Libraries and writers

It was some decades ago I first realised how few books are produced to help people understand a subject. Publishers need to make their books stand out in a very crowded market – they therefore select books which can claim to distinctiveness, for which read "market niche" or "narrowness".

Of course we have the “Dummy” and the Very Short Introduction series catering for those who wish to get the big picture. Sadly, however, they tend to be regarded with some disdain by publishers, writers and readers alike. Personally I have found the few books I have read in the latter series both original and clearly-written - and one of the authors actually has a blog which gives practical examples of the issues his book explores.

In the past 6 months, I’ve produced 4 E-books (see top right of the blog for the list) three of which have are my posts of the past 4 years or so on a subject I was trying to understand - with the posts separated into a logical structure and prefaced by an introduction. 
I find it both salutary and stimulating to reread them with a fresh eye and to ask, in editorial style, “what is this actually trying to say…how can I express it better?.....where is the narrative - and how can it flow better??”  And, to help identify such things, I have to print and bind the book – I find I can’t edit onscreen…..

Each of the books retains the structure of the original blog – which I like to think is more user-friendly for the reader…..I hate these books which consist of endless pages of text, unrelieved by headings….I need to get a fix on the writer’s thinking by seeing some headings…..

But somehow I can’t complete the work. I know that I need to be even more disciplined in my questioning of each post. Ideally I should actually attach to each post a brief summary and identify the inconsistencies, repetitions etc But that’s too much like work!!!

So for past few days have been mooching in the library here in my mountain house…. which has a wide range of subjects and titles. I was reading recently that Susan Sontag’s library consisted of 25,000 books – and Umberto Eco’s famous library must consist of the same number….My nomadic life has meant that I keep losing my library – but the last few years has allowed me to develop quite a respectable library here in the mountain house which must amount to about 2,000 books 

Amazingly, as I have prowled amongst its shelves (which cover shelves on the top of each door and cascade over stairs) I can’t find anything to grab my interest – although I was moved this past couple of weeks by some books about economic ownership (see the last 2 posts); a highly original account of the source of American economic strength and decline written by a couple of 80-year old Scottish engineer emigres - The Puritan Gift; and Patrick Leigh-Fermour – an Adventure.

But I just couldn’t find anything else to whet my appetite…..Typically, I assume the grass is greener elsewhere and duly sent off for the books which had been languishing on my Amazon wishlist.

The first three are by authors who have given me much pleasure in the past - the first 2 being new

The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future by Theodore Zeldin

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy 

The Proper Study Of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (Vintage Classics) by Isaiah Berlin – whose scintillating essays I first came across at University.

Despite my disillusionment with economics and management, I am always a sucker for a new “take” on the subjects and was intrigued by -

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux

Economics of the 1% (Anthem Other Canon Economics) by John Weeks

I am always intrigued by material on Germany (see my posts of May and June 2013 when I spent 10 weeks there) and found the idea of a history written by a non-academic very appealing and therefore look forward to -

Death of a Nation: A New History of Germany by Stephen R A'Barrow; as well as a collection of historical reviews - In Defence of History by Richard Evans

Finally The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World (2012) by Evgeny Morozov whose writings I find very stimulating; and the only novel, another of the rediscovered books by Hans Fallada - Iron Gustav: A Berlin Family Chronicle (Penguin Translated Texts)  

Flushing out what's worth reading

A couple of months ago, in a post headed No Excuse for Apathy I reminded readers (and myself!)  that one of my unfinished projects has been a mapping of the different paths which various authors have suggested  in recent years we need to take in order to improve (if not replace) the mad economic system which has had the globe in thrall (and peril) for at least the last thirty years.

The project started with a short essay in 2001 (updated in Notes for the Perplexed) and moved into higher gear with the opening last autumn of a website Mapping the Common Ground which acts as a library of useful material for those keen to effect social change.

The Global Crisis – Telling it as it is  is an edited version of the posts which record the reading I have been doing in recent years – with my common complaint being the failure of writers to give credit to others and indeed to make any attempt to do what Google Scholar exhorts us to do – “stand on the shoulders of giants”.

