Come back Corporatism - all is forgiven!

The events of the past few years have made millions of people angry with their political leaders and disillusioned with the political and economic systems in which they operate.

But for anything to happen, there have to be feasible and legitimate options capable of gaining the support of a significant number of people.

That’s quite a challenging set of preconditions – feasibility, legitimacy and support! A paper on my website tries to track the various analyses and reforms which have been offered in the past decade or so (excluding technical tinkering).

But nothing will happen without catalysts for that change – individuals who have an understanding of the social process of the transformation process and the skills and credibility to ease change into place. Noone buys blueprints (let alone manifestos) any more. And politicians in many countries have lost credibility. Process is all. So where are the catalysts who have that understanding and skill sets; and who cannot be fitted into the conventional political labels?

It was by accident that I pulled a book from my library yesterday which has been lying unread since I bought it years ago. It was Paul Hirst’s From Statism to Pluralism produced in 1997 from various papers he had written in the previous 5 years and arguing the case for “associational democracy” in both the public and private sectors. It has a powerful beginning –

The brutalities of actually existing socialism have fatally crippled the power of socialist ideas of any kind to motivate and inspire. The collapse of communism and the decline of wars between the major industrial states have removed the major justifications of social democracy for established elites – that it could prevent the worse evil of communism and that it could harness organized labour in the national war effort.

Those elites have not just turned against social democracy, but they almost seem to have convinced significant sections of the population that a regulated economy and comprehensive social welfare are either unattainable or undesirable

.He then goes on to argue that –
• more “associational” forms of democracy and wider decision-making would help re-balance the centralisation of the state and the dominance of big business. In this view ‘association’ means groups of people who have similar concerns, views, and aims.
• Associationalism (it has many similarities with mutualism) is the most neglected of the great 19th century doctrines of social organisation. It lost out to collectivism and individualism. But conditions have now changed dramatically and make it an appropriate principle of reform and renewal of Western societies.
• widely distributed methods of decision-making, (both within and between organisations and groups throughout society and the economy) would better enable effective, informed and appropriate action. It might reduce the need for complex top-down regulation, better distribute wealth and security, and offer a potential solution to mistrust and social disintegration within communities.

Sadly Hirst died in 2003 but I discovered yesterday that other people in Britain have recently been going back to his papers and books. Indeed a booklet was produced earlier this year on the discussions.

Clearly the renewed interest stems from the UK Prime Minister’s interest in what he calls the “Big Society” – of public services being managed by its workers (part of the mutualist approach) or by community and voluntary organizations (social enterprise). Although Cameron was talking about this before the global crisis, the concept is a bit suspect these days with such large cuts in public expenditure.

However, social enterprise has a long and honourable tradition and was one I was proud to work for in the 1980s. A recent article set out how the Hirst agenda and social enterprise fit However the elephant in the room is the Big Corporation – and here the limits of (if not the motives for) the Cameron agenda are perhaps most exposed.

And Hirst too does not say much about the economic side of things which Will Hutton was so eloquent about at the same time (stakeholder society) – beyond a few comments about the “industrial districts of Italy”.

Although Germany gets a brief passing remark or two, I find it astounding that the “corporatist” model of North Europe does not get proper treatment. Is that because “corporatism” got a bad name in Britain in the 1970s (it was blamed for the poor economic performance) – or because the Brits (and Americans) are so myopic about foreign activities?

 We should not underestimate the power of words and phrases – but I suspect the explanation is more the latter. I find it ironic that the Brits were very interested in the 1960s with what they could learn from France and other European countries about industrial policy - but that they have no such interest when part of the European Union!

Apart from the usual academic books about German politics, I know of only two general books on Germany in the English language – the idiosyncratic Germania by Simon Winder and Peter Watson’s doorstopper of a book German Genius – neither of which says anything about how Germany managed, in the post-war period period, to become such a politically and economically resilient country.

The only serious article I know about the country are the 60 pages in Perry Anderson’s The New Old World. I remember in the 1970s we had a huge book by John Ardagh which took us through all aspects of contemporary Germany. Now the books are shallow (and mocking) travelogues whcih say more about the Brits than the Germans.

