Tools of manipulation

I’ve often in the past 25 years had to put myself in the shoes of Ministers and senior civil servants to help them develop “road maps” for their reforms….Indeed I would get them to brainstorm about why they thought people behaved the way they did whether as officials, citizens, politicians or businesspeople – and what that might suggest about ways to achieve the desired change.

After all, the projects I’ve led only exist because someone has decided the present state of affairs is no longer acceptable…..so what aspects of whose behaviour are we talking about? And what is it that is most likely to make target groups change their behaviour?

·         Simple instructions?

·         Threats? Incentives?

·         Explanations and understanding?

·         Moral exhortation?

 One result was this table which focuses on the assumptions we make about motives - and then explores the various mechanisms which are available to those trying to change beliefs and behaviour 

The “behavioural turn” - Tools in the change process

Focus of attention	Example of tool	Relevant Tool
1. Understanding	Training Campaigns Functional review	Rational persuasion images Factual analysis
2. Commitment	Leadership Communications Training	Legitimisation; inspiration   Pride
3. Maximising Personal Benefit	Pay increase and bonus Promotion (including political office) Good publicity Winning an award	Monetary calculation ambition Reputation; Psychological Status
4. Minimising Personal Cost	Named as poor performer Demotion Report cards	Psychological (Shame) Monetary Pride
5. Obligation	Law Action plan Family ties	Courts Managerial authority Social pressure
6. Peer influence	Bribery Quality circles	Pressure Support
7. Social influence	Opinion surveys	Feedback from public about service quality

 The explosion of interest in behaviour; In the last decade, the question of changing (other) people’s behaviour has become a central one for government, business and NGOs. Professors Thaler and Cass may have “nudged” interest with their 2008 Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness but it was in fact the UK Cabinet Office which arguably set the ball rolling four years earlier with its Personal Responsibility and changing behaviour – the state of knowledge and its implications for public policy (2004) - an example which was followed with Changing Behaviour – a public policy perspective (Australian Government 2007). 

The Nudge book certainly inspired the Cameron government some 7 years later to set up a Nudge Unit in the Cabinet but the British government had been exploring this issue in its The Use of sanctions and rewards in the public sector (NAO 2008) accompanied by a literature review drafted by Deloitte. Even the House of Lords was not to be outdone – with the voluminous evidence of its Behaviour Change in 2011. And the voluntary sector put down an early marker with its Common Case – the case for working with our cultural values (2010)– which showed more familiarity with the marketing approach than did the economistic and rationalistic assumptions which were embedded in the early British attempts. So the World Bank was rather lagging behind when its Annual Development Report got round to dealing with the issue - in its Mind, Society and Behaviour (2015)

Government normally set up for Failure

Government systems are best known for their failures – and we certainly make the most of it when they happen, whether we are journalists, academics or mere citizens and voters. Books with titles such as “Great Planning Disasters” (1980) or “The Blunders of our Governments” (2013) line our shelves; and reports, post-mortems and articles on specific instances of breakdown and failure are legion. For some reason, the same interest isn’t shown in government success. One reviewer of the second book explained why – 

In our anti-politics culture it may be thought that governments never do anything else but blunder. That is not actually true: a serious academic work could be written examining the things governments got right and lessons learnt there from—but who would buy a book entitled ”The Successes of Our Governments”? Change the title to The Blunders of Our Governments and the readers are there 

There was a period – in the 1970s – when some interest was shown in positive government outcomes. I remember, in particular, “Change, Choice and Conflict in Social Policy” by Hall, Land, Parker and Webb (1975) with 6 case studies including the struggle for Clean Air, establishment of the Open University and of Health Centres. The authors suggested 3 important perquisites for such success which I have never forgotten - legitimacy, feasibility and support viz that policies require

·         clear and indisputable claims to authority ,

·         a good chance of achieving a successful outcome

·         indications of extensive support 

But the endeavours of government fell out of favour in the 1980s – at least in anglo-saxon territories – with austerity programmes caused by the bailing out of the banks in 2008 being a final challenge for even successful governments.  

