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 stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts

Sunday, January 10, 2021

Things go Up..and Down...and round-about

 A lot of clever people have devoted a lot of intellectual effort to suggest that all novels can be reduced to 6-7 basic plots which are all variants of the rags to riches story. As usual, visuals say it all much more clearly and noone recounts it better than the sadly-missed Kurt Vonnegut who gave this hilarious short presentation (with spanish sub-titles) to demonstrate that the basic plots narrate how things go up and down.

His vertical axis measures good and bad outcomes; and the horizontal one time.

I won't give a spoiler to what is a fantastic presentation – suffice to say that Hamlet and a poor teenage orphan both figure in the plot outlines!

Regular readers know that one of the things this blog tries to do is to map recent intellectual history – that's one the reasons for the long annotated bibliographies which crop up in the posts.

So an obvious question is whether similar patterns can be identified in non-fiction books.

And a review in the current issue of the New York Review of Books alerted me to a book - namely Robert Shiller's “Narrative Economics – how stories go viral and drive economic events” (2019) - which explores how people have tried to make sense of what was happening to the economy – be it inflation, monopoly, boom and bust, inequality, automation, bubbles, or austerity.

With Vonnegut as inspiration, it didn't take me long to work out that non-fiction books also have plots and narratives. Things go up and down - and the authors spend most of their time describing why and how this has happened – with a few pages on what those in power should be doing to bring things back up again......Books about global warming will now add a comment about what the ordinary citizen should be doing....

And, of course, a note of panic has been discernible since the new millennium – just look at the titles - “The Long Descent”, “Extinction”, “The End of Progress”, “Requiem for a Species”, “Collapse”, “The Five Stages of Collapse”.

So most of the Vonnegut-type graphs slope downwards these days – only the likes of Stephen Pinker will have upward-sloping curves, with Branko Milanovic's Elephant curve being a complex outlier.

Update; I have just come across what looks a wonderful compendium of Vonnegut's writing Pity the Reader – on writing with style; Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell (2019)

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Stories we tell

Since we were small children, we have all needed stories – to help us understand and come to terms with the strange world we inhabit. In this post-modern world, “narratives” have become a fashionable adult activity for the same reason.
It’s significant that, when I was looking for a structure with which to classify the different approaches in the (vast) literature about the global crisis, I used the classification - micro-meso-macro. That shows the grip my university training in political economy still has on me. Political sociology actually had more appeal for me – but somehow lacked the apparent legitimacy of economics.
In fact, the anthropological ways of looking at the world have much more power than the economic – in particular the grid-group typology of Mary Douglas (and her Cultural Theory) which first gave us the four schools or lenses (“hierarchical”, “individualistic”, “egalitarian” and “fatalistic”) used to such effect in Chris Hood’s great little book “The Art of the State” (1990). It was indeed his book which introduced me to this typology which allows us to tell distinctive “stories” about the same phenomenon. More interestingly, he then shows the typical policy responses, weaknesses and strengths of each school. A sense of his book's argument can be gained from the review of the book which can be accessed toward the end of the contents sheet of this journal

At University I had been interested in how social systems held together and why people (generally) obeyed - and I had liked Max Weber’s classification of political systems into – “traditional”, “charismatic” and “rational-legal”.
But it was the sociologist Ametai Etzioni who first impressed me in the 1970s with his suggestion that we behaved the way we did for basically three different types of motives – “remunerative”, “coercive” and “normative” – namely that it was made worth our while; we were forced to; or that we thought it right. He then went on to suggest (in his 1975 Social Problems) that our explanations for social problems could be grouped into equivalent political stances - “individualistic”, “hierarchical” or “consensual”. These are effectively “stories” about the world. Unfortunately google search will not give me access to the relevant works of Etzioni or Hood - although substantial chunks of a similar sort of book "Responses to Governance - governing corporations and societies in the world" by John Dixon can be read on google books.

During the 1980s, when I was doing my Masters in Policy Analysis, I was (briefly) interested in the potential of “Frame Analysis” which showed how we could tell different “stories” to make sense of complex social events.
The last decade has seen a revival of interest in such typologies - The case for clumsiness which, again, sets out the various stories which sustain the different positions people take us on various key policy issues – such as the environment. There is a good interview with the author here and a short summary here
Three recent reports give an excellent summary of all this literature - Common Cause; FindingFrames; and Keith Grint’s Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions 

I know this has not been easy reading – but my next post will hopefully show its relevance to the search for a typology to help us navigate the literature on the global crisis!

The photo on my new "masthead" is from Sunday's annual "milk festival" in my village. The weather was superb and the next day the best of the year

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Talking - not Writing....

Two very charming and unusual websites which humanise ideas and writing – first Web of Stories which consists of videos of short chats of people explaining how the creative process has worked for them   
It began as an archive of life stories told by some of the great scientists of our time. As the number of stories grew, it became obvious that some were on related topics and a web was slowly being created of connected stories. After a while we also invited famous people outside the field of science to tell their life stories.We are now opening up Web of Stories to everyone, inviting you to help make our web of stories grow. We all have wonderful stories to share, and have family and friends whose tales we would like to hear. So tell your stories, and invite others to tell theirs.
Each contribution lasts little more than a couple minutes but often you will find a series of such sessions eg from Diana Athill, a marvellous nonogarian who was a publisher and came to writing quite late in life. I was just reading her Life Class a few days ago which has an excellent Introduction by Ian Jack 

Somehow, watching and listening to a “character” speak seems to offer a richer experience. Frankly speaking, a lot of talk is drivel but, in front of a tape recorder or camera/video, people discipline themselves a bit better - while still allowing themselves the spontaneity and sidetracks which you often miss with written interviews.

