A Salute to exemplary writing

Charles Handy has been one of the few writers who has really touched and inspired me on my journey of the past 40 odd years. The first book of his I became aware of was “Understanding Organisations” (1976) - written after 5 years’ experience of helping establish the country’s first business school and was indeed one of the few books on management available in Britain at the time. When the huge new Strathclyde Region set up a small group in 1975 to review its departmental structure, the Chief Executive gave us a Peter Drucker paperback to give us ideas – it was the only paperback on the subject available….  Handy’s “Understanding Organisations” came a year later and was written for the practising executive – management “students” didn’t exist then! 

Unlike the humility and moral power in Handy’s writing, technical smartness and artifice are the basic features of most management books. His next book - “Gods of Management” (1978) was a shorter one which told the story of the 4 types of organisational culture. It was a superb read and was reflected in presentations I subsequently did in Central Asia in the early 2000s to help officials set the “one-man management” principle they were familiar with against alternative systems…. 

I have just been rereading his little autobiography - Myself– and other more important matters which is so delightful and thought-provoking and has such a superb review here by someone who knew him that I thought I would reproduce it in its entirety 

If we have any British management gurus, Charles Handy must head the list, although he doesn’t really like being called a guru. This book is the nearest we shall get to his autobiography, including, as it does, much of his understanding of key management issues. He describes himself as a social philosopher, weighing up the social implications of management and employment matters. We also meet him in this book as a humble person, who, while knowing that he has something to offer, doesn’t “think of himself more highly than he should”.

As well as many insights into a life well lived, there is much food for thought here about life/work balance, about career paths which emerge rather than get chosen, about how experience teaches us, about the purpose of a business, about the way in which our identity is shaped and success is defined. 

Career philosophy

Charles Handy traces his career from early life in an Irish Anglican vicarage, to classical scholar at Cambridge, to Shell executive struggling in the jungles of Borneo, to business school professor, to public figure and broadcaster, traveller and world circuit lecturer. But as in most careers there is a great deal of the unplanned and unexpected in it. We also meet some of the non-public Charles Handy and see him wrestling with personal dilemmas and the implications that we all have different personae, depending on the circumstances of time and place. What is identity? Do we remain the same person throughout our lives? For example, was he the same person at work as the one his family knew at home? 

One of the problems of being a manager is that you may be required to try to change what a person really is to what the company or institution wants. For this reason Handy inclines to the view that we should not mix friendship and work zones. Also personality tests, while not devoid of meaning, should be treated with some reserve, because we do change through life and we are usually a mix depending on situations which arise. As he reflects on his experiences, Handy sees that his genetic inheritance did not determine his actions and that if you care passionately about something you discover elements within yourself which you didn’t realise were there and which get filled out under the pressure of experience. The influence of his wife, Elizabeth, herself a professional photographer, is credited with making him more of a “connector” and “salesperson” than he would otherwise have been.

One could say that Handy believes that success does not come from knowing where you want to go. Rather by action, experimentation, questioning and re-acting we discover who and what we are.  This might help us to a sense of reality when we read these “how to” books that give a clear guide on how to plan and implement your career. He doubts whether even now he really knows who he is; he quotes T.S.Eliot “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” 

Early development

Charles Handy looks at the various stages of his life in terms of their relevance to making him what he became and, indeed, what he is. He grew up in an Irish society where there was little social mixing between Catholics and Protestants, though there was little overt hostility in his early experience. His family, whose forebears had lived in Ireland for 300 years,  was part of the Anglo-Irish community which has now largely vanished from the Republic of Ireland.  Regardless of the religious divide, and in spite of an upbringing which deeply respected the British monarchy, he never ceased to feel Irish; after 40 years in England, Handy does not really know whether he is English or Irish in his inner self, though temperamentally, he says, he lacks the Irish gregariousness.

Ireland as the fourth richest country in the world by per capita income has moved on, economically and culturally since he left, but he regrets that many aspects of life which had an Irish charm have diminished. He muses on the mixed blessing which globalisation brings and wonders whether the seductions of consumerism and the pulling apart of old communities have been for the best. He speaks of a seminar he and his wife ran in Dublin where participants expressed regret that good features, like the friendliness, the sense of timelessness, the easy-going life with the family as the centre, had gone, as well as the factors that were not so good like extremes of poverty, false religiosity and island mentality. In all this, Handy is looking back from where he is now; not at what he would have perceived as he was growing up.

So also in relation to his education; he went to Oxford as a classicist, having attained good pre-university Latin and Greek, by a series of fortuitous circumstances rather than by design. Frequently he refers back to his university experience as he sees its effect on his career. He quickly realised that he was being exposed to a different form of education from anything he had previously met. In his first week, his tutor asked him to prepare an essay on “What is Truth?” – this initiated him into a different intellectual world.

Languages per se did not attract him, but they opened the doors to the study of the great philosophers such as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. He was learning to think rigorously and rationally. Plato left him with the awareness that so much of what we think of as reality is but our perception of reality. In later years he found this a valuable understanding in the teaching of management. (Perhaps this is why business schools like Dartmouth and Aspen have included in their programmes a course for managers and their spouses on the great thinkers of all ages.) Handy learnt that the world was not a simple place; he became a habitual sceptic or at least a thoughtful person. 

The Greek philosophers anticipated many of our current problems; Socrates probed underlying assumptions. Handy finds that using a series of “Why? questions” often gets to the heart of a matter. Aristotle’s Golden Mean – not too much or too little of anything – has influenced his choices in life, which have not been to be as rich as possible. Aristotle had a lot to say about eudaimonia, a Greek word, often translated as happiness, but which really means doing your best with what you are best at, which, with its ethical undertone, is more profound than “optimising your core competences”.

Handy muses on his time at university, that education is not passing on to the new generation what has worked in the past; it is not a matter of merely memorising the great minds of the past and regurgitating the results at exam time. He learnt the value of talking in learning, quoting an Irish saying, “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?” He looks back on university as a time of learning to think cogently and coherently and applying the reasoning to all aspects of life. “The proof of the educational pudding is in much later life.” 