However there is a recent academic paper which explores why a “coordinated market economy” was first chosen as the appropriate model for Germany; and why it might still be the most appropriate for Germany but for other EC countries.

Our catastrophic elites

In 1987 a book and a film appeared in America which seemed to signal a questioning of the greed culture which had received the imprint of approval from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The book was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities which ended with the come-uppance of one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the universe”. The film was Wall Street; Money never sleeps - starring Michael Dougals as Gordon Gekko whose signature line was "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
Alas, the reflective mood was momentary – indeed the broader effect seemed to have been to persuade other professions to get into the act. A decade later, a distinguished historian, Harold Perkin, published The Third Revolution - Professional Elites in the Modern World(1996). In previous books Perkin had studied the rise of professional society. In this one he looked at Twentieth Century elites in the USA, England, France, Germany, Russia and Japan - and finds their behaviour equally deficient and morally irresponsible -

What all six countries, except Germany, are found to have in common are greed and corruption, from the wholesale fraud, embezzlement, and bribery practised by Soviet apparatchiks , through the systematic bribery of Japanese politicians by the big corporations, and the apparently general corruption in French local government contracts, to the more 'legitimate' but dubiously ethical machinations of junk bond merchants in the U. S. or take-over conmen in Britain. This is attributed to the professional elites who are 'good servants but bad masters', and when they have power are liable to abuse it, exploit the masses, and line their own pockets. At this point one cannot help concluding that there is nothing new under the sun, that ruling elites or cliques have always been tempted to enrich themselves, and that corruption, even blatant and very large- scale corruption, is not an invention of professional society.

It is a book which should be given to each individual when (s)he makes it into their country's "Who's Who" and becomes part of the "system".
A few years earlier, a powerful but different critique of our elites had been launched by Christopher Lasch - The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. The book's title is a take-off on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a reactionary work published in 1930 that ascribed the crisis of Western culture to the "political domination of the masses." Ortega believed that the rise of the masses threatened democracy by undermining the ideals of civic virtue that characterized the old ruling elites. But in late twentieth-century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch -

The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts" — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life."
The privileged classes, which, according to Lasch's "expansive" definition, now make up roughly a fifth of the population, are heavily invested in the notion of social mobility. The new meritocracy has made professional advancement and the freedom to make money "the overriding goal of social policy." "The reign of specialized expertise," he writes, "is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the 'last, best hope of earth'". Citizenship is grounded not in equal access to economic competition but in shared participation in a common life and a common political dialogue. The aim is not to hold out the promise of escape from the "labouring classes," Lasch contends, but to ground the values and institutions of democracy in the inventiveness, industry, self-reliance, and self-respect of working people.
The decline of democratic discourse has come about largely at the hands of the elites, or "talking classes," as Lasch refers to them. Intelligent debate about common concerns has been almost entirely supplanted by ideological quarrels, sour dogma, and name-calling. The growing insularity of what passes for public discourse today has been exacerbated, he says, by the loss of "third places" — beyond the home and workplace — which foster the sort of free-wheeling and spontaneous conversation among citizens on which democracy thrives. Without the civic institutions — ranging from political parties to public parks and informal meeting places — that "promote general conversation across class lines," social classes increasingly "speak to themselves in a dialect of their own, inaccessible to outsiders."

Lasch proposes something else: a recovery of what he calls the “populist tradition,” and a fresh understanding of democracy, not as a set of procedural or institutional arrangements but as an ethos, one that the new elites have been doing their best to undermine.

It has to be said that neither book made much impact – perhaps they were just seen as “moralizing”. Contrast that with the impact made in 1958 by JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Has any recent book, I wonder, made the same impact? Perhaps the Spirit Level – why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) comes closest. I would therefore have to nominate them for the Social Europe award mentioned recently - although I personally think that Danny Dorling's 2010 Injustice - why social inequality persists is a more powerful book since it doesn't just itemise the inequalities but identifies and explodes the various rationalisations which sustain them.