The second website is a blog based on the great idea of getting together with a writer in a pub or wine bar – with the additional frisson of the context being Germany (although the text English!). The blog is called Drinking with German Writers and it really gives a marvellous feeling for one particular side of German life. Very worthwhile! It reminds me of the blog of a German journalist (whose address I will hopefully give shortly) who spent a month in each of 10 global cities and wrote a book about it – and is now doing the same thing in Germany. This month she is in Trier.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

The power of stories

In the past few weeks, I’ve been going through the 500 pages of text and pictures which the blogging of the past 2-3 years has produced – and asking myself where exactly I am (or should be) going with it. The daily process of thinking about a particular aspect of my life’s work of tinkering with government institutions is a useful discipline. Since an early age, I have had the habit of writing critical analyses of policy initiatives – in the naive belief that this was the route to improved performance (I had forgotten that this habit led to Socrates having to drink hemlock!). Many of my reflections about these various efforts – whether at community, municipal, regional or national levels - are available on my website 

And the daily copying of reading references – whether of journals or books – has also helped build up a useful virtual library. As, however, Umberto Eco has remarked – the beauty of a good library is that only a minority of the texts have actually been read!

The question with which I am now wrestling is whether to continue with this process – a bit like the 5- minute Thought of the Day programme which the BBC has been running for decades – or to take time out to read more closely the material in the library and try to write something more focussed and coherent. My blogposts reflect the gadfly which is (and has been) an important part of me – alighting for some time on a flower and then moving on to another.
It is, however, the process of going over my blogs which has made me realise how much value I place on the ideas embodied in books. Most people are sceptical about the power of ideas and assume that baser motives make the world go round. John Maynard Keynes opposed this vew with great elegance in 1935 when he wrote
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas
But we all need to make sense of the world. Some do so with their own, home-built view of the world which, all too often, is two-dimensional if not demented. Most of us, however, seek some external guidance – but there are so many voices today that we require mediators and popularisers to help us make sense of things - whether committed journalists like Will Hutton, Paul Mason and George Monbiot; essayists such as Malcolm Gladwell and serious analytical blogs such as Daniel Little’s Understanding Society. Matthew Taylor is one of the few bloggers who, like me, has straddled the worlds of theory and practice and continues, in his role as Director of the UK Royal Society of Arts to reflect on his reading. He had a good post recently on a seminar which featured Nassim Taleb -
The event was packed out and the chairman was at pains to emphasise the powerful influence of Taleb’s ideas on Government thinking. In essence Taleb’s argument – based on a fascinating, but occasionally somewhat opaque, mixture of philosophy, statistics and metaphors – is that big systems are much more prone to catastrophic failure (or in some cases sensational success) than small devolved ones. From bankers to planners to politicians, a combination of ignorance, complacency and self-interest leads to a systematic underestimation of the inherent risk of large complex systems.
The British Prime Minister is clearly looking for a fig-leaf with which to clothe his moral nakedness and finds Taleb’s arguments a useful cover. The RSA site actually has a video of David Cameron in conversation in 2009 with Taleb when he was Opposition Leader. Taleb has many useful insights to offer. He questions our reliance on the "narrative fallacy", the way past information is used to analyse the causes of events when so much history is actually "silent". It is the silence - the gap - the missing energy in the historical system, which produces the black swan. Imagine, says Taleb, the problem of turkeys:
Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests', as a politician will say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief
Those wanting to find out more about Taleb’s arguments will find a useful paper from him on the Edge site I mentioned yesterday
Matthew Taylor then asks a powerful question on his post about the logic and consistency of the Coalition Government’s use of Taleb’s thinking -
why is a democratically accountable and relatively weak organisation like a local education authority portrayed by ministers as the kind of overbearing power that needs to be broken up while Tesco (to take just one example) is left free to grow even more powerful and major Academy chains, massive welfare to work providers and various other large scale private sector providers are encouraged?

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

the search for the holy grail

One of my problems has always been that I imagine that the next book I read will give me the key to the problematics about effective organisations. In reality, the next book confuses even more - by introducing a plausible new idea or praxis...
I'm not an academic - so I can't be satisfied with critiquing ideas - I'm looking for what works!
And Toyota have gained a reputation for working! And so, inevitably, the reformers and consultants in the public sector seek to identify the essence of that success and transfer it into a message of reform for the public sector. So the last Amazon delivery here contained 2 books - by Jeffrey Liker - on their principles and operations. I've started the first - and can relate to it. It tells stories - amazing stories - about a different way of doing business which one idealistically imagines should be seen in the public sector. The ideas may be radical - but the company is well-known for being conservative - taking time to think things through - but implementing fast.
This is what is needed in the UK where ideas are valued - but not implementation.

At the same time I dip into an academic study of the application of business reengineering ("big-bang")principles to a UK hospital - Reengineering Health Care - the complexities of organisational transformation by Mc Nulty and Ferlie and reel away, appalled and injured by the jargon and complexity. See for yourself here.
Ricardo Semler is the MD of Semco which has turned traditional management principles on their head - he writes about this in 2 books Maverick and The Seven-Day Weekend. There is a link here with cooperatives - the underrated organisational principle.....