If everyone has rights, no one has them

This is the paradox which I am increasingly forced to consider. I started well – protesting at school against the massacre and exploitation of African workers in what was then a British colony; and campaigning against poor housing conditions. These were the late 1950s and 60s – when Penguin books were publishing their great series on “What’s Wrong with Britain?” lambasting British institutions as not fit for purpose.

But I then got stuck on what would, these days, be called class issues and was, for example, no great enthusiast for the campaign against “the glass ceiling” - which I saw as an issue for already privileged women…. 

Slowly, however, a hitherto “deferential” society was changing and asserting itself. The traditional authority of bodies such as the church, state, monarch and elites was challenged – not least with the weapons of ridicule and satire. And, oddly, one of the greatest challengers to that traditional respect and authority in the 1980s was no less a figure than the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who launched an astonishing and sustained attack not only on the trade unions but the legal and academic establishments…..Everything needed to change…to be open to scrutiny – with the Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation being enacted in the year 2000

What few of us saw at the time was the effects of this new critical spirit on social cohesion. 

A new little industry has become that of plotting public trust in various profession and institutions. The results are worrying - 

Since the mid-1960s, public trust in government and political institutions has been decreasing in all of the advanced industrialized democracies. Although the pattern and the pace of the decrease are dissimilar across countries, the downward trend is ubiquitous. Except for the Netherlands, which actually shows increased trust in the government from the 1970s until the mid-1990s, all of the other advanced industrialized democracies recorded a decline in the level of trust their respective governments have enjoyed. Austrians pointed to the collapse of collectivist consensus as the main culprit of declining trust in government. Canadians blamed the continuing tensions on nationalism and separatism in the country. Germans attributed their malaise to the strains of unification, while the Japanese condemned the consecutive political scandals and the long economic recession of the 1990s.

Even the Swedes and the Norwegians, generally associated with high degree of trust in politics, became distrustful of their political institutions in the 1990s….

Open and critical inquiry is the mark of a civilized nation…..is it not? Who can possibly gainsay that?

It’s surely only old fuddy-duddies who could argue otherwise? People like David Brooks – whose book “The Road to Character” I looked at not so long ago – just after I had been deeply impressed by another small book called On Thinking Institutionally by Hugh Heclo (2008)

Pages 18-20 of Heclo’s book is a timeline which explains the development of political distrust in the USA   

In the last 60 years our education system has designated institutions as, at best, annoying encumbrances and, at worst, oppressive tools of the past. Students are taught to believe what they like and express themselves as they see fit. 

Even people understood to be conservatives—at least in the way we conceptualize political ideology today—assail institutions. Free market economics places a premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.
 But institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and institutionalize trust. They give our lives purpose and, therefore, the kind of self-satisfaction that only the wholesale rejection of them is supposed to provide. 

How, then, do we protect and promote them? I must confess that, much as I wanted to understand his arguments, I found it difficult to summarise them clearly. He clearly wants to move our focus away from the self and towards a recognition of our debts and obligations to others. To “think institutionally” is to do something much more than provide individuals with incentives to be part of and promote institutions - it rather calls on them to modify their behaviour. Heclo argues that acting institutionally has three components.

-       The first, "profession," involves learning and respecting a body of knowledge and aspiring to a particular level of conduct.

-       The second, "office," is a sense of duty that compels an individual to accomplish considerably more for the institution than a minimal check-list of tasks enumerated within a kind of job description. 

-       Finally, there is "stewardship." Here Heclo is getting at the notion of fiduciary responsibility. The individual essentially takes the decisions of past members on trust, acts in the interests of present and future members, and stands accountable for his actions.

