Management and economics as the new Religion

Epiphanies (or “Eureka!” moments) are memorable – and I therefore remember some ten years ago being in the flat I had for a couple of years in central Bishkek. I was flicking through a book I had picked from my kitchen shelf - Reformation –Europe’s House Divided - and suddenly realising that the intense disputations about religious doctrine in this period were remarkably similar to contemporary economic disputes. Other people, of course, have developed this theme of the religious role taken by modern management and economics – for example Susan George in her 1994 book Faith and Credit - a tough critique of the World Bank which was the subject of a brilliant satire here

And a recent book was entitled The New Holy Wars – economic religion versus environmental religion

In the early 90s, a book actually bore the title Economics as Religion  – and its Introduction can be read here 

You would think that “Management” offers an easier target since it patently has less reason to claim scientific status - not that this has prevented such claims being made! Charles Handy’s Gods of Management is actually about “cultures” of management and resists the temptation to explode the pretensions of management gurus.

It is not easy to find a book on “management as religion” – although there are several classics which have a go at the management gurus and one of them (Russel Ackoff) actually (and famously) wrote A Little Book of F-Laws 

Eventually my search produced a 1997 book The Faith of the Managers - when management becomes religion 

So much damage has been done to the arbitrary drive for “Efficiency” that one would have thought the time is overdue for a savage critique of the religion of management,

There is, of course, an academic discipline called “Critical Management Studies” one of whose foremost proponents is Chris Grey whose small book about studying organisations is a clear and powerful read. But the discipline as a whole is a let-down and rarely offers good insights - "Against Management" is a good example

It's Good to Talk

In the late 60s I became a fan of “participative politics”. First in the small “ward” to which I was elected; then in 1971, as chairman of a major municipal Committee in a shipbuilding town of 70,000 people organising annual Conferences; and, in the early 80s , convening six large Conferences of community activists in a Region of two and half million people. Reports and actions followed. Focused, communal talking has, for me, been an important social glue.

I’ve now stumbled on the idea of “Unconferences” which apparently

sprang out of the experience that many conference goers have – that the real value of some conferences comes from the conversations over coffee and lunch rather than the lectures themselves. Lectures didn’t engage and often inhibited discussion – one person standing at the front of a room of peers holding forth.

Conferences reflect the power structure of an organization - the distinctive feature of “unconferences” is set out in this table 

Before I knew what was happening, I was in a world of “barcamps”, “brewcamps” and knowledge cafes  - all of which reminded me of the idea of World Cafes which I had last heard of almost a decade ago in a book called The World Café – shaping our futuresthrough conversations that matter (Berret-Koehler 2005) which described the dialogues taking place throughout the world by using an informal format (set out like a café) of small tables at which 4 people sit initially to discuss a question which has been carefully prepared. After 20 minutes everyone (save one) changes places – and the previous conversation is summarised.

But the world café site seem no longer active with their last high profile activity (in Prague) being last year 

Further thought took me back to the Search Conferences (described in this paper) of Eric Trist and Fred and Marlyn Emery 

There’s clearly some money to be made from this structured searching and its easy to be cynical.

Time was when you needed people for such events – but Open Source seems to have changed all that

Missing intellectual fare

Where do we go for a journal which speaks to the increasing number of people who are alienated from politics, corporate power and the media; who want more than empty slogans; and who are keen to read well-written pieces by those whose reading is extensive enough to make them aware of their own limitations?

Not to newspapers whose deadlines make the required quality of writing and scope of reading impossible – although Le Monde and Die Zeit (a weekly) try hard. 
Sensible people go to the New York. London and Dublin Reviews of Books. While preparing this post, I came across this helpful list of the 50 “best literary” journals but they are American and limited to magazines judged to be literary. The Nation makes the cut but, for some reason, The New Republic and The Boston Review don’t. Not literary enough?

Over the past few years, I have several times commented on the lamentable choices for those of us looking for deep, non-partisan and well-written coverage of key issues facing Europeans. In 2011 I talked about “gated communities” 

The barrier to our understanding of development in other European countries is not just linguistic. It stems also from the intellectual compartmentalisation (or apartheid) which universities and European networks have encouraged in our elites. European political scientists, for example, have excellent networks but talk in a highly specialised language about recondite topics which they publish in inaccessible language in inaccessible journals. What insights they have about each other’s countries are rarely made available to the wider public. The same is true of the civil service nationals who participate in EC comitology or OECD networks – let alone the myriad professional networks. We talk about gated communities – but they exist virtually as well as physically.

