Repressed Art

A decade or so ago, I was on a 3 year project in Uzbekistan and saw a temporary exhibition of stunning paintings in one of Tashkent’s few public galleries. I was not then in collection mode but was sufficiently impressed to photograph some of them – sadly without noting the names of the painters. Yesterday I was googling “socialist realism” and stumbled across an amazing story of artistic gems hidden in the (western) Karakalpak region of Uzbekistan. One man, Igor Savitsky, saved a treasure trove of Russian and Uzbek art by “hiding” it in a museum in Nukus near the infamous Aral Sea -

A tireless collector of paintings that the Soviet government wanted destroyed, Savitsky traveled thousands of miles in the post-war period scheming, plotting, pleading, doing whatever it took to get his hands on the art he so passionately wanted to preserve.
A frustrated artist, Savitsky was working as an archaeologist when he became fascinated by the indigenous cultures of Western Uzbekistan. He began to collect jewelry, coins, handmade clothing, and other items in danger of being lost as the Soviets sought to devalue distinctively ethnic artifacts. Savitsky even succeeded in convincing government officials to provide funding for a museum in Nukus, far from Moscow’s prying eyes. But then Savitsky discovered his true calling. Pretending to buy state-approved art, he daringly rescued thousands of works by artists banned during the Stalin era for speaking out against authority, for being gay, or for simply refusing to paint in the style they were told. Risking torture, imprisonment, and death, this small group remained true to their artistic vision. Savitsky even managed to cajole the cash to pay for the art from the same authorities who had banned it.
Savitsky’s greatest discovery was an unknown school of artists who settled in Uzbekistan after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. There they encountered an Islamic culture as exotic to them as Tahiti was for Gauguin, and they developed a startlingly original style that fused European modernism with centuries-old Eastern traditions.

It all came to wider light apparently in 1998 when the New York Times published this article.
And all of this was celebrated in a special film earlier this year. Desert of Forbidden Art uses this story of Savitsky and the artists by juxtaposing images from the collection with rare Soviet archival film and stills. Ben Kingsley, Sally Field, and Ed Asner voice the diaries and letters of Savitsky and the artists and bring to life a dramatic journey of sacrifice for the sake of creative freedom.

But late last year Uzbek officials abruptly gave the Nukus Museum 48 hours to evacuate one of its two exhibition buildings, so staff members ended up stacking hundreds of fragile canvases and paper works on the floor of the other space. The building has since stood empty, its fate unknown, and more than 2,000 works are no longer on view at the museum. The museum’s director, Marinika M. Babanazarova, who has fiercely guarded the collection for 27 years since Savitsky’s death in 1984, was not permitted to travel to the United States for a trip that was to include a screening of the documentary at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
And over the last year Ms. Babanazarova’s staff members have undergone 15 government audits, in which they have repeatedly been asked to explain their travels overseas and the nature of their contacts with foreigners, she said.
The irony is that the art Savitsky saved — beginning with traditional Uzbek folk art and textiles and blossoming to comprise art by ethnic Russian avant-garde artists — was at the time under fire for not being Soviet enough. Now it seems, 20 years after Uzbekistan won its independence — it is being targeted by the new regime for not being Uzbek enough.

Issues; there are several lessons from this story which, hopefully, I will pursue in future posts. First and foremost - what an exceptional, courageous individual can achieve. This is an issue which has cropped up several times in this blog eg an American who did heroic things during the Smyrna massacres of 1923; a Greek and a Turk who had in the preceding decade or so tried to stem the tide of ethnic hatred; Havel; the good German of Nanjing in the early 1940s.
And, second, the way artists have had to adjust to repressive regimes. I realised only recently just how much the Bulgarian art I admire, for eaxmple, must have been affected by that. A few migrated; many opted for design work in the cinema and theatre; a few courageous ones like Boris Denev refused to compromise and were banned from painting.

update; https://lithub.com/visiting-a-secret-museum-in-the-middle-of-the-uzbek-desert/

Gloom and doom

I don’t often refer to the deaths of public figures in this blog. But some critical comments about Vaclav Havel in this discussion thread – did inspire me to make my own contribution - "Of course there are, for those with a radical turn of mind, blemishes on Havel’s record – such as his support for the Iraq war and for NATO. But why do we expect perfection from those who are suddenly elevated to such positions of leadership – particularly when that position was so bereft of real powers? Looked at any way, the man was a tower of moral strength and courage – as can be seen by the uncompromising way he addressed the Czech politicians in 1997. In November 1997, the Czech government, led by Prime Minister Václav Klaus, was forced to resign in the wake of allegations that, among other things, the Civic Democratic Party, led by Klaus, had access to a slush fund held in an unauthorized Swiss bank account. In the period between those resignations and the appointment of an interim government, President Havel, who had recently been released from hospital and was recuperating from pneumonia, delivered what is, in effect, a state of the union speech to the Parliament and Senate of the Czech Republic -

It seems to me that our main fault was vanity. We behaved like arrogant students at the top of their class or spoiled only children who feel superior to others and think they have the right to tell others what to do. …We were hypnotized by our own macroeconomic indicators, heedless of the fact that sooner or later these indicators would also reveal what lay beyond the horizon of the economic or technocratic world view: that there are factors whose weight or significance no accountant can calculate, but which nevertheless create the only thinkable environment for any economic development—I mean the rules of the game, the rule of law, the moral order from which every system of governance derives and without which it cannot function, a climate of social concord.
The declared ideal of success and profit was defiled because we permitted a state of affairs in which the most immoral became the most successful and the greatest profits were made by thieves who stole with impunity. Under the cloak of an unqualified liberalism, which regarded any kind of economic controls or regulations as left-wing aberrations….. morality, decency, humility before the order of nature, solidarity, concern for future generations, respect for the law, the culture of interpersonal relationships—all these and many similar things were trivialised as "superstructure," as icing on the cake, until at last we realised that there was nothing left to put the icing on: the forces of economic production themselves had been undermined. They were undermined because—with apologies to the atheists among you—they were not cultivated in the strict spirit of the divine commandments. Drunk with power and success, and spellbound by what a wonderful career move a political party was, many began—in an environment that made light of the law—to turn a blind eye to one thing and another, until at last they were confronted with scandals that brought into question one of our greatest reason for pride—the privatisation process.

You can read the entire address at pages 39-47 of a paper on my website. And another (earlier) powerful address he made in 1995 about more global issues to an American audience) can be found here.
At a time when our politicians are so puny, I find it difficult to understand why there are so many people incapable of recognising courage and honesty when it is staring them in the face - particularly on the person's death? We are, indeed, pathetic and ungenerous individuals.
This extended article is a good introduction to Havel's life and work.
John Keane’s Vaclav Havel – a political tragedy in six acts (2000) was one attempt to put the man in historical context (by a prominent british political scientist) - although at least one highly critical review felt the large and well-documented book was rather light in its intellectual (particularly Czech) foundations. For example, there is apparently no mention of the great Thomas Masaryk, in 1919 the first Czechoslovak President, in Keane's book. The review is so savage that its rejoinder from the author is only appropriate. The renowned sociologist Ernest Gellner - who spent the last five years of his life teaching at the Central European University in Prague - supplied, as possibly his last paper, the comparison of the 2 intellectual Presidents and their times.

