The Pragmatic Idealism of Strathclyde Region – part VII

Retracing one’s steps can be both frustrating and dangerous - frustrating when you are looking for something and not quite sure what it is; and dangerous if you discover things about yourself that might better be left concealed. I’m stuck in the 1970s – exploring how a few of us managed to develop a “social inclusion” strategy whose vestiges can still be seen in Scotland almost 50 years later - and not sure whether what I’m exploring are tools of change or changing contexts or changing perceptions (not least my own)

My original idea had been to list some of the texts I’ve found useful in thinking about how to undertake planned change – covering my life both as a political reformer and, from 1990, a neutral consultant. But then some material demanded to be included in the list, such as Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977), which had been important voices as we drafted “Social Strategy for the Eighties”. And so I threw away what was an overly technical list and replaced it with one which tries to identify the books which influenced my generation – which was, of course, a younger one than my colleagues in the Region.

Our focus at the time was thoroughly pragmatic – it was what precise steps we should be taking as a Council to show that the strategy of urban deprivation Strathclyde Region had approved in 1976 was meant to be taken seriously. Our audience was clear – mainly the teachers, policemen, engineers, social workers who formed our 100,000 strong staff. These were the people we had to convince – both that we were deadly serious and with the message the document contains about the need for change. 

Bear in mind that we no longer had a government sympathetic to our endeavours. Margaret Thatcher had started in 1979 what was to be an 11 year reign. But Strathclyde was not one of the overtly leftist councils which aggressively flaunted its opposition to government policies. We played a very different game and were assisted by a sympathetic Scottish Office and Ministers such as George Younger and Malcoln Rifkind

And it was shortly after the launching of the Strategy and combining my academic and political roles that I brought together a diverse collection of officials and councillors of different councils in the West of Scotland, academics and others to explore how we could extend our understanding of what we were dealing with – and how our policies might make more impact. It was a regular monthly forum called “the urban change network” and it was probably the single most effective thing I ever did. I still have the tapes of some of the discussions – one, for example, led by Professor Lewis Gunn on issues of implementation! 

So, for what it is worth (in my case a huge amount) here are the messages my generation had been absorbing up to the point of publishing the Social Strategy in 1982. 

The Open Society and its Enemies- Karl Popper The book which made the biggest impact on me and to which I owe my scepticism….A lot of it (particularly the sections on Plato, Hegel and Marx) went over my head – but its assertion of the importance of subjecting assertions to tests of evidence has stayed with me my entire life…..

The Future of Socialism- CAR Crosland (1956) the key revisionist text for the UK left in the 20th century…

The End of Ideology– Daniel Bell (1960) the author who introduced us to post-industrialism

The Death and Life of American Cities Jane Jacobs (1961)

On Becoming a Person - Carl Rodgers (1961) The figure who most clearly expressed the mood and feelings of my generation….

The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin (1962) I absorbed at the time more the poetic than the political message

Silent Spring– Rachel Carson (1962) The first environmental book!

In Defence of Politics– Bernard Crick (1962) Along with Popper, the book which changed my life!

Capitalism and Freedom- Milton Friedmann (1962) I may not have agreed with it but I had to recognise its power

The Feminine Mystique– Betty Friedan (1963) Interesting that it took almost 15 years for de Beauvoir’s message to find wide expression….

Unsafe at any speed- Ralph Nadar (1965) the first sign of the new consumer power

Modern Capitalism – the changing balance of public and private power– Andrew Shonfield (1966) legitimising the mixed economy

Dilemmas of Social Reform – poverty and community in the US by Peter Marris and Martin Rein (1967) which I treated as the bible

The New Industrial State – JK Galbraith (1967) The only author to get 2 books in the list reflects both the importance of the subjects he dealt with – and the accessible and wryly humorous style of his writing

The Costs of Economic Growth – EJ Mishan 1967. A book so in advance of its age…..

The Active Society– Amitai Etzioni (1968) A book whose importance I was aware of without having the tenacity to read……

Deschooling Society- Ivan Illich (1970) One of several Illich books which made me sceptical of organisational power…

Future Shock– Alvin Toffler (1970) The first of the books which alerted us to the scale of the change underway in our societies.