Handy’s early business career

He wanted to see the world and have a wide range of experience and got a job with Shell whose interviewer told him “You have a well trained, but empty mind; we’ll fill it with useful knowledge”.  There followed two 3-year tours of duty as an executive in South East Asia, beginning as an economist in Singapore, where he got himself started by reading a little book Teach Yourself Economics. Quite soon he was subjected to development by immersion – “throw them in and they will have to learn to swim”. His main activity was in Borneo, devoid of roads and Western amenities, where travel was mainly by alligator infested rivers and where he had just one expatriate assistant to help him administer a vast area of oil activity. 

It was no good merely working by the manuals. You learnt as you went along, especially by mistakes. It was obvious that “warehoused learning” wasn’t going to be of much use. Getting the right people was the most significant road to success. He was not really happy with the Borneo experience; it did not give him the outlet for his personality that he needed. There was scope for making mistakes from which you could learn if you were honest in your subsequent reflection; this remained valuable for the rest of his life. But a career with a big multinational was not for him.

He came back to London where he was given a non-job, which taught him that to be under-loaded can be more destructive than over-loaded. He had no positive responsibility, but plenty of negative responsibility. He could stop things happening, and from this he learned to understand why people lacking positive responsibility could be obstructive, such as the official who refuses a planning application without reason, or the airline employee who closes the gate just as you are rushing up, the waiter who ignores you and so on. For some, it is the only way they can create meaning in what they do. 

Handy was then transferred to the Shell Management Training College and felt he had found his vocation in preparing managers for their next assignments. But in a short time he was required to leave that and prepare to go to Liberia. So he sat down and wrote his letter of resignation, not knowing what would happen and after only a year or so of married life. Elizabeth, his wife, receives frequent mention in the book. They have been real partners who complemented each other. Her drive and skill as a connector with people has been a major contribution to his own success. 

The turning point

Behind the scenes, someone who had been observing him in Shell initiated a situation as a result of which in 1965 he was offered a post at the new London Business School, which led to a full professorship, without all the normal procedures. He became responsible for the Sloan Management Programme in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the development of which he spent a year in the USA and found himself enlivened by the flexibility and energy he experienced there – an attitude that the future is ours to create and that initiative should be encouraged, that anything is possible if you care enough. 

The move to London Business School was the turning point in his life which ultimately led to the Charles Handy we know. He comments on the way in which people can influence your path in life and reflects on the opportunity that the work he was then embarking on gave scope to influence others. He talks, from the receiving end, of the chance remark which can have momentous consequences, helping people to believe in themselves. In contrast, he recalls cases where some managers seemed to think that if they were not actively and negatively criticising people that should be enough to indicate satisfaction with performance. He advocates the sowing of seeds in the right quarters which can create opportunity for people to progress; also seeds can be sown in their own minds which can lead to personal development and seeing the right openings.

Whilst he enjoyed and valued his year at MIT, he subsequently realised that, in one sense, he had no real need to have gone. Most of the value of his learning experience lay in the fact that what he knew intuitively and implicitly became explicit and useable. (I found myself very responsive to Handy’s thought here. When teaching I often say to the participants that I will not tell them anything they don’t already know – only they don’t know they know it.)

At MIT and in his work at London Business School, Charles Handy learnt to see management as a practical art, rather than as an applied science. It requires ingenuity, imagination and character. Beyond analytical skill it requires insight; concepts emerge from experience rather then preceding it. He humorously suggests that the MBA programme ought often to be called “Master of Business Analysis”, for this is what the daily working on case studies at many business schools leads to. Like Henry Mintzberg,  Handy emphasises that learning about management should take place in tandem with practical experience – a kind of apprenticeship process.

Consultancy and banking firms tend to value the analytical skills, but if you are a practical manager, you require people skills, perseverance, courage, an ethical stance, self-knowledge – a range of awareness encapsulated nowadays under the term “emotional intelligence”. The teaching at London Business School in its early stages was not based on this perception, but Charles Handy tried to introduce ethical awareness by the study of the Greek classic Antigone, where the main character was torn asunder by a clash of loyalties. After a trial run he had to drop it. 

This concern to emphasise practical management led in 1981 to his involvement in the Open University programme "The Effective Manager". He wrote much of the home study text and was able to marry classroom material to the realities which the students would be facing in their daily work life. They were earning while learning. The programme developed into the Open University MBA programme which now has some 3000 students, more than any other business school in Europe. (Perhaps I might be allowed a comment that the Ashridge MBA programmes and its consultancy services share the Handy philosophy and even earned a pat on the back from Mintzberg.)

This experience of business school teaching in 1987 led to Charles Handy’s role as chairing the production of the report The Making of Managers, in which he proposed a two-part MBA programme, the first, in the classroom on the language of management, and the second, part-time and related to current experience and involving mentors from the participants’ organisations. It did not catch on immediately, but its influence is perhaps seen in the later proliferation of part time programmes for working executives. 

A new direction

We have jumped ahead and have to return to a sad, yet transforming experience in Charles’ life. His father, a 74 year old retired vicar in the Church of Ireland (Anglican), died unexpectedly. People from all over Ireland flocked to the funeral, a testimony to a quiet but deeply concerned life to which many owed much. Handy saw into the depths of purpose and meaning in life and resolved to do something more meaningful than climbing career ladders.

He consulted two bishops as to his prospects of entering the priesthood. They felt the rough and tumble of parish life would not suit him, even if he might make a good bishop ultimately. However they knew that there was a vacancy coming up as warden of St George’s House, Windsor Castle. This is a “college” within the grounds of the castle, just by the beautiful St George’s Chapel, where some surplus accommodation was taken over to enable training courses for the clergy to be run and where, also, especially at weekends, what were called “consultations” took place. 

