Avoiding Best Practice

The last few posts (on cultural values) have led me back to the draft of a little book I abandoned two years ago – Crafting Effective Public Management - a collection of personal reflections about the craft I have followed now for almost 50 years.

As it stands, the document represents the musings I penned as I tried to understand the lessons from the very distinctive work which has occupied me for most of the last half of this period – namely reforming institutions of local and central state administration in ex-communist countries in these regions....

The opening section of the book (Part 1) was written in the late 1990s as I was trying to explain to a Central European audience the nature and significance of the changes in organising the business of government which started in britain in the 1970s and soon became global in scope. Separated geographically by then for almost a decade from that world, I could perhaps aspire to a measure of distance if not objectivity….

“Managing Change” may have been at the height of fashion then back home but the projects funded in the “newly-liberated countries” by Europe (and America) were not in the business of “catalysing” change but rather “imposing” it….”This is the way it's going to be”!! I vividly remembering the ticking off I got from the German company which employed me when, as Director of an Energy Centre in Prague, I offered some ideas for how the centre’s work might better fit the Czecho-Slovak context (it was 1992). Their response was classic - “We do not pay you to think – we pay you to obey”……I kid you not!! German friends tell me that there are traces in that formulation of the old Prussian influence!

It became obvious to me that these centres (funded by the European Commission) which purported to be helping countries of the ex-soviet bloc adjust to new ways of energy conservation were in fact little more than fronts for the selling of western technology…

“Best practice” was the phrase which the British private sector consultants were bringing with them to projects and was one to which I was starting to object. It was in Tashkent in 2000 that I first drafted material to make a point about the relative novelty of the government procedures in Europe which passed for “best practice” (whether in matters of hiring or procurement) and the number of exceptions one could find not just in southern European countries but even in the heart of Europe…..

As writers such as Ha-Joon Chang have documented in the development field, a lot of kidology was clearly going on!

Old draft material is like a good cheese or wine – it needs time to mature. And, rereading my material on ”crafting effective PM” made me realise that, despite my own determination since the beginning of my work here always to start from the local context and to find ”local champions”, I felt it needed more detail on how exactly to avoid the trap of "the best practice" formulae which are embedded in most EC guidelines...  

I have never been a fan of the World Bank but its Governance Reforms under real world conditions (2006) is one of the best reads - one paper in particular (by Matthew Andrews which starts part 2 of that book) weaves a very good approach around 3 words – “acceptance”, “authority” and “ability”. 
I enthused about the paper in a 2010 post and notice that he (and a couple of colleagues) have another book out - Building State Capability  - on the same theme of the need for a practical, ”learning approach” The book can be downloaded in its entirety from the publisher here.....

It’s got too much jargon for my taste; rather overdoes the analyses of individual (African and Asian) countries; and disfigures every line of every page with this annoying academic habit which groups names in brackets to prove that the author has read everything - but its basic argument is very important and can be read in this earlier paper by Andrews and Moorcock about something called ”Capability Traps”. 

“capability traps can be avoided and overcome by fostering different types of interventions…..which - 

(i) aim to solve particular problems in local contexts,

(ii) through the creation of an ‘authorizing environment’ for decisionmaking that allows ‘positive deviation’ and experimentation,

(iii) involving active, ongoing and experiential learning and the iterative feedback of lessons into new solutions, doing so by

(iv) engaging broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate and relevant—i.e., politically supportable and practically implementable.

We propose this kind of intervention as an alternative approach to enhancing state capability, one we call Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA). We emphasize that PDIA is not so much ‘new’ thinking as an attempt at a pragmatic and operational synthesis of related

The authors are part of an increasing number of people who want, like me, to “do development differently” – a few years back it was called…. political analysis……. From Political Economy to Political Analysis (2014) is an excellent overview of the thinking process

The basic ideas can be expressed a bit more simply -

- Fixing on an issue widely seen as problematic

- Getting people to admit that it can’t be solved by the usual top-down approach

- Getting wide ”buy-in” to this

- Bringing people together from all sectors which are touched by the issue

- Starting from an analysis of where we find ourselves  (reminds me of a philosophical colleague known for his phrase “We are where we are”!)

- Avoiding polarisation

- Working patiently to seek a feasible and acceptable solution

Fairly simple steps - which, however, conflict with prevailing political cultures – and not just in Central Europe!!

