57 Varieties of Capitalism

Last October I developed a table in what was probably the most important post of the year – one in a series about capitalism. The table listed 11 academic disciplines; showed how 3 “schools” of thinking could be discerned in each discipline; and how they tended to treat the subject.

The key variable distinguishing these schools was the extent to which they recognised the realities of power. I named them “market theoreticians”; “mixed” and “critical-realist” respectively.

The subsequent matrix produced 33 different “lens” with which to try to understand the system which rules over us with Minotaur-like voraciousness. I was proud of the result – I had never seen it done before. Of course there was a school of political economists which developed in the 1980s and 90s called the Varieties of Capitalism approach – but this focused on essentially two basic models. 

My matrix is distinctive in 3 ways – first that so many academic fields are listed. At best people will mention economics, sociology and political science – with little recognition that economics has several very different sub-fields. And I might have added “complexity science” which has rapidly developed its own specialism.

The second original aspect of the table is the recognition of three very different “schools” or approaches…Most economists, of course, still adhere to highly theoretical and unrealistic assumptions which were explored (and exploded) in this recent post

But political and behavioural economists – let alone the sociologists, geographers and even psychologists have been muscling in….Indeed I have had to add the psychologists to the table…giving 36 "lens" or squares

And the final distinctive aspect of the table is the identification of so many books – almost 50 covering most of squares…
I have selected the books which appear in the table according to whether they portray a world of “perfect competition” in which, according to the theory, no one has any power or, at the other extreme, a world of large companies and groups exercising power (legal and illegal). 

We are prone these days to use ideological labels too easily – so I want to avoid that by using less obvious labels.

- “Market theoreticians” (column 3) are those whose writing is based on the totally unrealistic assumptions of perfect competition

“Mixed economy” therefore covers those who clearly argue for what used to be called “the mixed economy” and are quite clear that they wish a better, more balanced capitalism;

- The “critical-realist” label covers those who go further in their critical approach, extending their analysis to the role exercised by dubious and illegitimate power players who try to buy democracy and whose activities threaten the planet’s very survival.

Some academic disciplines, of course, like economics, are almost exclusively associated with one school (market) whereas others are more pluralist 

Needless to say, the allocation to one particular column is arbitrary and could be disputed – as can the choice of illustrative authors and books (not all of which I have actually read)

The table is, however, a rather superb example of what post-modernism has done to us – which I will explore in a subsequent post   

The table is, however, a good example of what post-modernism has done to us

 Key Texts about the future of capitalism – by academic discipline and “approach”

 