The consultations gathered together people from all walks of life, who might have a contribution to make to working through the social dilemmas of our time. (I was privileged to attend a number of them under the wardenship of Charles Handy’s successors. They are unforgettable, mind-stretching occasions in unique surroundings. The ideas shared are usually summarised to contribute to the literature of the particular theme.) Out of these consultations grew the writing of Charles Handy on the Future of Work. The little summary of the consultations on that theme is still the best piece of writing on the topic, which he has developed further in works like "The Age of Unreason" and "The Empty Raincoat". 

Particularly he has popularised the idea of a portfolio life. The four components of the portfolio life are “paid work” (fee or waged work), “gift work” (voluntary), “study work” and “home work”. These may operate simultaneously. An associated concept is that at different stages of life one may be a core employee of a company, a contracted specialist, a part time worker or freelance. No longer is work a matter of a lifetime of 40 years or more with one firm. Rather there is the freedom to move through a variety of work experiences without having to be subject to the lifelong discipline of being a fulltime employee. And with this approach is the opportunity to go on sharing, even into old age, any wisdom one has acquired. 

In taking on the work at St George’s, Handy dropped his salary considerably and had to watch the pennies, yet felt that in other ways he was enriched and a wider world was opened to him by which he has been led into paths he could never have sat down and planned. He was uplifted by the spiritual elements of the experience of being associated with the royal chapel, with its contrasts between the pomp of human prowess and the humility of service. He is what he calls a cultural Christian; not strong on the formal doctrines, though powerfully affected by the underlying significance of the Biblical stories, finding in the spiritual experience of St George’s a peace and sense of values which will always be with him and which is reflected in the regular talks he has given for the BBC on the Thought for the Day programme. (Some of these are gathered together in a little book Thoughts for the Day.)

The search for deeper meaning which was prompted by his father’s death took a step forward when he felt he ought to apply the principles of the portfolio life to himself. So when his stint at Windsor ended he did not seek formal employment but decided to become a freelance, no longer imprisoned by organisational life, but ready to follow the path as it emerged. 

Living the portfolio life

There was considerable risk involved in going freelance. He was a successful author, though not all his works sold well, and now there would be no monthly cheque coming in. With the full support of his wife, the next phase of life’s adventure started for him and them.  We have already referred to some of his activities in the early part of his new life – with the Open University and “The Making of Managers”. But for the first few years there was also some anxiety about whether the income would be there to pay the bills. Activities like being the chair of the Royal Society of Arts would not have sufficed, though they were good for his image. (A thought he would not have welcomed, feeling uneasy about self promotion; his wife became his agent eventually and she had fewer inhibitions about ensuring that some of his value was recognised in a practical way.)

However, had he allowed the risks to dominate his thinking he would have been the poorer and so would all of us who have been influenced by his writings. But one is glad that he shares in this book the difficulties of ensuring a roof over their heads, ensuring that cash was coming in and taking care of the education of two teenage children. He did a lot of lecturing. Indeed it was in this period this author first met him at Ashridge and saw for ourselves the humility of a man whose fame was spreading. He discovered during this period that if you “care deeply about what you are doing, then nothing else matters too much”.

In time, he and his wife achieved a good measure of professional stability. How they have organised their portfolio lives makes fascinating reading. He undertook world lecture tours on which she joined him, and they rationed them to enable them to gain pleasure and experience from them, which was of greater value to life than accepting all the offers he received and the money that would have gone with them. They also planned how many days they would work on their two professions and on how many they could enjoy their freedom, with an allocation for voluntary work. They worked separately, yet with a deep interest in what the other was doing. He also became an accomplished cook. 

Their experiences of living within their means, particularly in the early days of the freelance phase, also caused him to reflect upon how the consumer society is not satisfied with enough, but is always seeking more and more. It is said that the goods on offer add to your power of choice. But what is the value of such a bewildering range of choices in the absence of a criterion of choice? They simply add stress. Handy refers to Adam Smith’s view that while economic growth was obviously a good thing, making life easier for everyone, too much of it for too long would result in a surfeit of unnecessary things. But Handy, as a social philosopher, also asks whether we have the right to determine for others what is necessary and what merely clutters up the streets with discarded packaging. He also recognises that all these luxuries create work for others. So he gets us questioning rather than providing unambiguous answers. 

Thoughts on capitalism

His experiences linked with his social philosopher role led him into some thoughts on capitalism (more fully dealt with in his book The Hungry Spirit). At one stage by a variety of circumstances he and his wife found themselves the owners of three homes, which made him feel guilty. He felt that the business culture may have become distorted. He evinces reservations about the American culture “that argued that the market was king, that the shareholder always had priority, that business was the key engine of progress, and that, as such, its needs should prevail in all policy decisions.” He considers that what is called for is to retain the energy of capitalism without its flaws.

Shareholders tend not to be owners in the sense of taking a pride in their property; more often they are just investors or even punters. They are there for the money. But if money is the purpose of business activity, it is like living to eat instead of eating to live. “The purpose of a business is not to make a profit, full stop. It is to make a profit in order to enable it to do something more or better. What that something is, becomes the real justification for the existence of the business.” He quotes a speech by the head of a large MNC, stressing that all the stakeholders benefit from a profitable business. Handy agrees, so long as the benefits are fairly balanced. 

In his concluding remarks Handy looks back over his life experiences and asks questions such as why do we need such big organisations when most of us don’t relish working in them. While he approves of the open market, carefully regulated, as a means of making the world a better place, he regrets that the phrase about making the world a better place is often missing from the capitalist narrative. Capitalism too often takes selfishness to be its driving force, where dog eats dog. Yet he believes that there is an altruistic gene in most of us. Why then when reporting their yearly results do companies tend to report the results just for themselves, rather than including the results for the customers or the world at large? 