Why Role Conflict is Good for You

I was born and raised in a West of Scotland shipbuilding town, the son of a Presbyterian Minister (or “son of the manse” as we were known) and received my education in a state school which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition……now, sadly, much traduced. It would have been easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but, as this was in a mansion (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End”, the school was fee-paying and my parents – although no radicals – just never contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with their more modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town.

Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..

And trying to straddle such borders makes everyone uncomfortable and lonely as I was to discover when I became an active member of the Labour party in my final years at school - at the same time as I was playing rugby for a highly Conservative club.

When I became a young councillor in 1968, I found myself similarly torn – as I tried to describe in the post a few days ago about political roles. I developed loyalties to the local community activists but found myself in conflict with my (older) political colleagues and officials. And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..

The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants!

And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower.     

Yet I was to learn that, if you are able to sustain the discomfort, being exposed to conflicting loyalties can reap great dividends in insight – if not moral strength. That extended to the boundaries between academic disciplines – I started at my College as an economist but moved to political sociology. And the inter-disciplinary nature of my writings was not to my colleagues’ liking…

When, in the 1980s, I was able to develop European networks and then, in the 1990s, to work in a dozen countries of central Euro[e and Central Asia, I became aware of my (North) western European heritage - and to question things I had previously taken for granted…..
Changing my role from academic to politician…then consultant – and then straddling the West-East divide gave me incredibly rich experience which I wouldn’t have missed for the world…

A Hundred Years of Solitude....alienation.... and "transition"?

I’ve been in sensitive territory with my last three posts which covered the fields of “formal” and “informal” structures - and of the values which sustain the latter…

I suggested that Romanian (managerial) culture makes cooperative endeavour of any sort difficult - there is simply too much distrust (let alone macho leadership and partiality). 
The Head of the European Delegation to Romania (Karen Fogg 1993-98) used to give every visiting consultant a summary of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in Italy (1993) which suggested that the "amoral familism” of southern Italian Regions (well caught in Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958) effectively placed them 300 years behind the northern regions. That’s “path dependency” at its most powerful,,,

Romania had some 200 years under the Ottoman and the Phanariot thumbs - but then had 50 years of autonomy during which it developed all the indications of modernity (if plunging latterly into  Fascism).

The subsequent experience of Romanian communism, however, created a society in which, paradoxically, deep distrust became the norm – with villagers forcibly moved to urban areas to drive industrialisation; the medical profession enrolled to check that women were not using contraceptives or abortion; and Securitate spies numbering one in every three citizens.

The institutions of the Romanian state collapsed at Xmas 1989 and were subsequently held together simply by the informal pre-existing networks – not least those of the old Communist party and of the Securitate. Tom Gallagher has documented the process in “Theft of a Nation”.

Sorin Ionitsa’s booklet on Poor Policy Making in Weak States (2006) captures brilliantly the profound continuing influence of the different layers of cultural values on present-day political and administrative behavior in Romania; and uses recent literature to identify the weaknesses of the rationalistic approaches used by the EC.

But the foreign consultants working on the capacity building (which was carried out for 15 years with EC funding) understood little of these informal networks and the values on which they were based – they worked rather with toolkits of rational planning and, latterly, Guidebooks on Anti-Corruption……and ignored the hint Karen Fogg seemed to be giving them.

The development literature is full of warnings about the pitfalls of a rationalistic approach – but in those days any hapless foreigner who mentioned African (or even Asian) experience got a very bad reaction.

In a paper I delivered in 2011 to the Annual NISPAcee Conference - The Long Game – not the log-frame – I invented the phrase “impervious regimes” to cover the mixture of autocracies, kleptocracies and incipient democracies with which I have become all too familiar in the last 27 years. I also tried to explain what I thought was wrong with the toolkits and Guides with which reformers operated; and offered some ideas for a different, more incremental and “learning” approach.