In 2012 a blogpost talked of a “european failure of knowledge management” and blamed journalists - although it is clearly publishers who are at fault. Later that same year a post tried to express the need more clearly 

In my days, we had the magazine Encounter (Der Monat in Germany) which gave me stimulating articles by renowned French, German and Italian writers, for example, but was then discovered to have been funded by the CIA and soon folded. Where is its equivalent these days? Le Monde Diplomatique and Lettre International perhaps - except there is, sadly, no English version of the latter - and only a short version in English of the former (whose language is, in any event, a bit opaque).
In 2004 Carl Fredrikkson wrote an article about the need for a proper European public space where ideas were exchanged across national boundaries and Jan-Werner Muller returned to the issue earlier this year with an important article entitled The Failure of European Intellectuals?But I am actually asking for something simpler - clear and insightful writing about different European societies. The recent publication on The Inner lives of Cultures could give us only one European system!

 And, at the beginning of this year, a post entitled Indifference to European Differences posed a simple question

there are tens of thousands of journalists and academics churning out articles in (hundreds of) thousands of journals in the general field of politics and social policy. Can we not think of a way of making the better of these pieces more accessible - in various European languages?? That's the Eurozine concept - but they're selecting from a rather precious bunch of cultural magazines whose language doesn't take many prisoners!
One of the factors which gets in the way of even this simple idea is the specialisation of political, professional and academic silos - just have a look at the lists of academic magazines at publishers such as Elsevier,Sage or Wiley. Twenty- odd years ago journals such as Parliamentary Affairs, Political Quarterly, West European Politics and Government and Opposition offered civilised reading. Now, with the exception of Political Quarterly, you get highly specialised  topics with boring technocratic prose.

Of course, the weekly Courrier International and Project Syndicate bring us syndicated pieces from around the world – but these are from newspapers and therefore suffer from superficiality.

Perhaps I’ve been missing something….I google “lists” and come up with an interesting table of about 150 political magazines covering key countries. But nothing I didn’t already know.

By the way, the current edition Government and Opposition – on The Power of Finance - can be downloaded free – article by article (until mid-August). And the journal Governance does have a useful blog which picks out worthwhile articles.

I liked the way the original editors of The Nation expressed its philosophy way back in 1835

The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.

But where is the political equivalent of Granta?

The Common Sense of Visionaries

We are all inspired by Stephane Hessel who, in his nineties, produced the short book (“Indignez-vous!”) about the global crisis and inequality which touched millions. But I hadn’t heard of Grace Lee Boggs who is apparently still campaigning in America at the age of 99. A journal devoted to art and politics called Guernica has a fascinating interview with this Chinese-American philosopher who has been refusing to stand still for nearly a century, mobilizing alongside various freedom struggles from civil rights to climate change campaigns. The opening chapter of her book – The next American Revolution; sustainable activism for the 21st Century - has echoes, for me, of Robert Quinn’s hugely underrated Change the World

Most of us operate with an “instrumental” or “agency” view of social change. We assume that “a” causes “z” and that socio-economic ills can therefore be dealt with by specific measures. But a couple of decades ago, an approach – variously called “chaos” or “complexity” theory – started to undermine such assumptions. Writers such as Margaret Wheatley and Quinn have shown the implications for management practice - but few activists have.

Lee Boggs puts it as follows

I think it’s really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change. The idea of protest organizing, as summarized by [community organizer] Saul Alinsky, is that if we put enough pressure on the government, it will do things to help people. We don’t realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking. But with globalization and the weakening of the nation-state, that kind of organizing doesn’t work. We need to do what I call visionary organizing. Recognize that in every crisis, people do not respond like a school of fish. Some people become immobilized. Some people become very angry, some commit suicide, and other people begin to find solutions. And visionary organizers look at those people, recognize them and encourage them, and they become leaders of the future.

Quinn’s book was produced in 1996 and is an excellent antidote for those who are still fixated on the expert model of change – those who imagine it can be achieved by “telling”, “forcing” or by participation. Quinn exposes the last for what it normally is (despite the best intentions of those in power) – a form of manipulation – and effectively encourages us, through examples, to have more faith in people.

As the blurb says – “the idea that inner change makes outer change possible has always been part of spiritual and psychological teachings. But not an idea that’s generally addressed in leadership and management training.