We can let him sum up his social philosophy:

"I believe that organisations are, in a broad sense, the servants of society. They exist to provide us with the things and services we need or want. We rely on them to do so efficiently and effectively. Ideally, their interests and ours should coincide, but they will prosper most if they define their purpose as something bigger than themselves". 

Whatever happened to Rationality?

I was deeply affected by the “rationalistic turn” in the social sciences which coincided with my University days from 1960-64. My initial field of study had been modern languages simply because I had been good in school at French and German but I was soon seduced by economics and politics and duly switched in my final two Honours years to those subjects 

It’s only recently that some books have started to appear pointing to just how much military funding and the Cold War had contributed to the new focus of the social sciences on rationality. Robert McNamara best embodied the spirit of calculation first in the Ford Company, then in the US Department of Defence – where he introduced the idea of PPBS during the Vietnam war - and finally in the World Bank

But it was to be a decade later before I got properly into the works of people such as Herbert Simon, Etzioni, Lindblom and Wildavsky and indeed I studied them closely only in the 1980s as part of the UK’s first MSc course in Policy Analysis with Lewis Gunn in which I enrolled in the early 1980s

And it was 1992 before I came across “Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of Reason in the Western World” which I barely understood but loved - and was to be an early warning shot across the bows of the technocrats in what has, since the onslaught of populism in the past 5 years, become a continuous salvo. 

So it’s about time we sought some clarity - and perhaps balance – in this fraught debate about rationality and The Enlightenment. Particularly because the latest knight to present himself in the lists - in all his shining armour – is none other than Steven Pinker, the Panglossian Optimist and author of Enlightenment Now who has a new book called “Rationality – what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters” with the embedded discussion thread being fairly useful. 

I sense, however, that getting through the bibliography below is going to be a long haul – so let me just flag the key reading up and we’ll see how it goes 

Background Reading

Crisis of expertise CEU 2021 syllabus A fascinating outline of a recent course run by the Central European University

The Dialectic of Enlightenment; by Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) It was these German emigrees of the 1930s who brought to America the critique of the enlightenment which arguably sparked the recent right-wing backlash. Ironic that they did so at a time when scientism was taking off with a vengeance!

The Origins of American Social Science Dorothy Ross (1990) Focusing on the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and history, this book examines how American social science came to model itself on natural science and liberal politics. Professor Ross argues that American social science receives its distinctive stamp from the ideology of American exceptionalism, the idea that America occupies an exceptional place in history, based on her republican government and wide economic opportunity. Under the influence of this national self-conception, Americans believed that their history was set on a millennial course, exempted from historical change and from the mass poverty and class conflict of Europe. Before the Civil War, this vision of American exceptionalism drew social scientists into the national effort to stay the hand of time. Not until after the Civil War did industrialization force Americans to confront the idea and reality of historical change. The social science disciplines had their origin in that crisis and their development is a story of efforts to evade and tame historical transformation in the interest of exceptionalist ideals. This is the first book to look broadly at American social science in its historical context and to demonstrate the central importance of the national ideology of American exceptionalism to the development of the social sciences and to American social thought generally. 

Reclaiming the Enlightenment – toward a politics of radical engagement by Stephen Eric Bronner (2004) The start of the left’s comeback 

Shaky Foundations – the politics-social science nexus in post-war america Mark Solovey (2013) embraced a strategy that rested on two key commitments, to scientism and to social engineering. The first commitment involved accepting, in a broad sense, a unity- of- science viewpoint, which assumed that the social sciences lagged behind the more mature natural sciences and which posited that the former should follow in the footsteps of the latter. Often this viewpoint meant the social sciences needed to rid themselves of their involvement with a wide array of humanistic forms of inquiry, including “soft” qualitative, philosophical, historical, and normative forms of analysis. Just as importantly, social scientists had to establish a clear distinction between scientific social inquiry and other value- laden spheres of social action, such as politics, social reform, and ideology, and especially Marxist or socialist perspectives.

More positively, this viewpoint implied that the path to scientific credibility and progress lay in the pursuit of more rigorous, systematic, and quantitative investigations that promised to yield accurate predictions about what individuals, social groups, and social systems, including economic and political systems, would do under stated conditions. The other key commitment, concerning the social sciences’ practical value, indicated that this work would contribute to the national welfare and human betterment more generally through social engineering applications. This commitment often rested on an instrumental viewpoint, which regarded social science knowledge, techniques of analysis, and expertise as apolitical, nonideological, and value free. A very common idea associated with this position suggested that basic or pure scientific inquiry, whether in the social or the natural sciences, produced value- neutral knowledge of a fundamental sort. Such knowledge, in turn, provided the basis for realizing desired practical goals in a couple of ways, depending on the specific domains of investigation. Certain lines of investigation sought to place the processes of decision making on a rational basis. Other lines promised to facilitate control over individuals, social groups, and social systems. Both manners of realizing social sciences’ practical value rested on a technocratic outlook, as their proponents generally assumed that leaders and managers in various sectors of society, especially in government, comprised the most relevant audiences for social science knowledge

As the first chapter’s consideration of the NSF debate indicates and as subsequent chapters explain more fully, basic questions about the scientific identity, practical utility, and political import of the social sciences attracted extensive attention and provoked considerable controversy in the early postwar years. The second, third, and fourth chapters examine the stories of the military, the Ford Foundation, and the new NSF, respectively, to describe how each patron staked out its importance within the context of a transformed and largely new Cold War patronage system, to analyze the ways patrons and the scholars who worked most closely with them addressed long- standing questions and contemporary disputes about the social sciences and their funding, and to illuminate pointed challenges that arose as these patrons sought to advance scholarship grounded in scientistic and social engineering commitments.

By midcentury nobody doubted that the recently unified Department of Defense (DOD) was and would remain the dominant patron of American science for the foreseeable future. So for social scientists seeking support for their work in the Cold War years, the enormous defense science establishment naturally had great significance. Building on a sizable body of work about the military– social science partnership that includes many excellent accounts of specific disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, chapter 2 focuses on the development of military funding policies and programs and examines the struggles of social scientists to establish their presence in the natural science–oriented defense science establishment. These scholars encountered persistent conservative suspicions and often found it hard to gain support from their superiors in the defense science establishment, including skeptical physical scientists.

