of his larger argument about how governments have in the past decade shoved a lot of debt on future generations – the British Private Finance Initiative (PFI) is just the most visible example (with 300 billion pounds being the latest estimate of what the final bill will be. Talk about a Faustian pact!