Academic Discipline	1. Critical-Realist	2. Mixed approach	3. “market theoreticians”
Economics	Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012)  Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015). Davey is not a career or conventional economist!   23 Things they didn’t tell you about capitalism; Ha Joon-Chang (2010)	People, Power and Profits – progressive capitalism for an age of discontent; Joseph Stiglitz (2019) The Future of Capitalism – facing new anxieties; Paul Collier (2018) Shifts and Shocks – what we’ve learned, and still have to, from the financial crisis; Martin Wolf (2014) Conceptualising Capitalism – institutions, evolution, future; Geoff Hodgson (2015)	Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004)     most of the discipline
Economic history	Capitalism and its Economics – a critical History; Douglas Dowd (2000) Never Let a Good Crisis go to waste; Philip Mirowski  (2013)	Crashed – how a decade of financial crises changed the world Adam Tooze (2018)	Economic historians by definition have a strong sense of political and other institutions
Political economy	Inside Capitalism – an intro to political economy; Paul Phillips (2003) Susan Strange - States and Markets (1988) - Casino Capitalism ; (1986) - The Retreat of the State (1994)	Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea; Mark Blyth (2013) Yanis Varoufakis - And the Weak Suffer what they must – Europe, austerity and the threat to global stability (2016) - The Global Minotaur (2012)	The discipline still rediscovering itself but, again, by definition, has a strong sense of the importance of institutions
Political Science	Crisis without End - the unravelling of western prosperity: A Gamble (2014)  Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism; Sheldon Wolin (2008)	Paul Hirst eg Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011).  The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order; Francis Fukuyama (1999)  Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now; David Marquand (2015)	Only a few brave pol scientists trespass into the economic field – although it is becoming more fashionable
Policy analysis/Think Tanks		“The Locust and the Bee – predators and creators in capitalism’s future”; G Mulgan (2015)	An Intro to Capitalism (IEA 2018)
Sociology	Wolfgang Streeck. - How will Capitalism End?; (2016) - Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (2013) End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013) Capitalism; Geoff Ingham (2008)	Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)	The sociological voice is still inspired by C Wright Mills, Veblen, Weber and Durkheim
Geography	David Harvey - Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014) - The Enigma of Capital (2010) - A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism (2005).	Danny Dorling - A Better Politics – how government can make us happier (2016 - Injustice (2014)	The geographers are a bolshie lot - with a strong sense of geo-politics
Environment	Come On! Capitalism, short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet; (Club of Rome 2018).	Why we can’t agree about Climate Change; Mike Hulme (2009) Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999)	they pride themselves on their technocracy
Management and man’t studies	“The Dictionary of Alternatives – utopianism and organisation”; M Parker (2007)	Rebalancing Society; Henry Mintzberg (2014) Peter Senge Charles Handy	Most mant writers are apologists – apart from the critical mant theorists
Religious studies	Laudato-Si – Pope Francis’ Encyclical (2015). Accessible in its entirety here	The Crisis of global capitalism – Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical and the future of political economy; ed A Pabst (2011)	Questions of Business Life; Higginson (2002)
Psychology	Herbert Marcuse What about me – the struggle for identity in a market based society?; Paul Verhaeghe (2014)
Journalism	Post Capitalism – a guide to our Future; Paul Mason (2015) ….  The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System; Jerry Mander (2012).	How Good Can we be – ending the mercenary society Will Hutton (2015)  Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes (2006)	They don’t enjoy the tenure of the academics (altho Hutton is a college Director)

Is Organisational Reform really all that sexy?

The last 2 posts have tried to direct readers to posts they may have missed last year - relating to one of the three subjects which most occupied my thoughts viz the nature of the economic beast which had us in its grips. You can read these thoughts more easily on “To Whom it May Concern” – the latest version of which is accessible by clicking on that title in the list in the top-right corner of the blog’s masthead.

Today I want to switch the focus to the section of the collection which is entitled “What is it about Admin Reform which makes it so sexy?” But first I owe my readers some explanation of why I continue to be so fixated about public management reform….Quite simply I find the writings on the subject less than satisfactory because they are produced either by academics (who reify and obfuscate) or by think-tankers (who simplify and exaggerate). It’s very difficult to find material written by practitioners – or, even better, by those who straddle boundaries of discipline, nation or role.

I came to full adult consciousness in the 1960s, getting my first taste of political power in 1968 and of political responsibility and innovation in 1971 when I became Chairman of a Scottish Social Work Committee.

“Reform” was very much in the air – although no one could then have imagined what an industry public administrative reform would become. Indeed, in those days, the only management author you could find in the bookstores was Peter Drucker. And the only books about reform were American….

The opening pages of my How did Administrative Reform get to be so Sexy? try to convey a sense of what it was like to be an early pioneer of organisational change in the country. My position in academia encouraged me to develop a habit of publishing “think-pieces” often in the form of pamphlets in a Local Government Research Unit which I established in 1970 at Paisley College of Technology – this 1977 article gives a good example of the style.

The same year I published a little book about the experience of the new system of Scottish local government and, for the next decade, musings on my experience of running a unique social strategy in the West of Scotland. 

In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) were the reflections which resulted from my first decade living and working in the countries of post-communist central Europe. Eight years then followed in three Central Asian countries and strengthened a feeling about the inappropriateness of the approach we “foreign experts” were using in our “technical assistance”.