Under these conditions, social scientists had little choice but to argue strongly for scientistic forms of inquiry and their social engineering applications. Such ideas then became pervasive in military social science agencies and programs, thereby providing valuable support to many influential fields of research in ways consistent with those social engineering commitments. Moreover, these developments stimulated the growth of the military– social science partnership, which became increasingly important to American military operations and Cold War strategy by the time of the Kennedy administration. 

Cold war social sciences – knowledge production, liberal democracy and human nature  ed M Solovey and H Cravens (2012)

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/06/10/book-review-cold-war-social-science-knowledge-production-liberal-democracy-and-human-nature/

https://www.academia.edu/7398929/Cold_War_Social_Science_Specter_Reality_or_Useful_Concept

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis; Aaron Wildavsky (originally 1979) but special edition with foreward by B Guy Peters (2018). This was the analyst who almost single-handedly held the rationalist school up to ridicule and showed how political judgement came into every key decision....

Nervous States – Democracy and the decline of Reason; William Davies (2019) A Fantastic and highly original book - reviewed here by one of my favourite political science writers - David Runciman

"When Michael Gove announced before the Brexit vote that the British public had had enough of experts, he was thought to have introduced something new and shocking into our politics. As his interviewer Faisal Islam responded incredulously at the time, Gove sounded like an “Oxbridge Trump”. Davies’s book wants to give us a sense of perspective on this feeling of outrage. We shouldn’t really be so shocked, because what Gove said is at some basic level true: the claim to expertise is deeply alienating to many people. And for that reason it is nothing new – the battle between the experts and their critics has been going on for centuries.

Davies traces it back to the 17th century and to two key developments in the evolution of modern politics: the attempt to distinguish reason from emotion and the desire to separate out war from peace. A peaceful politics built on reason created the space for expertise to flourish, including the birth of modern science and the launch of learned societies to champion its cause. Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying – and stable politics depends on the authority of the state. The problem is that these categories can quickly get jumbled up. Experts start to present themselves as the ultimate authorities and to view their specialist knowledge as the voice of reason. Instead of politics making expertise possible, experts come to assume that they are the ones making politics possible. That arrogance is what alienates people, and it helps to undermine the basic distinction between reason and emotion on which modern politics depends. It makes us feel bad.

Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying. This book does a good job of showing that the two-way contest between experts and the people is really a three-way relationship: both are fighting to claim the authority of the state. Davies also identifies many of the reasons why this fight has become so fraught in recent years. Some of it has to do with the pace of change. Expertise depends on our ability to fix the world in place long enough for an agreed version of the facts to take hold: it needs time to stand still for a moment. That doesn’t happen any more. As Davies writes: “The promise of digital computing, by contrast, is to maximise sensitivity to a changing environment.” Disruption is the watchword of Silicon Valley and it spells the death knell of conventional expertise.

The other great advantage that the new breed of data analysts has over technocrats and bureaucrats is that it appears to be on the side of our emotions in an increasingly emotional age. “The hostility directed towards experts stems from a deep-lying sense that, in their attention to mathematical laws and models, they are not really interested in individual people, their desires, fears and lives. Facebook doesn’t suffer the same alienation because its ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ are so utterly different. Its users express themselves in their own words and feelings.” Unlike analogue expertise, the digital version hides behind a touchy-feely interface, notwithstanding that what lies underneath is more technically complex than ever. “As the maths has become more and more sophisticated, the user no longer even experiences it as mathematical.”

These are sparkling insights, but Nervous States can’t decide whether we are living in unprecedented times or not. As a publishing strategy, it makes sense to talk up the novelty of the current moment, but the argument frequently cuts against that. Just as the idea of post-truth starts to lose its edge when we try to find an age of truth to contrast it with (there aren’t any), so the notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon.

For an account that is rightly sceptical of many inflated claims to expertise, Davies’s argument is often based on versions of the same. In one instance, he uses surveys to describe the current state of popular opinion without saying anything about the limitations of such an approach. He cites a 2017 survey that showed that while 53% of Ukip supporters believe torture works, 56% think it should be permitted, meaning 3% of Ukip supporters think that we should torture people just for the hell of it. “This is a political vision,” Davies writes, “in which the infliction of physical pain, and even death, is how authority should work, whether that be in the criminal justice system, school, security services or the family.” But that is a big claim to base on the views of such a tiny number of people (given Ukip supporters in this survey would have been a minute fraction of the whole, since almost no one was voting Ukip in 2017, we are talking about only a handful of respondents). What four or five people might think doesn’t sound like the basis of a political vision to me.

The notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon. Where it is useful to his account, he uses factual evidence to bolster his case, yet he often undercuts it at the same time. He draws on the statistical work of the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to show that falling life expectancy in the US is driving feelings of insecurity, particularly in regions that voted for Trump. But he also wants to argue that these same people feel more insecure because experts routinely ignore their bodily experiences. No doubt evidence of suffering and ignorance of suffering are both part of the story. But Davies does not explain how they are related. Sometimes the facts he uses are simply wrong. He states that we now live in societies where “around 50% of people go to university and 50% don’t”, something that divides us down the middle. But while it is true that around half of young people now go to university, among older generations the figures are much lower, which means that the large majority are still not university educated. Brexit is inexplicable unless this fact is taken into account.

This is an ambitious book with plenty to commend it, which covers many concerns in our age of political upheaval – from drone warfare and safe spaces to imperialism and the Anthropocene. It represents an attempt to join up the myriad dots of our anxieties, but I could not see a way through its maze of facts and feelings, authorities and counter-authorities.