I have some sympathy for this line of argument – against “the quick buck”…. instant gratification….. tomorrow’s headlines…..we need cultures which respect partnership, timescales for investment and the idea of “stewardship” which Robert Greenleaf tried, unsuccessfully, to cultivate…..The quotation, indeed, which graces the first page of my Dispatches to the post-capitalist generation is from Dwight Eisenhower’s last address in 1960 

We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Heclo’s book, I concede, is in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott and tended to attract the attention of clerics and university administrators – some of whom produced this interesting symposium 

The trouble, however, is that “possessive individualism” has such a grip on us all that these arguments no longer seem to have any traction. Although I’ve just noticed that another conservative has just published a book which tries to build on Heclo’s much-neglected book - “A Time to Build” Yuval Levin (2020)

Anti-Corruption – a Great Game no longer

Other societies and their cultures are strange – so we invent stories to help us understand their behavior. Thus the French are argumentative and the Germans methodical…Some people indeed have made careers from explaining local behaviour to visitors eg Geert de Hodstede, Richard Lewis and Frans Trompenaars. Add in some scandal and wrongdoing, and you soon have a full-scale industry – namely that of anti-corruption. This post is my attempt as an outsider to offer an overview of that literature of the past 30 years.….

When, in the late 1990s, I first noticed this development, my judgement was that the “best practice” being offered was very much what the sociologists, rather euphemistically, call “an ideal type” ie a version of reality one rarely finds in practice. This is what I wrote at the time – 

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.

Of course public appointments, for example, should be made on merit – and not on the basis of family, ethnic or religious networks. But civil service appointments and structures in Belgium and Netherlands, to name but two European examples, were – until very recently – influenced by religious and party considerations. 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 recently) the form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public good had been completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and appointments) were, until the end of the 20^th century, made in favour of Protestants.

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. American influence played a powerful part in sustaining this in the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and has allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system. At least for a few years – before Berlusconi scuppered it all  

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 perverted the apparent neutrality and openness of their public administration – the “old boy network” which was still the basis of the senior civil service in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s a century after the first major reform. And the elitist and closed nature of the French ENArque system has, in the new millennium, become the subject of heated debate in that country.

In many countries, local government appointments systems were, until very recently, strongly politicised - and it is clear that national european systems are becoming more politicised. This trend was started by Margaret Thatcher who simply did not trust the senior civil service to do what she needed. She brought in individuals who had proved their worth in the private sector and came into government service for a limited period of time (sometimes part-time and unpaid) to do a specific task which the Minister or Prime Minister judged the civil servants to be incapable of doing.

Her critique of the UK Civil Service was twofold – first that those at the top were so balanced and objective in their advice that they lacked the appetite to help lead and implement the changes she considered British society needed; and second that those further down the ladder lacked the management skills necessary to manage public services. The Labour Government since 1997 inherited a civil service they considered somewhat contaminated by 18 years of such dominant political government – and had more than 200 such political appointees. Such trends are very worrying for the civil service which has lost the influence and constraining force they once had. 

Conclusion; Too much of the commentary of international bodies on transition countries seems oblivious to this history and these realities – and imagines that a mixture of persuasive rhetoric and arm-twisting can lead to relevant, rapid and significant changes. A bit more humility is needed – and more thought about the realistic trajectory of change. To recognize this is not, however, to condone a system of recruitment by connections – “people we know”. Celebration of cultural differences can sometimes be used to legitimize practices which undermine social coherence and organizational effectiveness. And the acid test of a State body is whether the public thinks they are getting good public services delivered in an acceptable way! 

The two decades since then have seen national reputations for integrity challenged – the British judicial system, for example, took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” Ed by D Whyte appeared – followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).  

A later post will pursue this post-modernist disenchantment with the western institutions of which we used to be so proud.

For the moment, it's the situation in the new member states I want to focus on. Ralf Dahrendorf was probably the first to suggest (in 1990) that it would take the newly independent states of central and eastern Europe at least two generations to develop full Rule of Law and a properly functioning civil society. I vividly remember in the mid-1990s the EU’s first Ambassador to Romania (Karen Fogg) giving every visiting consultant such as me a copy of a review of Robert Putnam’s “Making Democracy Work” which contrasted northern and southern Italy and suggested that the latter’s emphasis on family connections put it several centuries behind the north (This little article in the current copy of NLR would suggest that was an overoptimistic interpretation of the North!). This is the same Robert Putnam who coined the concept of “social capital” which was taken up with great enthusiasm for a decade or so by the World Bank and academics but is critically assessed here. Although Robert Putnam gets the credit for making the idea of “social capital” or “trust” a central one in the mid 1990s, it was Francis Fukuyama who, for me, wrote the most interesting book on the subject – namely "Trust and the creation of prosperity” (1995)

Putnam’s book was based on an earlier work by an older American political scientist – Edward Banfield – who had, with his Italian wife, spent two years in the mid 1950s in a small Italian village in the south and subsequently produced a famous book “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society” (1958) which fixed the peculiarities of Italian society in the popular mind – until the Godfather films came along. “The never-ending debate about the moral basis of a backward society” is an excellent 2009 article by Emiliane Ferragina which explored the influence of the books. 