Quinn looks at how leaders such as Gandhi and Luther King mobilised people for major change and derives certain principles for “change agents” to enable them to help ordinary people achieve transformative change. These principles include recognizing our own hypocrisy and fears; “going with the flow” and “enticing through moral power”

Balkan Struggles

Can a Greek historian (even if one who now teaches at an American University) cast aside his preconceptions and offer the English-speaking reader an understanding of “the Balkan Wars”? This is the question I have after reading Andre Gerolymatos’ The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond

It was one of two books I bought recently to help me throw some light on the two 1912-13 Balkan conflicts in which first Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia united to fight (successfully) the Ottomans and then divided to fight one another. I quickly discovered that the book is mistitled and that the Balkan wars to which the title referred are in fact the various struggles (not least between brigands) and bloodletting which have characterised the area for centuries. It is none the worse for that wider focus. The second book – by a Serb – has the narrower focus.

As one review puts it 

this book is a work of cultural sociology in seeking to uncover the patterns of history that have led to constant conflict, the choices that led to cycles of endless acts of retribution, the cultural scripts of martyrdom, betrayal, and defeat that have led to the nursing of grudges. There are a lot of people who come off looking very poor in this book, whether it is exploitative Phanariot Greeks in areas like Moldova and Rumania; the Ottoman sultans (even when in reform mood); or the brigands whose oppressive and exploitative ways was a result of and contributed to chaos and anarchy throughout the Balkans. But towering above all this is the two-faced nature of the interest of the “Great Powers” in the region

We know little of these wars in the West – coverage of the ethnic cleansing of the 90s focused on older struggles, not on the events of 100 years ago. And there were very few commemorations in 2012 and 2013 – particularly in Bulgaria which risked (and lost) everything by its wanton attack after the cease-fire on its previous ally Serbia in order to try to win the disputed lands of neighbouring Macedonia. Illusions of a lost grandeur! Of course, with my interest in Bulgarian painting of that period, I come across frequent references to the time many of my favourite artists spent as war artists in this period….

The Black Dog

The trip to Zarnesti is always a pleasure – down the spectacular road on the narrow ridge which separates Moiecu and Pestera villages on either side below (with the mountain ranges behind them); through Bran and then left at the old village of Tohani with its saxon houses; then the short run in open country with the side of the Piatra Craiului range towering on the left. The trip this time was for dental purposes – my partner’s not mine – and I was able to use the time to visit the amazing 16th century Gothic church in the centre (opposite the municipality) which has stunning mural paintings – from 1515! I have to confess that I have neglected this aspect of the country’s painting heritage and could immediately sense the difference in colour tints – clearly coming from the Catholic west rather than the Byzantine church whose painting style alienates me. 
My daughter, at the same time, was visiting the area further north and brought back beautiful shots from the village museum in Sibiu.

So when, on Monday, I came across a book on Gothic Mural Paintings of Transylvania by Dana Jenei – as well as one on the Wooden Churches of Salaj (North-west of Cluj) by Ana Barga, I had no hesitation in buying copies, both being in English.

The Humanitas bookshop (next door to the English Bookshop) also had an intriguing-looking 2001 book called The Noonday Demon – an anatomy of depression by Andrew Solomon which had received rave reviews – not least one from Joyce CarolOates

Like most achievers, I have known depression – fortunately only for a few years in the last half of the 1980s. In my case the causes were external/contextual rather than chemical/genetic – strong elements of manic depression – I worked myself very hard. So I was able (slowly) to identify the root causes and even have a stab at understanding the trigger events and therefore be in a better position to deal with it when it next reared its head.

It didn’t help that I was living in dark, damp Scotland! I would basically hibernate for the winter months – during 3-4 years.

I tried therapy - but was too good with words for that really to be much help - and fairly quickly gave up lithium. 

What I did was to make a fundamental change to my life – I left my family, my job and my country! That was 24 years ago – and only in 2010 suffered again – for about 6 months when 2 projects were really screwing me up – one in Beijing. Since the experience, I think I have a different attitude to life – I have become more grateful for my blessings…

So it’s a condition for which I have a lot of sympathy. And am always pleased when a prominent person (like Stephen Fry) comes out strongly about his experience.

In my days (almost 30 years ago) there wasn’t all that much to read – although I do remember the anguish of Philip Toynbee’s diaries 

Solomon’s book is a big one (more than 500 pages) which mixes harrowing tales of his own case with those of others and extensive research (the bibliography and notes account for the last 100 pages) But is a real page-turner (I’ve almost finished it in 2 days).
In the extent to which it peeled back lives,  I was reminded of the way Theodore Zeldin dealt with individuals in his marvellous Intimate History of Humanity

The Black Dog is how (manic-depressive) Winston Churchill referred to his condition. Sadly that did not seem to help advance the need for its proper recognition let alone treatment.

