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 malcolm gladwell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label malcolm gladwell. Show all posts

Saturday, November 23, 2019

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…..

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

Sunday, April 7, 2019

Decisions. Decisions…….

A daughter’s career dilemma raises the question of how well served we are by the literature on decision-making. With the usual serendipity, I had just bought from the second-hand English bookshop here "Decisive – how to make better decisions in Life and Work" (2013) whose focus is actually a bit more on the commercial world – although it does give examples of more solitary decision-making. It is actually one of no less than 89 books which one site offers on decision-making
And I had already noticed that the bookshelves are being increasingly swamped by books by psychologists divulging in numbing detail their various experiments and how they might help us improve our personal decision-making.

I blame populiser Malcolm Gladwell - for the success of his 2005 "Blink – the power of thinking without thinking" about which a contemporary reviewer wrote -
Malcolm Gladwell’s fevered new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is evangelical in a got-religion kind of way, with Gladwell praising a stratagem he calls “thin-slicing” — using the smallest amount of information possible to make decisions. In fact he’s wandering through territory staked out by Herbert Simon fifty years ago when he wrote about “bounded rationality,” as well as by practitioners of a branch of psychology called “heuristics and biases,” and by evolutionary biologists and economists and neuroscientists and philosophers and those ancient taxonomists who classified cognition as either intuition or reason. It’s a long literature, and hey! who has time for it?

The result, ironically, of this embarrassment of riches is to make it increasingly difficult to find the book on the subject which might best fit a particular person at a particular point. Of course, you can find lots of reviews of such books – but they are of a single book and give no overall assessment of the field..  And those most capable of doing such comparative assessments would never attempt it...for fear of the damage it would do their professional or academic reputations….”did you hear that old so and so actually reviewed a clutch of self-help books??? What is the world coming to…??”

I can’t say I am all that decisive myself – things panned out well for me...so I tend to a more fatalistic philosophy….Que sera sera. But the reference to Herbert Simon in the review above reminds me that I do have form in this field of decision-making…..Back in the 1980s I took a part-time MSc in the country’s first degree course in Policy Analysis in which Simon and others such as Etzioni loomed large….I even, in 2002, wrote a Manual on the subject – for Slovak senior civil servants!
The New Labour government of 1997 made the subject a sexy one – although the manuals its policy unit spawned were still rationalistic…..it was not until the mid 2000s that I got a copy of what remains for me far and away the most satisfactory (less rationalistic) treatment - Policy Paradox -the art of political decision-making by Deborah Stone

A post last autumn noted the explosion of interest the last decade has seen in efforts to change people’s behavior – initially it seemed by governments although subsequent revelations demonstrated the extent to which big business had been successfully using algorithms to influence our social behavior…

My plea
So my plea to editors of book sections and of Literary journals is – please don’t look down on these popular books on decision-making….there are a lot of readers out there who would value some guidance to the literature!

Background Reading
The Art of Decision Making; Helen Drummond (2001)

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Gladwell and Diamond - a Health warning

I enjoy the essays of Malcolm Gladwell – as I enjoy essays as an art-form (and his book The Tipping Point). But I had failed to spot the ideological baggage he carries.
His original training was apparently in a school funded by the tobacco industry; he has received considerable amounts from the corporate lobby (which shows in quite a few of his arguments) and he now earns most of his money from huge speaking fees from multinational companies.

Another populiser, Jared Diamond, has also come in for some serious criticism for making life comfortable his readers by using a “blame the victim” meme in his books about the collapse of civilisations.
After a successful slave rebellion formally freed the Haitians from their French masters, the French still managed to bully the Haitians into paying them the huge indemnity for “lost property”—that is, freed slaves—in exchange for diplomatic relations. By 1900, 80 percent of Haiti’s annual budget was consumed by these payments, which did not end until 1947. By then, Haiti had paid France about $21 billion in contemporary US dollars. In explaining Haiti’s social collapse, Diamond ignored 120 years of illegitimate debt payments as well as the long history of US interference in Haitian affairs, including America’s decades-long support of dictatorship under the Duvalier regime.Diamond’s blindness to imperial power was of a piece with the assumption embedded in his subtitle: Failed societies (a reified abstraction) have somehow chosen to fail. In the wake of the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, the New York Times columnist David Brooks revealed his attachment to the same point of view: Haitians’ attachment to voodoo and other primitive superstitions, Brooks believed, had immeasurably exacerbated their suffering in the wake of the disaster. Once again, Diamond’s work revealed its resonance with neoliberal conventional wisdom. As the anthropologist Frederick K. Errington wrote, Diamond’s two books constituted a “‘one-two punch.’ The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their control, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise.” One could hardly imagine a more comforting account of global inequalities.
Ignoring class and other social divisions among the victors as well as the vanquished, Diamond overlooks the complex political conflicts involved in imperial policy—which included decisions about how to use guns and steel as well as how to make alliances with native elites. As the anthropologist Michael Wilcox writes: “A more appropriate troika of destruction [than ‘guns, germs, and steel’] would be ‘lawyers, god, and money.’”

A recent article has put these sorts of books in a wider context
The more the healers (and their “conditions”) proliferated, the harder it became for customers to figure out where to focus their limited time, money, and attention. It made sense that by 2000, our biggest guru wasn’t a writer but a new pope, Oprah Winfrey, whose brand lay in the power to ordain others. Like that other millennial guide, ­Malcolm Gladwell, she was a curator rather than a creator.Some think it was The Tipping Point, Gladwell’s 2000 argument for the power of social connections, which made it safe for techies and business types—and, more generally, men—to read about bettering themselves. “The whole idea of showing that there is a counter­intuitive way of looking at information, to make you understand yourself in a completely different way—that’s been game-changing,” one commentator  says.You could argue that the marriage of self-help and social science began a few years earlier with Daniel Goleman, a bridge between self-help’s New Age past and its journalist-driven, label-defying present. A Harvard Ph.D. and a science reporter for the New York Times, his ­Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ spent more than a year on the Times best-seller. 
postscript; John Gray has just written an interesting piece on Gladwell's latest book about David and Goliath. Gray suggests that -
One of the features of Gladwell’s genre is a repeated effort to back the stories he tells with evidence from academic sources—a move that has attracted some of the most virulent attacks on his work. Yet Gladwell has more in common with his academic critics than either he or they realize, or care to admit. Academic writing is rarely a pursuit of unpopular truths; much of the time it is an attempt to bolster prevailing orthodoxies and shore up widely felt but ill-founded hopes. There are many examples of academics who have distorted fact or disregarded evidence in order to tell an edifying tale that accords with respectable hopes.