Beyond the Stable State – Donald Schon (1971) No book made more impact on me than this one whose core arguments I vividly remembering listening to on the family radio as Reith Lectures in 1970…..This when I became seriously interested in organisations…..

Rules for Radicals; Saul Alinsky (1971) the follow-up to Reveille for Radicals which  had been published in 1946 and became THE handbook for generations of activists

The Limits to Growth– Club of Rome (1972)

Small is Beautiful – Ernst Schumacher (1973)

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism– Daniel Bell (1976) one of the first books to talk of post-industrialism

Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) No wonder the Labour government regretted opening the Pandora's box of community development!

Orientalism– Edward Said (1978) The book which made us aware of our eurocentrism

The Breakdown of Nations – Leopold Kohr (1978) A personal favourite….which somehow made more impact than the earlier “Small is Beautiful”

The Culture of Narcissism– Christopher Lasch (1979) which first drew individualism to our attention

Urban Political Analysis – the politics of collective consumption Patrick Dunleavy (1980) which forced me to grapple with neo-Marxist analysis

Speak, Memory - the UK in the late 1960s – part VI of the current series about “Change”

 This post has proved quite a challenge – forcing me to confront the question of the reliability of our own personal memories compared with the sort of collective accounts you find in post-war social history which has become so popular in the last decade  with publics everywhere – eg in the UK David Kynaston and Dominic Sandbrook. Speak, Memory is, of course, the title of Vladimir Nabakov’s autobiography

Take 1968 - which was, in 2018, the subject of celebrations for, and disputations against what it was assumed to stand for – freedom and disdain for authority and tradition. But for me, 1968 was significant more for my election as a councillor for the municipality of a Scottish shipbuilding town and my appointment as a Lecturer at Paisley College of Technology.

After all in 1968 I was 25 – no longer a student - and had more important things to do than tear up Parisian cobbles. Community action was very much in the air and chimed well with “the community power debate” which had been an important one for me during university just a few years earlier. In 1956 C Wright Mills had produced his famous “The Power Elite” - a radical critique of the structure of power in US society – which pluralist political scientists such as Robert Dahl tried to take down. And it was probably Steven Lukes who settled the debate eventually in 1974 with Power – a radical view in which he argued that 

Power has three faces –

·         the public face which Dahl, Polsby and others had studied,

·         a hidden face, which served to keep issues off of the agenda of decision making arenas (Bachrach and Baratz 1962), and

·         an even more ‘insidious’ third face, through which the relatively powerless came to internalise and accept their own condition, and thus might not be aware of nor act upon their interests in any observable way.

 

Lukes’ analysis of what he called the three ‘dimensions of power’ has spawned a series of debates and studies about how power affects not only who participates in decision making processes, but also who does not, and why. 

Those who want to know the details of how that debate has gone since have only to consult the magnificent website kept by William Domhoff for the past 50 years – Who Rules America?

And one of the first books I called for in 1968 - with the library facilities at Paisley College at my full disposal - was Dilemmas of Social Reform – poverty and community in the US by Peter Marris and Martin Rein. This had come out in 1967 and was the more analytical complement to the  activism of Saul Alinsky as I took my first steps in community action.

The promise of change was heavy in the air we breathed in those years - Harold Wilson’s Labour Government of 1964-70 had started well with official and open Inquiries into so many fields which had been causing deep concern – not least the civil service, local government and devolution – and was sufficiently influenced by Johnson’s War on Poverty to set up its own Community Development Programme which is described in this short article.

It also to set up an enquiry into public participation in planning led by Arthur Skeffington, a Labour MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Housing and Local Government, Tony Greenwood. It arose from growing interest in the idea of ‘participatory democracy’ (that ordinary people need to be engaged in decision-making rather than simply voting for representatives to make decisions on their behalves). What became known as the Skeffington Report or “People and Planning” published its report in 1969 with a famous review by Sean Damer and Cliff Hague giving an excellent sense of the issues and prevailing context. The review mentions only at the end Sherry Arnstein’s famous ladder of participation

But all good things have to come to an end – and the Labour government duly ran out of steam. 

