How the attack on the state harms us all

We’re all ambivalent about “the State”….We slag it off with pejorative terms…and often profess to anarchistic and libertarian tendencies….In my formative period in the early 70s I was very taken with the concept of The Local State whose corporatist tentacles we saw strangling everything in Scotland. Cynthia Cockburn’s 1977 book on the subject and the products of the national CDP Project were the most powerful expression of this critique – although Newcastle sociologists such as Jon Davies and Norman Dennis had led the way with their books of 1972.

And yet I was an active social democrat, consciously using the levers of (local) state power open to me to push the boundaries of opportunity for people I saw as marginalized and disenfranchised

That period of my life lasted from 1974-90 and is captured in From Multiple Deprivation to Social Exclusion

Since then, my focus has been more single-mindedly on the development of institutional capacity in the state bodies of ex-communist countries. The World Bank reflected the prevailing opinion of the early 90s in asserting that the state should simply be allowed to crumble….. and only came to is senses (partly due to Japanese pressure) with its 1997 Report – the State in a Changing World

  

By the time of my exodus from Britain, the country had already had a full decade of Thatcher – and of privatisation. I confess that part of me felt that a bit of a shake-up had been necessary…..but it was George Monbiot’s The Captive State (2000) – 3 years after New Labour’s stunning victory - which alerted me to the full scale of the corporate capture of our institutions and elites regardless of political affiliation …

And why did this capture take place? Simply because of a set of insidious ideas about freedom which I felt as I grew up and have seen weld itself into the almost irresistible force we now call “neoliberalism”……..But it is a word we should be very careful of using….partly because it is not easy to explain but mainly because it carries that implication of being beyond human resistance….

The sociologists talk of “reification” when our use of abstract nouns gives away such power – abstracting us as human agents out of the picture. 
Don’t Think of an Elephant – know your values and frame the debate is apparently quite a famous book published in 2004 by American psychologist George Lakoff - which gives a wonderful insight into how words and phrases can gain this sort of power – and can be used deliberately in the sorts of campaigns which are now being waged all around us…    

Amidst all the causes which vie for our attention, it has become clear to me that the central one must be for the integrity of the State – whether local or national….I know all the counter-arguments – I am still a huge fan of community power and social enterprise. And the state’s increasingly militaristic profile threatens to undermine what’s left of our trust. But those profiled in “Dismembered – how the attack on the State harms us all” are the millions who work in public services which are our lifeblood – not just the teachers and health workers but all the others on whom we depend, even the much maligned inspectorates - all suffering from cutbacks, monstrous organizational upheavals and structures….

I am amazed that more books like this one have not been forthcoming…

Coincidentally, I have also been reading the confessions of a few political scientists who argue that it lost its way in the 70s and, for decades, has not been dealing with real issues. I do remember Gerry Stoker saying this to the American professional body in 2010 and am delighted that more have now joined him in a quest for relevance 

And I’m looking forward to the publication in a few weeks of The Next Public Administration – debates and dilemmas; by Guy Peters (and Jon Pierre) who is one of the best political scientists of his generation.

For too long, “the State” has been the focus of irrelevant academic scribbling….at last there are some stirrings of change!

Making Sense of the Global Crisis

Earlier this year, I ran a series of ten posts which started with a simple question – why are we so badly served with books about the economic crisis? I bemoaned the fact that authors –

-  seem to have made up their mind up about the explanation before they started to write

- make little attempt to analyse previous efforts at explanation

- generally spend their time on diagnosis

- leaving prescriptions to the last few pages

Of course, there are exceptions – in particular Howard Davies’ The Financial Crisis (2010) which identified and briefly assessed no fewer than 39 different explanations for the crisis. And I have just been reading Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures a book by Paul Kennedy which appeared only a few months ago. 

An academic sociologist, Kennedy earns high points by stating in the very first sentence that he has 

“stood on the shoulders of so many giants that I am dizzy” 

and then proves the point by each chapter of his book having extensive notes (often with hyperlinks) and concluding with a bibliography of 25 pages…

More to the point, the book covers pretty extensively a lot of subjects, such as the ecological crisis and the future of work, which are normally ignored in such texts. You really feel that the guy has made a real effort to track down and summarise for us the most important texts in the field – a quite exceptional approach….which so few others attempt. You can check for yourself since the book can be downloaded in its entirety here.