In 2007 I tried to interest people in the NISPace network in a critique called Missionaries, mercenaries or witchdoctors – is admin reform in transition countries a religion, business or a medicine? – but to no avail.

I started blogging in 2008 with a website which is still active – publicadminreform - clearly signalling that I wanted to use it to reach out to others. Sadly that has not happened…but it has not stopped me from continuing to “talk to myself” on this blog and from trying to produce a book which does justice to the thoughts and experiences I’ve had in about 10 countries over the past 50 years….

So let me try to summarise why I persevere with this fixation of mine –

-       Authors in this field focus either on students or experts in government, academia and think tanks.

-       I know of only a handful of books which have been written for the general public

-       Most writers about PAR have known only one occupation – whether academic or think-tanker – and one country

-       I’ve occupied different roles (political, academic, consultancy) in different countries and can therefore see the issues from many sides

-       few authors have bothered to try to explore the possible reasons for the stratospheric and continued rise in interest in administrative reform

-       New cohorts of politicians, public servants and even academics arrive in the workforce without a good sense of the history of this subject

Post	What sparked it off	Why it’s worth reading
Time to reclaim public services Time to get the Finger out	Oxfam report for Davos Rereading last year’s draft book about administrative reform	Gives us the encouraging lessons from the experience of those who have rolled back privatisation
The invisible power of managerial ideology	Going back to Burnham	Explores the question we rarely ask
How did it happen? part II	My 1999 book “In Transit – notes on Good Governance”	Looks at how reform was seen in the 1990s
a Rare voice of clarity – part III	Gerald Caiden	A prescient voice
Machiavelli’s Warning – part IV	A reminder of the strength of organ inertia	A first stab at an answer to the question
The Managerial Turn - part V	Clarifying professionalism	First we rubbished the professionals
“Not with a bang, but a whimper” - Part VI	We don’t seem to have learned much in 40 years……	Key lessons are however extracted
Chris Pollitt RIP	Belated acknowledgement of a great scholar	Those who express important truths in a clear language deserve honour
Looking for purpose	“The Puritan Gift” is a rare critique of how modern management has poisoned us all	Has a good summary
Peter Drucker’s Deadly Sins of PA – part VII	The Grand Old Man of management says it better	Important proverbs
Wresting politics back from the technocrats	an article being hyped as “the new practice of public problem-solving”	Technocracy is the new enemy
Workforce management – an idea whose time has come	Laloux book	Summary of one of the most important books about organisations in recent years
Let the Fingers do the Talking	an article being hyped as “the new practice of public problem-solving	Good references
Real Control	Workforce management again
The Virus affecting the world	Neoliberalism
Blowing up departmental silos	Hilary Cottam’s book	Time to take this issue seriously
Plain speaking - words and PAR	A rare article about translation  should leave us wondering why international summits are not more conflictual..

The Beast – part II

The penultimate post of 2019 surveyed the critical state in which the economics “discipline” has found itself in this past decade. Despite having an Economics degree and actually teaching the subject for a few years in a Polytechnic in the 1970s, I readily admit my confusions - globalisation - the new tools of financial engineering and IT have introduced totally new dimensions to the economic world and left me (and most others) very conscious of our ignorance.

I knew I had to put my distaste for economics books aside and take time try to understand not so much the financial crash but rather the true nature of this turbulent system

So, a couple of years ago, I produced two rare annotated lists of books. First of the key books written before the 2008 financial crash; then of those I judged worthy of mention which had appeared after the crash. How, you might reasonably ask, did you select these books? Why should we trust your judgement? I try to answer such questions here

One thing I noticed was how differently the various academic disciplines dealt with the subject. Economists seemed the obvious people to start with – but their texts were remarkably dry and clearly oblivious to a lot of important factors. For people who had failed to anticipate the crash, their tone was also a bit too cocky and self-assured. 