At the end of November I confessed to some “ennui” – the pall had gone off reading and blogging. Particularly relating to my professional interests. Was it the lack of wine? I have been pretty disciplined in the past month in resisting the blandishments of the tasty Bulgarian whites. But that has been more than compensated for by the tastiness of the vegetarian dishes I have been creating – eg this morning a very succulent grated beetroot, apple and carrot dish – seasoned with small dabs of olive oil, apple vinegar and salt. Probably it is just the combination of end-of-year blues and the general sense of gloom which pervades much of the (European) world. An article today on this has a quote from the political philospher John Gray which captures things very well-

We've moved from the delusional optimism of the 1990s to a sense of intractable difficulties: resource scarcity and enormous debts; the erosion of bourgeois life; the inability of politicians to solve big problems; the realisation that the economic problems of the 70s weren't really solved; the realisation that the window for doing something about climate change – the next five years – will be entirely occupied with trying to restart economic growth.
Meanwhile, for westerners who instinctively look to other countries or big political ideas for inspiration, the possibilities seem to be withering. The US appears economically declining and politically dysfunctional. The EU is damaged and possibly disintegrating. The social democracy of Europe's postwar golden decades seems unable to modernise itself.

postscript
In early 2012 a review appeared in Osteuropa and, in English, on Eurozine which is perhaps the best assessment of Havel's life

It's politics, stupid

My mother lived to the grand old age of 101 – and was still pottering around her small flat in the supported accomodation in which she lived for almost a decade in her 90s, doing her own shopping and cooking meals for me on my visits from far-flung places. She had some difficulty understanding what it was I was doing in the countries of central europe and central asia which had, for so much of her lifetime, behind "The Iron Curtain". And it was not easy to explain – she was, after all, of that generation which actually produced things; the more effete characters who provided services in those days such as teachers, acountants, bankers, doctors had status precisely because they were in such a small minority. Since then the number of what Robert Reich called in the 90s "symbolic analysts” who do little more than manipulate words and figures has grown to scandalous proportions. Little wonder that we are all so confused!
But I have just come across a new paper which gives a clear overview of the difficulties people doing my sort of work in transition countries over the past 2 decades face; and which also captures the critique I have been conducting of it in varoius papers. It’s written by Tom Carrothers for the Carnegie Foundation and is entitled Aiding governance in developing countries – progress despite uncertainties. He has eight injunctions –
• recognise that governance deficiencies are primarily political
• give attention to the demand for governance, not just the supply
• go local
• strive for best fit – rather than best practice
• take informal institutions into account
• mainstream governance (ie don't just run it as an add-on)
• don’t ignore the international dimensions
• reform thyself

Its references pointed me to a useful summary which DfiD did recently of the findings from 10 years of funded research on governance and fragile states 2001-2010 - The Politics of poverty - elites, citizens and states
A year ago, I was working on a sceptic's glossary of administrative and political terms which really deserves wider currency

Sofia City Gallery scores again!

The Sofia City Art Gallery has put together another excellent exhibition – this time to honour the memory of the Bulgarian Association of New Artists which was active from 1931 to after 1944. Founded in Sofia, its objective was to unite artists with similar aesthetic viewpoints who espoused new trends in art in keeping with movements in western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Although its first members worked primarily in a realistic manner, around 1936—when membership had grown to 55—other Bulgarian artists who had studied and worked in Paris, Munich and Vienna joined its ranks. Artists such as Alexandar Zhendov, BENCHO OBRESHKOV, Boris Eliseev, Vera Nedkova, David Perets, Eliezer Alshekh, IVAN NENOV, Kiril Petrov and KIRIL TSONEV contributed more modernist approaches, rejecting academic art, folkloric elements and especially the ideas of Social Realism put into practice by the founders of the Society. An internet review said its members created works with a „sophisticated approach to style, a purity of form and a stable internal structure”. But this sort of jargon doesn’t tell me anything – and I have to say that, much as I appreciate this insight into the historical developments of Bulgarian painting and the imaginative way the City Gallery has dealt with it (with blow-ups of the agonised press receptions of the time addorning the gallery’s pillars), this is not a genre which particularly appeals to me. But I was deeply impressed with the graphics of Vesselin Staikov and the work of Ivan Penkov and Bronka Gyurova. After 1944 the New Artists’ Society was absorbed by the Union of Bulgarian Artists . Many of those who had been members of the Society were declared ‘bourgeois artists’ by the Communist regime and were no longer able to take part in exhibitions; several, including Alshekh, Elisev and Perets, emigrated.
The frequency of these special exhibitions at the City Gallery (which always borrow works from the country’s regional galleries) contrasts so favourably with the lack of imagination shown by the National Gallery just across the road which never changes its permanent exhibition and rarely puts on worthwhile specials (I do remember a great tanev exhibition they mounted a year or so ago. The National Gallery charges about 5 euros – and the City Gallery is free. Therein lies a lessons about the better service generally offered by local government!
The graphic is one of Vesselin Staikov's at the exhibition. In addition to engravings with themes from nature, old towns and mountain villages, Staikov produced a cycle of engravings on the modern city: Sofia with its modern architecture, the clearing of rubble after the air-raids and the construction of new houses and buildings. The artist is also fond of doing ancient, strangely shaped trees. Labour themes occupy an important place in Staikov’s work. He shows love and understanding for the worker, the peasant. Some engravings reflect the romanticism of Bulgarian scenery and architecture, others – the primitive force and ruggedness of the village landscape. .

Britain and Europe

A year ago, my blog rose to a challenge to name the 50 books to keep in one’s library if forced to reduce it to 50 books My basic criteria were (a) the light thrown on the European dilemmas of the last century and (b) the quality of the language and the book as a whole. There’s nothing I would really want to change in the entry. I did, however, leave 6 vacant places – and should now consider if any of the books I have read in 2011 might be added to the list.
And the 10th December post of last year celebrated, on my dad’s birth day, some of the values of his generation which are, today, sorely missed.

The British veto at last week’s EU summit is shocking both for what it represents - the protection of financial sector interests by a political cabinet whose members are funded by these financial parasites; and for the marginalisation it augurs for the country. The Guardian has a useful overview which makes the point that this is the culmination of both daft recent political decisions (such as the Conservative withdrawal a couple of years ago from the European People’s Party, the umbrella group in the European Parliament for the parties which dominate so many European governments these days) and the incomprehending and hostile attitude of so many of the old British political class to Europeans. A friend sent me recently Thomas Kremer’s 2005 book The Missing Heart of Europe which explains much of this mutual incomprehension -

The engineers of the EU are deaf to the rising clamour of national identities as they are blind to the profound continent’s diversity of economic and political cultures. within the continent. Therein lies the breathtaking arrogance of their profession. The fatal assumption all along has been that member states are similar, and that national national diversity does not matter and can be over-ridden by negotiations in a closed political circle. within the confines of a narrow bureaucratic and political circle. But it is precisely this diversity that determines just how far, how fast and how deep European European integration can be.is possible.
Europe’s faultline does not lie in the middle of the English Channel. Across the continent it separates those countries with an eccentric heritage, where power emanates from the grass roots and authority is vested in the individual, from those with a concentric tradition, where power is centralised and the corporate state predominates. The confrontation between France and Britain is not about €3bn ($3.7bn), or integration, or the visceral dislike of two leaders or about reigniting historical rivalries. It is more profound than that.
What makes Britain eccentric is the organic development of its parliamentary democracy; its trade-based maritime expansion; a rich, flexible , multi-rooted and near grammar-less language; a pragmatic approach to life and philosophy; the common law; an anti-authoritarian spirit; an all-pervasive and irreverent humour; an unwritten , rolling constitution; reliance on individual initiative; commercial enterprise and an attitude of easygoing carelessness.
What makes France concentric is almost the exact opposite. It moved from a successful absolutist rule to an uneasy democracy by episodic revolutions; it achieved its pre-eminence through a land mass expansion; the grammar of its language is sophisticated with a vocabulary jealously guarded by an august academic body; its philosophy is steeped in great ideals with logic preferred to common sense; its monarchies, empires and republics are distinguished by a rich tapestry of often rewritten constitutions; it draws heavily on formal, written procedures inherent in Roman law rather than live evidence and courtroom drama; its people defernaturally, if with some resentment, to the authority of the state; a n economic reliance on state-supported enterprises and a fine-honed bureaucracy that governs life through manifold regulations that its citizens have learnt to circumvent.
In critical respects the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and along with Britain are eccentric while Germany, Spain and together with France form the concentric core of the continent.