It’s only the perseverance of people like Mark Moore and Paul t’Hart which has brought us positive stories of government efforts – with Alan McConnell’s Understanding Policy Success (2010) being an early and important milestone in what is now a burgeoning field 

Useful Further Reading

Reports and Books

Personal Responsibility and changing behaviour – the state of knowledge and its implications for public policy (UK Cabinet Office 2004

Changing Behaviour – a public policy perspective (Australian Government 2007)

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness; Thaler and Cass (2008).

The Use of sanctions and rewards in the public sector (NAO 2008) accompanied by a literature review drafted by Deloitte

Common Case – the case for working with our cultural values (2010)

Behaviour Change (House of Lords (2011)

Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public in global poverty (2011)

Nudge, nudge, think, think;by Peter John, Smith and Gerry Stoker (2011)

A Practitioner’s Guide to Nudging; Rotman 2013

Mind, Society and Behaviour (World Development Report; World Bank 2015

Sanctions, Rewards and Learning (IDEA 2016)

Governance and the Law (World Development Report; World Bank 2017)

Influencing Behaviours and Practices to tackle poverty and injustice (Oxfam 2018)

Articles

“Finding the appropriate policy tools” (RG Young 2008)

Wicked Problems and clumsy solutions – the role of leadership; Keith Grint (2008)

 “Nudge, nudge, think, think”; article by John, Smith and Stoker (2009)

The Rational Paradox of Nudge in a world of bounded rationality; Martin Lodge and Kai Wegrich (2016). A quite excellent critique

The Obliteration of Memories

Googling is so easy – “everything we need is there”. Except it’s simply not true. Google has a gigantic hole which no-one talks about – knowledge of those who acted as role models in the period before Google existed (BG – before google).

I’ve been trying to check my memory of events in the late 1960s and 1970s when I was involved in initiatives which swept across Scotland and had influences further afield. But as far as Google is concerned, these events never took place. 

I google the names of people on whose words I used to hang – like John Mackintosh, who had been an academic tutor of mine and then Professor and Labour MP but found only a couple of references (including a huge list of the articles in his archives). However, thanks to the archives site, I was able to access his The Devolution of Power : local democracy, regionalism and nationalism which came out in 1968.

Geoff Shaw had been an inspiring Glasgow community minister and then, all-too briefly, political leader of Glasgow City and the first Convener of the new Strathclyde Regional Council from 1974-78. A book had been written about him (“Geoff”) and his funeral (at Glasgow Cathedral) attended by the nation’s dignitaries drew overflow crowds. But he gets only a couple of google references – including a short Wikipedia entry.  

And Dick Stewart, the ex-miner and leader of Lanark County Council and of Strathclyde’s Labour Group is virtually impossible to find - despite his funeral actually being attended by a Conservative Cabinet Minister. 

It’s only thanks to an ex-official’s mountain blogs that we have this record of the Region’s achievements – although one of my other senior colleagues was persuaded by one of the Scottish national newspapers to pen this paean on the Region’s demise in 1996. 

So – to offset the Google hegemony – I offer my record of important material about the Scottish condition between the 1960s and 1980s which I know about -

·       Scottish Government Yearbooks !976-1992 A superb website which gives access the archives of every yearbook in this period. Probably the only source which gives a sense of what it was like to be alive during these years – although subject to the usual vagaries and prejudices of the academics (generally) who supplied the material. A couple of my pieces can be found – one from 1983 on the relationships between the Scottish Regions and the Districts.- and a more speculative piece from 1984 called Scottish local government; what future? 

·         Review of Local Governance (COSLA 2018) A useful overview – starting in 1968 - of what various efforts of reorganisation have achieved

Re  generation and Poverty in Scotland – evidence and policy review; Douglas Robertson (Rowntree Trust 2014) This is an important academic study of how governments from 1968 to the Coalition government dealt with the social and economic aspects of regeneration. A shorter version is available here

·       The making of an empowering profession (Community Learning and Development Council 2002) tells the fascinating story of how Scotland rediscovered its democratic traditions in the last few decades of the 20th century 

·       Case study in Organisational Learning and Political Amnesia (1995) tells the neglected story of how Strathclyde Region came to establish a unique social strategy which influenced the Scottish government - updated this year by  Modernity’s Last Gasp - SRC’’s theory of change

·       Criticism and public rationality – professional rigidity and the search for caring government; Harry Smart (1991) is a rare and riveting account of tensions between education and social work as a political system tried to introduce changes which challenged professional traditions. 