Focus on what;s important

Exactly ten years ago I presented a paper at the Black Sea resort of Varna to the NISPAcee annual Conference (Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Admin in central and eastern Europe). The paper was called “The Long Game – not the logframe” and exposed the superficiality of the assumptions EC bureaucrats seemed to be making in its Technical Assistance programmes  about what I called the kleptocracy or “impervious regimes” which prevailed in most ex-communist countries. The paper

·       argued that the variety of terms used to try to describe the nature of the regimes which control both the countries targeted by the EC’s Neighbourhood Policy and wider afield indicate weak understanding of the structure of power

·       suggested the term ”impervious” regime as a useful description of an all-too common system which can ride rough-shod over its subjects’ concerns in the pursuit of its own selfish goals

·       asked what we expect administrative reform to deliver in such systems

·       questioned the efficacy of the tools which international bodies favour in the reform of state bodies in such contexts

·       looked briefly at the (scanty) literature about the results from these tools

·       explored the concept of ”windows of opportunity”

·       concluded that technical assistance is built on shaky foundations

·       not least in relation to the knowledge base of westerners and their sensitivity to context 

Basically my argument was that more attention needed to be paid to creating the conditions whereby senior politicians in the Region would actually want reform….

These were the tools which the paper examined which transition countries were being asked to use to get a system of public administration more responsive to public need[1] –

• Judicial reform; to embed properly the principle of the rule of law[2]
• Budgetary reform; to ensure the integrity and transparency of public resources
• Civil service laws, structures and training institutions – to encourage professionalism and less politicization of staff of state bodies
• Impact assessment – to try to move the transition systems away from a legalistic approach and force policy-makers to carry out consultations and assess the financial and other effects of draft legislation
• Functional Review – to try to remove those functions of state bodies which are no longer necessary or are best handled by another sector or body[3].
• Institutional twinning – to help build the capacity of those state bodies whose performance is crucial to the implementation of the Acquis Communautaire
• Development of local government and NGOs – to try to ensure that a redistribution of power takes place
• Anti-corruption strategies[4] – which incorporate elements of the first three of the above
• Performance measurement and management eg EFQM
• report-cards[5] -  

Needless to say, my paper went down like a lead balloon. My audience, after all, were the directors and teachers of central European schools of public administration – and I was asking them to take on the additional task of networking with politicians to persuade them of the need for change!       

Seven years later a small but astonishing report was submitted to the EC as part of an EC-funded programme which stated quite baldly that very little was known about the way public administration was organised in the Region – but broadly confirming the tenor of my paper 

At the same time, the EC, World Bank and OECD were producing Manuals such as Quality of Public Administration – toolbox for practitioners (EC 2017 edition) and Principles of Public Administration (SIGMA 2018) to make sure that new and aspiring member states properly understood what was expected of them. A somewhat belated recognition that several states had been allowed to join the European Union before they had actually achieved the relevant capacity – not just in the contentious judicial field but in basic aspects of good government.  

The SIGMA guidelines, for example, state that 

Modern public service is regarded as possible only when a set of conditions is in place that ensures:  

·       separation between the public and private spheres;  

·       separation between politics and administration;  

·       individual accountability of public servants;  

·       sufficient job protection, levels of pay and stability, and clearly defined rights and obligations for public servants;  

·       recruitment and promotion based on merit 

The EC contribution to the development of capacity in state institutions is massive - billions of euros of Structural Funds and accounts for at least a quarter of the new investment in the Region. But the EC Toolbox (coming in at 487 pages) is quite unrealistic in its expectations and has clearly forgotten the excellent advice in 2002 of Merilee Grindle in her article Good Enough Governance – namely to focus on the important things….

---

[1] The Governance  and Social Development Resource Centre published in 2011 an interesting overview of ”Current trends in governance support”- at  http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/HD755.pdf

[2] see http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/Rule_of_Law_Temptations.pdf

[3] a rare set of guidelines was given in 2001 by Manning et al http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2005/06/22/000090341_20050622142938/Rendered/PDF/32699.pdf

[4] the sociologists and anthropologists have given us a useful critique of the role of anti-corruption

[5] consumer feedback on public services - one of the tools summarised in a useful meniu published by the World Bank in 2005 http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/civilservice/ACSRCourse2007/Session%208/IncreasingGovEffectiveness.pdf

Yes, Minister

Not so long ago, I spent almost a decade of my life on “civil service reform” in countries ruled until 1989 by communist parties which brooked no dissent. It wasn’t exactly the easiest of tasks to convince the new breed of politicians that they needed a civil service system which was less subservient – particularly because the model most of us westerners brought was one where politicians took the decisions - for civil servants to implement.

In reality, of course, the dynamic was somewhat different – with the role of senior civil servants being to bring the more expert institutional wisdom to challenge the generally naïve and over-simplistic ideas of politicians new to office. But, in Britain, Margaret Thatcher started a politicisation continued by New Labour which has become ever more intense. "Are you one of us?" became Thatcher's catchphrase - and Bliar just assumed that, after 18 years of Tory rule, senior civil servants were untrustworthy.....

I know that many readers’ eyes will have glazed over from the very first mention of the phrase “civil service” but bear with me as I quickly cover the background to what is a crucial subject to our days – how to get policies that work 

Cronyism was endemic in government until the late 19^th century - it was indeed the infamous charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 during the Crimean War which created the conditions which led to the creation of the British civil service system which remained intact for more than 100 years.  

A Royal Commission on the Civil Service (Northcote-Trevelyan) had been set up in the early 1850s but had been labouring until that military action exposed the disastrous nature of the aristocratic leadership in the country – it was the spark which led to the demands for a more meritocratic approach…..

And the early 1960s saw strong questioning again of British administrative traditions – epitomized in the establishment in 1966 of the Royal (or Fulton) Commission on the Civil Service which laid the foundations to a much more managerial approach in the 1970s which became increasingly aggressive in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. Richard Chapman’s The Civil Service Commission – a bureau biography 1855-1991 (2005) is the best guide to this process – although B Guy Peters’ The Politics of Bureaucracy – an introduction to comparative public administration; (1978) was the first comparative and sociological approach to the subject. 