I’m glad to say that just such a new approach began to surface a few years ago – known variously as “doing development differently”, or the iterative or political analysis…….it was presaged almost 10 years ago by the World Bank’s Governance Reforms under real world conditions written around the sorts of questions we consultants deal with on a daily basis - one paper in particular (by Matthew Andrews which starts part 2 of the book) weaves a very good theory around 3 words – "acceptance", "authority" and "ability". I enthused about the approach in a 2010 post

But there is a strange apartheid in consultancy and scholastic circles between those engaged in “development”, on the one hand, and those in “organisational reform” in the developed world, on the other…..The newer EU member states are now assumed to be fully-fledged systems (apart from a bit of tinkering still needed in their judicial systems – oh…. and Hungary and Poland have gone back on some fundamental elements of liberal democracy…..!). But they are all remain sovereign states – subject only to their own laws plus those enshrined in EC Directives….

EC Structural Funds grant billions of euros to the new member states which are managed by each country’s local consultants who use the “best practice” tools - which anyone with any familiarity with “path dependency” or “cultural” or even anthropological theory would be able to tell them are totally inappropriate to local conditions..…
But the local consultants are working to a highly rationalistic managerial framework imposed on them by the European Commission; and are, for the most part, young and trained to western thought. 

They know that the brief projects on which they work have little sustainability but – heh – look at the hundreds of millions of euros which will continue to roll in as far as the eye can see…..!!!

Someone in central Europe needs to be brave enough to shout out that ”the Emperor has no clothes!!” To challenge the apartheid in scholastic circles….and to draw to attention to the continued relevance of Ionitsa’s 10- year old booklet and Governance Reforms under real world conditions  

Afterthought; The title is deliberately provocative! I appreciate that the reference to "transition" in the title implies progress to a "better" system; and that the core "liberal democracy" system is now under question.....one could indeed argue that, from now on, it is the older member states who need to make the transition to simpler and more resilient societies!!   

Are Nations really masters of their fates?

I’ve just been doing an interview for a website about my experience of Romania. I found myself giving this rather severe response to one of the questions – 

Section 14 of my E-book Mapping Romania contains two excerpts from key books – the first from an article by a compatriot of mine (like me, with a Romanian partner) who moved recently from Bucharest to France.

It describes some typical scenes – which are also the focus of Mike Ormsby’s short stories about the country in “Never Mind the Balkans – here’s Romania” (You can read a couple of them here in “Bucharest Tales”). The second, longer excerpt is from a fat book called “When Cultures Clash” which includes good sections on both Bulgaria and Romania…  Section 7 has some further snapshots…… 

The overriding impression which remains with me is of a people who are unable to trust – and cannot therefore even begin to cooperate with - one another in matters of business or civic life….. This fascinating cultural map (which uses 2 different measures of values) puts Romania half way down the left part of the diagram.......The map is explained here…..

This raises fundamental questions about how free we are to shake off cultural values….Authors such as de Hofstede; Ronald Inglehart; FransTrompenaars; and Richard Lewis (in When Cultures Clash tell us how such values affect our everyday behaviour. One Romanian academic, for example, tried, a few years back, to apply the important de Hofstede cultural concepts to Romanian organisations).  
And there is a body of literature called “path dependency” which indicates that such behaviour deeply affects a country's institutions and is rooted in long-distant events and quirks of history. But few authors, it seems, are brave enough to look at conscious efforts to reform such institutional behaviour..

Germany, for example, used to be well-known for its “Sonderweg” ie the distinctive historical and cultural path it had trodden – superbly critiqued by Fritz Stern…..But, somehow, it seems in the last 70 years to have shaken that cultural tradition off...How exactly did that happen? I vividly remember reading Ralf Dahrendorf's sociological analyses of the issue in the 1970s

An obvious reason for the lack of trust in country such as Romania is that it experienced 50 years of totalitarian rule from 1945- but, as Sorin Ionitsa has explained, the Ottoman and Greek Phanariot influences of 1700-1870 seem to have left stronger behavioural influences! 

When I was in Poland very briefly in the early 90s I was struck immediately with the paranoiac level of distrust which separated the various groups (which sadly continues to poison that country’s political development) I don't know to what to attribute that....

The obvious question which follows is what those in authority in those new EU Member States – eg in the universities – have been doing to try to encourage more cooperation eg in the cross-border field? When I was on a Fellowship in the States in the late 80s I had come across a fascinating structure called City Leadership which brought leaders from all sectors of city life (inc Unions, NGOs, churches, culture etc) together once a month to forge bonds of understanding. There is a global version of this here – although I can’t speak of its success.