·         Social Strategy for the Eighties (Strathclyde Regional Council 1982) This is the “little Red Book” which was widely distributed within the Region and whose development is described in later posts. I’m seeing it for the first time in 30 years thanks to the valiant efforts of Keith Yates who worked with me on the draft for several months in 1981/82 

·       The Search for Democracy – a guide to and polemic about local government in Scotland (1977); a little book I produced for students and community activists to help demystify a new system of local government 

·       What Sort of Overgovernment?  Chapter in “Red Paper on Scotland” ed G Brown (1975) My earliest published piece about the challenge of democracy – in a famous book edited by someone who was UK Prime Minister 2007-2010.

The Managerial Creed

Anything which smacks of the managerial is suspect these days – but have we really pinned down what it is we find so objectionable – apart from the proliferation of the breed and their counter-productivity? And, given the way Artificial Intelligence and robots threaten to make managers redundant, should we not just treat what James Burnham called (in 1941) the “managerial revolution” as an embarrassing hiccup?  

It’s difficult for younger people to realise there was once a time when managers hardly existed. I well remember when the concept of management first became fashionable in the UK – in the early 1970s, when professionals ruled the roost as accountants, engineers, educationalists, lawyers or medics. I have to confess to being part of the first generation which became enthusiasts for the promise of management. 

It was actually a priest in South America who most effectively set the cat amongst the pigeons of UK professionalism with his anarchistic critiques of the grip which educational and medical castes had on our minds - namely Ivan Illich of Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1974) fame. I used to tour the various professional associations in Scotland in those years – using both the Illich critique and the insights I had gained as a Chair of one of the new Social Work Committees to challenge the conventional wisdoms of these professions.

And it was for this reason that, under the influence of John Stewart of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), I became an early convert to the idea of corporate planning and management which was then fashionable - although its time soon passed, with complaints about “silo management” being, if anything stronger  in recent years (see Gillian Tett’s 2015 book below). Getting agreement about priorities is, of course, the easy part – making those priorities stick when it comes to implementation is the rather more difficult part– particularly for political organisations.

I’ve had a curious relationship with management over the past half century – the first half of my adult life, from age 25, was spent as a reforming politician where the Directors of professional services were amongst my closest colleagues (my paid job in academia was a bit of a sideline). That changed in the second half of my life - when I entered the project management world of consultancy where I was generally Team Leader of small groups of professionals trying to develop the capacity of organisations in ex-communist countries. That was, quite frankly, very much a question of the blind leading the blind since we “westerners” were only subject specialists (usually of only one country’s system) and had little experience of change management – let alone understanding of the context in which we were working. So I made a point of doing my homework on what the literature of “change management” (which had started in the mid 1980s and was a decade later the most popular field) had to say. Out of historical interest, I’ve reproduced the Annotated Bibliography for change agents I did in those days. 

The blog has several times suggested that there are religious overtones to economics and management – culminating with this post last year which listed the relevant books, including The Faith of the Managers by Stephen Pattison (1998) 

By seeing much of modern management as in some ways a profoundly religious and ethical activity that looks different to those who are managed rather than managing, I hope to place it in a new light. Management is deified by some and demonized by others. Subjecting it to a partial critique that emphasizes religious and ethical features should help both protagonists and detractors to see management for what it is - a human activity with strengths, weaknesses, possibilities and pitfalls.

Management is an important and necessary function in the modern world. No organization that is in any sense organized can do without some kind of management function, and it is unhelpful and unrealistic to hope that management will go away or can be dispensed with.

Rather, management needs to be improved and made more effective.

This might be expedited in part by helping both managers and the managed to become more self-consciously aware and articulate about the nature of this activity and the assumptions upon which it rests.

Readers will be familiar with my view that we need shorter books – authors really do need to compress their thoughts more clearly and in a shorter format. There’s far too much padding. That’s why I favour those articles which try to give an overview of the literature on a subject. I see that I noticed this in what I think was the last post on managerialism  almost three years ago. The subject is, correctly in my view, now beginning to attract more attention. 

For the moment I aim to skim the books I’ve listed below – and then perhaps come back to you with my thoughts. I should emphasise that these are not management textbooks – or the pop-management stuff you buy in airports. They are rather the critical reflections on that body of crap.