Triumph of the political class

Thunder has been reverbating around the valleys in the last couple of days, knocking out my electricity several times. But that is not the reason for my silence. I have been absorbed by one of the books in the latest Amazon package (which arrived within 2 days of my ordering them) – Peter Oborne’s The Triumph of the Political Class. Some months ago I said that noone seemed to be celebrating the anniversary of Robert Michels’ Political Parties which appeared a hundred years ago and which was one of the seminal books of my university years – suggesting that trade unions and social democratic parties were inevitably destined to betrayal by their leaders through the “iron law of oligarchy”. Havong tasted the perks of power, they don't easily let it go. Oborne’s book appeared in 2007 - but is a worthy successor and offers important perspectives to the various posts I’ve made about the collapse of our democracy -

Lewis Namier (1888-1960) argued in his masterwork "The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III" that talk of great battles of principle between the Whigs and Tories of Hanoverian England was nonsense. Ministers were in politics for the money and to advance the interests of their cliques. MPs who boasted of their independence were forever seeking favours from the public purse. Ideology mattered so little that 'the political life of the period could be fully described without ever using a party denomination'.

You can do the same today, argues Peter Oborne in this thought-provoking polemic. Members of the 21st-century 'political class' are as isolated and self-interested as their Georgian predecessors. The political class is very different from the old establishment. It despises the values of traditional institutions that once acted as restraints on the power of the state - the independence of the judiciary, the neutrality of the Civil Service and the accountability of ministers to the Commons.

If you are young and ambitious and want to join, Oborne sketches out a career path. First, you must set yourself apart from your contemporaries at university by taking an interest in politics. You must join a think-tank or become researcher to an upwardly mobile MP on graduation. Before getting to the top, you will have eaten with, drunk with and slept with people exactly like you, not only in politics but in the media, PR and advertising - trades the old establishment despised, but you admire for their ability to manipulate the masses.
You will talk a language the vast majority of your fellow citizens can't understand and be obsessed with the marketing of politics rather than its content. You will notice that once in power, you can get away with behaviour that would have stunned your predecessors. You can use your position to profit from lecture tours and negotiate discounts, as the wife of PM Tony Blair uniquely did. Politics will be your career. You will have no experience of other trades and be a worse politician for it. Despite the strong language you may use against other political parties, you will develop a stronger loyalty to parliamentarians (regardless of political label) than others and will close ranks if their privileges are under threat.

I have only two quibbles with the book - first that he attributes the decline of parliament to the new political class - but its decline goes back several decades before that. He makes an interesting point, however, about the Whip's power being challenged in the past decade by the power of the Press Secretary (whipping the media into its place). And, although he mentions Mosca's famous book on the political class of a hundred years ago, he fails to place his critique in the wider critical literature. See tomorrow's post for more on this.

Ways we see the world

I don’t know whether the generations which have grown up with television and the internet experience have experienced the power of seminal texts which many in my generation did. I was driven this past week to think about the key authors who had a profound influence (during my spell at University) on my way of looking at the world. For probably the first time, I saw the common theme in their message – celebration of pluralism and of scepticism at a time when the influence of ideology was still strong. I should also have mentioned the writing of Bernard Crick whose book “In Defence of Politics” (1962) celebrated the practice of politics as a necessary and honourable one and may have been one of the factors leading me a few years later to go into local politics. (We are in need of such a text these days!)
Two difficult recent questions have made me think about “figures of influence” – a question about which contemporary figure (s) I admired (I could come up only with that of Riccardo Petrella); and, today, with an invitation from Social Europe to nominate the (living) “thinkers” (my inverted commas) with the biggest influence on the European left-of-centre agenda in 2010/2011.
When I read the names of those nominated last year, my immediate reaction was that the left thoroughly deserved its present pathetic electoral position if the poll was correct in its judgement. The first three names were Paul Krugman, Juergen Habermas and Slavoj Zizek (who??). Even worse was that Anthony Giddens, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Umberto Eco came next. Then Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Oskar Lafontaine, Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells and (wait for it!)…Ed Miliband! When, 10 years ago, I wrote my own list of inspiring “standard bearers” it did include Lafontaine (and George Monbiot).
But I’m not sure how sensible the poll is – each country is so different – and how does one actually measure the influence which any thinker has had? And what exactly is a “thinker”? Do we not all think? And if by “thinker” we mean an academic such as Etzioni, is there not a certain contradition between being a “thinker” and having an influence on party agendas? Of course, you will say, neo-liberals such as Hayek have had a profound influence on the agendas of all parties in the past couple of decades – but he is dead. Keynes put it so well in 1935

