Why academia is irrelevant

The snow has at last reached Bucharest – although it’s fairly wet. We walked yesterday to Strada Doamnei (just off Piate Universitate) which has 3-4 second-hand bookshops but got no further than the first which has a uniform price (7 euros) for its entire stock – most of which are large expensive (and heavy!) glossies in English. We staggered out with 9 real bargains – including a superbly crafted and illustrated account of an art dealer’s life (focussing on his trading with van Goghs and Cezannes); a large and well-illustrated book on Antique Prices; and one on Chinese Art.
The American Association of Political Science has just held its Annual Conference – and a fascinating summary is available here Nothing could confirm more strongly my allegations against the pointlessness if not damage the discipline of political science has done to the study of politics. The article also put me on to a great website of an academic, inspired by C Wright Mills, who is trying to make his work relevant to public concerns and who uses the concept of public sociology for this purpose.
I had no sooner finished reading that than I came across an article in the latest issue of New York Review of Books on the role performance indicators play in making academic writing so irrelevant.

Some of the most telling testimony on the damage to British scholarship inflicted by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) carried our every 7 years has come not from an academic but from Richard Baggaley, the European publishing director of Princeton University Press, and an acute observer of the quality of British scholarly output.
Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement in May 2007, Baggaley deplored what he saw as “a trend towards short-termism and narrowness of focus in British academe.” In the natural and social sciences this took the form of “intense individual and team pressure to publish journal articles,” with the writing of books strongly discouraged, and especially the writing of what he calls “big idea books” that may define their disciplines. Baggaley attributes this bias against books directly to the distorting effects of the RAE. Journal articles are congenial to the RAE because they can be safely completed and peer-reviewed in good time for the RAE deadline. If they are in a prestigious journal, that is the kind of peer approval that will impress the RAE panelists.
The pressure to be published in the top journals, Baggaley wrote, also „increases a tendency to play to what the journal likes, to not threaten the status quo in the discipline, to be risk-averse and less innovative, to concentrate on small incremental steps and to avoid big-picture interdisciplinary work.
„In the humanities the RAE bias also works in favor of the 180–200-page monograph, hyperspecialized, cautious and incremental in its findings, with few prospects for sale as a bound book but again with a good chance of being completed and peer-reviewed in time for the RAE deadline. A bookseller at Blackwell’s, the leading Oxford bookstore, told me that he dreaded the influx of such books as the RAE deadline approached”.
A further set of practices, above and beyond the RAE, that push British academics toward “short-termism and narrowness of focus” in their research are the reporting and auditing burdens imposed on them by its sister bureaucracies such as the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) and by the administrators of the academics’ own university. This is the “pressure for internal and external accountability” to which the Universities UK refers in its report, and is known collectively as the “audit culture.” The audit culture requires academics to squander vast amounts of time and energy producing lengthy and pointless reports, drenched in the jargon of management consultancy, showing how their chosen “processes” for the organization of teaching, research, and the running of academic departments conform to managerial “best practice” as laid down by HEFCE, the QAA, or the university administration itself. Words like “quality” and “excellence” have become increasingly empty. For the handful of British universities that are world-class—Oxford, Cambridge, and the various components of the University of London foremost among them—the HEFCE system is especially dangerous, because the reputation of these universities really does depend on their ability to do first-rate research, which is most threatened by HEFCE’s crass managerialism. In Britain there are scholars who will continue to produce exceptional work despite HEFCE and the RAE. But by treating the universities as if they were the research division of Great Britain Inc., the UK government and HEFCE have relegated the scholar to the lower echelons of a corporate hierarchy, surrounding him or her with hoards of managerial busybodies bristling with benchmarks, incentives, and penalties.I need to emphasise that I'm not an academic but simply someone who was exposed in the 1960s to social science writing - and had high hopes of its potential contribution to social improvement efforts. Not only has this not happened - but those in academia have given us a double whammy of obfuscation and Candide-like justification of the status-quo.