The two best articles in the immediate list below are the Doran one and the last one 

Key Articles

NPM – the dark side of managerial enlightenment; Thomas Diefenbach (2000) Focused on the issues raised by the market-based new public management.

Managerialism – an ideology and its evolution; Christine Doran (2016) A very clear and useful overview of the literature

Managerialism and the continuing project of state reform Janet Newman and John Clarke (2016) A rather more academic treatment of aspects of public sector reform

A Zizekian Ideological critique of managerialism Keith Abbott (2018) A typically compressed and far too clever academic argument of a sort which gives academia a bad name

The Political Economy of Managerialism; Eagelton_Pearce and Kanfo (2020) which explores why this discipline seems to have ignored this issue

The Managerialist Credo; Glover, McGowan and Tracey (2021) A quite excellent overview of the topic

Books

Managerialism – the emergence of a new ideology by Willard Enteman (1993) rather pedantic treatment by a US academic focusing more on socialism, capitalism and democracy than on managerialism

Managing Britannia – culture and management in modern Britain; Robert Protherough and John Pick (2003) 

Against Management – organisation in the age of managerialism; Martin Parker (2004) I didn’t find this book all that interesting when I first skimmed it quite a few years ago – but that probably says more about my impatience with a lot of sociologists  

The Making of Modern Management – British management in historical perspective Wilson and Thomson (2006) Very thorough treatment by 2 British economic historians    

The Age of Heretics – a history of the radical thinkers who reinvented corporate management Art Kleiner (2008) a US journalist examines the past half century for key moments in a racey read.

Management and the Dominance of Managers – an inquiry into why and how managers rule our organisations; Thomas Diefenbach (2009) suggests that the question of how managers have gained their excessive power has not been sufficiently explored…..This article of his is in “academese” but you can still sense his concerns

Rethinking Management – radical insights from the complexity sciences; Chris Mowles (2011)

A delightful and very thoughtful book from an experienced consultant trying to rethink his profession from first principles….

Confronting Managerialism - How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender (2011) Locke is an American Prof who has been very critical of managerialism

Managerialism – a critique of an ideology   Thomas Klikauer (2013) written by a German who started as an engineer and trade unionist and now teaches Australian MBA students, this is a superb and comprehensive attack on the pretensions of manageriaism.l

The Silo Effect – the peril of expertise Gillian Tett (2015) Tett is a financial journalist and anthropologist and this is a very practical attack on groupthink

Strategic management and organisational dynamics Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles (2016) a very thorough and critical assessment which contrasts “realist” and “postmodern” approaches and suggests a better, more reflective way

The Triumph of Managerialism? New Technologies of Government and their implications for value edited by Anna Yeatman, Bogdan Costea (2018) Have only google excerpts

Anarchism, organisation and management Martin Parker (2020) This is an update to his 2004 book – he’s also published an interesting dictionary of alternative organisations

an ode to civilisation

 Sometimes a picture says it better

courtesy of https://scheerpost.com/

And will someone official deny this statement that senior US people are trying to extend the war

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/03/25/more-evidence-that-the-us-is-trying-to-prolong-this-war/

And thank God for Macron! 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/27/us-denies-it-is-seeking-regime-change-in-russia-after-biden-comments-putin

“Credentialism” as the dubious legacy of meritocracy

The very first political principle I found myself warming to as a teenager was that of “equality of opportunity” and that came from my reading of The Conservative Enemy – a programme for radical reform in the Sixties (1962) by Anthony Crosland author of the definitive revisionist “The Future of Socialism” (1956) which was one of the strands which had made a young socialist of me.

Although I read with fascination the early issues of New Left Review which started to appear in 1960, I was very much a middle-class revisionist. My family may have lived in a large mansion in the West End of a class-ridden Scottish shipbuilding town but we were penniless - the house was owned by the Church of Scotland since my Dad was a Reverend and earned what was called a “stipend” (just under 2,000 pounds a year). Unusually, he also became a councillor (then Bailie) as a member of the “Moderate (or Progressive)” party which acted as a balance between the town’s right-wing Liberal party (composed of lawyers, accountants and shopkeepers representing the town’s sugar and shipbuilding interests) and the Labour party representing the town’s workers.  