During the 80s I had a lot of experience of working with European colleagues – in at the founding of the French-led Organisation for Traditional Industrial Regions (RETI), for example, and a member of Dutch and Italian led- networks which produced reports on the experience of urban participation and innovation in Europe. I was also one of the British representatives on the Council of Europe’s Standing Conference of Local and Regional Authorities for some 4 years. Even with my French and German languages, I would get pretty impatient with the posturing and rhetoric of my continental colleagues! But this was one of the things we contributed to Europe - puncturing the hot air of the overpaid Eurocrats and federalists. Critical as I am of the New Labour Governments, its Ministers made a positive contribution to European developments and earned respect. But the upper class twits who now form the Conservative political class have barely altered their attitude to foreigners in 100 years - and are sadly supported by many nationalistic working class English whose tribal emotions have been touched by the immigration of the past 4 decades. Cameron and his team have been steadily alienating European leaders with their comments and behaviour - and this was probably the personal pay-off.
Having said all that, however, some of the reactions to Cameron's veto are probably a bit extreme. And this article - 10 myths about Cameron's EU Veto - is an important challenge to the Guardian newspaper line. But probably the most continuously insightful blog on the UK position in all these negotiations is the Bagehot one in The Economist journal. However, the best single comment is probably this blogger with diplomatic experience.

Most of my working experience in the past 20 years has been with Dutch or German-led consortia. I got on well with the former - although the German bureaucracy did get to me! However, my worst (sourest and most pedantic)boss was an English woman lawyer who headed the TAIEX office in the 90s which arranged trips for technocrats in EU and aspiring countries in the pursuit of theie future compliance with EU regulations. That office also gave me a real insight into the operation of European civil servants - who devoted their enrgies to in-fighting(the real work was done by those on short-term contracts); and left the office early - secure in the knowledge that they couldn't be sacked.

Britain has been in steady decline all my adult life. The 60s were the years of diagnosis; the 70s of experimentation – with 1979 as a landmark when even the Labour government lost its faith in Keynesianism. The next 3 decades of Thatcherism and Bliarism seemed to many at the time to be giving Britain a new lease of life – but is belatedly being recognised as a disastrous abandonment of its basic industries and encouragement of unsustainable private debt. With the North Sea oil running out and no further benefits to be accrued by the state from privatisations, the future is bleak for the country. It is appropriate to ask how Japan coped with the melt-down it faced almost 20 years ago – and what lessons that experience contains for the UK.
Richard Koo has for some time been trying to get us to look at what that Japanese experience can tell us about the current addiction to deflation and austerityhere; here and here.
Also a video

Sofia was looking like this a few days ago. Its another new acquisition - an Ivan Petrov from the 1960s

Rethinking local services

For someone who dedicated 22 years of his life to local government - in senior political positions in local government and running, in parallel in academia, a Local Government Unit which ran workshops and published papers about issues about local government management, I write very little now about the subject. True, there are some papers on my website - about the lessons I drew from social inclusion work which took up a lot of my time and commitment between 1970 and 1990 ; about the experience of European local government in transferring functions; and a Roadmap which
I enjoyed writing in 2003-05 for those running the Kyrgyzstan system.

I have, however, watched with despair as the british system has become even more centralised in the past 2 decades – the Scottish less than the English. They seem impervious to the lessons that lie on their (European) doorstep – that decentralised systems are healthier and more able to deal with issues. The British political parties are full of the rhetoric of people power – but when in power continue to centralise. An astonishing 70% of local government spending in the UK is controlled by central government - compared with 19% in Germany and 32% in France.
I therefore stopped watching developments on that front some time ago – but seem, as a result, to have missed an interesting initiative which took place in the Brown years – something called Total place. This encouraged municipalities and local state bodies to come together; identify how much was being spent on particular problems eg drug treatment; and to rethink the services with a smaller budget. 13 pilots were selected and helped by some universities. The results seemed to be promising and give a new legitimacy and role for local government – as is seen in this final report; and handbook . The focus on clients – rather than departments – is radical and clearly could be taken seriously only because of economic and budgetary crisis. Part of its thinking can be traced back to the zero-budgeting ideas of the 1960s and 1970s and indeed I came across a comment from an interesting guy, Des McConaghy, I had contact with in those days -

it is intolerably frustrating – almost 40 years later and at 80 years of age! – seeing so many “total approach” initiatives come and go – decade after decade; each inevitably failing for much the same reasons as each new generation “starts from square one”. The landscape is strewn with their wreckage. So it’s now up to the Cabinet Office to really get to grips with the actual policy implications of localism. They must see that while this does indeed mean massively devolving all that can be safely left to the localities it also means a better grip on Whitehall’s own strategic role – plus the management and political validation of that vital constituency dimension!

However, the Handbook is a very rare celebration of systems thinking - it is very well-presented and shows how the concept and its operation draws on different strands of thinking (eg group-grid theory which I referred to recently; styles of learning; dialogue etc). It is very rare for an official document to refer to such theoretical grounding. My only beef is that there are few hard examples of the results in the Handbook. For that you have to go to the individual Final Report eg from Birmingham.
My internet search, however, suggests that the Total Place initiative seems, despite (because of?)its hype, to have disappeared without a trace with the arrival of the Coalition Government - being replaced by another pilot (this time in 2 places only) called Community Budgets. The "Prospectus" (typical business language) about the concept fails to mention the "total place" work even once. Instead, the phrase "whole-place" is used. Why do politicians need to behave so childishly?
Just what local government can offer particularly in this part of the world is nicely shown in this Local Government and Public Services book
The painting is a new acquisition - from last night's auction, It's by Grigor Naidenov who was born in Sofia in 1895 and focussed on urban life and scenes
Breaking news; The UK Deputy PM announced at the weekend that the English cities would get the chance to be free of a lot of central regulations - if, that is, he succeeded in his ongoing battle with the civil servants.

Bankers as communist nomenklatura?

In a nutshell, the governments that saved the banks and financial markets from a meltdown by borrowing huge amounts of monies are now being attacked for having too much debt by the institutions they saved.

This is just one of several arresting passages in a stimulating Open Democracy article I’ve just received and which argues that the banks have, over the past decade, broken the basic rules of lending - which normally allow only 6 pounds to be created from a single pound deposit and which ensure that 13% of every deposit is kept as a bank deposit. In its place, he argues, has been created a Ponzi scheme. The article continues -

The bankers and financiers do not own banks and financial institutions. They are owned by pension funds, saving policies and endowment policy holders, and even by governments and taxpayers. Effectively, the tax-paying middle class who saves and invests owns the financial industry which is in turn under the management of the bankers and financiers, the nomenklatura of the 21st century. And, like in the Soviet style communism system, these financial apparatchiks are not accountable to anybody but only interested in short term gains and squeezing as much as possible from anyone who has any money and cannot escape: by and large middle class taxpayers
In the 10 years leading to the collapse of 2008, the financial system abandoned the fiat currency and fractional reserve banking. This was the system wereby the money, as the store of value, was underwritten by individual countries and multiplied in a controlled way. Instead, the financiers and bankers started practicing a depleting reserve banking technique: a mechanism that replaces the currency, i.e. fiat money and legal tenders in the banks' reserves (in terms of their ratio) by papers generated by the banks themselves.

The author, Greg Pytel, has an interesting looking blog which rates second in UK blogs about corporate finance and submitted in early 2009 a damning paper to a House of Commons committee with the great title The Largest Heist in History

A Chief Executive of a Bank was one of apparently only a few who took issue with the argument and their exchange can be seen here.
Need to ask someone like Paul Mason what he makes of the argument.