A booklet on Poor Policy Making in Weak States produced by Sorin Ionitsa in 2006 - is one of the best attempts I’ve seen to face up to the issue.  But, somehow, our current elites are too smug and complacent to bother with such basic questions.......It seems easier to use meaningless technocratic rhetoric than admit to bafflement.

I would like to see elites express more realism, modesty…indeed humility about what is possible…..

How the Scales Fell from our Eyes

When, some 15 years ago, I was Team Leader of an EC-funded project in Central Asia I tried to formulate what I saw as the “gold standard” for a democratic system – after some false starts, it eventually came as follows -

·         A political executive - whose members are elected and whose role is to set the policy agenda- that is develop a strategy (and make available the laws and resources) to deal with those issues which it feels need to be addressed

·         A freely elected legislative Assembly – whose role is to ensure (i) that the merits of new legislation and policies of the political Executive are critically and openly assessed; (ii) that the performance of government and civil servants is held to account; and (iii) that, by the way these roles are performed, the public develop confidence in the workings of the political system.

·         An independent Judiciary – which ensures that the rule of Law prevails, that is to say that no-one is able to feel above the law.

·         A free media; where journalists and people can express their opinions freely and without fear.

·         A professional impartial Civil Service – whose members have been appointed and promoted by virtue of their technical ability to ensure (i) that the political Executive receives the most competent policy advice; (ii) that the decisions of the executive (approved as necessary by Parliament) are effectively implemented ; and that (iii) public services are well-managed

·         The major institutions of Government - Ministries, Regional structures (Governor and regional offices of Ministries) and various types of Agencies. These bodies should be structured, staffed and managed in a purposeful manner

·         An independent system of local self-government – whose leaders are accountable through direct elections to the local population[1]. The staff may or may not be civil servants.

·         An active civil society – with a rich structure of voluntary associations – able to establish and operate without restriction. Politicians can ignore the general public for some time but, as the last ten years has shown, only for so long! The vitality of civil society – and of the media – creates (and withdraws) the legitimacy of political systems.

·         An independent university system – which encourages critical thinking

I did have the grace to admit that “such a democratic model is, of course, an “ideal-type” – a model which few (if any) countries actually match in all respects. A lot of what the global community preaches as “good practice” in government structures is actually of very recent vintage in their own countries and is still often more rhetoric than actual practice”.

But there was no doubt that I felt Britain was as close to the gold standard as it got. Gradually, however, my naivety was exposed. A year or so later, 

“Public appointments, for example, should be taken on merit – and not on the basis of ethnic or religious networks. But Belgium and Netherlands, to name but two European examples, have a formal structure of government based, until very recently, on religious and ethnic divisions[2]. In those cases a system which is otherwise rule-based and transparent has had minor adjustments made to take account of strong social realities and ensure consensus.
“But in the case of countries such as Northern Ireland (until very recently), the form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public good has been completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and appointments) were made in favour of Protestants.“And the Italian system has for decades been notorious for the systemic abuse of the machinery of the state by various powerful groups – with eventually the Mafia itself clearly controlling some key parts of it[3]. American influence played a powerful part in this in the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system – until Berlusconi intervened”.

These are well-known cases – but the more we look, the more we find that countries which have long boasted of their fair and objective public administration systems have in fact suffered serious intrusions by sectional interests. The British and French indeed have invented words to describe the informal systems which has perverted the apparent neutrality of their public administration – “the old boy network”[4] and “pantouflage” of “ENArques”[5]. A decade later I had to amend my picture further 

In recent years, bankers have become a hated group. However, before the politicians could do any damage to their privileges and excesses, the British right-wing media was able to make an issue of some excessive financial claims made by numerous member of parliament (average 20k) and neuter what remaining power politicians had in that country. It was Harold MacMillan who suggested at a meeting of ex-Prime Ministers that the collective noun for a group of political leaders was a “lack of principles” (He also, interestingly, said that “we did not give up the divine right of kings to succumb to the divine right of experts”!).

The media scandal in Britain (finally) exposed the moral bankruptcy of the “tabloid” newspapers which struck fear into politicians and therefore reluctant to take actions which would offend newspaper moguls. A joke which beautifully illustrates the perversion of these papers has the Pope in a rowing boat with the leader of the miners’ union of the 1980s then in deep conflict with the government. The oars are lost and Scargill (the miners’ leader) gets out of the boat and walks across the water to retrieve the oars. The next day’s newspapers headlines are “Arthur Scargill can’t swim!”!! That scandal also brought police corruption into the frame in England.