Gerry Stoker said it was important for the discipline to grapple with the criticism that it has become irrelevant, but he also said that there were "tricky issues" that made it difficult for scholars to become more relevant without sacrificing key values. "Truth and evidence and reasoning are not in the forefront of political decision making," he said, and yet political scientists revere those things. In the political sphere, "we are competing with ideology, pragmatism, interests," he said. And Stoker also said that the discipline doesn't reward relevance. A young scholar is more likely to be promoted for "the novelty of methodological contribution" than for "research that actually has an impact."
A Swedish colleague Bo Rothstein was even tougher - he described his experiences teaching at Harvard University, where he was tremendously impressed with the 20 seniors in his seminar on comparative politics. One day he asked how many were planning to go to graduate school in political science and was "stunned" to find out that the students -- many of them idealistic about changing the world -- had to a person ruled that out in favor of law school. Their view was that "to be relevant, you have to have a law degree."
In Sweden, Rothstein said, this would be viewed as a terrible thing. "No such persons" like those Harvard seniors he taught "would dream of going to law school," which they would see as "boring and technical." But while American universities tell those who want to change the world to go to law school, they attract other kinds of students to grad school. "I was not at all impressed by the graduate students" at Harvard, he said. "They wanted to stay away from anything relevant."
Political scientists are too focused on developing theories about government, ignoring the huge impact -- a life-and-death impact, he noted -- that government has. Tens of thousands of people die each year because they can't get safe water or health care from corrupt governments, but political scientists prefer to theorize about the governments rather than thinking about how to change them with the goal of getting them to provide their people with water and health care.
As an example, Rothstein cited a session he attended on "clientelism" in Africa, a form of corruption that is widespread and damaging. Rothstein said he asked the presenters about comparisons to countries that have moved past clientelism, and that they had no answers. "The discipline is organized" such that African area studies scholars will simply compare various forms of the practice and "never ask how you can get out of clientelism," since that would require looking outside their region and focusing on solutions, he said. "The discipline is organized to avoid interesting comparisons of issues," rather than "on actual people."

Good resolutions

The good weather continues. Christmas was passed in the quiet and isolated way which I find the only way to deal with it in Europe. Food was burnished walnuts, the glorious Recas Riesling-Pinot Gris wine whose praises I have already sung; and green bean and smoked sausage stew. Only today did we have the more normal Sarma (sour cabbage boiled in mince with dill).
This is the time of the year when thoughts turn to Good Resolutions for the coming year. However corny some of it may sound, I still recommend the 40 tips I came across in late 2009.
And please have a look at the updated version of Just Words?. This now has more than 100 words; a more explicitly radical agenda; a more extended bibliography; and a recognition of the role of poetry, caricature and novels.

a missing social democratic vision

The mild weather continues. David Marquand – whose stuff is always worth reading – had a piece in Open Democracy the other day, emphasising that the Labour rethink under its new leader, Ed Miliband, needs to be deeper than so far evident. From his Scottish base, Gerry Hassan agrees and reminds us that, neither under Labour nor the nationalists, has Scotland bought into the neo-liberalism. However, as he has argued on previous occasions, these is no sensible vision being articulated there to deal with the continuing grip of neo-liberalism. Germany has managed to retain an industrial base; still has its commitment to indigeous industry and a financial system which supports that; and is weathering the present financial crisis well. I would be curious to know what the SDP and leftist vision is there.
In the meantime, I would urge everyone (but particularly those still convinced that private sector management and models have anything to offer the public sector) to have a read of a 2000 article on the management of government by the management guru Henry Mintzberg. In this he argues that it was not capitalism which won in 1989 - it was "balance" ie a system in which all three sectors were strong. The push to privatise everything will, he asserted, lead to the same disease of communist societies. His discussion is particularly helpful for the distinctions he draws - first the 4 different roles of customer, client, citizen and subject. Secondly the 4 types of organisations - privately owned, state-owned, non-owned and cooperative.
Then four models/metaphors of state management - government as machine, network, performance control and normative. In between he explodes the 3 basic management myths.

David Marquand's attack runs deep -

At stake now are the future of our public culture and, on a deeper level, of our civilisation. In the last few weeks we have seen four significant steps towards an insidious barbarism: the Health White Paper promising yet more marketisation in health care; the the proposal to hold elections for police commissioners; the decision to withdraw state funding for undergraduate teaching in the humanities and social sciences, and to create a market in higher education; and Michael Gove’s plans to flood the education system with academies and ‘free schools’, and in doing so to emasculate local government’s role in education.