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas

.There are so many voices today that we often require an intermediary (journalists like Will Hutton, Paul Mason and George Monbiot) to act as mediators and popularisers.
In any event, I would prefer to explore which “writers” have the most to offer the social democrats – regardless of the likelihood of their message being bought. In the article I wrote a couple of weeks back for the Romanian journal, I found myself using two quotations from the world of a green Irish economist - Richard Douthwaite – and would therefore certainly nominate him. I will now look around my (extensive) bookshelves and see who else should be nominated. And you, gentle reader? Who would you nominate?
I'm glad to be able to show a Romanian painting for once - by late 19th century painter Theodor Pallady

Sceptic pluralist

The superb weather continues – azure blue sky, blazing sun, light breeze and scattered fluffy clouds. A run down to Bran to stock up and bumped twice people into I knew! I’m obviously becoming a native at last. It will be difficult to tear myself away – but Bulgaria does now beckon with the resumption of workshops there next week
I’m still reflecting on the editorial labelling my published article in Revista 22 got last week (“view from the left”) and, specifically, the “key influences” I referenced in my initial blog response (Crosland and Shonfield). I realised that I had missed some of those whose writings I came across when I was at University and which, effectively, marked me for life – namely Karl Popper, Joseph Schumpeter, Reinhold Niebuhr, JK Galbraith, Robert Michels and Ralf Dahrendorf (in that order). All shared a sceptical and pluralistic outlook on life – and these 2 words are more important to me than “left” which, sadly, embraces all that’s best and worst in politics. I am not trying to establish liberal credentials – particularly since one of the 2 (funded) supplements in that issue of Revista 22 was an eight-page summary of 23 “right-intellectual” streams of thought. Just wondering where I actually stand in relation to all that has been written about social improvement in the past century.
I suppose I was always a bit “elusive” politically. I wrote once that I never felt I really “belonged” anywhere (my upbringing on the class-divide in a Scottish shipbuilding town saw to that). The more I read, the more confused was life and the path to take – both individually and collectively.
For those who want to taste the real Popper, the 800 pages of The Open Society and its Enemies are available here.
And a short and dismissive libertarian review (“sheer social democracy”) can be read here.
But my reflections brought up this gem – of Ralf Dahrendorf in conversation in 1989 in a great history series

Why is it that the older I get, the better the writing seems to become? I finished a few days ago another “travelogue” (there has to be a better name for such sublime writing) - Out of Steppe about the lost peoples of central asia where I spent 5 years of my life. And I have now started another in this genre of well-read young Englishmen immersing themselves in the life of people whose predecessors suffered repression, forced marches and exile – Rebel Land – among Turkey’s Forgotten People. Reading about the suffering of these diverse groups from the Balkans, Caucasus and Turkey certainly makes the grievances of the Scots rather trivial!

Another reminder of what Roosevelt’s programme for artists during the Great Depression produced. Where is its like today?

Do we need the state?