So, in the course of 3-4 years, 4 core professions of the British Establishment (or Power Elite) have been demonised – bankers, politicians, media and police. Perhaps the most powerful professional group, however, has managed to stay out of the spotlight – but needs now to be “outed” and ousted from its privileged and corrupting position. And which group is that? They are the (corporate) lawyers. Britain and America have more lawyers than most of the countries of the globe put together – and they basically protect the amorality of corporations. And it is these people who then go to become judges - Craig Murray has written about the amorality of our judges. And those with any optimism remaining for the future of the planet will be disappointed to learn that the majority of graduates these days still want to go into either the finance or legal sectors. If our churches had any morality left they would be focusing on this – and discouraging our youngsters from such decisions.

So I offer you the 5 groups who are destroying our civilisation - investment bankers, politicians, corporate lawyers and judges, tabloid journalists and corrupt policemen. But what about the accountants/economists, academics and preachers??? Damn! There seem to be 8 horses of the apocalypse! Let me in conclusion, offer this quotation from mediaeval times -

Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other human beings - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends 

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[1] Encouraging a strong and free system of local self-government is perhaps the most difficult part of the transition process – since it means allowing forces of opposition to have a power base. But it is the way to develop public confidence in government! 

[2] Ie each of Belgium’s 3 Regions has a both an executive and a “community” structure – with the latter reflecting ethnic issues. Netherlands has long had its “Pillars” which ensured that the main religious forces had their say in nominations and decisions. This has now weakened.

[3] There is a voluminous literature on this – the most lively is Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily (Harvill Press 1996). For an update, read Berlusconi’s Shadow – crime, justice and the pursuit of power by David Lane (Penguin 2005)

[4] published critiques of the narrow circles from which business and political leaders were drawn started in the early 1960s – but only Margaret Thatcher’s rule of the 1980s really broke the power of this elite and created a meritocracy

[5] business, political and Civil service leaders have overwhelmingly passed through the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) and have moved easily from a top position in the Civil Service to political leadership to business leadership.

Ways of Seeing

You may have noticed that the last few posts have mentioned the importance of trying to see the world from a variety of perspectives. I stumbled on the importance of such a vision through the accident of my birth – caught in the middle of the tensions (class, religious and political) between the West and East ends of a shipbuilding town in the West of Scotland. 

In my 30s, as a senior local politician, I felt the pull between loyalties to local constituents; to party colleagues; to official advisers; and to my own conscience – and indeed developed a diagram for students to show the 4 very different pressures (audiences) to which politicians are subjected – 

- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);

- the party;

- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;

- their conscience.

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – eg populist; ideologue; statesman; maverick.

- The "populist" (or Tribune of the people) simply purports to gives the people what (s)he thinks they want - regardless of logic, coherence or consequences. 

- The "ideologue" (or party spokesman) simply reflects what the party activist (or bosses) say - regardless of logic etc. 

- The "statesman" (or manager) does what the professional experts in the appropriate bit of the bureaucracy tell him/her - regardless of its partiality etc

- the "maverick" (or conviction politician) does what they think right (in the quiet of their conscience or mind - no matter how perverted) 

I tried to suggest that the effective politician was the one who resisted the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its element of truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership, 

And, as a nomadic consultant, I have noticed how academic and national boundaries make mutual understanding difficult – but that those who persist in working in the "no man's land" on these boundaries get superb opportunities for new insights……A bridge-builder is a metaphor I like - although there is a famous central European saying that "the problem with bridges is that, in peace time horses shit on them and, in war, they are blown up" 

All this came back to me as I read a paper by Peter Mair (from 1995) which, looking at the relationship of the political party to both society and the state, nicely tracks the historical trajectory of the politician.

First “grandees” (above it all); then later “delegates” (of particular social interests), then later again, in the heyday of the catch-all party, “entrepreneurs”, parties, the authors argued, have now become “semi-state agencies”. The article has some simple but useful diagrams showing how the three entities of political party, society and state have altered their interactions and roles in the last century.

     

We are told that proportional representation gives citizens a much stronger chance of their preferences being expressed in the final makeup of a Parliament. But that fails to deal with the reality of the party boss. Politicians elected for geographical constituencies (as distinct from party lists) have (some at least) voters breathing down their necks all year round. 

