Good advice

"I always pass on good advice", Oscar Wilde has a character say - Ït's the only thing to do with it".
The use of consultants by British Governments over the past 15 or so years had become an increasing scandal – with annual spending running at well over a billion pounds. One positive result of the austerity measures, however, is a significant scaling back. But the big consultancies have become hooked on the connection and the money – and can’t kick the habit. So now they are offering to do the work for free! At least one of them - KPMG - has offered to work for a year on what it calls a charitable basis!
Three factors contributed to New Labour fascination with such external “advice”. First the employment of quite a few leading Labour MPs by the Big Consultancies in the 1990s when Labour was in opposition; then the natural suspicion a new Government has of the civil servants who had (by 1997) faithfully served another party for 13 years. And, finally, the social engineering tendencies of even New Labourites and the 1999 modernisation programme they pursued. For some reason The National Audit Office (NAO) – which is supposed to be the nation’s financial watchdog – started to look at the issue of consultant use only in 2005 – but has, since then, issued various reports exposing the bad practice and issuing both recommendations, guidelines and the inevitable “toolkits”.
Their most recent report( issued in October for the new government) gives a useful overview of issues - and one of the annexes to the significant 2007 report is a helpful set of guidelines on increasing the commitment of clients and consultants during the projects.

Technically I have been a consultant for the past 20 years – but hate the term. I was about to say they are parasites (they are) but have just thought of an even better definition which I’ve now placed in my glossary – “a con-man who operates like a sultan”. Not only are the two separate words retained in the definition – but the Sultanic parallel covers both the rewards and airs of consultants and the way they expect the client to jump to their orders in data-collection etc.
Of course, the consultancy work I do in programmes of “Technical Assistance” in transition countries is of a different nature than that in Western Europe. And the giveaway is the use of terms – “beneficiary” rather than “client”. A client is assumed to be in control (although the NAO reports show how little British Ministries actually are in control!) – whereas a beneficiary is a passive recipient of a project he may neither want nor need! After all, he doesn’t pay for it (it’s a freebie) – and has played little part in drafting its specifications! Here is another example of a system needing a proper balance between its demand and supply sides - an issue which "donors" have recognised in recent years with their talk of demand-driven strategies (The OECD Development Assistance centre issues interesting papers from the donor network it supports - see, for example,a recent paper which summarises some approaches and draws out some lessons). For some people (not only William Easterley), however, the only way out of these dilemmas is to remove the donors and donations.
The amount of money spent on consultancy (by Governments on their own structures and by international bodies on Technical Assistance) surpasses 100 billion euros (accroding to a 2006 OECD report) and yet how little has been written about the whole industry - let alone by anyone in it! I'll try to track down some references for a future post. And given the number of consultants in the world, isn't it about time that novels and satires were written about this??

I woke up this morning in the middle of a dream about the process of deliberation (I kid you not) which set me thinking about the lack of systemic perspective in so much of the work we are asked to do to improve the deliberative capacity of governments in transition countries. I will develop this tomorrow.......

The balance of power

My blog managers have suddenly added a statistics button which tells me the number of people accessing the site. Quite salutary to learn that the most popular entry was one in which I said absolutely nothing – merely gave a link to the Ideas Festival!! What was that about? And do I have to conclude that “least said best said”? Probably – since I have also noticed that it tends to be the shorter Amazon book reviews which are rated most highly. Talking of which, I am still not able to use my Amazon site – perhaps one of my readers can help me? Amazon certainly can’t – they gave me some obtuse advice about my cookies. I started to look in the oven – but did eventually manage to find a cookie-editing facility on the laptop and adjust it but it made no difference.
During the cold war, the phrase “balance of power” became unfashionable in liberal circles - and remains so. I never succumbed to that liberal fallacy. I had meant to devote my last post of 2010 to the principle of the golden mean – since I’ve been reminded a couple of times recently about the importance of “balance” in development. First was some work I was doing for a project bid. I had to draft something about building up the training system for civil servants and I remembered some consolidated thoughts on this issue I had drafted a couple of years ago – building on what I had learned from three years setting up a training centre for civil servants in Uzbekistan; 2 years’ work with Kyrgyz municipalities; and a year developing training in Bulgaria to help “the implementation of European norms” (to use the dreadful jargon. Most technical assistance works on the supply side – training trainers and helping establish training institutions. However useful this is, the main factor which will ensure training effectiveness is a clear demand from the organisation in which the “trainees’ work. A Polish friend and colleague on the latter project (Jacek) helped me understand the relevance of “learning outcomes” - and another friend and colleague (Daryoush) and I had developed a diagram which showed that effective training required input from 4 different groups – client, training manager, instructor and learner. Very slowly in the west, power has shifted from the suppliers to the consumers – but the best system is one in which there is a balance of power.
Then there was the thought-provoking start to Henry Mintzberg’s 2000 article on the management of government
“It was not capitalism which triumphed when the Berlin wall fell – it was balance.” the article began – going on to set the “strong private sector, strong public sector and strength in the sectors between” against the lack of balance and of “countervailing power” in the so-called communist societies.
A recent paper from the Compass Think-Tank Time for a new socialism made the point that thinking about the best point of balance between the various sectors shifts cyclically.

Historians like Arthur Schlesinger and theorists like Albert Hirschman have recorded that every thirty years or so, society shifts - essentially, from the public to the private and back again. The grass, after a while, always feels greener on the other side. The late 1940s to the late 1970s was a period of the public, the late ‘70s to now, the private. Now the conditions are right for another turn, to a new common life and the security and freedom it affords, but only if we make it happen by tackling a market that is too free and a state that is too remote.

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”!