The first wave of enthusiasm, in global bodies and academia alike, for anti-corruption (or “good governance” as it was more diplomatically called) strategies ended in the new millennium – when a note of realism became evident. It was at that stage that I realized that some of the best analyses were coming from the anthropologists

Further Reading

Shifting obsessions – 3 essays on the politics of anti-corruption Ivan Krastev (2004) Bulgarian political scientist exposes the hypocrisy behind the rhetoric

Syndromes of corruption – wealth,power and democracy Michael Johnson (2005) An American political scientist who has been involved with the Transparency International work does good comparative work here

Corruption – anthropological perspectives edited by D Haller and C Shore (2005) quite excellent collection of case studies

Confronting Corruption, building accountability – lessons from the world of international development advising L Dumas, J Wedel and G Callman (2010)

Unaccountable – how anti-corruption watchdogs and lobbyists sabotaged america’s finance, freedom and security ; J Wedel (2016) another anthropologist

Making Sense of Corruption; Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions – this time by a Scandinavian political scientist

comment from Patrick Cockburn on the corruption of the British political class

Rule of Law?

If the relevance of research in ….political science is understood as how it may improve human well-being and/or political legitimacy, research has to a large extent been focusing on the least important part of the political system, namely, how ‘access to power’ is organized (i.e. electoral and representative democracy and processes of democratization).

This focus on elections, democratization processes and party systems ignores what we consider to be the more important part of the state machinery for increasing human well-being, namely, how power is exercised or, in other words, the quality of how the state manages to govern society

(Bo Rothstein 2011).

In the autumn of 1990, I made a fateful trip across the North Sea to take up a short-term assignment in Copenhagen with the World Health Organisation to help its Head of Public Health map out strategic options for what were then regarded as “the newly independent states” of central and eastern Europe. The difficulties these countries faced in their “transition” to a “better” state were soon reflected in the literature of “transitology”, “democratization” and of “capacity development”.

One of the many fields into which my new line of work took me was that of “corruption” – which the academics made typically complex by designating it, variously, “particularism”, clientilism or “patrimonialism”. Bo Rothstein is one of the best analysts in the field and explains in the linked article that the very word wasn’t acceptable until the early 1990s – after which it became essentially a stick with which to beat nations judged to be inferior.

The European Union and Commission bear a particular responsibility for first pushing privatization on the countries seeking membership of the Union; and then corrupting their new institutions with tens of billions of European Regional Funding.

This may initially have had the elites licking their lips – but the scale of the bureaucracy required to access the goodies and the subsequent monitoring and fraud investigations has now made this a much less attractive proposition. The use of these funds were recently analysed in painstaking detail in "Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. borders" by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2019)

Of course, “it takes two to tango” – and I’m not disputing the need for effective anti-corruption strategies - but there is too much rhetoric and lip-service evident in the way this work is carried out. The sources of the wealth which seduces and corrupts are Western – those who are presented with the opportunities are Bulgarian, Czechs, Greeks, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Slovaks. 

And the corruption is not just systemic but moral and, thanks to the European Union, has seeped into the very bloodstream of society. The average monthly pension and wage in Bulgaria and Romania is just over 300 euros but their judges, generals and MEPs earn 10,000 euros with a cascading effect on senior salaries.

Is it any wonder that the result is totally alienated societies???

The Fall - and Rise - of Positive Public Admin

The last post flagged up what seems to have been a change in tone recently in the vast literature which has inundated us since the early 90s on public management reform. 

But first a little potted history. A half-century ago, nothing seemed more boring than my chosen field of UK public administration. It was descriptive and drew mainly on public law – with a smattering of politics. But, in the late 1960s, local government and the civil service suddenly became subjects of immense interest. Critiqued for being behind the times and needing “modernisation”, they were investigated by prestigious Royal Commissions which, after several years of open inquiry, issued detailed reports declaring in ringing tones that they were not fit for purpose and needed radical change….

