WORLDVIEWS

To make sense of the world, we all create patterns of meaning.In my youth it was a tripartite division – conservatives, socialists and liberals. Not for me the Manichean approach of left/right or insider/outsider - there was always a third way. It was only in 2000, however, that I became aware of the four dimensions of grid-group theory which anthropologist Mary Douglas introduced - consisting of four very different “world views” (what she calls hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist) which came to be known as “Cultural Theory”. I came across Mary Douglas’ theory thanks to public admin theorist Chris Hood’s “The Art of the State” (2000)

Another approach was that of cultural values – the work of people such as de Hofstede; Ronald Inglehart; Frans Trompenaars; Richard Lewis (of When Cultures Collide fame) and Richard Nesbitt a body of writing which emphasises the distinctiveness of national values most graphically illustrated in the Inglehart cultural map of the world and best explained in this brochure. Multinational companies were funding a lot of this work as they tried to understand how they could weld different nationalities into coherent and effective teams. Other companies had also been funding a lot of this work to try to get into the minds of their consumers - but international charities suddenly realised a decade or so ago could also be used to prise money out of all of us for their more altruistic purposes (see below) – a politicisation of which Adam Curtis' documentaries have made us much more aware

Those were the days when a body of literature called “path dependency ” was raising important questions about how “sticky” cultural values were…viz how difficult national behavioural traits are to change. And, just the other day, I discovered Betti’s argument that there were actually twelve ways of seeing the world (see list below)

Psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists have approached this question of perceptions and values completely separately and at different times - making few attempts to engage one another in discussion It's such a critical issue that it's time they reached out to one another - and made the connection with the developing literature on world views

Recommended Reading

BOOKS

- Management development through cultural diversity Ronnie Lessem (1995) 
Lessem is a south african who uses the four lens of the compass to show how the 

environment governs our ways of thinking.
- When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures; Richard Lewis (1996) The book 

which introduced us to the field – and gave us marvellous vignettes of the strange 

habits of almost all countries of the world

- Spiral Dynamics – mastering values, leadership, change; Don Beck and Chris Cowan

 (1996)  with crucial explorations of the very different levels of explanation needed 

for discussions of behaviour and the values which underpin it.

- Riding the Waves of Culture – understanding cultural diversity in business Frans 

Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997) the Dutchman who took on de 

Hofstede’s mantle
 “The Art of the State” Chris Hood (2000)  uses Mary Douglas’ grid-group typology 

brilliantly to help us understand the strengths, weaknesses and risks of these 

various world views.
- The Geography of Thought – how westerners and asians think differently and why; 

Richard Nesbitt (2003) An American social psychologist gives a thought-provoking book
- “Way of life theory – the underlying structure of world views, social relations and lifestyles” 

– a rather disjointed and abstract dissertation by Michael Edward Pepperday (2009) an 

introduction to which is here

- Consumer Shift - how changing values are reshaping the consumer landscape (2011) 

actually much more about values and world views than it is about consumers….
-The Patterning Instinct; Jeremy Lent (2017) how worldviews develop and can change 

history 

- Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world ;

 Ronald Inglehart (2018)  a political scientist who has been at the heart of discussion 

about cultural values for the past 50 years – and the book and this article summarised 

that work.
- Twelve Ways of Seeing the World  M Betti (2019 Eng – original German 2001) a 

curious book based on the work of Rudolf Steiner
- The Web of Meaning ; Jeremy Lent (2021) an important follow up to his 2017 book
- Theories of International Relations ed R Devetak and J True (6th ed 2022)
- Foundations of International Relations ed S McGlinchey et al 2022
- The Battle for Britain – crises, conflicts and the conjunctures  John Clarke 2023


ARTICLES
- Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions ; Keith Grint (2008) a short very useful article 

by an academic
- Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values  (2010) 

a useful little manual for charities
- Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) ditto
- A Cultural Theory of Politics ” (2011) a short article which shows how the 

grid-group approach has been used in a range of disciplines
- Grid, group and grade – challenges in operationalising cultural theory for 

cross-national research (2014) is a very academic article although its comparative 

diagrams are instructive

- Britain’s Choice – common ground and divisions in 2020s Britain (More in Common

 2020) a detailed picture of the british people and their values these days

Reassessing one’s World View

Last month I posted about a book which mapped the painful process of someone changing a worldview which he had held passionately and, with some serendipity, a post then arrived from my favourite blogger, Dave Pollard which deserves reproduction (at least partially)

My worldview is a model of the world as I (want to believe I) ‘know’ it, and I am 

seemingly compelled to try to make everything ‘fit’ into that model. And I change 

it reluctantly. I don’t think I’m unusual in this. In this as in many other aspects of 

human behaviour, I am conditioned to believe what I believe — 

• by my personal experiences, 

• by what I’ve been taught by people I trust (or, at least, don’t distrust), 

• by stories that I’ve been told

• by the beliefs of others I know directly or have read or listened to. 

All of this conditioning is filtered through my current worldview. And the 
result — what gets through that filter — is what I purportedly ‘know’….
I used to believe, quite strongly, a lot of things that I no longer believe. My 
worldview has changed, often slowly-and-then-all-at-once, as I found my old 
beliefs simply weren’t tenable. Most recently, I’ve come to understand, to my 
chagrin, that my belief in my country’s (Canada’s) political independence from 
the US Empire was naive. 