Most books about the “global crisis” focus on the easy part of the story – “diagnosis” and “blame” – and skate over the really challenging (later) stages of the process of social change – such as prescription (“what is to be done?”); and, most of all, “coalition-building” (with what sources of power?).

Indeed I now have three tests for any book about the global crisis I look at –

- What proportion of space they devote to the later, prescriptive, stage

- What awareness they show of the “problems of agency” ie of the tenuous nature of the “toolkit of change” which the change management literature introduced us to in the 1980s

- How generous their references to other literature are

Most writing demonstrates a naïve belief in the power of persuasion – the belief that argument can mobilise change. Many people can indeed be persuaded of the “need” for change – but fewer about its precise “direction” and shape….. Robert Quinn is one of the few people who has powerfully pointed out how mechanistic is the discourse of reformist “persuasion” – with its assumption that an intellectual elite has the capacity to “mobilise” people to its way of thinking……His books talk rather of the power of example…..and the growing literature on systems theory of the “emergence” of new methods and models…

The post I referred to in the opening paragraph linked to a fascinating American project – The Next System whose short, initial publication promised to

launch a national debate on the nature of “the next system” using the best research, understanding, and strategic thinking, on the one hand, and on-the-ground organizing and development experience, on the other, to refine and publicize comprehensive alternative political-economic system models that are different in fundamental ways from the failed systems of the past and capable of delivering superior social, economic, and ecological outcomes.

By defining issues systemically, we believe we can begin to move the political conversation beyond current limits with the aim of catalyzing a substantive debate about the need for a radically different system and how we might go about its construction. Despite the scale of the difficulties, a cautious and paradoxical optimism is warranted. There are real alternatives. Arising from the unforgiving logic of dead ends, the steadily building array of promising new proposals and alternative institutions and experiments, together with an explosion of ideas and new activism, offer a powerful basis for hope.

And the last week has seen several more straws in the wind –

Democratic Wealth – being a little E-book of Cambridge and Oxford University bloggers’ takes on the crisis

Civic Capitalism – ditto from some Sheffield University academics

Laudato-Si – the latest Papal Encyclical. A summary is available here. Its entire 184 pages can be read here

We All Want the Change the World is a book which represents the mature thoughts of one (American) lefty and, for me, is a superb illustration of why the left is in such deeptrouble. The book starts brilliantly but quickly degenerates into cultural tripe

Beacons of Hope

Employee-ownership is not the most obvious of subjects to set one's spirits soaring  - but two books I’ve just been reading on this subject are positively inspirational and probably the best guides available for those of us who have been searching for a plausible challenge to the amoral corporate power tearing our societies and planet apart. The  books are -
Beyond the Corporation: Humanity Working by David Erdal (2011); and 
Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly  (2012)

Each complements the other beautifully - Erdal’s book uses the story of the employee buy-out he led in the 1980s of his family’s Fife-based paper business (Tullis Russell) as an introduction to employee-owned businesses the world over (amongst many others, the John Lewis Partnership in the UK, the Mondragón group in Spain and the US supermarket chain, Publix) – and then examines the history of the legal structures that underpin modern capitalism and convincingly exposes the gross errors in the conventional models economists use to describe people and businesses (which he labels ‘just-so stories’) - showing how and why employee-owned businesses are superior to publicly listed companies in every way.

Marjorie Kelly’s book helps us understand the “financialisation” which has overtaken companies in the last thirty years – I was able to download the first draft of the book (minus a couple of the chapters) by simply tapping the title and author’s name and the preface and first chapter can be read here   

The first section of Erdal’s book demolishes the predictions made by traditional economists about the supposed efficiency of the Market (a word that Erdal capitalises) and the supposed flaws of employee-owned concerns: 

Very little of the money raised by public shares is invested in strategically building businesses – most of it is used for (often destructive) acquisitions and lining the pockets of shareholders and top management.For companies to flourish in the long term, employees must have a real sense of ownership. No management techniques can substitute for the rights and benefits of genuine ownership, but even the managers of employee-owned concerns need to work hard to ensure workers feel involved.