I suspect that one reason for this feature is that the book is based on a much longer textbook he did a few years back called  Global Sociology – which would perhaps explain the lightness of some of the discussion dealing with the feasibility of “green solutions” to the ecological aspects of the crisis. Surprisingly, there is no reference to Capitalism 3.0 (2006) by Peter Barnes – a very fair-minded entrepreneur sensitive to the evils of unregulated capitalism. Nor to people such Paul Hawkens….whose Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution made such an impact when it came out as far as back as 1999. Hawkens indeed has just released an intensive analysis of 100 “feasible solutions” – assessed by a credible advisory team over the past 3 years…… Drawdown

But I didn ‘t actually mean any takedown with these remarks – because at least the man has been courageous enough to aim high, write clearly and put his stuff out there for us to assess…..I so much wish others would do likewise…….

 

In that spirit, let me return to the effort I made earlier this year to identify, in some ten posts, about 200 of the key books which try to explain the economics of the modern world – you can find them dealt with from pages 35-58 of Common Endeavour

Somewhere I have made the comment that the best books on the subject for me are actually not written by economists - so I thought I would test that throwaway remark and came up with the following table which simply identifies (very subjectively) some seminal titles which are then placed not quite in a left-right spectrum but more in a “tonal” spectrum…..

 Key Texts on the Crisis - by category of writing - and "tone"

Discipline	Critical	Moderate	Apologiae
Economics	Globalisation and its Discontents; Joseph Stiglitz (2002) Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012) Debunking Economics – the naked emperor dethroned; Steve Keen (2011 edition)	Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004) Shifts and Shocks – what we’ve learned, and still have to, from the financial crisis; Martin Wolf (2014) – with accompanying power point presentation.	most of the discipline
Political economy	Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea; Mark Blyth (2013)		The discipline still rediscovering itself
Political science	Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism; Sheldon Wolin  (2008) Crisis without End - the unravelling of western prosperity: Andrew Gamble (2014) Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now; David Marquand (2015)	Paul Hirst (stakeholding) Peter Mair	Few pol scientists trespass into the economic field
Sociology	Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism; Wolfgang Streeck (2013) End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013) Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)	A lot of sociologists seduced into polling work	The sociological voice is still inspired by C Wright Mills – although divided a  bit by the French school
geography	A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism – David Harvey (2005). Injustice ; Daniel Dorling 2014) A Better Politics – how government can make us happier D Dorling (2016		The geographers are a bolshie lot!
Environment		Why we can’t agree about Climate Change; Mike Hulme (2009) Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999)	Although most of this bunch have been geographers, they pride themselves on their technocracy
Journalism	The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System; Jerry Mander (2012). Post Capitalism – a guide to our Future; Paul Mason (2015) ….	How Good Can we be – ending the mercenary society Will Hutton (2015)	They don’t enjoy the tenure of the academics – and therefore have to pay attention to their mealticket
Management and mant studies	Rebalancing Society; Henry Mintzberg (2014)	Peter Senge Charles Handy Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes (2006)	Most mant writers are apologists – apart from the critical mant theorists
Religious studies	Laudato-Si – Pope Francis’ Encyclical (2015). Accessible in its entirety here	Questions of Business Life; Higginson (2002)	A more ecumenical bunch!

My apologies to all those who may feel demeaned……but, as I hope my next post will make clear, there is a very serious point I will be trying to make……  

Close Encounters of the…..”bureaucratic” kind

Next year will mark 50 years for me of “close encounters” with “state structures” or (more emotively expressed) with “bureaucracy”. Except that I am a political “scientist” and was trained in the 1960s in the Weberian tradition – to understand that term in a more analytic way as “the exercise of rational-legal authority”. 
Weber – like most classical philosophers and sociologists – was intrigued a hundred years ago by the source of social obedience. Why do people obey the rulers? And he produced the most satisfactory answer – with a famous three-fold classification – traditional, charismatic and rational-legal authority…..

By 1945 the world had had its fill of charismatic authority and settled amicably in the 1950s, for the most part, for “rational-legal” authority – although, in the 1960s, clever people such as JK Galbraith started to mock it and such as Ivan Illich and Paole Freire to critique it. Toffler’s “Future Shock” (1970) was probably the real warning shot that the old certainties were gone – and “change” has been non-stop since then. 

I’ve operated at the community, municipal, Regional and national levels of public management – in some ten countries in Europe and Central Asia and have tried, over this half-century, to keep track of the more important of the texts with which we have been deluged (in the English language) about the efforts of administrative reform.

I do realize that I am a bit naïve in the faith I still pin on the written word – in my continual search for the holy grail. After all, it was as long ago as 1975 – when I wrote my own first little book - when I first realized that few writers of books are seriously in the business of helping the public understand an issue – the motive is generally to make a reputation or sell a particular world view…. 