Why we disagree about "wicked problems"

For years I’ve been searching for a book which did justice – in a clear and generous way - to the complexity of the world we inhabit; and which helped us place our own “confused take” on “wicked problems” into a wider schema. Hood’s 1990 book “The Art of the State” (mentioned in the last post) is one of a handful in these.

But by far and away the best book is one I’ve just finished reading this week– Why We Disagree about Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity by geographer Mike Hulme.

Hulme’s book clarifies the climate debate by using seven different lenses (or perspectives) to make sense of climate change: science, economics, religion, psychology, media, development, and governance. His argument is basically that –

·       We understand science and scientific knowledge in different ways

·       We value things differently
·        We believe different things about ourselves, the universe and our place in the universe

·       We fear different things

·   We receive multiple and conflicting messages about climate change – and interpret them differently

·       We understand “development” differently

·  We seek to govern in different ways (eg top-down “green governmentality”; market environmentalism; or “civic environmentalism”)

Climate science is an instance of “post-normal science” (p. 78). In today’s contentious political context, scientists must more than ever “recognize and reflect upon their own values and upon the collective values of their colleagues. These values and world views continually seep into their activities as scientists and inflect the knowledge that is formed” (p. 79). 

Post-normal science also challenges how expertise is understood. People with varying backgrounds want and need to weigh in on important issues of the day, including climate change. Hence, natural science must cede some governance to wider society and some ground to “other ways of knowing” (p. 81). In post-normal science, moreover, people acknowledge that there is much that we cannot predict; uncertainty is intrinsic to climate change issues. The public and their political representatives may want certainty, but it is not available in regard to the behaviour of a chaotic system such as climate (pp. 83-84).

In chapter four, “The Endowment of Value,” Hulme offers an exceptionally well-informed review of debates carried on by people with very different evaluations of what ought to be done about climate change. He remarks: “We disagree about climate change because we view our responsibilities to future generations differently, because we value humans and Nature in different ways, and because we have different attitudes to climate risks” (p. 139).

Similarly, in chapter five, he maintains that: “One of the reasons we disagree about climate change is because we believe different things about our duty to others, to Nature, and to our deities” (p. 144). Hulme describes a host of competing but important views about such duties, including monotheistic stewardship of Creation, the responsibility to care for life, environmentalism as a religious discourse, the moral imperative to care for Gaia, and romantic views of nature.

Theologies of blame arise, one of which accuses individuals of responsibility for climate change, another of which accuses socio-economic systems

Hulme maps the cultural categorization scheme of individualists, egalitarians, hierarchalists, and fatalists onto ecologist C.S. (“Buzz”) Hollings’ notion of the four “myths” about nature (p. 188).

      Hollings’ myths, which describe the degree to which people think of nature as stable or unstable, are represented by four pictures depicting different arrangements of a ball in a landscape. The degree of natural stability is indicated by whether the ball is situated so as to resist change of location (nature as stable) or whether the ball is situated so as to be easily moved (nature as unstable).
·         The first picture, nature as “benign,” depicts a ball sitting at the bottom of a U-shaped landscape. According to this view, favoured by individualists, nature is capable of maintaining or reestablishing its current organization despite human influence, such as introducing large amounts of C02 into the atmosphere. Human-friendly nature will continue to operate within boundaries favourable to human life, so the risk posed by climate change is low. In other words, we do not have to “turn back the clock of technological change” (p. 190).
·         The second picture, nature as “ephemeral,” shows the ball as unstably perched atop a steep hill, thus easily thrown out of kilter by human interference. This view of nature, favoured by egalitarians, indicates that the risks posed by climate change are high, such that excessive fossil fuel use will likely lead to climate chaos and the collapse of civilization.
·         The third picture, nature as “perverse/tolerant,” shows the ball at the bottom of a deep valley formed by two hills. According to this view of nature, favoured by hierarchalists, nature is somewhat unpredictable, but also relatively resilient, if managed appropriately. Guided by scientific knowledge, we can develop predictive abilities that will allow us to formulate policies needed to limit climate change.
·         Finally, the fourth picture, nature as “capricious,” shows a ball sitting on a line. According to this view, favoured by fatalists, nature is basically unpredictable, given that its behaviour is influenced not only by human behaviour, but also by countless other factors, including many unknown to us. Climate will continue, as ever, to pose change and thus risk to humans, some of whom will cope, while others will not. For the fatalist, climate change of one sort or another will continue even if industrial civilization immediately grinds to a halt (pp.188-190).
 After entertaining the possibility of viewing climate change as either a “clumsy” problem or even as a “wicked” problem (one so complex that some proposed solutions end up undermining other solutions), Hulme concludes that climate is not a “problem” to be solved at all. Instead, it is an opportunity to transform how we understand ourselves and relate to one another.