Communication is key: managers must make information fully and openly available, must listen, and must allow employees to make contributions to improving how things are done.Although employee-owners need leaders, given the same quality of leadership employee-owned businesses always outperform those owned by outsiders. The former are more productive, they survive better in bad times, they have lower employee turnover and absenteeism and they give better service (the top-rated companies for service in both the UK and the USA are employee-owned).

Employees in employee-owned companies learn more participation skills, they are better trained, they contribute more innovative ideas, they implement change quicker, and they are wealthier, with communities in which they live benefiting from both money and skills.Many economists are blind to all the above, repeatedly citing old papers based on nothing but theory, and falsely claiming that such organisations will be overwhelmed by free-riders, that decision-making will be impracticably slow, and that employee-owners will forever be falling out with each other. These unevidenced views of economists place significant obstacles in the way of those hoping to set up employee-owned concerns.

As he ironically puts it -

‘Ironically, capitalism itself is built on the idea that owners will work more energetically and creatively, and with greater commitment, than people who are employed by others. Instead of following through [this] logic […], the owners of capital […] have built company structures in which employees have none of the participation of ownership: they have no right to influence the choice of leader or the policies set, and no right to participate in the wealth that they create together. The vast majority of people are systematically deprived of any ownership stake. It is as if they are seen as coming from a different species, insensitive to the galvanising effect of ownership.’

The second section describes the horror of working for publicly traded companies subject to so-called ‘market discipline’ and contrasts this with the experience of employee-owners, and shows why ‘market discipline’ is powerless to curb excessive executive pay and does nothing to promote stability and innovation. It also relates the jaw-dropping history of the employee contract (which Erdal contends violates what should be inalienable rights) and of the present economic system – rigged from the outset in the favour of the rich and powerful.

The impact of asset-stripping by private equity investors on the employees and customers of Debenham’s, as well as its suppliers, is powerfully conveyed. After all but destroying staff morale, delaying payment for suppliers, decreasing investment in new stores and the refurbishment of old ones, and making various cut-backs and redundancies, investors left the company nearly £1 billion in debt. 

.........Crucial to the success of all employee-owned businesses are consultation and keeping employees informed: ‘If it feels to the managers like overkill – as if they are giving out too much information – then they may be close to giving out enough’. People must also be allowed to make a difference, and increased efficiency should not result in people being sacked – they can be redeployed or given further training. Although hierarchies do exist in employee-owned concerns, their purpose is simply ‘to enable the front-line workers to be wholly effective’.

Sustaining employee ownership requires some thought: ‘The structuring of the ownership is of crucial importance in ensuring longevity. When all the shares are held by the individual employees a substantial ‘repurchase liability’ – the need eventually to find the cash to buy back the shares – builds up.’ Erdal discusses this topic in some depth, suggesting various alternatives and criticising US ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans, where shareholding trusts take the form of pension funds) as being ‘vulnerable to Wall Street types’. He champions the capital account system used by Spain’s Mondragón group, and urges tax concessions to support this.
However employee-owned businesses are structured, Erdal believes that in the end they can ‘be made effective only through the courage, energy and personal ethics of those involved’. Nonetheless, he maintains that they are certainly less vulnerable to abuse of power by CEOs than public corporations where ‘CEOs are running away with the loot’.......

.......Contrary to economists’ predictions, reinvestment is not a problem for employee-owned concerns as people generally ‘want to keep the company strong for their own sakes and they want to pass it on strong to the next generation’. As Erdal says, ‘They are much more than the money-grubbing automata of economists’ models’.

If by this stage you are still not persuaded of the virtues of employee-ownership, perhaps you will find Erdal’s measurement of the wider effects of employee ownership on communities in Italy convincing. Erdal compared three similar towns, differing only with regard to the proportion of their residents working for employee-owned concerns. He found that where many people worked for such businesses, residents lived a lot longer, they enjoyed larger and more supportive social networks, they perceived political authorities as being more on their side, more voted, they believed that domestic violence was less prevalent, they donated more blood, their children stayed at school longer and did better, and, ‘to a radically greater extent’, they continued being trained and educated throughout their lives. Most intriguingly, they apparently didn’t bother buying big cars to show off their wealth, despite having higher disposable incomes! Employee-ownership kills conspicuous consumption?