Still I persist in believing that the next book on the reading list will help the scales fall from my eyes!
So it’s taken me a long time to develop this little table about patterns of writing about admin reform…… 

Communicating administrative reform

Source	Activity	Who they write for	In what format	With what “Tone”
Academics	Too many!	One another – and students	Academic journal articles; and books	Aloof, qualified and opaque
Journalists	Fair number	The public – and professionals	PR handouts generally; more rarely an article	Breathless; More rarely critical
Politicians	A few	The electorate	PR handouts; more rarely a pamphlet	Critical of past; optimistic of the future
Think-Tankers	A lot	Opinion-makers	Booklets; and PR material	Ditto
Consultants	Even more!	Senior civil servants	Confidential reports; very rarely booklets and even a few books	Celebrating their “product”
Officials	Few	One another; OECD wonks	Descriptive papers and reports	Ditto
Global organs (eg World Bank, ADB, WHO	More than we think	A global network inc Cabinet Offices, Ministers, think-tanks; journalists;	well-researched, well-produced reports and websites	Omniscient, dry
Mugwumps – sitting on fences	Very few	The poor middle-ranking official who is expected to achieve the required change	Toolkits; manuals; roadmaps; notebooks	Open, humorous

The fads and fashions of organizational “reform” include “reengineering”, “transformation”……even “revolution” and we no longer know who to believe or trust – let alone obey…..  
From time to time I try to make sense of this avalanche of material eg in the early part of the In Transit – notes on good governance book which I wrote in 1999 for young Central European reformers – or The Long Game – not the log-frame - where I tried to capture a sense of the various organisational models with which consultants were trying to entice central European policy-makers. 

More recently I’ve tried to incorporate such texts with relevant blogposts in a draft book about “Crafting Effective Public Management” – but have had to accept that it didn't read well....too scrappy certainly,,,,but something else too....

But, as I said, a few weeks back, someone with my experience of straddling all these worlds must (and does) have something distinctive to say about all this organisational effort. 

And I think I have perhaps cracked what’s been wrong – I’ve been using the wrong “tone” in those efforts…the text is too abstract – for the most part “writing about writing”!!

In the last few days I've been experimenting with a different approach to my reflections about the experiences of organisational change ....  It consists of -

…..“telling a story”…..of the times when a few of us came together and, through a combination of imagination, discussion, networking and sheer inspiration, were able to raft something (a project) which gave the system a bit of a jolt…..

In fact I had written a lot about these occasions – they were all in various folders. But I have never given the papers the profile and legitimacy I now realize they deserve. I’ll give some examples in the next post

Most of the writing about reform cuts out that human factor – so what you get is a profound sense of inanimate concepts and forces……And to be fair, a lot of changes are like that – a few people at the top think something is a good idea; announce it; and expect to see it implemented and working. Effective change, however, requires not hierarchy and obedience - but open dialogue and negotiation. There was a time when we thought we had learned that ….eg from the Japanese…. But that memory faded and, in these autocratic days, too many people in organisations still act like the couriers in Hans Christian Andersen’s story about the Emperor’s New Clothes …..developing the groupthink and suspension of disbelief to be able to ignore the Emperor’s actual sartorial condition!

But, at my level, all effective changes I have seen have come from a few individuals coming together to explore deeply how they can improve a problematic situation - and then developing a constituency of change around a vision which emerges as consensual. Never by one person at the top imposing a fad or idea!

Perhaps that’s why charlatans like Michael Barber have been able recently to make such a global impact with his “deliverology” – for which Justin Trudeau is the latest to fall prey…..A new central Unit….reporting to the boss….a few simple messages….a few targets…..big data crunching…..sticks and carrots……..and hey presto…we’ve solved the perennial problem of implementation!!

French Letters

The last post suggested it was not easy to find well-written books which gave a true sense of the intellectual styles and trajectories of individual European countries – at least not in the English-language. Perry Anderson is one these rare characters – to whose extensive analyses of contemporary France, Germany and Italy I duly supplied appropriate links – taken from his stunning study The New Old World (2009) which occupies a prominent place in my library. I have just discovered that the book can be read in its entirety HERE (all 560 pages).

I would rate the book easily the best I have ever read on what it is to be European – about a third being a survey of the literature on the “European Project”; another third being insightful and acerbic analyses of the political and intellectual currents of the “Core” European countries (with the noticeable and dismissive exclusion of the UK); and the final section (“The Eastern Question”) devoted largely to Turkey.