Guy Peters returned to the issue very recently in a short article which explored the effects of the populist mood on the relationship between politicians and civil servants 

the traditional conception of a stark separation of the competencies and the careers of civil servants and politicians was becoming more a useful myth for both parties, the spread of populism and other forms of “democratic backsliding” have altered these relationships.

In the contemporary populist era of governance there tends to be a stark separation between political leaders and their civil servants. The assumption by many, if not most of those political leaders, is that the bureaucrats are members of the “Deep State” that seeks to maintain its own power in the face of the will of “the people”.

While even when there were conflicts between politicians and bureaucrats in previous decades, they were still “different players on the same team”. However, today politicians and bureaucrats are often on different teams with different goals.

The political leaders in some countries, including some in the Visegrád Four countries, have sidelined their civil servants in favor of political appointees and cronies. The same has been true in the United States, Brazil and to a lesser extent in some West European countries. The civil servants may remain in place but are largely ignored by the political leaders. 

But there is an even more insidious force at work 

Prime ministers have tended to draw control over government to themselves, even from their ministerial colleagues, demanding greater loyalty from public servants in the process. The same process has affected the individual ministers who also want control over their civil servants, as opposed to “frank and fearless advice”. 

So much for the recent efforts of people like Matt Syed (“Rebel Ideas”) and Gillian Tett (“The Silo Effect”) to challenge the “groupthink” at the heart of government” 

Both the growing power of populist movements and the general increase of political polarization within government and society have been contributing to an increased level of politicization of civil servants and an increased use of patronage.

The concept of a neutral, expert civil service is now less acceptable to political leaders, and a variety of methods are being used to reduce the autonomy and independence of the civil service to ensure the loyalty of civil servants, even in countries with long histories of civil-service independence. 

The emphasis on political loyalty and adherence to the policy ideas of the government of the day is especially interesting in an era of (presumably) “evidence-based policymaking” (Cairney 2016).

The increased availability of evidence about policy both within individual countries and across countries should make the contemporary period one of applying expertise to solve policy problems.

But expertise has become politicized, and only those experts who support the policy ideas of the incumbent government are likely to have any influence. 

And then one for Emanuel Macron – 

While individual countries and the world are confronted with a host of wicked problems – notably climate change – the responses from governments may be very tame. Due to the relative lack of preparation for governing of populist governments, and their unwillingness to use the expertise available within the civil service, developing forceful and creative solutions will be difficult. This is all the more so given that any real solutions to problems such as climate change will involve upsetting existing patterns of life for “the people” who are the presumed beneficiaries of populist governments.

In Macron’s case, of course, the system still had the expertise which he tried to follow – but was outboxed by the gilets jaunes.

Why the Shortages??

There’s a lot of nonsense (understandably) being talked about the shortages being experienced at the moment in the developed world – in the UK, Europe and America alike. Initially, I assumed it was an obvious result of Brexit – with Britain famously relying on Russian and Ukrainian long-distance lorry drivers and treating them like shit. It’s only on the continent that decent facilities for truckers are available.

But it seems that things are more complicated – and much more to do with food prices and climate, globalisation and “just-in-time delivery”

By far and away the best article on the crisis is this one on the situation in America

There’s a quiet panic happening in the US economy. Medical labs are running out of supplies, restaurants are having trouble getting food, and automobile, paint, and electronics firms are curtailing production because they can’t get semiconductors.

The problem seems to be getting worse, as the shortages pile on top of each other like a snake eating its tail. For instance, the inability to fix trucks means that truck drivers can’t haul boxes of goods, which might actually contain the parts needed to fix the trucks, and so forth.

 

There are multiple arguments about why the problem is as bad as it is. Everyone agrees that the Covid pandemic and chaotic changes in consumption habits have caused inevitable short-term price hikes and shortages.

But what we’re experiencing is also the net result of decades of policy choices starting in the 1970s that emphasized consumer sovereignty over citizenship. The consolidation of power into the hands of private equity financiers and monopolists over the last four decades has left us uniquely unprepared to manage a supply shock. Our hyper-efficient globalized supply chain, once romanticized by men like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat, is the problem. Like the financial system before the 2008 crash, this kind of economic order hides its fragility. It seems to work quite well, until it doesn’t.

 

The specific policies that led to our supply constrained world are lax antitrust, deregulation of basic infrastructure industries like shipping, railroads, and trucking, disinvestment in domestic production, and trade policy emphasizing finance over manufacturing.

 

Take biopharmaceutical equipment necessary to make vaccines. There’s a shortage of fancy plastic bags that you mix chemicals in to make medicine, which isn’t surprising in a pandemic. But the reason for the shortage isn’t just Covid but a merger wave; over the last 15 years, four firms bought up the biopharmaceutical equipment industry, without any antitrust agency taking meaningful action. These firms now have market power, and dominate their competitors, by ensuring their bags can only interoperate with their specific mixing machines. It’s like not having enough Keurig coffee machine pods; the shortage isn’t the coffee, it’s the artificial bottleneck used to lock in customers.

 

Another example is railroads. Since deregulation in 1980, Wall Street consolidated 33 firms into just seven. And because the Surface Transportation Board lacks authority, Wall Street-owned railroads cut their workforce by 33% over the last six years, degrading our public shipping capacity. The Union Pacific closed a giant Chicago sorting facility in 2019; it now has so much backed up traffic that it suspended traffic from west coast ports.

 

Ocean shipping is the same. The 1997 Ocean Shipping Reform Act legalized secret rebates and led to a merger wave. The entire industry has now consolidated globally into three giant alliances that occasionally crash their too-big-to-sail ships into the side of the Suez canal.