On Friday, the clouds were mottled and swirling in a string wind – autumn, it seemed, had closed down summer. But the last 2 days have been cloudless and the dawn now announces a similar day. Yesterday, as I was preparing the potato omelette with the eggs my neighbours had brought me (and a very tasty soup); the milk from their cow (who feeds on our grass); the locally prepared cheese I had bought from other neighbours; and the salami from a neighbouring village, I realised that, here in my village, I am almost self-sufficient (if we count the village as “self” and allow me to keep my oriental spices and large, white Bulgarian beans (“Bob” – as they are called). My overheads (I have to keep on pinching myself) are 100 euros a month (including power, heating, tax and insurance). It is petrol and the mobile phone (25 euros) which adds to the expenses (and the wine and palinka/Rakia stocks!)
By coincidence, I came across this American paper which confronts the possibility of the collapse of American society – and how people should cope. Sadly (but typically) a lot of space is concerned with guns and self-defence. And the paper makes no reference to the blog which has, for some years, been dealing (on a weekly basis) with the “peak oil syndrome”; how it would affect the (unrealistic) way of life of north americans; and what practical steps people could be taking now to develop the resilience which will be necessary to cope with the new conditions. One of my readers has drawn my attention to a book published in 2008 which suggested many of the conditions which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union (military spending; oil shortage, debt, trade deficit) are now present in the USA - Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse - but that much of the infrastructure available to the Russians to cope (eg District heating; vegetable plots) is missing in North America.
North Americans, of course, do not factor the state into these issues since they assume that the state is part of the problem. In Europe – despite the neo-liberal hollowing out of the state and politicians increasingly being seen as hollow puppits – many persist in our belief that collective action still has a role. The question is whether politicians and the state can rise to the challenge.

Last November I suggested that any convincing argument for systemic reform needed to tackle four questions -
• Why do we need major change in our systems?
• Who or what is the culprit?
• What programme might start a significant change process?
• What mechanisms (process or institutions) do we need to implement such programmes?

Earlier this year I drafted a paper which tried, amongst other things, to summarise some of the writing on the second and third of these questions - but have not given proper attention to the last question.
One of the bloggers I respect has, however, recently turned his attention to the issue of the moral basis for a greater role for the state.
And a recent paper from the Quality of Governance Institute by Bo Rothstein, entitled Creating a sustainable solidaristic society - a manual is also relevant.

The proper and legitimate role of the state are, of course, central concerns of this blog of mine. It was only when I started my work with governments in transition countries 20 years ago that I started to think seriously about the subject – although my debureaucratising mission of the 1970s in Scottish local government had made me think very hard about the role of local government and its various stakeholders. But this was hardly the most appropriate preparation for the issue of what “the state” might reasonably be expected to do in the special conditions of post-communism? And, in any event, the basic questions of the role of the state were quickly settled in Central Europe in 1990-92 without any public discussion – thanks to international bodies such as The World Bank. You would nonetheless have thought that some academics in countries such as Slovakia (which has twice experienced the process of state-building - once in 1918 as part of Czechoslovakia, then in 1993) might have pulled together some lessons and considerations about the role of the state!

I’ve also started to Fukuyama’s latest tomb – The Origins of Political Order - which appeared in the spring. It’s a sequel of sorts to the late Samuel Huntington’s classic “Political Order in Changing Societies.” Fukuyama’s update of Huntington’s work examines what current scholarship understands about the evolution of states. Beginning with hunter-gatherers, the book ranges across an astonishing array of knowledge to look at the development of countries, up to the French Revolution. (A second volume is intended to pick up where “The Origins of Political Order” leaves off). Evolutionary biology, sociology, political philosophy, anthropology – all these disciplines are mined for insights into what is among the most difficult problems in international politics: the question of how to establish modern, functioning states. David Runciman summarises thus