The picture shows a rare painting by Alexander Bozhinov which is being auctioned soon here in Sofia. He was a one of Bulgaria's great caricaturists (whose house I lived next door to recently) but this is actually a painting he did on wood in Berlin in 1927

vegetables, books, grids and groups

The vegetable shop on the corner is the busiest shop I have ever known – although it does seem to be the older generation which uses it. Well-stocked and –frequented vegetable shops are a great feature of Sofia.
It would be interesting to know whether this healthy diet is reflected in Bulgarian health statistics…although any undoubted benefits will be swamped by the effects of smoking!
Certainly when I lived here for 18 months in 2007/2009, it made a significant (positive) difference to my cholesterol level.
So the verandah here is groaning with leeks, pears, beetroot, brocoli, gigantic parsnip, celery etc

I’m not sure if my love of reading and buying books technically qualifies me as a "bibliophile” since the dictionary defines that as "someone who loves or collects books especially as examples of fine or unusual printing or biding”. But I have always admired typface and regret that few publishers give information about the typeface used – or indeed seem to recognise that such an aesthetic consideration might actually help sell their products. I was therefore delighted to read this article which indicates that beautiful book covers are making a comeback. I also discovered that there is a website which celebrates the aesthetics of reading with the delightful name of bookporn.

Talking of books, when I looked recently at my ecological footprint, I forgot to factor in my use of Amazon books. A recent article paints a rather chilling picture of what it’s alike to work in one of their warehouses.

"Aha!" (or eureka) moments are an important but neglected part of life – when complexity and confusion momentarily clear and a strong ray of sunshine reveals a "truth”. I vividly remember that when I first read, in the 1970s, the section of Etzioni’s Social Problems which set out the stories which lay behind and sustained the individualistic, hierarchic and egalitarian perceptions and responses to social problems. The same happened in 1999 when I discovered Chris Hood's The Art of the State – rhetoric, culture and public management. This book uses Mary Douglas’grid-group theory to reduce the whole literature on admin reform to four basic schools. “Grid” denotes the degree to which our lives are circumscribed by rules – “group” indicates the extent to which we are governed by group choice. This gives a matrix of -
• Hierarchist (high on both)
• individualist (low on both)
• Egalitarian (high on group; low on grid)
• Fatalist (high on grid; low on group)

More interestingly, he then shows their typical policy responses, weaknesses and strengths. Sadly, neither the Etzioni nor Hood book is available on google – although this article by Hood demonstrates the use which can be made of the typology. The link I've given ábove for Mary Douglas is actually a very interesting piece in which she reflects on the origins of her theory - and how it developed. It's rare that one gets such an insight into a concept's origins and development from the author. Too often and too quickly concepts become reified.

I had another "aha!" moment when I found recently The case for clumsiness which, again, sets out the various stories which sustain the different positions people take us on various key policy issues – such as the environment. There is a good interview with the author here and a short summary here

Rediscovery of political economy

I have referred several times to the radical rethinking of the economics discipline and also of psychology and regretted that there was little sign of such reassessment of basic principles in the schools of management – let alone in those of public management which continue to regurgitate so many of the hoary myths of management from the surreal world of management writing.
In fact, I now realise, some people – in and around The World Bank of all places – have been engaged in some basic reappraisals of relevant literature for administrative reform efforts and producing some very readable documents. They are those associated with the World Bank’s recent Governance Reforms under real world conditions written around the central questions for my work as a consultant -
1. How do we build broad coalitions of influentials in favour of change? What do we do about powerful vested interests?
2. How do we help reformers transform indifferent, or even hostile, public opinion into support for reform objectives?
3. How do we instigate citizen demand for good governance and accountability to sustain governance reform?

I realise I keep repeating these questions (and the reference) but the questions are so rarely asked in practice let alone pursued seriously in transition countries - and the book is quite excellent. This morning, the WB drew my attention to three useful bits of training material to back up that work.
Interestingly, the displines they draw on are political economy and communications. Both are dear to my heart – the first being the neglected Scottish intellectual tradition which was (just) still alive in my university days - although this useful paper from the Asian development Bank on the subject credits the first use of the term to a 17th century Frenchman. This paper from the ODI gives examples of its use to ensure that development interventions are on a firm basis.

A new website offers an advance copy of an article on an overdue subject – corporate psychopaths and their role in the global crisis.

Pursuing ones passions

For some time, I’ve been fascinated that my most popular post by far is the one from a year ago entitled "adversarial and consensual systems” which has been viewed almost 600 times without any prompting on my part – 130 of these in the last month.
The post actually gives an account of what I would call the "catholicism" of my approach to life (I don’t understand how this word can also have this meaning of "breadth”) - and the number of times this led me into bipartisan activity which never went down well with my immediate political colleagues.

It’s actually highly ironic that, at age 26, I was elevated by my political colleagues to the post of Secretary of the Labour group on the municipality since my commitment (in both practice and writing) to community development challenged the whole edifice of political parties. Two years later I also took the post of Chairman of the recently established Social Work authority – which allowed me to pursue an agenda of what we now call inclusiveness at both a neighbourhood and town level. I suppose they gave me my head since the energy and openness I showed reflected well on a party which had become somewhat moribund.
I used the experience to found a Local Government Unit in the nearby College where I lectured; wrote papers; and organised workshops about the new promise of corporate management and community development. Quite a recipe! And it positioned me well when a large and powerful Region was created in 1974 covering half of Scotland.
By then, my work had made me an interesting and familiar figure to the councillors who made up the controlling Labour group on the new Region – and I was again selected to act as the Secretary, one of 4 leadership positions. Elections to that position were held every two years – and I managed to hold the post until my resignation 16 or so years later. Again I was given my head on matters of social inclusion (we called it multiple deprivation then) and brought a whole new set of community- and policy-based structures into existence – as well as starting the support for social enterprise (community business as we called it).
Those were the days in which national government largely left us alone in local government – and we were left to blaze trails. Local government since then has become very boring in the UK with municipalities press-ganged to serve the latest central government wheeze.

But the power base of the empires of Education, Roads etc was never threatened by all this activity. And I was too much the loner – working with allies in officialdom, community groups etc, writing papers for national journals rather than spending the necessary time in the smoke-filled rooms with indifferent or hostile colleagues who chaired these sorts of committess and were in cahoots with their Directors. A paper on my website summarises the 16-year experience of developing and managing these policies – and the lessons I found myself drawing in the early 1990s (thanks to a fellowship the Glasgow-based Urban Studies magazing gave me in 1996)

And then, one day in late October 1990, I found myself on the North Sea on a ferry to Copenhagen, beginning a completely new life as a technocratic adviser in central europe – supposed to be helping them build up government systems. It would be nice to say that the commitments and insights of my earlier life have informed my new life of the past 20 years – but this has rarely been the case. Although the early work in central europe was with local government systems, I steadily moved to national government issues – particularly relating to the establishment of a more meritocratic civil service. All the time I was learning as mch as advising – particularly about how other European countries operated (fortunately I had developed good European networks in the 1980s). My great success was in Azerbaijan of all places – in setting up a Civil Service Agency which is still going strong.
But the last 6 years have focussed on training systems and programmes. I don’t pretend to be an expert on this subject – but my background has given me the confidence to challenge some of the sloppy thinking I encounter in this field. Recent blogposts have tried to summarise these thoughts – and I am now trying to integrate these with a paper I wrote in 2008. The results I hope to put on the website soon.

So I have been a very lucky man – free (and paid) to pursue my passions. It’s one of the reasons I feel unable to offer advice to young people. Apart from the fact that these are much more difficult times, I just happened to be in (or manoeuvre myself into) the right place at the right time.

This blog has been a useful focus in the past 2 years for my thoughts and reading. But I have probably reached the point when I need to be more disciplined. One of the blogs I admire posts only every Wednesday – and this is perhaps a format I should be thinking of.

A Citizen's Bible?