Introducing the Romanian Realists

I’ve been stuck this past week on the hot Bucharest plain - so not exactly fizzing with ideas. I took the opportunity to pull together some of the material which has been lying on my PC about the Romanian Realist painters of the late  19^th and early 20^th Century

Introducing the Romanian Realists is 200 pages long – and excludes the well-known work of TheodorAmman, Nicolae Grigorescu, Ion Andreescu, Camil Ressu, Stefan Luchian and Nicolae Tonitsa!!

Why are the Brits schizophrenic?

The British public remains proud of its National Health Service – although electors have shown little apparent concern at the non-stop organisational upheavals to which it has been subject over the past 30 or so years. The latest survey showed that 89% of adults in Great Britain support a national health system that is tax-funded, free at the point of use and provides comprehensive care for all citizens.

Oddly, however, 43% of those polled didn’t seem to care whether the service was provided by the NHS or another provider (e.g. private company or not-for-profit body such as a charity or social enterprise). 39% expressed an active preference for this care to be delivered by the NHS.

Although I’ve been out of the country for 25 years I understand this apparent schizophrenia.

I was heavily influenced by the anti-institutionalism of the post ‘68 period – seeing with my own eyes the complacency and protectionism of local bureaucracies. I avidly devoured the critiques of The Local State and the works of Ivan Illich (of Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis fame)

I belonged to that small wing of the Labour Party which regretted that the party had, in the 1940s, turned its back on its “voluntarist” tradition and opted for the centralisation model (Egalitarian thought and labour politics – retreating visions; Nicolas Ellison (1994) nicely sets out the three strands (or “visions”) of Labour thought) 

Presented, however, with a choice between professional or managerial power, I opted for the latter - consoling myself that the “new managers” being promoted in the 1970s in the wave of enthusiasm for corporate management would challenge the complacency I saw. 

I never imagined that the managers would take over – and pave the way for the privatisation and commodification of everything!

At a personal level, I have always been wary of the “health system” – seeing its overworked doctors as too much as the prey of the pharmaceutical industry; and the fashion for monstrous new “factory” hospitals as horrific expressions of gigantism. Hence my activity in the World Health Organisation’s Healthy Cities Network – with its emphasis on health promotion and prevention.

And, from a distance, I have followed with distaste the various scandals which have erupted whether about medical malpractice or hospital mismanagement….

And yet I have never supported the neo-liberal project of privatising health care.

My partner challenged me yesterday on this apparent contradiction – how could I still support “the British model” given the views I have expressed over the years (let alone my own rejection of the idea of ever being hospitalised)?

I knew that the French health system represented one of the world’s best – and the US one of the worst but had been getting conflicting signals recently from the various international league tables with which we are now assailed. One table (in 2007) told me that the NHS was only 17^th globally for healthcare systems. Another (just a few months ago) focused on health and wellbeing (ie outcomes) and put Britain in 27^th place. But a survey conducted by The Commonwealth Fund last year ranked the UK first overall, scoring it highly for its quality of care, efficiency and low cost at the point of service, with Switzerland coming an overall second.

What are mere mortals to make of such contradictory reports? Fortunately there is help to hand – for example from something called “The Health Foundation” which published earlier in the year this short pamphlet which shines light on both the strengths and weaknesses of the British system. Knowing the scale of money from dubious sources behind Think Tanks, I checked out their website which gives reassuring answers to the obvious questions. Of course there are other, even better-known places where such analysis is conducted (such as the King’s Fund)…..  

But perhaps the most interesting find was this survey commissioned by the Health Care Commission

Views of the NHS and Healthcare have to be viewed at three levels.
Views of the NHS as a whole are often very different from, and influenced by different issues, than public perceptions of local health services, and different again from patient perceptions.

- The NHS as a whole, and in particular the principles it embodies, remains a huge source of latent pride. It is still perceived by the British general public to be one of the best of its kind in the world. People also see the NHS as critical to society, and despite concerns about its management, they feel it needs to be protected and maintained rather than re-invented.