Human beings have always organised themselves in tight-knit groups – there never was a Rousseauian paradise of free-spirited individuals roaming contentedly through the primordial forests. The trouble was that the first human societies were too tight-knit. These were essentially kinship groups and generated what Fukuyama calls "the tyranny of cousins". People would do almost anything for their relatives, and almost anything to the people who weren't (rape, pillage, murder). This was a recipe for constant, low-level conflict, interspersed with periodic bouts of serious blood-letting.
The way out of the kinship trap was the creation of states (by which Fukuyama means centralised political authorities), which were needed to break the hold of families. States are one of the three pillars Fukuyama identifies as providing the basis for political order. The reason that powerful states aren't enough on their own is that political power doesn't necessarily solve the problem of kinship. Instead, it can simply relocate it up the chain, so that all you get are strong rulers who use their power to favour their relatives, a phenomenon that is all too easy to identify, from the ancient world to contemporary Libya. So the rule of states needs to be supplemented by the rule of law, which imposes limits on political power and corruption. However, the rule of law itself can destabilise political order by undermining the ability of states to take decisive action when it is needed, and giving non-state organisations too much of a free hand. Hence the need for the third pillar: accountable government (or what we might now call democracy). This retains a strong state but allows people to change their rulers when they start behaving badly.
Fukuyama thinks that we too often treat the three pillars of political order as though they were separate goods in their own right, capable of doing the job on their own. We champion democracy, forgetting that without the rule of law it is liable simply to entrench social divisions. Or we champion the rule of law, forgetting that without a strong state it is liable to lead to political instability. But he also thinks that whole societies can make the same mistake. He distinguishes between a good political order, and an order that is simply "good enough", which occurs when only one or two of the building blocks is in place, giving the illusion of security. For instance, ancient China arrived at a strong centralised state far earlier than the west, in order to combat the problem of endemic civil war. But the Chinese state that emerged was too strong: it crushed the warlords but also crushed any incipient civil society or ideas of accountability. Thus China enjoyed an early advantage on the path to political order, but it was this advantage that set it back, because too much power was concentrated too soon. It is this fact, Fukuyama believes, that explains the autocratic condition of Chinese politics to this day.

Other useful reviews are here, here and here
The sculpture is in the park next to the Sofia City Gallery - marking the allied bombing of the city in 1944. For some reason some people want to remove it.....

Writing

I’ve ben racing through books in the last few days – first a marvellous tale The Last Testament of Gideon Mack by one of Scotland’s up-and-coming generation of writers, James Robertson. The link gives a review by Irvine Walsh, one of the more established of our writers, who not only gives an excellent summary and commentary on the novel but also graciously asserts that Robertson is one of Britain’s best current novellists. Certainly I enjoyed his most recent book – And the Land Lay Still which Walsh also reviews very positively (google for that). Recent political events in Scotland are an important presence in both books (indeed the main character in his most recent) – but Gideon Mack had a particular resonance for me since its main character is a “son of the manse” (who, despite lack of belief, becomes a minister himself). The sense he conveys of life in the manse (the house in which the Minister lives) as Gideon is growing up and of church activities, for me, as another “son of the manse” is very well done.
At one point he has the devil say to Mack –

I like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that’s always below the surface. And I oike the way you deal with religion. One century you’re up to your lugs in it, the next you’re trading the whole apparatus for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath for they shall have the best bargains. Oh yesy, this is a very fine country

Norman Lewis was also admired for his writing in the second half of the last century - although he’s better known now as a travel writer. I read earlier in the year an excellent biography of Lewis and read this week the first two parts of his autobiography – I Came, I Saw; and The World, The World. Quite sublime writing! He can summons up characters and landscapes so powerfully - and is particularly strong on the loss of traditional ways of living (whether in Spain, India, Latin America or rural Essex)

In April 2010, I blogged about the sudden commitment which appeared in Conservative manifesto to permit “free schools” – based on the Swedish model There is a story today about the apparent decline of school performance in Sweden – and some backtracking in Sweden on the concept of the “free school”

Sweden's path-breaking educational reforms of the 1990s have come under question since last December when the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment. This showed that Swedish students had dropped to 19th place out of 57 countries for literacy, to 24th in maths, and to 28th in science. This compared with 9th, 17th and 16th in studies done in 2000, 2003 and 2006 respectively. And Swedes, used to coming near the top of just about every human development index, were appalled. Jan Björklund, the minister of education, moved to tighten central control over schools and is soon to launch a parliamentary inquiry into competition and free schools.

Just two excerpts from the discussion thread which followed - 1.