Recommended Reading

1968 Memories and Legacies of a global revolt (Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC 2009) Trust the Germans to produce the best account of the global wave of protest!  This detailed account looks at all corners of the globe and includes a fascinating last chapter involving a discussion between New Left Norman Birnbaum and Tom Haydn

Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) The most famous of the titles which came from the UK anti-poverty programme

local government and the local state – from crisis to crisis a submission as a Conference paper on austerity which gives a good sense of academic discussions a decade ago

Telling Stories about post-war Britain; the crisis of the 1970s (2017) a very thorough and superbly referenced long article which gives a great sense of this turning point in UK history

From the Bronx to Oxford and not quite back Norman Birnbaum (2018) Memoir of a sociologist who helped found “New Left Review” and was in the middle of an amazing global network of intellectuals and activists

Aftermath – life in the fallout from the Third Reich 1945-1955 Harald Jaehner 2021 a German journalist covers the period with the harrowing stories I remember from Heinrich Boll’s novels

Social history of post-war Britain; a few books selected by David Kyanston. 

What do we mean when we talk about change? part V of a series

We use the concept of “change” all the time but there seems to be surprisingly little written about it as an all-embracing concept. The literature on change is, of course, immense but is divided very much into several completely separate fields which, curiously, are totally uninterested in each other - dealing with the individual, the organisational and the societal respectively (forgive the last term but “social” does have a rather different meaning from activities relating to a particular society).

·         the first field draws on psychology and tends to be interested in things like stress;

·         the second in the management of organisational change (but divided by their respective focus on companies, the public sector and the NGO field);      

·         the last in collective challenges to power which often go under the label of “social change” 

Capacity development is one of the few approaches which recognises the importance of all three – although, in reality, its focus is on training and it never ventures into the dangerous field of social change. It’s only in the past year or so that some people have dared challenge this (see last 2 titles of “networked” level of table).

 I had a post at the beginning of the year on this subject - but the lack of interest each of these fields takes in one another is so remarkable that it’s worth updating the post and integrating it in what has become one of my series 

This (updated) table tries to reduce these 4 fields of writing to a few milestones.

The Level	The Focus	Example
The individual	Self-help, psychology	In Over our Heads – the mental demands of modern life Robert Kegan  1995
The organisational	Commercial – managing change, Organ Development	In Search of Excellence Peters and Waterman 1982 Managing Change in Organisations Colin Carnall (1990) Management challenges for the 21st century Peter Drucker (2001)
	Public – new public management, public value	Reinventing Government Graeber and Osborne (1992) Change here – managing change to improve local services (Audit Commission 2001) Appraising public value; past, present and futures (2011) useful (academic) summary article Public Value Management – governance and reform in Britain ; John Connolly et al (2021)
	Non-governmental	Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world J Bryson and B Crosby (2015)
The societal	Social change	Change the World Robert Quinn (2000) Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition) Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013)
networked	The dynamic between the 3 levels	Life and How to Survive it R Skynner and J Cleese 1993 The World We Create Tomas Bjorkman  2019 Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

Can low expectations be mobilised?

The last three posts have been a preface to the second look I wanted to take at a detailed case-study I had written some 25 years ago about the most important programme I have ever been involved with – Strathclyde Region’s “Social Strategy for the Eighties”. The full story of the strategy is here – and a short version here. Strathclyde Region controlled key public services for half of Scotland’s population and had 100,000 professional staff. The strategy -

·         took some 18 months to prepare,

·         went through a continuous learning process eg “SS for the 80s”, “SS for the 90s”

·         lasted the 22 years’ life of the Region and

·         was continued by the new system of Scottish government which assumed power in 1999 

M involvement lasted 16 years – from 1974 when I became one of what was jokingly called “the gang of four” which led the Region in its first spell in office until I left the country to pursue a new career as an international consultant. 