- Despite this, the NHS regularly features as one of the biggest issues facing Britain today for the public. In early 2006, levels of optimism about the future prospects of the NHS reached their lowest recorded levels since 2002.

- However, public satisfaction with the NHS at a national level, and patient satisfaction, have remained relatively stable since 2000 and have recently shown signs of improvement. Patient ratings of their treatment are always far higher than ratings of the NHS as a whole.
 Our analysis highlights the impact of media coverage and politics on the NHS at a national level, where people rely on media coverage to form judgement.

Not surprising that the barrage of hostile comment about health care from those in the pay of corporate power (waiting to pick up rich pickings) has been having an affect.

I remain an unrepentant “mutualist” – believing that healthcare is too important to be left to commercial, managerial, political or medical interests on their own. It needs to be locally owned – with citizen interests balancing the others…..

I appreciate that this is a minority position which may indeed be seen as positively "cavalier" (Don Quixote) these days - so will try in future posts to explore what might be involved.....

Praising - not Burying

People writing books on social affairs will usually spend at least a couple of years on their book – only to see it dealt with in a 1,000 word review (if they are lucky) – even in professional journals. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Crooked Timber book seminars which produce at least 50 page overviews of selected books – made up of 6-7 contributions. The last (on Red Plenty) had 135 pages!

I am currently reading Will Hutton’s new book How Good We Can Be (not to be confused with As Good as it Gets!) – an update of the series of books Hutton has been writing on the DNA of Anglo-American capitalism since “The State We’re In” (1995) 

Hutton is that rare character – a British journalist who cares about ideas and shares his wide and deep reading in his books; someone who can and does try to build bridges between the worlds of academia and action which I have been blogging about recently.

But, as I’ve said before here, the trouble with bridges is that, in peacetime, horses shit on them and, in wartime, they are blown up!

A lot of people therefore “have it in” for Hutton - Frederic Mount is a good example. Someone who was at one time Head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit but reengineered himself a few years ago to write a devastating critique of the new British oligarchy. His review of Hutton’s latest book has a fairly typical tone

If a book’s worth writing once, it’s worth writing several times. This homely maxim has often proved a recipe for success. Will Hutton is a case in point. Twenty years ago, he had a runaway hit with The State We’re In. He followed that up with "The State to Come" (1997), then came "TheWorld We’re In "(2002). As Hutton moved from the editor’s chair at the Observer to the Work Foundation and now to the Principal’s lodge at Hertford College, Oxford, he has stayed heroically on his own message. The title’s tweaked, but the melody lingers on.

The continentals are enlightened, the Anglo-Saxons are deluded. Europe is the future and we would be crazy to stay out of the euro. John Maynard Keynes is good, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are no good. The state is the solution, not the problem. It already showers blessings on us and would shower many more if only we could overcome our misguided suspicions. Government regulation and high taxes are the way to make us happy.For painting in black and white there are few like Hutton. There is no hesitation or deviation, although there is quite a bit of repetition, …….. 

Yet, oddly enough, many of Hutton’s proposals will appeal to a wider audience than social liberals and socialists. In fact, they are pretty much the new consensus: the separation between high street banks and the casino banks; a stiffer stewardship code to deter looting in the boardroom; Treasury guarantees for big construction projects; restoring the insurance base of the welfare state; a return to the old sliding scale for capital gains tax, in order to encourage long-term holding of shares; an end to the tax advantages of debt over equity; reforming council tax and giving local authorities back their financial independence.

I warm to all this, and I also like Hutton’s proposals to reinvent the trade unions as co-partners with business, particularly the idea that they might set up mutually-owned service companies to sell their services to employers.

These days we are all in favour of diversifying patterns of ownership beyond the standard plc model, to include more co-operatives and also “public benefit companies,” which guarantee under charter to deliver certain public benefits and enjoy tax advantages in return. Free enterprise used to be more diverse and could be so again.

The awkward truth is, though, that these alluring alternatives are no more risk-free than the old limited company. It is an awkward thought that the best-known alternative corporations of this sort over the past few years have been the Co-op, Railtrack/Network Rail and the BBC—none of them exactly without problems of governance.