Only 10% of Swedish students go to free schools (as of 2008) so for Sweden to have been dropping in the 2009 PISA tables must surely be a reflection on the whole system, for example even if the 10% did a fantastic job it could not make up for the other 90% if they underperformed.
2. Many Swedish free schools are not run for a profit, they are run by churches or charities, so you cannot generalise about the profit motive and all Swedish free schools.

and, from one of the customers,

One of those free schools I went to, JENSEN, had half-days for all its pupils, which basically ment that you started at 8 am and left at 12ish am for 1 week, and then switched to beginning at 11 am and leaving at 4ish PM the next week. The school did this because this, basically, ment that they could have twice the amount of students in 1 school as opposed to having a full day at school which would mean less pupils = less taxpayer-money = less profit.
So they have an incentive to fill classes up with 30-40 students in tight rooms, to cut the amount of hours of teacher-led classes and to basically warehouse pupils until they are old enough to disappear.

Contingency

Faithful readers of the blog will know that I am no friend of the model of management which underpins the European Commission system of procuring Technical Assistance; and that, indeed, I have suggested it has many similarities with the Stalinist model which preceded it in the countries in which I work. Target setting; requirements to stick to activities decided hierarchically a couple of years earlier; tight monitoring - all betraying the confidence that their planned interventions can and should conquer the complexity of the world. And that failure to do so is the fault of those (lowly) individuals trying to implement the ordered change rather than the systems in which the intervention is located (or of the leaders who maintain those systems)
Aid on the Edge- Exploring complexity & evolutionary sciences in foreign aid - is a thoughtful blog which often explores these issues and had a good post this week on the debate which is apparently going on in the development field about a "results'based" approach

On one side of the results tug of war are those calling for more and better results, more rigour in analysis and more discipline in reporting. The failure of development, they argue, is basically about the failure to focus on results. ‘Modern management techniques’, especially those that are embodied by ‘results-based management’ are seen as the answer.
On the other side are those who argue for a ‘push back’ against this approach. Such reductionist approaches are seen as only suitable for certain kinds of development interventions, and that at their worst, these approaches inhibit the creativity and innovation needed to achieve results in the first place. The danger here is that we throw out the results baby with the reductionist bathwater (see here for a previous Aid on the Edge post on this).
Appropriate strategic approaches (and by extension, results approaches) need to be based on:
(a) the nature of the intervention we are looking at, and
(b) the context in which it is being delivered.
Reading across these approaches we can suggest a preliminary framework which may prove useful in bringing together different results approaches in a productive and mutually beneficial way.
First, imagine an agencies projects and programmes being distributed across a spectrum of the ‘nature of interventions’, placing relatively simple interventions on one end, and more complex issues, at the other.
Then let’s add in a vertical axes on context. Again, think of a spectrum, this time from stable/identical to dynamic/diverse. This gives us a 2 by 2 framework for analysing and mapping different development interventions. Where exactly an intervention is positioned on this framework has implications for the kinds of results orientation we can take. In the top left corner of simple interventions in identical stable settings, is the Plan and Control zone – here ‘traditional’ results-based management approach, conventional value for money analyses and randomised control trials work well.
The bottom right corner of complex interventions in diverse, dynamic settings is what I have termed Managing Turbulence. Here we need to learn from the work of professional crisis managers, the military and others working in dynamic and fluid contexts.
In between is what I have called Adaptive Management, where either because of the nature of the intervention or the nature of the context, multiple parallel experiments need to be undertaken, with real-time learning to check their relative effectiveness, scaling up those that work and scaling down those that don’t.

Sadly, my blog does not allow me to reproduce the matrix - but it is the sort of "balanced", "appropriate" or "contingent" approach I admire. I know it's fashionable to attack a "one size fits all" approach - but I find that political and managerial leaders generally find it difficult to resist the latest managerial fashion. If only more of them could develop and use such matrices!!
"Balance" is a word I have noticed this year pops up quite a lot in my writing. It was one of the central points of my Revista 22 article which appeared this week; and the importance of getting the appropriate balance between demand and supply factors is a central part of my approach to the development of effective training systems. As I thought about this, the word "requisite" also came into my mind - and I remembered the work of the sadly neglected organisational theorist Elliot Jaques