The shocking 1973 “Born to Fail?” report  identified the West of Scotland as a UK leader in “multiple deprivation” and a few of us – instead of acting defensively - saw this as an opportunity to ensure that the new Region acted innovatively. An initial deprivation strategy was further developed over the winter of 1981 at a series of community conferences attended by 1000 activists which reviewed the actions taken to date by the Region and just before the May 1982 elections gave the subsequent report a fresh legitimacy

It was printed as an attractive (little red) booklet (complete with poems!) and widely distributed, as was a shorter version in the internal staff Bulletin. The Region's free Newspaper distributed to every household - and more selective monthly "Digest" sent to all Community groups - were both intensively used in the years to come to explain the details of the work. Workshops were held in a variety of public and professional settings over the following years to get the key messages across.  And these were simple - if challenging - 

            "The existing inequalities in service allocation did not happen by accident: they are mediated through the administrative machine by generally well-intentioned professionals and administrators practising apparently fair and neutral principles. To tackle these inequalities therefore requires more than a general expression of content handed over, in traditional style, for implementation. It demands the alteration of structures and the working assumptions".

 

            "What we were asking our staff to do in 1976 was to accept that fairly simple things were needed from them in the first instance; not massive spending but just a commitment, firstly to those who lived in the APTs; secondly to attempting new relationships both with their colleagues in other Departments and with residents. We were also asking for imagination and courage in encouraging staff to bring forward proposals for better practice despite the discouragement we knew they would encounter from the rules, traditions and prejudices which seem deeply engrained in certain departments"

 

            "The majority of staff are discouraged from joint work with councillors, other professionals and residents in APTs by the way the traditional departmental system of local government works. Career advance depends on one's work as a professional or manager in a particular department - and not on the collaborative ventures emphasised in this and the 1976 document. That is the crucial issue which must now be faced and resolved. Exhortations and good intentions are no longer enough" 

I was pretty happy with the detailed analysis of the experience I had prepared in the mid 1990s with the benefit not only of the distance brought by my having left the country but of a short sabbatical I had been given then by the Urban Studies group of Glasgow University. But the model of change used was perhaps not as clear as it might be - with a brief references to Kurt Lewin's freezing/refreezing approach and only the briefest of references to a piece I’d written in a major article in 1977 entitled Community Development – its administrative and political challenge. This actually gave a sense of the thinking which drove us - arguing that 

Our society is hardly what one would call a participatory democracy. The term that is used - "representative" democracy - is official recognition of the fact that "the people" do not take political decisions but have rather surrendered that power to one tor several) small elites - subject to  infrequent checks. Such checks are, of course, a rather weak base on which to rest claims for democracy⁴ and more emphasis is therefore given to the freedom of expression and organisation whereby pressure groups articulate a variety of interests. Those who defend the consequent operation of the political process argue that we have, in effect a political market place in which valid or strongly supported ideas survive and are absorbed into new policies. They further argue that every viewpoint or interest has a more or less equal chance of finding expression and recognition. This is the political theory of pluralism.⁵

 

Community development is an expression of unhappiness with this view of the operation of the policy process. At its most extreme - in some theories of com­munity action - it argues that the whole process is a gigantic confidence trick. In its more liberal version it merely wants to strengthen the voice of certain inarticulate members of society.

There is, I would suggest, a relatively simple way 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 are attributable to the faults of individuals rather than to the system. It involves looking at how new policies emerge.

The policy process

A key question is: 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

·         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

Problems hadn't until then been defined by local people - professionally-dominated agendas were rather imposed on them in a variety of more or less subtle ways. The Region's community development staff were, in a sense, the shock-troops to help make the pluralist system work again (that was also evident in the "enterprise" rhetoric of community business).

Theories of Change

 The last post had two purposes –

·         to explore seven tools which governments have used in efforts to alter the behaviour of both citizens and organisations (public and commercial).

·         to remind us that some preliminary efforts in the 1970s to identify the factors which accounted for some successful  government initiatives of the 1960s had subsequently floundered in the 1980s - as Thatcherism, privatisation and neo-liberalism downgraded government in favour of what was little more than the downright worship of markets. New Labour may, in the new millennium, have brought back a few government programmes (such as Sure Start) but basically retained its faith in competition, globalisation and the market. 