I have to confess to some ennui – like my gout, an affliction of the privileged! Perhaps the absence of the edge the white wine brought to my pallet accounts for a certain reduction in zest. More likely, I have simply run out of „projects”. A daily blog no longer supplies the focus.

In March last year I suggested that, as both mainstream economics and psychology were undergoing major challenge, it was time that the scholastic discipline of public management had this sort of overhaul The only popular book on the subject I can think of was Reinventing Government (1991) by David Osbourne and Ted Gaebler – which did not, however, attempt an overview of the topic but was rather proselytise for neo-liberalism.
Economics and psychology, of course, are subjects dear to the heart of everyone – and economists and psychologists figures of both power and ridicule. Poor old public administration and its experts are hardly in the same league! But not only does noone listen to them – the scholars are embarrassed to be caught even writing for a bureaucratic or political audience.
And yet the last two decades have seen ministries and governments everywhere embark on major upheavals of administrative and policy systems – the very stuff of public administration. But the role of the scholars has (unlike the 2 other disciplines) been simply to observe, calibrate and comment. No theory has been developed by scholars equivalent to the power of the "market”, "competitive equilibrium” or "the unconscious” – unless, that is, you count Weber’s "rational-legal bureaucracy” or Robert Michels "iron law of oligarchy”. Somehow Lindblom's "disjointed incrementalism" never caught on as a public phrase!
Those behind the marketising prescriptions of New Public Management (NPM) were not from the public admin stable – but rather from Public Choice Economics and from the OECD – and the role of PA scholars has been map its rise and apparent fall and (occasionally) to deflate its pretensions. At its best, this type of commentary and analysis is very useful – few have surpassed Chris Hood’s masterly dissection of NPM 20 years ago. This set out for the first time the basic features of (and arguments for) the disparate elements which had characterised the apparently ad-hoc series of measures seen in the previous 15 years in the UK, New Zealand and Australia – and then suggests that the underlying values of NPM (what he calls the sigma value of efficiency) are simply one of three clusters of adminstrative values – the other two being concerned with rectitude (theta value) and resilience (lamda value). Table 2 of the paper sets this out in more detail.
The trick (as with life) is to get the appropriate balance between these three. Any attempt to favour one at the expense of the others (NPM) will lead inevitably to reaction and is therefore unstable.
This emphasis on the importance of balance was the focus of a very good (but neglected) paper which Henry Mintzberg published in 2000 (which I’ve mentioned before on the blog) about the Management of Government which starts with the assertion that it was not capitalism which won in 1989 but "the balanced model” ie a system in which there was some sort of balance between the power of commerce, the state and the citizen. Patently the balance has swung too far in the intervening 20 years!
Incidentally I see from Mintzbergs (rather disappointing) website that he is working on a book on this theme with the title Rebalancing Society; radical renewal beyond Smith and Marx. Mintzberg is a very sane voice in a mad world – ás is obvious from this article on managing quietly and his ten musings on management.
Hood elaborates on these three sets of values in the book he published at the same time with Michael Jackson - Administrative Argument (sadly out of print) - when he set out 99 (conflicting) proverbs used in organisational change.
In 2007, Russell Ackoff, the US strategic management guru, published a more folksy variant of this proverbs approach – The F Laws of management a short version of which can be read here. We desperately need this sort of approach applied to the "reformitis” which has afflicted bureaucrats and politicians in the past 20 years.

One of the few claims I feel able to make with confidence about myself is that I am well-read (see the (admittedly out-of-date annotated bibliography for change agents on my website). But I know of no book written for the concerned citizen which gives a realistic sense BOTH of the forces which constrain political action AND of the possibilities of creating a more decent society.
A book is needed which –
• Is written for the general public
* is not associated with discredited political parties (which, by definition, sell their souls)
• Sets out the thinking which has dominated government practices of the past 20 years; where it has come from; and what results it has had (already well done in academia see the Pal paper on the role of the OECD)
• Gives case studies – not of the academic sort but more fire in the belly stuff which comes, for example, from the pen of Kenneth Roy in the great crusading Emag he edits and eg the tale which should be shouted from the rooftops of the collusion of so many public figures with the activities of the cowboys who run privatised companies which are trying to muscle in on (and make profit from) public services.

Perhaps I should try to produce such a book? Various authors have already put in place some of the building blocks – eg Peter du Gay ("come back bureaucracy"); Chris Pollitt (in The Essential Public Manager); some of the work on public value by Mark Moore and others; even Geoff Mulgan's Good and Bad Power (which, sadly, I found impossible to finish.

Social Science as Sorcery

This is a period of my life when I try to sort out the sense and the nonsense from what I have absorbed from the social science literature which I first started to take seriously some 50 years ago. In those days, economics and the study of organisations were the focus of serious intellectual study – but by a tiny minority and in a highly rarified atmosphere. The 1960s was, however, when social science teaching started to expand in universities and make claims for itself which have only recently started to be questioned. A tiny minority of courageous academics did try to blow the whistle earlier - in particular Prof Stanislav Andreski in his magnificent 1972 book Social Science as Sorcery.
The Economics trade has been under increasing attack for about a decade – from behavioural economists and others – but its pretensions blown apart by the ongoing global crisis. But management thinking has, arguably, done equal damage to our societies and has escaped proper scrutiny - which is why I want to draw your attention to Chris Grey's A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organisations which I found myself this week reading for the third time in a short period (a first for me). Although I;ve mentioned the book before, this is the first time I have tried to capture some of the more powerful points it makes.
• "imagine a world where the thing which dominated it (God; the Party) was written about in one of three ways. One was like a bible, very heavy and dorthodox. The second was amusing and readable but didn’t tell you anything you couldn’t think for yourself. The third seemed to say some things you wouldn’t think yourself and suggested flaws in the Bible but you couldn’t understand it because it was so obscurely written. Such is the literature of organisations - in which we live our lives and yet are served by only Textbooks; pop management; and unreadable scholarly books or articles".
• Writers on organisations belong to one of two schools – those who believe "there exists an observable, objective organisational reality which exists independent of organisation theory. The task of OT is to uncover this reality and discover the laws by which it operates – and perhaps then to predict if not control future events. They tend to favour quantitative research. These are the positivists. Then there is a second camp which denies this scientific view – they might be called constructivists or relativists since, for them, organisational reality is constructed by people in organisations and by organisation theory”.
• The history of organisation theory you find in textbooks generally starts with the concept of "bureaucracy” as defined by Weber and with that of "scientific management” as set out by FW Taylor - both of whom were active in a 25 year period from the late 1880s to the end of the first world war, one as a (legal) academic in Prussia, the other as an engineer and early consultant in American steel mills in Pennsylvania.
• Weber was curious about the various motives there have been over history and societies for obedience. Why exactly have we accepted the authority of those with power? His answer gave us a typology of authority we still use today – "traditional", "charismatic" and what he called "rational-legal” which he saw developing in his time. A system of (fair) rules which made arbitrary (privileging) behaviour difficult. But this was an "ideal type” (ie a model) – not necessarily a precise description or prescription. Indeed studies from the mid 1950s showed just how much informal power there was in bureacracies.
• Taylor worked in an industry where it was normal for workers to organise their own work; and where owners tended to be Presbyterean and workers catholic immigrants. Taylor reckoned there was a lot of slacking going on – and applied a "scientific” approach to devise standards and measures of performance (time and motion) as well as "scientific” selection of workers and a strict separation of workers and managers.
• This caused strong reactions not only amongst workers but from many owners and only survived thanks to the production needs of the First World War
• The "evacuation of meaning” from work was intensified by Fordism.
• the "human resource” approach to management which followed was not the fundamental break which the textbooks portray but rather a cleverer legitimisation of management power – as was the cultural management (and TQM) of the latter part of the 20th century.
• Although managers call the shots, their organisational fashions always fail – because of unintended effects
• Business schools do not produce better managers – but rather give the breeed legitimisation; self-confidence; a shared world-view and a common (mystifying) language

One quote perhaps captures his argument "For all the talk about new paradigms, contemporary organisation theory and management method remain remarkably unchanged from their classical roots….because the underlying philosophy of instrumental rationality and control remains firmly in the ascendant”

In the 1970s we had people like Ivan Illich and Paolo Freire exposing the emptiness of the doctrines which sustained the power of education and health systems. We now desperately need people like this to help us tear apart the arbitrary assumptions which sustain the legitimacy of the new priests of technocracy. Daniel Dorling's recent book Injustice - why social inequality persists is exceptional because he tries to identify and then challenge the belief systems which sustain our present inequities.