Not so those from the party lists who only have to bother about the party bosses who, in the past few decades, have got their snouts increasingly stuck in the state (and corporate) coffers.

Looking at the three models as a dynamic rather than as three isolated snapshots, suggests the possibility that the movement of parties from civil society towards the state could continue to such an extent that parties become part of the state apparatus itself. It is our contention that this is precisely the direction in which the political parties in modern democracies have been heading over the past three decades. 

(We have seen a massive) decline in the levels of participation and involvement in party activity, with citizens preferring to invest their efforts elsewhere, particularly in groups where they can play a more active role and where they are more likely to be in full agreement with a narrower range of concerns, and where they feel they can make a difference. The more immediate local arena thus becomes more attractive than the remote and inertial national arena, while open, single-issue groups become more appealing than traditional, hierarchic party organizations.

Parties have therefore been obliged to look elsewhere for their resources, and in this case their role as governors and law-makers made it easy for them to turn to the state. Principal among the strategies they could pursue was the provision and regulation of state subventions to political parties, which, while varying from country to country, now often constitute one of the major financial and material resources with which the parties can conduct their activities both in parliament and in the wider society.

The growth in state subvention over the past two decades, and the promise of further growth in the coming years, has come to represent one of the most significant changes to the environment within which parties act

the drawing is by Bulgarian Alexiev (Zdravko) - a tribute to the martyrs of the 1876 uprising

Stories We Tell

As I was skimming the hundreds of books I have been checking for the working draft of my Dispatches to the Next Generation , I was reminded of the idea of there being only a small number of basic plots writers use in their novels (eg voyage and return; rags to riches; the quest; the tragedy). Some people have suggested seven basic plots, others twenty; one even 36. In an amusing clip, Kurt Vonnegut made it even more simple!

But what about non-fiction books? Since we were small children, we have all needed stories to help us give meaning to the strange world we inhabit. In this post-modern world, “narratives” indeed have become a fashionable adult activity for the same reason. Just google “story telling in management” if you don’t believe me – this booklet is just one fascinating example which the search produced

At University in the 60s I had been interested in how social systems held together and why people (generally) obeyed - Max Weber’s classification of political systems into – “traditional”, “charismatic” and “rational-legal” was an eye-opener. 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; that 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”.

During the 1980s, when I was doing my (part-time) Masters in Policy Analysis, I registered the potential of “Frame Analysis” (originating from Erving Goffman in 1974) which showed how different “stories” were used to make sense of complex social events – but had no occasion to use it myself. Little did I realize that it was becoming a central part of post-modernism’s encouragement of diverse realities…  

For me, the typologies surfaced again in political scientists Chris Hood’s The Art of the State (2000) which used Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory to offer a brilliant analysis of 4 basic “world views” and their strengths and weaknesses in particular contexts. Substantial chunks of a similar sort of book "Responses to Governance - governing corporations and societies in the world" ed by John Dixon (2003) can be read on google books.

Michael Thompson is an anthropologist who has used Mary Douglas’ cultural theory to make The case for clumsiness (2004) which, again, sets out the various stories which sustain the different positions people take on various key policy issues – such as the ecological disaster staring us in the face. There is a good interview with the author here

Three short reports give an excellent summary of all this literature; and how it finds practical expression in government policies – Keith Grint’s Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions (2008); Common Cause (2010); and Finding Frames (2010)

Three years ago I enthused about a book called Why We Disagree About Climate Change which uses seven different lenses (or perspectives) to make sense of climate change: science, economics, religion, psychology, media, development, and governance. His argument is basically that –

We understand science and scientific knowledge in different ways

We value things differently

We believe different things about ourselves, the universe and our place in the universe

We fear different things

We receive multiple and conflicting messages about climate change – and interpret them differently

We understand “development” differently

We seek to govern in different ways (eg top-down “green governmentality”; market environmentalism; or “civic environmentalism”)

But few authors have had the courage to apply this approach to the global economic crisis. Most writers are stuck in their own particular “quadrant” (to use the language of grid-group writing) and fail to do justice to the range of other ways of seeing the crisis.