None of these is earth-shattering on its own. Cumulatively they represent a profoundly destructive attack on the public domain of citizenship, service, equity and professionalism, which is fundamental to any civilised society. The whole point of electing police commissioners is to subordinate professional judgement to populist pressures – inevitably fanned by vicious media storms. The health reforms are designed to turn doctors into market traders, to open up the health-care system to profit seeking private providers and to turn patients into customers. Universities will become even more like private firms, complete with grotesquely overpaid chief executives, than they are already. Increasingly, they will stand or fall by their ability to compete for custom in a market-place dominated by a crass instrumentalism. Most academics will try try to hold firm to the values of disinterested enquiry, democratic public reasoning, humane learning and intellectual excellence, but the pressures of the market-place will be against them. And if Michael Gove achieves what he has set out to do, local government – already far feebler in this country than in the US or most of the rest of the EU – will become an institutional ghost. The barbarians are no longer at the gates. They are well inside them.

But the gates were stormed long ago. The Coalition is following where New Labour led – just as New Labour followed where Thatcher led. And, like New Labour and Thatcher, it is doing so, not because its members are wicked people, but because it is hard to do anything else in a culture from which the language of the public good and civic duty has been banished. The Labour movement can and should play a part in rescuing that language, but it can’t do so by itself. Labour people must reach out to other traditions – including some on what used to be called the ‘right’ – and learn from the wisdom of thinkers like Edmund Burke and Isaiah Berlin as well as from socialists like William Morris and social democrats like Tawney.

Draft Sceptic's Glossary

Incredibly warm for this time of the year here – 11C and a cloudless sky. 15 years or so ago the snow smothered the cars here. Strange that it is now the UK which is freezing! Is this the warming of the Gulf Stream?

Remember the little contest for the 50 books to form your library? The guy who set it has now given us his list.
I’m happy to report that you can now access the results of my last week’s musings on words at the latest paper Just Words? on my website . It is still very much at draft stage - but now able and needing to get feedback. So please read and tell me what you think.
I knew that there was an element of mere play in what I was doing with my definitions – for example suggesting that the word “capacity” so beloved of consultants could be interpreted simply as “something other people lack”! But – as many people have argued – play can liberate some powerful thoughts! And something very powerful has been driving this latest venture forward – at one stage I lost control of the process and began (very correctly) to question what I was trying to do. Was this just an exercise in superficial cynicism? Or was it a more profound exercise in scepticism?
Yesterday I suddenly remembered that I had a copy on my shelves here (as distinct from my real library at Sirnea) of A Doubter’s Companion – a dictionary of aggressive common sense produced in 1994 by the genius who wrote Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorshop of reason in the west, one of the really profound critiques of soi-disant expertise.

It’s a French edition I had picked up at a second-hand sale in Brussels and is not quite in the style I am trying to create for my glossary but it did remind me of the

 “humanist tradition of using alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon against idée recues (Flaubert actually issued a Dictionnaire des Idees recues in 1880) and the pretensions of power”. 

Saul contrasts this approach with that

“of the rationalists to the dictionary for whom it is a repository of truths and a tool to control communications”. 

This crystallised my thinking! Which is why I gave the draft its subtletly and ambiguous title – Just words? “Just” means both “merely” and “fair”!! And the subtitle “reclaiming the language” has, for me shades of the Greenock poet WS Graham.

Three powerful forces have created verbal gymnastics which need to be exposed –
- first the need of governments to avoid admission of failure – better to imply a new condition had arisen by inventing a new phrase!
- the professional interests which surround each new definition.
- The last decade or so has seen a third force - governments have fallen even further into the hands of spin doctors and corporate interests and a powerful new verbal smokescreen has arisen to try to conceal this.