With the world abuzz with talk of people power, I was elected as a municipal councillor, in 1968, in a shipbuilding town and was soon active in community politics – using my new position to help stir local activists against local officialdom. The spirit of such campaigns is nicely captured in Norman Dennis’ People and Planning – the sociology of housing in Sunderland (1970)

 

The Civil Service was a difficult nut to crack and the changes (which started on Ted Heath’s arrival in power in 1970) proved to be a generational process – starting with the introduction of managerial practices from the private sector and, later, more dramatic restructuring.

The reorganisation of local government, when it eventually came in 1975, was quite dramatic - with the number of councils in both England and Scotland being literally decimated.  

 

Thatcherism produced in the 1980s not only privatisation but dramatic changes in the structure of British government which, argued leading academics, was being “hollowed out”. Indeed, by 1992, the talk – on both sides of the Atlantic – was of the very reinvention of government.

This was the stage when a new academic industry of reform got underway - it was Chris Hood who first gave the new wave its designation (in 1991) of New Public Management but it was a book called Reinventing Government (1992) by a town manager and consultant (Ted Gaebler and David Osbourne) which opened the academic floodgates and led to Vice-President Gore’s Commission on Reinvention….A table in the Hood article caught the mood perfectly -

New Public Management (NPM)

No.	Doctrine	Meaning	Typical Justification
1	Hands-on professional management of Public Organisations	Visible management at the top; free to manage	Accountability requires clear assignment of responsibility
2.	Explicit standards and measures of performance	Goals and targets defined and measured as indicators of success	Accountability means clearly stated aims
3.	Greater emphasis on output controls	Resource allocation and rewards linked to performance	Need to stress results rather than procedures
4.	Shift to disaggregation of units	Unbundle public sector into units organised by products with devolved budgets	Make units manageable; split provision and production; use contracts
5.	Greater competition	Move to term contracts and tendering procedures	Rivalry as the key to lower costs and better standards
6	Stress on private sector styles of management practice	Move away from military- style ethic to more flexible hiring, pay rules, etc	Need to apply "proven" private sector management tools
7.	Stress on greater discipline and parsimony	Cut direct costs; raise labour discipline	Need to check resource demands; do more with less

 

For the next two decades, books and articles rolled from the academic world in increasing numbers about the new fad of “competitive managerialism” – although often with a note of caution…

 The Fourth Revolution – the global race to reinvent the state by J Micklewait and A Wooldridge (2014) - which I took to task a couple of years ago - seems, ironically, to have been the high-point of that wave……

Since then, the tone has changed – thanks largely, it seems, to Mark Moore the emphasis has turned to examples of what successful public managers and institutions are achieving. The Successful Public Governance website based in Utrecht is an excellent example….

 

I’ve listed below (in chronological order) the other books which have come to my attention recently and which also reflect the new tone

Understanding policy success – rethinking public policy; Alan McConnell (2010)

Agents of Change – strategy and tactics for social innovation ; S Cels, Jorrit de Jong and F Nauta   (2012)

Recognising Public Value Mark Moore (2013)

Dealing with Dysfunction – problem solving in the public sector; Jarrit de Jong (2014)

How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers don’t go Crazy ; Michael Barber (2015). A clearly written book about the approach taken by Tony Blair’s favourite consultant

The Barber Report (HMSO 2017) which he then summarised for a new government

Dismembered – the ideological attack on the state; Polly Toynbee and D Walker (2017) a strong analysis of austerity by two british journalists

“The 21^{HYPERLINK "http://zegervanderwal.com/zeger/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/The-21st-Century-Public-Manager-Chapter-1.pdf"st}HYPERLINK "http://zegervanderwal.com/zeger/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/The-21st-Century-Public-Manager-Chapter-1.pdf" century public manager – challenges, people and strategies”; Z van der Wal (2017) An interesting-looking book written by a Dutch academic and consultant who has spent the past  7 years as a Prof at the University of Singapore

Reclaiming Public Services – how cities and citizens are turning back privatisation; TNI (2017)

Radical HelpHYPERLINK "https://ukaji.org/2019/01/30/book-review-radical-help-how-we-can-remake-the-relationships-between-us-and-revolutionise-the-welfare-state-by-hilary-cottam-2018/" – how we can remake the relationships between us and Revolutionise the Welfare State; Hilary Cottam (2018) an inspiring example of experimental work

Great Policy Successes 2019

Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand (anu.edu.au); ed J Luentjens, M Mintrom and P n’Hart (2019)

Public Value Management, governance and reform in Britain ; ed J Connolly (2021) Pity about the extensive academic references and exclusive focus on UK – no references to Netherlands eg de Jong

Guardians of Public Value – how public organization become and remain institutions (2021) ed A Boi, L Harty and P t’Hart

Good techniques, leaders or institutions?