But it’s Hutton’s grand narrative that seems the more rickety. We are constantly told that the past 20 or 30 years have been a disaster for the United Kingdom. Yet at the same time we are also told that “Britain has more world-class universities per head of population than any other country,” that “The triangle bounded by the M3 in the south M40 to the north and with Heathrow at its centre boasts the highest concentration of high-tech start-ups outside California and Massachusetts,” that the BBC remains the finest broadcasting service in the world, that the National Health Service is “the cheapest system in the world producing the best health results across a range of key indicators” and “on measures of effectiveness, safety, patient-centredness, co-ordination, quality and access, Britain scores number one.”

I must confess that my eyes did begin to glaze over after the fifth or sixth of the series of injunctions Hutton gets started on later in the book. I longed for a lighter touch - and was therefore quite fascinated to discover this issue touched on in this detailed and very serious treatment of the sort calculated to warm the cockles of all writers - it's called Calling Capitalism to account by Steve New

Writers who want to engage seriously with economic and political reality face a problem. How to pitch the tone of what they say? Every simple story needs goodies and baddies; more complex stories need some sort of moral trajectory. But how explicitly should you tell the story? The vast bulk of serious academic work avoids offence by talking in the abstract, layering oblique evasion upon tactful qualification. Academics settle for the low temperature, formal modality of the learned journals; passion is excluded. Much is made of broad generalisations; no-one is criticised directly. ‘Firms’ and ‘Markets’ feature, as do ‘agents’, but mostly they don’t have names: authors can be pretty sure they’re not going to be sued by anyone, even in the rare event that a normative judgement is explicitly made.

Even academic work which reflects some kind of moral or political purpose (not all does) tends to be scrupulously anodyne, and keen not to offend. You’d really struggle to find explicit criticisms of particular firms or managers in the Academy of Management Review or the Journal of Finance or the Harvard Business Review2.

Politicians and activists can be more specific – we don’t like Shell, we don’t like Nike – but, often deliberately, tend to prioritize effect over accuracy or content3.

Journalists can be more direct, but mostly without the tedious necessity of consistency or depth. Will Hutton – over a prolific career operating in the relatively unpopulated overlap between journalist, academic and (perhaps) politician – has mastered a kind of middle ground. He writes about general ideas, but he also names names; he treads a line between rounded argument and polemical assertion; he tries to be critical

Writing about companies and business people and their ethics is tricky because it is easy to blunder into two equally stupid traps: you can declare them all horrible, beyond sympathy and empathy, or you can end up fawning and cooing in line with corporate propaganda. Nuanced and balanced treatment is hard: that’s part of why academics often stick to the abstract or typical case. If you get specific, you risk being a bombastic Spart or a corporate patsy.

Hutton navigates this carefully; he talks about particular firms, but from one particular angle at a time. So, in HGWCB, Apple is hailed as an example of innovation, with its ‘handsome, well-designed devices’ (26). But the working conditions in the supply chain are not discussed.
On the other hand, INEOS and Sports Direct are bad because of their employment practices; ARM is good because it’s successful and hasn’t been bought up by foreigners. Unilever has a declared purpose (of which more, later) and doesn’t do quarterly reporting (good). Virgin uses tax havens (bad). News International is beyond the pale because of its ‘purpose-free amoral culture’ (87).

Hutton uses specific examples of firms to point out particular virtues and vices, praising for X, damning for Y.

You have nothing to lose but your Chain.....-link Fences

The last few posts may have appeared to have had different themes but, I realise, were linked to the basic difficulty we seem these days in establishing common ground about the state of our societies/systems – or agreeing actionable programmes of change. 

I mentioned the failure of Ed Straw's book to mention – let alone begin to analyse – the important contributions which have come from other consultants/academics about the sad state of the machinery of British government. Everyone – left/right; Ministers/civil servants; Think Tanks/consultants/ economists/ sociologists/ political scientists – has their own narrative – and all talk past one another.....and the citizen…

Almost no one tries to establish a common denominator about this – let alone alliances. 