Time of year

I don’t normally like this time of year. It is, bluntly, when I am at risk (if in Christendom) of dipping (like a lot of others) into the depression zone – so much emphasis on families (difficult when you have made a mess of that), bright lights and selling. Twenty years ago I could put some of this down to the darkness (in north Europe they invented a useful term - sensory affective disorder (S.A.D. to explain how dreich some of us felt) And, certainly for most of the past 20 years, the exotic locations in which I have often passed this time of year have kept my spirits high – particularly when there were no celebrations taking place (Central Asia). But a small flat in Bucharest can get a bit claustrophobic – and some downs have been experienced during this artificial season. But not now that I am in semi-retirement; financially secure (absent bank meltdowns); and pursuing my own intellectual agenda, I can better enjoy the excuse the period offers to be in relaxed mode. This afternoon a visit to the Carteresti bookshop netted a wonderful new book on the Wooden Churches of Northern Olteniei; and JM Coetze’s Inner Workings – literary essay 200-2006. The latter has quite a few reviews of central European writers of the first part of the 20th century – and confirmed my fascination for this general part of the world – what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In the past couple of days my glossary (including introduction) is now 10 pages – and boasts the title Just Words? Reclaiming the language of social purpose. At the moment I am wrestling with post-modernism. I suppose if post-modernists have done anything, they have made us more aware of language. After all, they spend their time deconstructing texts! And they have been active in the field of public administration – Postmodern Public Administration (2007), is one taken at random. The trouble is that they play so many word games amongst themselves that what they produce is generally incomprehensible to the outsider. Despite their critiques and claims, therefore, I do not consider them helpful companions.
Before the post-modernists came along, M Edelman’s book The Symbolic Use of Politics was published in 1964 but then ignored – not least by myself. I have never found Chomsky an easy companion – but clearly books like his Language and politics (1988) are highly relevant to this theme. One of the most insightful texts for me, however, is Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisation - a fascinating treatment of the writing about organisations which demonstrates that many of our ideas about them are metaphorical : he suggests the literature uses eight "images" viz organisations as "political systems", as "instruments of domination", as "cultures", as "machines", as "organisms", as "brains", as "psychic prisons", as "flux and transformation" and as "instruments of domination".

Bucharest antique fair

An antique fair sets up on Parcu Kisselev most weekends – and I have always found it rather pathetic – full of shady characters. Sad – as I have spent so many happy hours browsing the stalls of the puces in places such as Berlin, Brussels, Glasgow and Zurich. As it was such a lovely day today – and I knew the Xmas stalls would also be up – we went out and hit gold. First a large snow mountain painting with a superb old frame - bought apparently in a Puces in Aachen (signed R Sagner. We got it for 100 euros (frame alone worth that); then a heavy cast-iron bell for the Sirnea door with a colourful Wallony type cock (25 euros); and, finally, a very large cast-iron frog (30 euros) - which will keep the stone duck company we picked up in a fantastic open-air stone carver's gallery on the border between Drama (Greece) and Bulgaria! Between times, we hit the normal Bucharest selling technique – when I was criticised for not spotting the 2 supposedly original sketches contained in a Steriadi Catalogue. “It takes some brain to learn to identify such things”, the gypsy guy apparently said ironically - as if we were not worthy to look at such precious things that only connaisseurs would appreciate. He wanted an incredible sum for the catalogue - about 400 euros! The aggressive, arrogant attitude we encountered several times in similar dives in Bucharest. Clearly apologies are due for disturbing such “cultural elites”!

Definitions

Snow has eventually come to Bucharest - and I crunched my way to the old market nearby, availing myself of the opportunity of a tasty warm vin fiert (Gluhwein)
Working on my Devil’s Dictionary is a very useful exercise in cutting through the verbal guff about subjects on which so much hot air has been expended. The management literature of the 1980s and 1990s gave people the sense that dramatic positive changes were going on in commerce – a movement from Theory X management to Theory Y at the very least. It all concealed the reality of a dog-eat-dog world. That’s why Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power was so welcome to me – a recognition (if somewhat overdone) that, generally, “plus ca change plus cést la meme chose”. A lot of my draft entries therefore suggest that the title should rather be “The Cynic’s Dictionary” – except that I do not see myself as a cynic. Here are a more draft entries -

Audit; a placebo to give the impression that all is well. Something both overdone and underdone – overdone in volume and underdone in results. A process more feared at the bottom than at the top as frequent recent scandals (auditors signed off on the accounts of Enron and those banks which subsequently almost collapsed). See also “Law”

Law; “the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them ensnare it, but large things break through and escape”. Solon

Communications; the first thing which people blame when things go wrong; parsed - “I communicate; you listen; he/they misunderstand”.