Books about getting public services to run well for the average person are little fun to read – which is a crying shame since the issue is of fundamental importance to almost all citizens.

Arguably, it was Gerald Caiden who first made administrative reform sexy – in the late 1960s

Because it’s an issue which has been central to my work, as academic, politician and then as consultant, for the past 50 years, I’ve had to wade through thousands of books and article on the subject since then – most of them academic. A few only have given real pleasure – those written by people such as Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt and B Guy Peters – exposing the nonsenses of the fashion for New Public Management (NPM) which started around 1990.

Most of the writing is spoiled by the appalling academic tic of backing up every statement, in almost every line, with named references (in brackets) linked to long bibliographic lists. And academics have to demonstrate their cleverness – so the articles and books consist of long descriptions of innovations – with results difficult to measure but almost certainly with little real impact…  

 

You might think that the net result of this torrent of negative academic coverage would have discouraged innovators in government – but, hey, there are reputations and careers to be made out of the change process. And staff turnover is such that the disappointing results which eventually come in can be blamed on others

 

Managers first started to make an appearance in government in the 1970s – they were the magicians supposed to turn dross into gold. I confess that I was an early enthusiast for “corporate management” which is indeed still alive and well in the continued reference to managerial silos which are to be slain…..John Stewart of the INLOGOV institute of the University of Birmingham was the guru who inspired a whole generation of local senior officials to think more creatively about this and indeed led me, in the mid 1970s, to help set up in Europe’s largest Region two new types of structure – area committees and scrutiny groups of middle-level officials and politicians  

But it was the Department of Government at Harvard University under the leadership of Mark Moore which began to show what it was possible to do at a more local level…His “Creating Public Value” (1995) celebrated the energy and creativity which good public managers brought to state bodies at both the national and local levels. By then, however, the formulaic NPM had got its grip and Moore, despite teaming up with Stewart and producing a second book, remained a lone voice – with his message that people (rather than techniques) made the difference. 

In recent years Ive noticed a little ripple of interesting titles about more creative ways of working – such as Frederic Laloux’s “Reinventing Organisations” (2014),  Jorrit de Jong’s (of the Kafka Brigade fame) “Dealing with Dysfunction” (2014), Hilary Cottam’s “Radical Help” (2018)  culminating in Strategies for Governing (2019) by Alasdair Roberts 

But it’s only in recent weeks that I’ve realised that Mark Moore’s influence has inspired a few Europeans (particularly from the Netherlands) who have been producing a series of books on good practice in public management – of both the “heroes” and “institutions” (of integrity) sort as they are called in the recent Guardians of Public Value – how public organization become and remain institutions (2021) ed A Boi, L Harty and P t’Hart This seems to take inspiration also from Hugh Heclo whose “On Thinking Institutionally” I wrote about some years ago 

At this stage I would normally conclude with a “resource” of relevant titles – but I realise that this can look a bit off-putting…..so those interested can ask me for the list (or I’ll add it later)

 

James Burnham has the last laugh

One of the central issues bothering the elite a century ago was that of how “the masses” might be “controlled” in the “new age of democracy”….Writers such as Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion 1922) and Ortego y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses 1930) conjured up frightening narratives about the dangers of the great unwashed masses. Lippmann’s full book can be read here…

The scintillating prose of Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was a favourite of mine at University – with his theory of the “circulation of the elites” reassuring the elites of the post-war period that all would be well…. 

Of course the rebellious 60s got them worried – but a combination of the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 report on The Crisis of Democracy and, as Perry Anderson has recently and very usefully reminded us, the European Commission soon saw the plebs off...... 