I appreciate that this is perhaps more of an Anglo-American thing than European – where there is broader acceptance of the need for negotiation and coalition.

But the academic specialisation which Scialabba was talking about – plus the niche marketing which the various experts (their institutions and publishers) are compelled to take part in in order to make any impact in the modern Tower of Babel we all now inhabit - has also affected the “consensual” aspect of European society….We are confused and cynical…..

A couple of books which were delivered just a few hours ago make the point - Governing Britain: Power, Politics and the Prime Minister  was published in 2013 by a well-known British academic (Patrick Diamond) and is the detailed story of how New Labour tried to modernise the machinery of government over its 13 years. Who Governs Britain? is a short book published this year by one of the doyens of British political science (Anthony King) and explores the question whether “our system of government is fit for purpose”.

Both books have copious indexes and bibliographies which I immediately checked for mention of the books of practical men such as Ed Straw or John Seddon. What do I find?
- No mention of these two – although Chris Foster (with an academic background) does rate 2 entries in Diamond’s book. 
- Michael Barber (Tony Blair’s Education guru and the inventor of “deliverology”) is the only significant change-agent to get real space in Diamond’s book. 
- The important Power Inquiry of 2005-2010 oddly gets no mention in King’s book and only 2 references in Diamond’s index.

- Democratic Audit’s satirical The Unspoken Constitution (2009) which gives us a very pointed critique of the concentration of irresponsible power of the British system is, of course, totally ignored.

The conclusion I draw from this is simple, Academics reference only one another (within their own narrow discipline) – and disdain to mention the outputs of mere practitioners (if they even bother to read them). And practitioners (civil servants/politicians) don’t have the temperament or patience to read and distill what the academics write. 

Consultants, journalists and Think-Tankers, however, are the sort of intermediaries who should be capable of selection and summary - but have their own interests, disdain most writing (Think-Tankers being an exception) and bring instead their particular brand of snake oil…….

One of the (few) heartening sections of Naughton’s book about the Internet is his chapter on the “media eco-system” in which he produces several case-studies of the upstaging of the mainstream media by bloggers who had more specialized knowledge than the journalists. 

There are an increasing number of (older) bloggers who have the time and inclination to challenge what the power elites are doing – but they have to network more – and sharpen their message.    

Perhaps my contribution is to try to identify those who are working in my field(s)….and try to get more of them working together and developing a higher profile???

Coincidentally, another book in the packet which arrived this afternoon offers an approach which might help pull ourselves out of our confusion – Ben Ramalingham’s Aid on the Edge of Chaos which applies systems theory to  a range of complex problems faced in most parts of the world.

Stand and Deliver - a new design for successful government??

A week ago I mentioned Ed Straw's “Stand and Deliver - a new design for successful government”.

In this – and a future post – I want to examine its analysis and claims.

It is an angry book - which reflects the public’s loss of trust in the political system….. but has attracted surprisingly few reviews - so let me start with the BBC coverage which, as you would expect, is simply a summary of the book’s blurb they were given -

The thrust of Ed Straw's book is that the current system of government is too adversarial, fails to include any feedback on whether policies have succeeded, gives little choice to voters and suffers from a civil service which hampers politicians' attempts to get things done."Between elections, the places where power resides are the news media running their various agendas, good and bad, political and business - large companies and industries with expert preferential lobbyists and party funders, dealing with a political and civil service class mostly ignorant of their business," he says.

He says governments "limp on with a mixture of muddle, error, howlers and the occasional success" and politicians "rarely work out before getting power that it's bust". He says he has come to the conclusion that the civil service cannot be reformed on its own, because reform would involve transferring more power to the government, which would "make it worse because they have too much power already". 

So his solution is a revamp of the whole system of government. The better-known reforms that he wants to see include proportional representation and state funding of political parties - with a ban on large donations - to promote competition among parties and make sure that individuals or interests cannot buy influence.Swiss-style referendums would be held on a more regular basis, while governments would be limited to four-year terms and prime ministers not allowed to serve more than eight years (to stop the "autocracy cap" where a leader with pretty much unchecked power becomes autocratic and "wants to stay for ever because you can't imagine life without that power"). 