But drafting it has also challenged my own prejudices. I was preparing to draft a cynical entry for “open government”. "A contradiction in terms”, I confidently started. Then I realised it has been some time since I had checked what was happening under this rubric; ran a google search and came across an interesting European site on use of public sector information and what looks to be definitive overviews of the position of freedom of information in the US and in the UK.

The contrast between the two countries seems quite striking – with the many contributors to the American book being the grassroots practitioners actually using the incredible amount of data available about government activities in the US (which seems to have a proactive system) and suggesting that bureaucratic silos are being broken up more effectively by a demand-led process whereas the academics of the British book plot patiently the resistance of the state to the inquiries which come in the reactive, supply-led 2005 british system. But at least there is a blog which plots the progress And a recent independent report does show just how far Britain has to go,

The language of Deceit

Ambrose Bierce was an American journalist in the latter part of the 19th Century whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”.
Words and language are what distinguish us from animals – but commercial, bureaucratic, political and intellectual systems have powerful interests in keeping us passive and unquestioning and have developed a language for this purpose. One of the best attacks on this is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language”. Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.
The importance of demystifying complex language was continued by C Wright Mills in the 1950s and 1960s who once famously summarised a 250 pages book written in tortuous syntax by the sociologist Talcott Parsons in 12 pages! And a South American priest Ivan Illich widened the attack on the mystification of professionals with his various books which eloquently argued against the damage done to learning by formal schooling methods – and to health by doctors and hospitals.
In 1979 some British citizens became so incensed with the incomprehensible language of official documents, letters and forms that they set up a campaign called “The Plain English Campaign”. It was its activities in making annual awards for good and bad practice that shamed most organisations – public and private - into reshaping their external communications. Their website contains their short but very useful manual; a list of alternative words; and lists of all the organisations which have received their awards.

It is 50 years since I started to read the literature about government and its endeavours seriously – as a student of politics and economics just as the social sciences were flexing their muscles and popular management texts appearing (we forget that Peter Drucker invented the genre only in the 1950s). And I entered the portals of (local) government in 1968 – keen to identify what that growing literature might have to say about improving the practice and impact of government endeavours.

At first I was amused at the verbal pretensions – then angry. “Governance” was one of the first terms to attract my ire. Only recently have I realised how deliberate much of it is. As governments have fallen in the past few decades even further into the hands of spin doctors and corporate interests, a powerful new verbal smokescreen has been put in place to try to conceal this.

“Evidence-based policy-making” is typical – first the arrogant implication that no policy-making until that point had been based on evidence; and the invented phrase concealing the fact that policy is increasingly being crafted without evidence in order to meet corporate interests! Sadly, a once worthy venture – the European Union – has developed such powerful interests of its own that it too is part of this significant obfuscation with its use of such phrases as “subsidiarity”.
More than 10 years ago, I prepared a glossary for a small book which contained a few ironic definitions – and I managed to slip a few more into one of the EU-funded publications I left behind recently in Bulgaria (you can see it at pages 7-11 of key paper 22 on my website ).

While you’re there – have a look at “Democracy, Bernard? It must be stopped!” (number 17) which is written from the same concerns about the emptiness behind the rhetoric about democracy and government.

At the beginning of the year I referred to the management guru Russell Ackoff’s great collection of tongue-in-cheek laws of management – Management F-Laws – how organisations really work. As the blurb put it –“They're truths about organizations that we might wish to deny or ignore - simple and more reliable guides to managers' everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists and philosophers”. An added bonus is that British author, Sally Bibb, was asked to respond in the light of current organizational thinking. Hers is a voice from another generation, another gender and another continent. On every lefthand page is printed Ackoff and Addison's f-Law with their commentary. Opposite, you'll find Sally Bibb's reply. A short version (13 Sins of management) can be read here. A typical rule is - "The more important the problem a manager asks consultants for help on, the less useful and more costly their solutions are likely to be". And I have also mentioned a couple of times the spoof on the British Constituion prepared recently by Stuart Weir.
It is people like Ackoff, Jay, Orwell, Pierce, Voltaire and Weir who are the inspiration for the new revised Devil’s Dictionary I am now working on - of about 60 words and phrases which occur frequently in the discourse of government and big business and are used to mask the worsening of social and political conditions. One I crafted today was - Bottleneck; "what prevents an organisation from achieving its best performance – always located at the top"