Misrule of Experts? The Financial Crisis as Elite Debacle M Moran et al (2011) is a rare essay which tries to plot the different types of explanation of the crisis - eg as “accident”, “conspiracy” or “calculative failure” and then frames the crisis differently as an “elite political debacle”

As I like such lists,  I should try to draw one for the crisis and try to fit the existing literature into the various categories! My starter would look like this –

- Stuff happens

- Things go up

- Things go down

Part V - Thinking Beyond Capitalism

Sadly, my blogspot host (in all other respects so generous) doesn’t give the option of uploading pdf files – which I need for my diagram with hyperlinks. And the photographs I am allowed are technically unable to contain hyperlinks.

I therefore have to ask those readers who want to know more about the illustrative names at the perimeter of the diagram which graces this post to click here for an interactive version of my amended version of Beyond Capitalism

The normal caveats prevail – namely that I owe the basic structure of 6 dimensions and 15 boxes to  the Commons in Transition people; that the simplified text and indicative names are my personal responsibility; and that I am well aware of the limitations of these last two…..

Having said that, let me offer an initial commentary on some aspects of the six dimensions

1. The POLITICS Dimension (Democracy and the Commons)

As representative democracy has eroded in recent decades, direct democracy has attracted increasing attention – eg referenda, citizens’ juries, participatory budgeting or random selection of electoral positions. There is no obvious name to offer – although John Keane’s huge book on The Life and Death of Democracy is one of the best resources.

Paul Hirst advanced the idea of “associative democracy” until his sad death in 2003. This drew on the thinking of figures such as GDH Cole…

As the internet has developed, so has the principle of “The Commons” of which Elinor Ostrom and Michael Bauwen are key figures…..

2. The ECONOMY (or Finance??) Dimension

actually reads to me more like the International Finance Regime – with a concession made to the importance of local banking but the normal economic world of production and other services missing. The North Dakota State Bank is one example of the wider concept of local banking. David Graeber; Thomas Pikety; Joseph Stiglitz; and Yanis Varoufakis are just a few of the most important writers on the issue of debt and capital

3. The WORK/ECONOMY Dimension

It is here I have my most fundamental questions about the classification – since the original diagram gives only one phrase (“enterprise- social and responsible”) for what is arguably the engine of the economy AND places this in the “Work” box – rather than the “economy” one….Robert Owen;  Mondragon; and Ronald Douthwaite are examples of those who have inspired global cooperative endeavours which account for far more jobs than people realize – about a quarter of jobs globally. With the appropriate tax regimes, that could be much more…

Even so, privately-owned companies have a critical role – as recognized by Paul Hawken in Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution and Peter Barnes in Capitalism 3.0
CASSE (advocating the “steady state economy”) should be transferred to this box……

The original diagram also failed to mention robotisation which has been the subject of much discussion recently such as here and here. Martin Ford is probably the key writer at the moment on the issue – perhaps also Jeremy Rifkin

4. The 4^th Dimension

Here again, I’m uncomfortable with the designation originally given to this box – “consumption/production”. It seems to me to cover at the moment the field of self-sufficiency (??) as propounded by people such as John Michael Greer and Dmitry Orlov – the latter in his Reinventing Collapse; the Soviet Experience and American Prospects – or the Resilience magazine

5. The CONSCIENCE Dimension

Robert Quinn’s Change the World is, for my money, the most persuasive tract – despite its off-putting (and very American) sub-title “how ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary results”. And, despite the cynicism he has attracted, Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is actually a very worthwhile read….If these are too “exhortatory” for readers, you may want to look at Character Strengths and Virtues by Martin Seligman

Danah Zohar’s Spiritual Capital – wealth we can live by (2004) is an interesting critique of capitalism with a rather too superficial approach to its amelioration. The Ethical Economy – rebuilding value after the crisis; A Arvidsson and N Peitersen (2013) covers the ground better - and is summarized here and critiqued here.

A fascinating and totally neglected book is Questions of Business Life by Richard Higginson (2002) which is what a cleric produced from his work at an ecumenical centre for business people….

6. The CITIZENS Dimension

The internet attracts great hopes – and fears. On balance, people are persuaded of its net benefits to democracy – although the high hopes of various “springs” and movements have been bitterly disappointed. Writers such as Paul Hawken and Paul Kingsnorth have written powerfully about these experiences…

Yochai Benkler is a new name for me. A legal scholar, he has written profusely about the limits and potential of the open source technology which leads us back to platform democracy and cooperatives….