• I’ve come to acknowledge that that Empire has been systematically and 

intensively destabilizing and immiserating the lives of most of the world’s 

citizens, if they are unfortunate enough to live in countries 

that aren’t subservient to the Empire’s ideology, and have been doing so for my entire life

• I’ve come to realize that my belief that the PMC are, if ideologically bent, nevertheless relatively informed about the world, open-minded, and inclined to seek collaboration and compromise to solve problems, was completely mistaken. 

• I’ve come to appreciate that our newspapers and other media are not at all committed to seeking and telling the objective truth. 

I suspect that, for many people, realizations that totally undermine one’s worldview 
and belief system would be gut-wrenching. But I’m preoccupied with knowing Why?

Why did my own conditioning lead me to so completely misunderstand what has

 been going on? Why - when there have been such astonishing opportunities for global peace, for redistribution of wealth, for solving the centuries-old problems of poverty and disease, for collaboratively tackling the horrific predicaments that are collapsing our civilization - has our conditioning instead led us to opt for preparations for an un-winnable, global, Empire-vs-Rest-of-the-World war? What madness has gripped our long-suffering species?

More people seem to be talking these days about ”worldviews” (I’m not sure if its one word or two) – so I’m going to develop this theme in the next few posts, 

Is there a Scottish model of policy-making?

Scottish government will celebrate 25 years of renewed existence on 12 May this year. Originally conceived (by a Labour government) with a proportional representation voting system aș a rebuke to the much-maligned bipolar Westminster system, it started with a Lab-Lib Coalition but became, first in 2007, a Scottish Nationalist minority government which went on to win, in 2011, a majority of the parliamentary seats. In 2015 it reduced the Labour party to a single seat although the last Scottish elections (in 2021) produced a 63/31/24 split for SNP/Cons/Labour

After 25 years, it’s reasonable to ask what impact the new system has made – whether on the Scottish public as a whole or on the “chattering classes”. It wasn’t as easy to get data on this as I had imagined but the survey conducted in 2021/22 suggested that two thirds of citizens thought that the Assembly gave the ordinary person more say in how Sotland was governed (as distinct from 5% who thought “less”).

The chattering class is a derogatory term applied to journalists, academics, public intellectuals and politicians who try to engage us in discussion of ideas. And it is here that Scotland seems remarkably weak.

• The powerful weekly Scottish Review stopped publishing 4 months ago.

• The last edition,of the Scottish Review of Books was more than 4 years ago.

• Although Scottish Left Review is still going strong

• Sceptical Scot momentarily stopped appearing but has now resumed welcome service

• With the recent death of Tom Nairn, the country has but a single public intellectual – the inestimable Gerry Hassan who used to write in Scottish Review but whose writing is now difficult to find – apart from on his blog.

• The other worthwhile blog is Bella Caledonia

Thank god therefore for Paul Cairney who, for the past decade and more, has been Professor of Public Policy at the University of Stirling – but also a prolific blogger and author. 

Not surprisingly, he has been an adviser to both the Scottish government and parliament with a recent paper posing the question What is Effective Government? as part of a wider process of inquiry being undertaken by the Parliament – which has produced this report. And he has just presented this 140 page evidence to the Scottish end of the UK official inquiry into Covid

The Scottish approach to politics is too often romanticised as not just democratic but social democratic whereas the statistics for its civil society activity and polling simply don’t bear that out. The country is rather petit bourgeois – I’m having difficulty with my internet speed at the moment and therefore can’t give a link for that assertion. Ditto the other links I would have wanted to insert. So, for the moment, let me rest on this statement about the “the scottish model” and this article of Paul Cairney’s “Public Administration in an age of austerity” from 2012

Further Reading

The Case for Scottish Independence – a history of nationalist political thought in modern scotland Ben Jackson 2020

In Praise of the Short Book/extended essay

15 years of serious blogging has created almost 2000 posts here – some of which are extended essays to be grouped together, with some editing and an introduction, to become mini-books. This is the process in which I am currently engaged around the topic of populism – sparked by a reading of The Populist Moment – the Left after the great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jaeger (2023).

This post, however, is more by way of a tribute to the format of the extended essay or short book for which I’m beginning to notice an admirable growing trend. ”The Populist Moment”, for example, is only 147 pages long and another Verso book (this time about the Italian right) - First They Took Rome - is just 174 pages. For several years, I’ve been urging authors and publishers to exercise more self-discipline – so this is indeed a welcome trend.

But the unannointed king of the contemporary extended essay is Perry Anderson whose extended essays in the London Review of Books have become the stuff of legend. ”Highly readable but serious” is the best way to describe the writing of this Marxist historian who has been based variously in the UK and the US and is the subject of a very inadequate Wikipedia entry. This Jacobin article does him more justice. I tried to google for other prominent extended essayists but all I got were guidelines for writing extended essays for the Internațional Baccalauriat!

George Orwell and Arthur Koestler wrote extended essays but the only contemporary exponent of the art I’ve come across is Aurelien

Some recommended reading

Contesting the Global Order – the radical political economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein by Gregory Williams (2020)

The H Word – the peripeteia of Hegemony Perry Anderson (2017) is 156 pages

Pessimism of the Intellect – history of the New Left Review Duncan Thompson (2007)