 

I reread Anderson’s chapter on France after the last post – and have to say that it gave me a better feel for the contemporary French scene (excluding the last decade) than the book my post was focusing on viz “How the French Think”

And there are other well-written books on France which explore the intellectual as much as the political – with the outstanding La Vie en Bleu – France and the French since 1990; Rod Kedward (2005) due surely for an update?

I bought it quite recently and was immediately gripped by its opening style. But, full confessions, I soon put the book aside – basically because it’s too daunting a read at 700 pages…One review (just double-click the hyperlink in the title) puts it nicely - 

In recent decades, historians have increasingly attempted to uncover the unique combination of attributes that precisely defines France.  They variously study the national “passions”, realms of memory, or socio-political characteristics in order to define that most elusive of elixirs: Frenchness. Some authors champion a specific set of characteristics, arguing that the key can be found in immigration, diverse social traditions, or cultural identity.

All share a common quest to determine what makes France tick, and how its unique path formed the national consciousness and institutions.  This is not merely an antiquarian exercise.  In an age of urban rioting by the children of excluded immigrants, ongoing debates about the legacy of Vichy and Algeria, and strident anti-Americanism, these studies have a striking contemporary relevance. The latest such effort is Rod Kedward’s “France and the French: La Vie en Bleu since 1900”, and it ranks among the most ambitious of its kind.

Already acclaimed for his now-standard studies of collaboration and resistance during the Vichy years, Kedward here offers an examination of “French political cultures and their chequered narratives, in which the meanings of the past reverberate through every action of the present” (p. xiii).  Simply put, he wishes to eliminate the traditional boundaries between modes of historical inquiry, arguing that political history cannot be adequately addressed without the inclusion of society, culture, memory, and even behavioural studies. 

Only a proper examination of these “multiple narratives” offers a genuine aperçu into French history and its contemporary resonances…… Kedward argues that the history of France since 1900 has been dominated by three central themes – the Republic; Ideology; and Identity.  From the turn of the century onwards, the population and government were obsessed with the idea of the Republic, a neo-Jacobin conceptual framework perceived to be universal in its application. 

Kedward contends that this uniformity dissipated after 1930, inaugurating an era of ideological conflict, in which the nation evolved from elitist party politics towards multiple strands that encompassed “the margins, the outsiders, the subjugated and the minorities” (p. 3).  The period culminated in the événements of 1968,pitting Gaullism against a variety of left-wing alternatives.  Yet the experience of that year both confirmed the existence of ideological pluralism and simultaneously denied it, yielding to a third duration in 1970, the age of identity, when notions of gender, race, sexual orientation, region, and even ecological commitment all trumped allegiances to political parties and doctrines.

 Although various tropes re-emerge in each section--the fight between economic modernization and tradition, the proponents and detractors of dirigisme, struggles for gender equality--Kedward deftly demonstrates the evolution of the various arguments, shifting through the paradigms of unity, diversity, and difference that characterize each historical period.

Inspired by Hazareesingh and Anderson, I now want to go back to Kedward and try to do its 700 pages full justice. I know it deserves it – but it’s so much easier to read smaller books!!!

On that subject, let me remind my readers about my ten tricks of fast reading and comprehension. They are very simply expressed -

General

- Read a lot (from an early age!)

- Read widely (outside your discipline)

- Read quickly (skim)

- If the author doesn’t write in clear and simple language, move on to another book asap. Life’s too short……Bad writing is a good indicator of a confused mind

For each book

- Mark extensively (with a pencil) – with question-marks, ticks, underlines, comments and expletives

- Read the reviews (surf)

- Identify questions from these to ensure you’re reading critically

- Write brief notes to remind you of the main themes and arguments

- Identify the main schools of thought about the subject

- Check the bibliography/index at the end – to see what obvious names are missing

And what did I discover when I applied the last test to “How the French Think”?? That it doesn’t have a bibliography or “further reading” list and that Kedward is not even in the index!! Bad blood somewhere???

Other books on French thinking

Melancholy Politics – loss, mourning and memory in late modern France ; Jean Philippe Mathy (2011)
The End of the French Exception?: Decline and Revival of the 'French Model'; edited by T. Chafer, E. Godin (2009)

After the Deluge – new perspectives on the intellectual and cultural history of post-war France ed J Bourg (2004)

The Anthropological turn in French Thought – the 1970s to the present – an academic thesis  Lignes – thesis on a cultural mag; Perry Anderson’s studies are always good for an analysis of journals – here’s an entire thesis devoted to one French mag!!