The opportunity favoured by Hulme becomes clear in his discussion of what he calls the four leading “myths” of climate change: Lamenting Eden, Presaging Apocalypse, Constructing Babel, and Celebrating Jubilee.
All four myths are taken from the Judeo-Christian tradition, which retains some of its original animating force, even though it has become marginalized in secular Euro-American cultures. They are

     ·         Lamenting Eden is the myth adhered to by postmodern greens who bemoan the loss of pristine nature and simpler ways of life.
·         Presaging Apocalypse is the myth adhered to by traditional conservatives who depict climate change in terms of calamities that exact cosmic retribution for human depravity, notions with a long and often  critically unscrutinized lineage.
·         Constructing Babel is the myth adhered to by rational moderns who, as in the Genesis myth of Babel, seek to become like God by developing technological power. Whereas the peoples at Babylon sought to build a tower reaching to heaven, contemporary geoengineers propose technical means to gain control over climate.

·         The fourth and final myth, Celebrating Jubilee, is consistent with Hulme’s vision of what climate change can do for us. Jubilee takes its name from the Jewish Torah, according to which every 50 years “soil, slaves and debtors should be liberated from their oppression.” Metaphorically, then, Celebrating Jubilee encourages us think about climate change in terms of morals and ethics, and “offers hope as an antidote to the presaging of Apocalypse” (pp. 353, 354)

An excellent comparative review of Hulme's book can be read here.

Stories we tell

Since we were small children, we have all needed stories – to help us understand and come to terms with the strange world we inhabit. In this post-modern world, “narratives” have become a fashionable adult activity for the same reason.

It’s significant that, when I was looking for a structure with which to classify the different approaches in the (vast) literature about the global crisis, I used the classification - micro-meso-macro. That shows the grip my university training in political economy still has on me. Political sociology actually had more appeal for me – but somehow lacked the apparent legitimacy of economics.

In fact, the anthropological ways of looking at the world have much more power than the economic – in particular the grid-group typology of Mary Douglas (and her Cultural Theory) which first gave us the four schools or lenses (“hierarchical”, “individualistic”, “egalitarian” and “fatalistic”) used to such effect in Chris Hood’s great little book “The Art of the State” (1990). It was indeed his book which introduced me to this typology which allows us to tell distinctive “stories” about the same phenomenon. More interestingly, he then shows the typical policy responses, weaknesses and strengths of each school. A sense of his book's argument can be gained from the review of the book which can be accessed toward the end of the contents sheet of this journal. 

At University I had been interested in how social systems held together and why people (generally) obeyed - and I had liked Max Weber’s classification of political systems into – “traditional”, “charismatic” and “rational-legal”.

But it was the sociologist Ametai Etzioni who first impressed me in the 1970s with his suggestion that we behaved the way we did for basically three different types of motives – “remunerative”, “coercive” and “normative” – namely that it was made worth our while; we were forced to; or that we thought it right. He then went on to suggest (in his 1975 Social Problems) that our explanations for social problems could be grouped into equivalent political stances - “individualistic”, “hierarchical” or “consensual”. These are effectively “stories” about the world. Unfortunately google search will not give me access to the relevant works of Etzioni or Hood - although substantial chunks of a similar sort of book "Responses to Governance - governing corporations and societies in the world" by John Dixon can be read on google books.

During the 1980s, when I was doing my Masters in Policy Analysis, I was (briefly) interested in the potential of “Frame Analysis” which showed how we could tell different “stories” to make sense of complex social events.

The last decade has seen a revival of interest in such typologies - The case for clumsiness which, again, sets out the various stories which sustain the different positions people take us on various key policy issues – such as the environment. There is a good interview with the author here and a short summary here

Three recent reports give an excellent summary of all this literature - Common Cause; FindingFrames; and Keith Grint’s Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions 

I know this has not been easy reading – but my next post will hopefully show its relevance to the search for a typology to help us navigate the literature on the global crisis!

The photo on my new "masthead" is from Sunday's annual "milk festival" in my village. The weather was superb and the next day the best of the year