The sociologists had a more plausible story to tell but generally seemed too ready to critique it all. I was most impressed with the smaller numbers of political economists (Blyth, Collier, Stiglitz, Streecken and Varoufakis), economic historians (Tooze) and even a few journalists (Mander)

Honing the recommendations

The two lists I did in 2017 dealt with more than 100 books – and I realise my readers don’t have time for this. So last September I had another look at the lists and came up with clear recommendations first of 15 important books which were written before the crash; and then of about 20 which appeared after it   

Somehow, however, the books never satisfy – after all they tend to convey the same message –

- The system is voracious, never satisfied

- It’s unstable – boom and then bust

- It leads increasingly to more and more inequality – the 1% have been replaced by some 25 families who control 99% of the wealth

- markets are naturally “oligopolistic” – ie tending to be controlled by a few massive companies which engage in billion dollar marketing and destructive pricing

- markets display none of the characteristics on which economists base their claims about the benefits of markets   

But this doesn’t stop my belief that the next book will give me the answers I’m seeking… eg the latest Stiglitz or Milanovic. Just as the Minotaur has an unquenchable thirst for profit and development, so as readers we are never satisfied. …Somehow we have to resist this temptation….to learn when we have had (or know) enough

Is it the system – or us?

The posts take an interesting turn toward the end of the year when Robert Greene’s latest book sparked some thoughts about human nature; and Zuboff raised the issue of surveillance capitalism. The posts about human nature reminded me of a book which had made a big impact on me as far ago as 1978 – “The Seventh Enemy” by Ronald Higgins. It was one of the first to look at six looming issues - viz of the population explosion, food shortages, raw materials exhaustion, environmental degradation, nuclear power; and abuse of science and technology. And to suggest that the real enemy was the seventh – us, the human race! Higgins’ book is no longer available but you can get the gist from this BBC documentary.

The table in yesterday’s post contained the first half of last year’s posts about the economic system. The table below completes the job – with the first 8 being those most concerned with economics…..

Post title	What sparked it off	Why you should read it
Selecting a Brains Trust for the End Times	The best of the authors are invited to a dinner before the crash	All selections are invidious – I’ve chosen here the individuals who had the ability to write clearly about the nature of our economic system BEFORE the 2008 crash
For Serious Activists only	And after the crash	Those who helped our understanding most after 2008
Another World is Possible	Erik Olin-Wright	Few authors have dealt properly with utopia
What’s in a Name?	Searching for the best book to recommend about “capitalism”	An American journalist wins by a long chalk – with his “The Capitalist Papers”
New Economic Thinking	Some promising new perspectives	Some great hyperlinks
Capitalism – by academic discipline	I realised how rarely I have tried to define the beast	Very rare table which uses 3 different lens to find how 11 different academic disciplines try to define the beast
A rare example of interdisciplinarity	A book from a global institute for social progress	Most writing on the subject suffers from being written from a single discipline
Can Economics change its Spots?	Review of 5 books	Explains why noone should take economists seriously these days
How did we let them get away with it?	Mount’s “The New Few”	A brave right-winger admits exposes the new oligarchy
Human Nature	Robert Greene’s latest book	An assessment of our frailties which is superbly written
Generational Cycles	Robert Greene again	How the 1970s American Democrats killed a great populist tradition
Turning Points	Alt history	we need to push back more against social forces which are presented as irresistible..
Building Character	David Brooks “The Road to Character”	An unfashionable subject these days!
Is our social DNA  changing?	Daniel Bell, Richard Sennett, Fukuyama; Davis “Reckless Opportunists ”	Is 1980s’ greed and opportunism; and social media changing our behaviour?
More surveillance than capitalism	Zuboff’s trilogy	Why I have my doubts about an overly-hyped book from an author I used to admire
Bullshit Jobs	David Graeber’s latest	Explains the importance of a book the academics would like to ignore