There are hundreds of thousands of academics receiving public money to teach and research so-called social "sciences" in universities and public institutions. The vast majority of them, whether they realise it or not, have been part of a large brain-washing exercise. A few of them only have broken ranks - not just the economists I have mentioned but those (generally American) sociologists who, for a few years, have been advocating what they call "public sociologies". Michael Burrawoy has been one of the main protagonists. Noone, however, should be under any illusions about the difficulties of making an intellectual challenge on this field of management and organisation studies in which so many brains, reputations and careers are now entrenched

Living without the luxuries

Monday early saw me at the Military hospital again – this time to a floor so munificent it must have been designed for the Generals and Admirals! High uric acid was confirmed and I was referred to a specialist colleague who has put me on a diet for a few weeks which excludes alcohol and meat. What a torture to be in Bulgaria and denied access to its superb wines and rakias! Particulary after rediscovering the shop which supplies Karlovo wines straight from the barrel! And ironic that the post from a year ago reproduced the text from a gravestone which celebrated someone's skills in producing drink
Reminds me of the refrain in my favourite Romanian poem – "cut out the wine!”.
The post from the 21st is also worth looking at again - it traced the writing over the past 50 years which has tried (unsuccessfully it seems) to persuade us to live a simpler and more social life
The New Yorker has a good piece of background reporting on one of the key figures behind the Occupy Wall St movement.

And a UK Think Tank has issued a report on some of the elements of the "good society” which has become an important theme in one strand of social democratic re-thinking in Europe.

It’s nice to be able to report on one celebrity figure actually helping to create a more sustainable form of housing.

Finally, it's the time of the year when Vihra of the Astry Gallery here delights us with her 30by30 annual exhibition The sketch is an Ilyia Beshkov - very appropriate!

mainline medical experience

So many books and paintings accumulated in 7 months in Sofia - that moving flats (back to the warmer one I had 3 years ago) proved more strenuous than I had imagined. Perhaps that’s why my big toe decided to swell – and led to more contact with the medical systems here in Sofia. The local medical centre decided after only a brief conversation that this was not for them and directed me to the Military Hospital nearby. It must be one of the largest buildings in the city – only a couple of bus-stops from the new flat off Hristo Botev Bvd. A friendly receptionist and passerby had me at a doctor in a few minutes who decided I needed to see a dermatologist. It was 13.50 when I reached the relevant corridor – and became an early part of a queue which steadily built up over the next 45 minutes with no sign of life inside the door a notice on which told us that consultations started at 14.00. Eventually a couple of women arrived – and, after 10 minutes, started to take people. I was told that I needed to have a blood test and to return with the result at 14.00 next day. A note was duly written specifying the checks which were needed after which I asked about payment. I was told that the charge was 15 euros and that I would have to go the 18th floor to make the payment – if, that is, I wanted a receipt. As I didn’t, the payment was made on the spot. I have to wonder hpw many others do the same thing. It depends presumably on whether the cash is subsequently reimbursed. The doctor gave me her business card and indicated her mobile number.
The “army laboratory” was closed by the time I reached it. At 08.30 the next day, I therefore joined another queue which moved quickly and paid another 15 euros to a receptionist who duly typed up the specification. After a 5 minute wait, I was admitted to the surgery – and asked for the doctor’s name (which was clearly not on the note she had written). Any statistics will therefore show the amount of blood tests given – but will be unable to attribute the source of demand.

At 11.00 I returned, as requested, for the result; and at 14.00 presented myself at the doctor’s cabinet clutching said results. I was alone – and again no sign of life. Another friendly doctor checked and told me the doctor had left the hospital for the day - it transpired that her daughter was ill and she had forgotten about the appointment. I have to return at 08.30 Monday – although I was duly warned that the people I am dealing with are diagnosticians only and that I will need to be referred elsewhere for treatment.

This compartmentalization is what I find so difficult about the medical systems everywhere – in Scotland I had a MRI scan for my weak knees a few years back and all the guy could tell me was that I had no physical debility. No advice on other options to pursue. I have had to assume that it is arthritic. Not surprising that I have lost confidence in medics. Either they are generalists – or diagnosticians – who merely refer. Or specialists who are trained only to identify and deal with their own specialism. As the old truism has it – “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”! Apparently we owe this saying to Maslow – of self-actualisation fame

Not much time for thinking or reading about weightier matters – but a couple of posts which seem to me to go to the essence of the Euro crisis and also here.

The Western interventions of the past 15 years have seen a lot of political and academic rationalisations and protests; and few considered analyses. A recent, short book by a couple of people with very extensive personal experience promises to right the balance. It’s “Can Intervention Work?” A New York Times article had this to say about it -

Rory Stewart castigates the international community for its irrelevant data sets, flow charts and attempts to define “best practices.” He worries that “a culture of country experts has been replaced by a culture of consultants” who travel everywhere with jargon: “Lofty abstractions such as ‘ungoverned space,’ ‘the rule of law’ and ‘the legitimate monopoly on the use of violence’ are so difficult to apply to an Afghan village that it was almost impossible to know when they were failing.” At Harvard, where he directed a human rights center, Stewart struggled to convince his congenitally optimistic American students of his stark conclusion: “The international community necessarily lacked the knowledge, the power and the legitimacy to engage with politics at a local provincial level.” If we are to intervene at all, we must do so with modest expectations and a sure sense that “less is often more” and that “we had no moral obligation to do what we could not do.” In a companion essay, Stewart’s former Harvard colleague Gerald Knaus defends the West’s intervention in Bosnia while arguing for an ethic of “principled incrementalism.” While “there is encouraging evidence that limited missions in support of peace agreements and with sufficient resources can produce a good result,” he concludes, the prospects for “nation-building under fire” are much worse

.Finally two sets of wonderful paintings - by Scottish and Russian women of more than a century ago.

Alternative medicine, healing - or scam?

I want to recount a sad experience I had on Sunday here in Bulgaria - near Veliko Trnovo. Since a hill walk in the Kyrgyz mountains in 2006 I have had weak (and occasionally painful) knees. The Magnetic Resonance machine (in Glasgow) couldn’t identify any physical deterioration – and left me to conclude that my condition was arthritic. I was therefore easy prey when a friend suggested I try some foot reflexology from a Bulgarian who had returned home after a successful practice in Italy. He took me in 2009 or so for my first (painful) hour’s treatment. It didn’t make any difference – but I was persuaded it needed a course of treatment. After all, when (some 25 years ago) no physical therapist could deal with a previous knee pain I had, it was (apparently) sorted out in a short session by a guy who just massaged it – all the while dangling a pendant like a metronome.
And last Thursday started – after a 3 hour journey from Sofia - what I thought would be such a course. An hour’s session cost me 50 levs – which I considered reasonable since a massage would have cost me about 60 (although leaving me more invigorated). I returned on Sunday for the second session – which was only 30 minutes (I had been made to wait an hour and needed to be back in Sofia by 16.00) – and was shocked to be asked for 50 euros – effectively 4 times the previous week’s rate (double the price for less than half the time). I was told two things – first that they had made a mistake the previous week, charging me the rate for Bulgarians (foreigners were 50 euros – Romanians too???). And, second, that what counted was not the length of the session (it’s not massage!) but the effectiveness. But I had no pain when I arrived – so lack of immediate pain (apart from the bones he had pressed) was no measure. I would be happy to pay by results – but that was never on offer! The “healer” (for that is the term I have discovered they use on the website which is still under construction) just decided to stop my treatment in order to give someone else treatment who was also in a hurry.
I confess I was a bit annoyed by the guy’s abruptness – and lack of interest in the information I tried to convey to him about a skin condition I have - and the small wooden roller he used was duly beginning to tear my skin
I had noticed some time ago that the Bulgarians have a great belief in spiritual energy - which does leave them vulnerable to people we northerners would regard as quacks. And last october the Bulgarian authorities were threatening to tighten up on "healers".