It was this awareness of straddling different worlds which very much made me who I am – and finds expression in the theory I’ve been advancing recently that people who change worlds (whether geographical or intellectual) are more creative. 

But, as always, I’ve gone off at a tangent - so “revenons aux moutons”. It was Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Meritocracy” which took me back to the Sixties – since his starting point is Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) which was actually a satire on an idea which, forty years later, had become a toxic aspiration.

Sandel’s target is “credentialism” – 

the way that academic qualifications are now required for all top jobs

-       the resentment and humiliation this has created in those without educational qualifications

-       the hubris exuded by the successful and

-       the damage to democracy created by the amoral technocratic elite which now controls our lives

Reading it brought the sudden, awful thought that 60 years of government interventions do not seem to have brought any great change to UK social conditions –

·       Most of the current UK Cabinet are public schoolboys

·       Most of the higher civil service are educated at private schools which charge huge fees

·       Most of the sociological research points to the intensification of social privilege

Which raises the even worse possibility that the fatalists and postmodernists are correct in their argument that social interventions are to no avail. One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted a book (”The Rhetoric of Reaction”) to examining three arguments conservative writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers: 

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment. 

Have a look at any argument against a proposed reform - you will find it a variant of these three. 

But let’s return to the development of “equality of opportunity” in the UK – at least as I was slowly beginning to understand it. In 1977 I was given the opportunity to publish this long article Community Development – its administrative and political challenge in a national  professional journal in which I explored the notion of representative democracy 

There is, I think, a relatively simple way in which to test the claims of those who argue that there is little scope for improve­ment in the operation of our democratic process and that any deficiencies art attributable to the faults of individuals rather than to the system. It involves looking at how new policies emerge and asking such questions as –

• how does government hear and act upon the signals from below?

·       how do "problems" get on the political "agenda"?

·       does the political and administrative process influence the type of problem picked up by government or the form in which it is presented?'

 

The assumption of our society, good "liberals" that most of us essentially are, is that the channels relating governors to governed are neutral and that the opportunity to articulate grievances and have these defined (if they are significant enough) as "problems" requiring action from authority is evenly distributed throughout society. This is what needs to be examined critically - the concept of grievance and the process by which government responds to grievances. "Problems" emerge because individuals or groups feel dissatisfied and articulate and organise that dissatisfaction in an influential way which makes it difficult for government to resist.

"Grievance" or "dissatisfaction" is not. however, a simple concept - it arises when a judgement is made that events fall short of what one has reason to expect. Grievance is a function of expectations and performance - both of which are relative and vary from individual to individual - or. more significantly, from group to group. 

I then looked at how grievances were expressed and organised and suggested that this posed the following questions -

 

1 Do all groups in our society have the same expectations about government or (say) the social services?

2 Do all groups share roughly the same level of critical perception of their own achievement?

3 Is the capacity to articulate grievances equally distributed in society?

4 Is the capacity to organise that articula­tion equally distributed?

5 Is the process by which the political system picks up signals a neutral one?

6 is the process by which civil servants define problems and collect information a random one?

7 Does the way our decisions are taken and implemented affect the chance of their subsequent success?

 

Community development grew in the 1960s as, increasingly, negative answers were given to these sorts of questions" and - perhaps more significantly - confidence grew that the situation could be changed.

Damn these software engineers

Why do IT people always assume that "improvements" mean better??? My website host has suddenly brought in a new style which has made my life a misery and the blog an aesthetic disaster.

 - the new software seems unable to allow new lines!! 

 - The hyperlinks which are embedded in my text no longer work. I have to find each url again, copy each one and then insert them one by one into the post 

the text which I was previously able to copy directly into the website in the precise format which I wanted no longer differentiates between large and small

 - italics and bold I have to insert afresh

 - other issues which I can't be bothered to write about 

 I want out! 

 At one fell swoop the software engineers have removed all enjoyment I had in uploading text to the blog!

Update; No reply yet from blogpost people - but I have been able to change the format - by clicking a hidden icon which then gave me an option of "compose view". And I've just successfully posted text with hyperlinks......so we could just be back in business!!

AND INDEED WE ARE. I've just uploaded a new post - successfully. 

We ARE back in business - just as before. For which MANY THANKS to the blogpost people for what has been a great site. I had been looking at other options - but they all posed problems for me.....