what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label Saul Alinsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saul Alinsky. Show all posts

Saturday, September 26, 2020

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.  

Friday, November 2, 2018

When the spark ignites

Sometimes a nation or a people feel such humiliation and anger about the way they are being treated that it takes only one incident to spark off a protest which makes the prevailing regime crumble. It’s said that one picture is worth (variously) a thousand or ten thousand words - although, these days, I would put the equation at more like a billion words and I would focus on dramatic actions - rather than pictures.  
Last month I discussed a neglected classic which explored the question of how people such as Jesus Christ and Mahatmi Gandhi came to inspire the world….Emile Zola’s famous J’Accuse letter may have been more than a hundred years ago but inspired one of the western world’s first social movements – which split France in half.
Saul Alinsky’s writings set in motion several generations of community activists. A black woman refused in December 1955 to obey racist instructions to move to the back of a bus…- thereby starting what became the US Civil Rights movement…….Police brutality has often been the cause of riots eg the Watts Riots of August 1965 in Los Angeles.
But it was probably Jan Palach’s act of setting himself on fire on 16 January 1969 in the centre of Prague (in protest against people’s indifference to the Russian invasion in the summer) which made the greatest impact. His memory stayed alive for the 20 years it took for the country to liberate itself……
 93-year old Stephane Hessel was so offended by the world’s treatment of Palestine (amongst other things) that in 2010 he published Time for Outrage (2010) which quickly climbed to the top of the best sellers….
Later that same year Mohamed Bouazizi - a Tunisian street vendor – also set himself alight in response to the confiscation of his wares by a municipal official and her aides. The subsequent riots led the then-president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down on 14 January 2011, after 23 years in power – and became a catalyst for the wider Arab Spring.

For every such defining moment, however, there are probably a million protests which lead nowhere….. The focus of protests have been variously industrial, racial, environmental, gender, housing, invasion. What, I have to wonder, makes the difference?
In all humility I wonder whether those Romanians who have taken to the street in the past couple of years - or even those such as Dorel Sandor and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi - should perhaps not be using that experience and literature to explore more deeply that basic question…..
Romania may have had blood on the streets in December 1989 but – unlike Poland and Czechoslovakia - its intellectuals were fairly passive until then (with the honourable exception of people like Ana Blandiana and Mircea Dinescu).

Social change, after all, doesn’t come from writing, consultancy or television appearances – but from a willingness to sacrifice…… Please understand that I’m not denigrating the writers when I say that – they are necessary but not sufficient. That’s clearly one of the messages which comes from the books I’ve selected for the important reading list I’ve developed below….

How, sub-consciously, we compartmentalise the world
It’s interesting what happened as I was developing this reading list……I knew that what I wanted to do was list some of books I had found useful in what is a massive literature on the experience and tactics of social struggle….ie a grassroots movement…..But I found references slipping in which I quickly realised didn’t fit……..which dealt what we might call “reform efforts from within the system of power”…..eg the World Bank titles and the Guide to Change management….. This blog has noticed repeated instances of people writing about the same issue but doing so with totally different language, concepts and “frames of reference” and – most importantly – without realising that there were “parallel universes” in which the same conversations were being conducted….

Having noticed this, I remembered the post I had done a year ago - Is it people who change systems - or systems which change people? – in which I had recounted the “pincer movement of change” I had developed in the 1970s. This argued that significant and lasting policy change required both “push and pull” – ie a combination of grassroots pressure with insiders sympathetic to change….Twenty five years later and in a different continent I developed what I called the “opportunistic” or “windows of opportunity” theory of change which I would expound to bewildered central Asian  bureaucrats…. 
“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity”. And the preparation is about analysis, mobilisation and trust.
- It is about us caring enough about our organisation and society to speak out about the need for change.
about taking the trouble to think and read about ways to improve things 
– and helping create and run networks of such change.
- And it is about establishing a personal reputation for probity and good judgement that people will follow your lead when that window of opportunity arises”.

 Reading list on social change
The selection is a very personal one and ranges from the passionate to the technical – with a  smattering of books that are more descriptive…..Temperamentally I go (at least these days) for the more analytical (and generic) works and the development literature is therefore probably a bit overrepresented (and the feminist underrepresented). Readers should also be aware that I was a strong community activist in my early days….
The first 8 titles can be read in full – as can the last 4. Strange that none of the books is written by a political scientist (with the possible exception of Gene Sharp). Machiavelli would be turning in his grave

Key Books for “social change” activists
Title

Focus
Notes
How Change Happens Duncan Green (2016)

Community groups and officials
Great overview – if from only a development experience perspective


Transition countries
Political culture
Very rare attempt to bring the insights of change management to those trying to build “rule of law” in transition and developing countries


Change agents in government
One of the best – straddling the various worlds of action, academia and officialdom – with the focus on fashioning an appropriate message and constituency for change


Charities
A great example of frame analysis – showing the importance of trying to identify the link between social values and politics

Indignez-vous; Stephane Hessel (2010)

Social justice
Inspiring pamphlet from the Frenchman whose whole life has been an inspiration to us all


Activists for global concerns
One of the most important 100 pages any social activist could read….it’s simply tragic that 8 years later, it would now be seen as revolutionary

Change agents in government
A decade on, it’s still offers one of the clearest frameworks for making government systems work for people


leaders
A must-read analysis which introduced many people to frame analysis - helps us adopt a more holistic approach

trade unionists
A story that needed telling in a media and political world which is now so hostile to working people organising to improve their lot

Environment
This is the field which has probably seen the most action – but the least results!
Change the World; Robert Quinn (2000)

Eclectic
A tragically neglected book

Regime change
The handbook for a lot of soi-disant revolutionaries….its provenance is a bit suspect….
Putting the Last First; Robert Chambers (1983)

Donors
A morally powerful book which challenged (to little avail) the “imperialist” assumptions of most technical assistance programmes

Rules for Radicals; Saul Alinsky (1971)

Community action
THE handbook for generations of activists…
the follow-up apparently to Reveille for Radicals which he published in 1946!

Occupy theory; is the first volume of a 3 vol series written by Michel Albert to mark the Occupy movement, the others being Occupy Vision and Occupy Strategy
When I googled “reading lists on social protest” I got this interesting selection https://c4aa.org/2017/02/reading-list-activism/