Coda
A Bulgarian reader who has received and seen Mitio's treatment has been in touch to argue Mitio's corner. He draws attention to the many people who have clearly benefited from the treatment. I am sure that his treatment has helped many people and admit that part of my concern is the language of "healing" since this, for me, is getting close to calling oneself a "miracle-worker" which my world-view has difficulty accepting. I readily accept that there are a lot of things man does not and probably never will explain with current methodologies. But would be more comfortable with the term "therapist" - and if he showed some humility about other (complementary) approaches. Clearly, for example, what one eats (and drinks) does affect one's body. Man ist was man isst! For example, a coupleof days later, I had a painful swelling in a big toe - and the blood test at the hosptital identified high uric acid. They immediately put me on a diet of no meat or wine (and lots of water) for 4 weeks - after which we will test again. And my body seem to appreciate the new diet!
And it is certainly a problem for me that (a) I don't know what technique he is using (is it reflexology?) and (b) that I don't get any feedback. I can share his view of the medical profession - but he equally needs to accept that people need information and feedback; and that his treatment may not necessarily be appropriate in all cases.
.

What would Google Do?

In fact, What Would Google Do? proved to be an engrossing and thought-provoking read – although the early stuff about turning customer complaints on their head (as it were) and using them as an intelligence tool to help improve design and/or maintenance is the stuff of common sense which I used forty years ago when I was a young politician trying to reshape municipal services. Except that, now, Blogs, Twitter and Facebook clearly give “the crowd” (that’s us) much more power – and not only negative (complaint) but positive – “your customers are your ad agency”. Later in the book, indeed, he explores the likelihood that various “middlemen” organizations such as advertising agencies may indeed become redundant. One review put it well

The principles he unearths from close observation of Google’s practices range from the obvious, like the importance of enabling customers to collaborate with you, to the apparently mystical mantra “focus on the user and all else will follow”.
In the second part of the book Jarvis offers ideas and suggestions for how various industry sectors can become more “Googley”, and although many of the proposals are more imaginative and speculative than realisable, by the end you get a real sense of the transformative power of applying the principles he has outlined. The core assumptions of transparency, connectedness and openness really do make a difference, and business models in the media, the car industry, venture capital and even the benighted banking sector would be transformed if they were taken seriously.
Sitting at the core is the desire to do more with data, to take the details of our daily lives, aggregate them with the information that companies inevitably gather and then – and this is the Googley bit – give us access so we can make our own choices eg a restaurant that open sources its menu and lets customers rate the wines as well as the service, Jarvis’s goal is to help us all to think differently.
It doesn’t always work, and the attempt to contrast Al Gore’s approach to solving the problems of global warming through regulation and control with that of Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who want to invest in finding ways to reduce the cost of renewable energy, ends up as an unconvincing paean to the free-market worldview that now seems rather dated in the midst of a banking-induced recession. But the overall tone is of infectious optimism in the power of innovation that is remarkably convincing.

I wasn’t quite so convinced. At one stage I started to wonder about the profile of these energetic and restless complainers who rush to put their experiences online and use comparative data to make their purchase decisions. It sounds suspiciously much like an idealisation of the rational (wo)man which is the basis of the economics doctrine which has just been blown away and is being replaced by behavioural economics. However, his section on the future of the book is provocative –

books are frozen in time without the means to be updated or corrected, except via new editions. They aren’t searchable in print. They create a one-way relationship. They tend not to teach authors. They cannot link directly to related knowledge, debate and sources as the internet can. They are expensive to produce. They depend on shelf space. They kill trees. There are only a few winners (20%) and the rest are losers.

Except that browsing a remaindered book section is an exercise in discovery. As the first review puts it -

deep down this is not really a book about Google as much as an extended meditation on the benefits of innovation, openness and the imaginative use of new technologies of networking and information processing. Jarvis uses Google’s undoubted success and continued development as a fulcrum for his rhetorical lever, attempting to move corporations, governments, educational institutions and the medical establishment away from their settled practices and into a space where innovation can flourish and where creative destruction leads to progress.

A critical review is here. The author uses his website to compose his books and there is an interesting assessment of some of the reviews of his latest here.
Two years ago I blogged about the Zhukoff book Support Capitalism which has a more measured (if more inaccessible) assessment

An opportunity to catch up

I will probably be out of access to the internet for the next few days – so please take the opportunity to check back on recent posts – most of which have dealt with the role of training public officials in countries emerging from autocratic rule. Or check the posts from exactly a year ago – for example the one for 10 November 2010 had a section which suggested we allow the wrong sort of people to be honoured and celebrated -

the first twenty years of my life, I focussed on the political – the "what”.

The last 20 years the focus has been on the "how”- on reforming the machinery of government. I’m still interested in the latter but, as the masthead quotation from JR Saul indicates, I think the value of technocrats is overrated and the role of citizens and the maligned politicians has to be asserted. And one of the things wrong with a lot of the reform writing is that it is too abstract. Change is a question of individuals – and we need more of the naming and shaming approach which I used myself for the first time a year ago when I picked out a State Secretary and analysed his (outdated) declaration of interest form which appeared on the Ministry website.

We also need to celebrate more those who are trying to make a positive mark on life – and, as I noted on a recent friend obituary, while they are still alive. One of the reasons I enjoyed Paul Kingsnorth’s book One No; many Yeses on the protests against the iniquities inflicted on the world by multi-national corporations is that it focused on the individuals in different parts of the world who are risking their lives and livelihoods to protest against the destruction being wrought by people running these organisations.

Business has been using the journal “portrait” for a long time to glorify their class – and most management books are little else than hero creation and worship. Only women like Rosabeth Kantor (with her marvellously mocking ten-rules-for-stifling-innovation and Shoshana Zuboff, it seems, are capable of resisting this inclination of business writers! But you don’t find such positive write-up of reformers – presumably because media ownership is so neo-liberal. And the publications of the reform movement tend to concentrate on ideas.
For example, I’ve wanted for some time to say something about one of the people I admire most – a Slovak friend of mine who, as Director of a training centre run on cooperative lines in a village, has utterly transformed an old palace, building up not only the facilities it offers (and the labour force) but commissioning local artists to create glorious murals to remind us of the place’s historical heritage and holding vernissages with painters from central europe, the Balkans, Central Asia etc. Walk into his huge office and he is almost lost amongst the books and paintings which are piled up around his desk. And his house is like a (living) museum – from all the artefacts he has brought back from his vacations throughout the world. He is such a lovely, modest man and I always feel a taste of heaven when I visit him at the Mojmirovce Kastiel.

I was stumped a few months back when I was asked who were the people I admired? Apart from a few inspirational friends such as my Slovak friend, the people I admire are those who have a combination of vision, social justice and communication for example Peter Drucker; Leopold Kohr; George Orwell; JK Galbraith; Ivan Illich; C Wright Mills; Ernst Schumacher. They’re all dead!

And the November 12 post poses four basic questions which are always worth posing and exploring.
So have a good rummage while I'm away......there is some good stuff there....