But the populism evident since the start of the new millennium has sparked new anxieties about the masses amongst the liberal elites – and indeed raised the question anew as to whether capitalism is consistent with democracy…

One guy whose words are worth reading on that question is SM Wolin – whose book on the history of political thought - Politics and Vision - held me spellbound in the 1960s. In his 90s he produced this great critique of the US system – Democracy Inc – managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (2008). And this is an interesting recent article, Why Elites always Rule which reminds the new generation of the significance of Pareto’s work….. 

In 1941 James Burnham produced his magisterial “The Managerial Revolution” against which George Orwell wrote in 1946 a devastating essay Second thoughts on James Burnham. Orwell clearly had some agreement with Burnham about the oligarchic direction in which political forces were pushing society and faulted Burnham more for his fatalistic assessment of the probability of Nazi success.

Not so well known was Burnham’s next book The Machiavellians – defenders of freedom (1943)  which examined the work of such theorists as Mosca, Pareto and Sorel

And also forgotten is a book he produced in 1964 - by which time he had turned from the fiery radical and "friend" of Trotsky to a full-blown liberal - Suicide of the West 

That sort of title has become a fairly common theme this past decade or so. In these myopic times, a bit of respect for long-dead writers is overdue!  

A New Class War??

I’ve been looking for some time for a book which does justice to our fall from innocence in the 1970s. I start from JK Galbraith’s concept of “countervailing power” which sustained the post-war period in western development. This was the theory that the corporate, union and social power held each other, for a “glorious 30 years”, in a certain balance until 1980 – with results good for everyone.

That balance was destroyed by something we too easily try to explain away by the use of the meaningless phrase “neoliberalism”. I’m familiar with the various efforts a range of social scientists have made to put meat on that particular bone – such as Philip Mirowski, Vivian Schmidt and, more recently, Quinn Slobodian. But, for my money “Licence to be Bad; how economics corrupted us” by Jonathan Aldred (2019) offers the most readable explanation of how we have all succumbed in the past 40 years to a new highly individualistic and greedy virus…..

The question which has been gnawing at me since the start of the new millennium is what can be done to put a new system of countervailing power in place…..????

Until now, few books dared raise or pursue that question, But Michael Lind’s The New Class War – saving democracy from the new managerial elite (2020) offers to do precisely that……

It starts powerfully – 

Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure.

before reminding us that -

In the 19^th and early twentieth centuries, five major schools of thought debated the future of industrial society: liberalism, producerism, socialism, corporatism, and pluralism (p39) 

……Producerism is the belief that the economy should be structured by the state to maximize the numbers of selfemployed family farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers in society. The moral ideal of this school is the selfsufficient citizen of a republic with a small-producer majority whose economic independence means that they cannot be intimidated or blackmailed by wealthy elites. In the form of Jeffersonian agrarianism, producerism has a rich history in the United States. The rise of mass production in the economy, and the shift from a majority made up of farm owners and farm workers to urban wage earners, rendered the producerist ideal irrelevant in the modern industrialized West. While small-producerism still has appeal to romantics on both the left and the right, it is and will remain anachronistic, and having criticized it elsewhere, I will not discuss it in this book.4

….. A fourth philosophy, opposed to free market liberalism and state socialism alike, envisioned a harmonious society of state-supervised but largely self-governing “corporations,” by which was meant entire economic sectors, not individual firms, rather like medieval guilds.6 This tradition influenced Catholic social thought, as expressed in the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931). For the French sociologist Émile Durkheim and others in the secular French republican solidarist tradition, the organization of labor and business could be an antidote to “anomie,” a phrase Durkheim devised to describe the isolation and disorientation of many individuals in urban industrial societies.7 The same term, “corporatism,” is often used for both democratic and dictatorial versions of this political tradition

….. The view of society as a community of self-organized and self-governing communities, under the supervision of a democratic government, is best described as “pluralism,” the term used by the English pluralists of the early twentieth century, like Neville Figgis, F. W. Maitland, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski, and by their late-twentieth century heirs, including Paul Hirst and David Marquand. 

And then goes on to argue that – 

Only a new democratic pluralism that compels managerial elites to share power with the multiracial, religiously pluralistic working class in the economy, politics, and the culture can end the cycle of oscillation between oppressive technocracy and destructive populism.