His more radical ideas are based around bringing in new feedback systems into the working of governments.He likens government at present to a gardener planting seeds, telling people what the garden will look like but then never actually checking whether or not they have grown as planned (instead spending lots of time checking on the sharpness of a spade or the water efficiency of a hose).That is in contrast to the private sector, which checks on the outcomes of spending continually.

A similar discipline needs to come into government, he says.There has been progress with the National Audit Office, the Office for National Statistics and select committees, he says, but he wants them all brought under the umbrella of the second chamber (the House of Lords at the moment) becoming a "Resulture" able to score policies and kill off those ones which are not working. 

The civil service would be radically revamped with it retaining a smaller administrative role, but in other areas there would no longer be a permanent civil service. Instead specialists with knowledge of, say, the railways, would be brought in to contract, manage and regulate that industry. 

Ed Straw says that his application of organisational theory onto how the UK government works is unique. He has also strong views on the Labour Party's structure. He says a lot of Labour's problems could have been avoided if they had a better process for challenging or replacing a leader, saying the Conservative system is much more efficient. It would have allowed Mr Blair to be removed before the 2005 election, for Gordon Brown to have gone within a year of taking office and John Smith to have led Labour in 1992 rather than Neil Kinnock, he says.But whatever the changes within parties, he says that successive governments have shown that nothing much will change without the wider reforms he is suggesting.

Most Brits will find all of this very acceptable….although I personally am a bit disappointed that his book doesn’t make any reference to the voluminous “What’s Wrong with British Government” literature.

- Chris Foster (academic, government adviser and fellow PWC consultant) wrote in 2005 an important paper Why we are so badly governed? – an enlarged version of which can be found in his book of the same year British Government in Crisis 

- Kate Jenkins was an active participant in the changes of the 1990s and wrote an important book in 2007 about her work Politicians and Public Services which is admittedly more descriptive.

- But others – such as John Seddon – have offered a more systemic approach
- and most British Think Tanks at one time or another have written critiques containing fairly radical proposals for change in the government system.

So it would have been useful if Straw had given some indication of exactly how his approach differs from others. But all we get is a short sentence saying his approach is “unique”!

 Apparently this is because his is an “an organizational perspective” (page 10) But what exactly does he mean by this? 

He seems to mean the “contestability” brought by competition between commercial companies (when it is allowed to exist) thereby raising a couple of critical questions - the first being the hoary question which occupied some of us in the 1980s – the extent to which it was possible to apply the same management principles in  public and commercial organisations. One the Professors on my MSc programme wrote one of the classic articles on this – with a strong warning about the scale of the difference between the two contexts and their measures (“profit” and “public interest”)

The second question is - Has the contestability factor not been at the heart of New Public Management (NPM) which the UK has had for the past 20-odd years?  
Ed Straw has been a senior partner in the Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC) Management Consultancy for many years – and gave evidence to the British Parliament’s Select Committee on Public Administration in 2005 which included strong support,for example, for the privatization of the Prison Service…and talked loosely about the need for further “politicization” of the Civil Service. In the name of “accountability”…..

His Demos pamphlet of the same year – The Dead Generalist – spelled out in more detail what he meant. Apparently he wants more contestability…..but his book is not happy with NPM – on page 36 he says simply that 

“the developers of NPM omitted some essential components of the original conception”. On the same page he refers to the “countless diagrams attempting to represent the unified field theory of public sector reform developed in central units like the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Delivery Unit from international management consultancies…..some are worth reading and some so limited as to be aberrant”. 

And that’s it! He divulges no more – except to tell us to read Norman Dixon’s “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence” (1976), Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, Michael Porter, Peter Senge and 3 others I have only vaguely heard of….

So what are the "essential components" of the NPM model which the British designers missed? We’re not told….

footnote; the subtlety of the book's  main title may be lost on some of my foreign readers - it is the demand that came from the highway robbermen of the past when stopping stage-coaches - "deliver your valuables......" But "delivery" (implementation) is also the bit of policy-making which governments (let alone consultants) have been identifying for decades as the key weakness of the government process