Leaders of change

New readers should note that this blog is a great resource for those concerned about the apparent collapse of key elements of our core systems – and what we should be doing about it. My blogs rarely comment on the trivia which passes for News these days (although I couldn’t resist the recent grilling of Rupert Murdoch by a UK House of Commons Committee) and try to strike a reasonable tone. They alternate between the professional and political aspects of improving governance (particularly in "transition countries" – a combination which gives these posts a distinctive slant. Most of my posts give direct links to papers which give hard evidence of my points. A bit like Google Scholar, I try to stand on the shoulders of giants. Indeed one of the reasons I keep blogging is that I find it is a great way of organising my reading. Anything which impresses me gets worked in; without the blog I would be wasting time trying to find a paper which I knew said something important. Now all I have to do is punch a keyword into the search engine on the site – and hey presto! The blogs are therefore (I hope) more like perennial flowers which can be enjoyed even if a couple of years old. And I am pleased to see that some of my readers do that without being urged.
Exactly a year ago I had a lament on impotence of democratic politicswhich shows you what I mean.

From October 28, I devoted a series of posts to the issue of the role of training in improving the performance of state bodies in ex-communist countries. I was pretty critical – particularly of the EC funding strategy.
The second post in the series summarised my critique and suggested three paths which those in charge of such training in these countries needed to take to make an impact -

1. to signal that the development of state capacity needs to be taken more seriously – by officials, politicians and academics – and to give practical examples of what this means
2. to try to shine some light on the role of training in individual learning and organisational development – to show both the potential of and limits on training and to have the courage to spell out the preconditions for training which actually helps improve the performance of state bodies
3. to encourage training institutes to cooperate more with change agents in the system - and with academia

Part V tried to put us in the shoes of a Director of the National Institute of training of public servants in these countries – facing incredible constraints - and to expand on these three points. Part VII switched the focus back to the funders and tried to reduce the critique to a few bullet points - "Wrong focus; wrong theory"; "context" and "leadership" and then went on to give an illustration of the sort of cooperation which might pay dividends for a Director of a Training Institute.
A final post backtracked a bit to ask what we actually know about the process of developing the administrative capacity which I had made the core of my argument.
It also noted that I should now explore why on earth anyone facing the sort of political and budgetary constraints which exist in the Balkan countries (widely defined) should ever wish to put her head over the parapet and "think big and reach out” as I had earlier suggested . So here goes……

I did make the point very strongly in the posts that each country has to make its own way – each context is very different and requires something which resonates with its key actors. Locals who bring foreign experience (like most think-tankers) are generally just trying to make a name for themselves as can be seen in this (otherwise interesting) book of case studies from the countries which were in the more direct influence of the Soviet Union.
But I am who I am am; my context (at least for the first 25 years of my working life) was the strong bureaucratic system of Scottish local government – which owned the vast proportion of the housing and transport system. I challenged this system – before Margaret Thatcher appeared on the scene – but from a new left and participative rather than privatising perspective.
And I had a lot of allies – first in men and women (more the latter) who worked in impossible circumstances of low income and insecurity – but who had the guts and energy to try to make a better lives for those around them. And, secondly, in a few officials who realised that if they did not use their position, skills and knowledge to try to make things better, then we would soon hit rock bottom. Mark Moore tried to legitimise the work of such committed officials in his 1995 Public Value book.

It is extraordinary people who make things change – sometimes, of course, for the worse. We have been brainwashed in the past 2 decades to believe that change was always for the better – the default option in the dreadful language. I linked yesterday to a Monbiot article which quoted from an important recent book identifying the psychotic element in so many corporate leaders – which has been a theme since Alaister Mant’s Leaders We Deserve. Malcolm Gladwell shows that even the recently deceased and highly regarded Steve Jobs had many elements of dysfunctionality in his pursuit of perfection.
And psychotic management seems to be in an even healthier state in ex-communist countries – although at least one book has tried to celebrate local heroes willing and able to make a difference.

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book The Tipping Point argued that the attainment of the "tipping point" (that transforms a phenomenon into an influential trend) usually requires the intervention of a number of influential types of people - not just a sinle "leader". On the path toward the tipping point, many trends are ushered into popularity by small groups of individuals that can be classified as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.
Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different realms and act as conduits between them, helping to engender connections, relationships, and “cross-fertilization” that otherwise might not have ever occurred.
Mavens are people who have a strong compulsion to help other consumers by helping them make informed decisions.
Salesmen are people whose unusual charisma allows them to be extremely persuasive in inducing others to take decisions and change their behaviour.
Hopefully my next post will be able to make proper use of all of these references!!

Management as religion

As you may perhaps have noticed, I’ve been experimenting with the title of the blog – in the belated realisation that "Balkan and Carpathian musings" may not be a phrase that people often punch into their search engine! "Better government" has the sort of technocratic note which is perhaps needed and does reflect some of the content. But what about the phrase I used yesterday - "in the public interest"? Another possible title could be "A Common Reader – since I do try to give references and excerpts from my extensive reading. On the other hand, I have always liked the metaphor of striving and exploring – indeed the designation on my new business card is "explorer and aesthete"(I actually wanted to put "epicurean" but desisted since it has contradictory meanings). My first little book (way back in the mid 1970s) was called "The Search for Democracy". Two titles of recent papers of mine reflect some of what I write about – "Just Words" and "Thoughts for Posterity" – but again have no resonance for those hitting the search engines. I need someone to explain to me the relative importance of (a) the name of the blog; (b) the title of the particular post; and (c) labels and keywords.
What frustrates me is that I have no real idea who the 40-50 people are who hit my various posts each day – nor whether they actually read the posts. Apart from the (rising) numbers each day, all I know is the location of the readers (in the past week the top 6 countries are, in descending order, Germany, Russia and central Asia, USA, South Korea, Bulgaria, Romania and UK). I don’t know how many of them actually return (eg there was a spike of 80 German page viewings last night).

Curious that I should buy at the weekend and start to read a book which announces (for the 4th or so time in my lifetime) the end of the power structures as we know them and the power which ordinary people now have – when the global demonstrations against finance capitalism demonstrate the scale of political impotence people all over the world feel. The book is one I had been recommended - What would Google Do? and I have discovered that it can be read for free in its entirety here.
It was first published in 2009 and, as far as I can understand, tries to demonstrate that the google way of doing business is the way of the future – for the public as well as the private sector – giving us all new power (though networks etc). You will get a good sense of it from this review.
From what I have read so far, I do not expect to have my sense of corporate power shattered – although I do hope to learn a bit more about how Google and internet companies operate.

But the book seems to me another example of how we seem to have lost our social memory.
I remember reading, in the early 1970s, books by prominent management theorists (such as Warren Bennis) and others (such as Toffler – Future Shock) which promised the end of bureaucracy.

The early 1990s saw breathless books (by people such as Tom Peters) which promised the same. Forty years on, what do we have – stronger bureaucracy (now called contracting, procurement and regulatory bodies) than ever - and more autocratic and pyschotic leadership and management!
And I find it significant that – as far as Google Scholar goes – Warren Bennis hardly existed.

For me, it is very strange how difficult it is to get hold of serious books which critique the whole management religion. I know that a lot of sociologists have in fact conducted such critiques but two factors make it difficult for the interested citizen (another possible title for my blog??) to access this stream of work. First the language in which (and the narrow audience for which) they write - in expensive, specialist academic journals.
And, secondly, the control exerted by (large) publishing companies who have a very special interest in NOT demystifying management since they make so much money from management books – whether textbooks or airport lounge pickups.
 All credit therefore to Sage Publications for giving Chris Grey the opportunity to publish A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organisations (2009 2nd edition) which, for me, contains more incendiary material than Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Al-Quada rolled together. It is written by an academic who can actually write clearly - and who sees it as his job to interpret for us the significant parts of academic work.