The global financial meltdown of 2008 took the gloss off all that – and it was not altogether surprising that Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Thaler and Cass became a best-seller in the same year. This was a long overdue recognition that governments could also be effective   

Huge amounts of money, of course, are spent - and thousands of lobbyists employed – to persuade us otherwise; to keep us constantly supplied with stories of government waste and ineptitude. And most academics, it must be said, are happy to go along with this. Which is why I finished the post by paying tribute to the perseverance of people like Mark Moore, Paul du Gay and Paul t’Hart who are amongst the very few academics who have chosen to focus their efforts on trying to understand the preconditions for positive government efforts. 

What I want to do in this post is to try to describe the theories of change I’ve found most useful in the 50 years I’ve been lucky enough to have the chance to practice leadership – initially political, then project management and, in retirement, more distant and reflective. 

From “the Pincer Movement” to celebration of opportunism

When I was lucky enough to find myself in a position of strategic leadership in a new and large organisation in the mid 1970s, we used what I called the “pincer approach” to set up reform structures at both a political and community level. The organisational culture was, of course, one of classic bureaucracy – but, from its very start, some of us made sure that it had to contend with the unruly forces of political idealism and community power. The regional body concerned was responsible for such local government functions as education, social work, transport, water and strategic planning for two and half million people; and employed 100,000 staff but very little has been written about it. You’ll find the full story of the strategy here – and a short version here. 

Thirty years later. I was doing a lot of training sessions in the Presidential Academies of Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and developed there what I called the “opportunistic” or “windows of opportunity” theory of change against what I started to call “impervious regimes” ie so confident of the lack of challenge to their rule that they had become impervious to their citizens. Initially I expressed it like this - 

• “Windows of opportunity present themselves - from outside the organization, in crises, pressure from below

• reformers have to be technically prepared, inspire confidence – and able to seize and direct the opportunity

• Others have to have a reason to follow

• the new ways of behaving have to be formalized in new structures. 

And then developed a more detailed formulation which put more emphasis on the individual, moral responsibility –

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity”. And the preparation is about analysis, mobilisation and trust.

·         It is about us caring enough about our organisation and society to speak out about the need for change.

·         It is about taking the trouble to think and read about ways to improve things – and

·         To help create and run networks of such change.

·         And it is about establishing a personal reputation for probity and good judgement 

·         that people will follow your lead when that window of opportunity arises”.

 Contagion and networks?

I am not a fan of Malcolm Gladwell but his popularisations have included the important notion of the Tipping Point (2010)  where he suggested that there were three key factors which determine whether an idea or fashion will “tip” into wide-scale popularity

·         the Law of the Few,

·         the Stickiness Factor, and

·         the Power of Context. 

The “Law of the Few” proposes that a few key types of people must champion an idea, concept, or product before it can reach the tipping point. Gladwell describes these key types as –

·         Connectors,

·         Mavens, and

·         Salesmen. 

(And a maven – in case you didn’t know - is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word maven comes from the Hebrew, via Yiddish, and means one who understands, based on an accumulation of knowledge). 

If individuals representing all three of these groups endorse and advocate a new idea, it is much more likely that it will tip into exponential success.

The other 2 concepts are, frankly, not so well dealt with – and we need to go the wider literature of change management and social marketing to get the whole picture. 

A Final Point

Effective change doesn’t come from the “ya-boo yo-yo” system of adversarial power blocs of the UK and USA – it comes from a combination of sustained dialogue; coalitions of change; and grassroots activism and protest. And, often, it starts with an experiment – rather than a grand programme…Take, for example, what is now being called the Dutch model for neighbourhood care – started by Buurtzorg a few years back which is now inspiring people everywhere. That is a worker cooperative model… which, quite rightly, figures in Frederic Laloux’s  Reinventing Organisations. 

Further Reading; Annotated bibliogaphy for change agents" it may be a bit dated, but it’s still a useful resource for those who want to change the system of which they’re part.

Best explanation of ”theory of change” and annotated bibliography

To be continued