 

Then there’s trucking. Talk to most businesspeople who make or move things and they will complain about the driver shortage. This too is a story of deregulation. In the 1970s, the end of public rate-setting forced trucking firms to compete against each other to offer lower shipping prices. The way they did this was by lowering pay to their drivers. Trucking on a firm-level became unpredictable and financially fragile, so for drivers schedules became unsustainable, even if the pay during boom times could be high. Today, even though pay is going up, the scheduling is crushing drivers. The result is a shortage of truckers.

There are more problems that strike at the heart of our economy. The most obvious is semiconductors. Production of high-end chips has gone offshore to East Asia because of deliberate policy to disinvest in the hard process of making things. In addition, the firm that now controls the industry, Taiwan Semiconductor, holds a near monopoly position with a substantial technological lead and a track record in the 1990s and early 2000s of dumping chips at below cost.

 

Fortunately, policymakers have noticed. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Beige Book, a report on the economy that is published eight times a year, mentions “shortage” 80 times, and FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra recently pointed out that shortages are slowing the economic recovery. Surface Transportation Board Chair Martin Oberman noted that railroads stripping down their operations to please Wall Street resulted in container congestions at US ports, a significant chokepoint for imports. And Congress is on the verge of funding tens of billions of dollars to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

Even business leaders are getting it. Chemical firms are asking regulators to act. And at last week’s Intermodal Association of North America’s Intermodal Expo, where representatives from the shipping, rail, ports and drayage industries spoke, one executive said, “Without fear of regulation, I don’t know what will motivate all stakeholders to be at the table.” Fundamentally, America – and the world - has to move away from the goal of seeking cheap stuff made abroad for consumers in a low-wage economy. That means rearranging our hierarchies of power so finance, consulting and capital-light tech leaders became less important than people who know how to make things. The problem we have is shortages, so it’s time to put people in charge who value production. 

In the UK, gas prices are increasing by no less than 70%. And this article certainly suggests that (although there is pressure on global prices) the culprit is privatisation – with few companies providing reserves and therefore being caught short when demand increases. No fewer than 8 suppliers have gone bankrupt.

There is also the little factor of Covid19 which caused first lockdown and a huge slowdown in production followed by massive "injections" of government cash to both workers and companies. Containers may have kept most global goods flowing - but the uncertainty combined with initial reduction of supplies and then renewed demand has completely upset the balance of demand and supply in many commodities as Boffy's comment emphasises.   

update; When you have a British Prime Minister actually saying that the 

Queues for petrol and mass culls of pigs at farms because of a lack of abattoir workers are part of a necessary transition for Britain to emerge from a broken economic model based on low wages 

then it’s clear I have to walk back a bit my suggestion that the current British crisis is simply part of a wider global phenomenon.  Now I see that it’s part of a Johnson “cunning plan”!! It remains, however, too easy to blame Brexit completely. Things, as always, are more complicated.  

update; an interesting German take on the issue

and one of the best explanations - courtesy of Dave Pollard's fantastic monthly roundup

an even better https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Gail-Tverberg-Our-Fossil-Fuel-Energy-Predicament-Nov-9.pdf

Am I the only person in the world finding Adam Tooze's regular bulletins totally incoherent? eg https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-51-explaining-the-energy

What about Me?

Exactly two years ago I asked whether our social DNA was changing. I conceded that older generations have this annoying habit of finding fault with the latest generation – in our case things like the “attention deficit” which modern IT gadgets seem to develop, “instant gratification” and how this might affect future “character”.

Surveys such as the World Values and Eurobarometer do indicate a large and significant trend since the early 1970s toward more individualistic, selfish and less trusting societies….And the post quoted the studies on this of people such as Daniel Bell (Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism), Richard Sennett (The Culture of the New Capitalism), Francis Fukuyama (The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order) – ending with Reckless Opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment (2018) with its ruthless exposure of the almost criminal damage which a new breed of elites have inflicted on a once proud nation. 

But we have to be careful – none of these writers have any particular claims to psychological insights into people’s souls. They are, rather, social commentators. I read the occasional psychology book – Robin Skynner and John Cleese’s "Life and How to Survive it" (1993) made a big impact. Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” was much appreciated – Steven Pinker less so.

"What about Me? the struggle for identity in a market-based society" by a Dutch psychotherapist, Paul Verhaege, came out in 2014 and was quite an unusual choice for me. It lay on the shelf for some time before I opened it – to discover a real gem.  It ranges through intellectual history, sociology and ethics before suggesting that the last few decades have seen a radical new self-identity being engineered – which he calls “The Enron Society”. 

The book starts by contrasting our two basic urges as individuals - the initial sense of "belonging" and the growing need for "separation" - and how this expresses itself in later struggles eg "self-respect" v "self-hatred". 

From his initial discussion of "identity", he then moves onto a fascinating discussion of values and morality - showing how the Greeks had an integrated view of our character which Christianity destroyed when it placed God as an external power. The Enlightenment dethroned religion to an extent – although Verhaeghe argues that Diderot’s emphasis on reason, passion and empathy was set aside by an unholy coalition of Voltaire and Rousseau who basically helped the French state set up a new religion. He also argues that true rationality started only after the second WW – which fits with the more recent arguments of people like Nicolas Guilhot who are beginning to analyse the role of the military in the post-war social sciences. 

It’s the chapter on the Enron Society where he really lets rip – “The west has never had it so good – but never felt so bad!” leads to a discussion on mental illness and the pharma industry. How, he asks, has 30 years of neoliberalism affected our DNA – with its “Rank and Yank” systems of management; Universities as knowledge businesses; anonymous call-centres; CCTV; ubiquitous contracts, rules, regulations, league tables, fear, uncertainty - but no real accountability 

Typically, however, it’s the final section which lets him down. Apart from repeating Mintzberg’s call for “balance” and praising the Wilkinson/Pickett line on equality, his only advice seems to be for greater activism – “Ditch the cynicism!”!!

But it’s good to have a text from outwith the anglo-american core – with several interesting discoveries in his little bibliography (which doesn’t, however, mention Kenneth Gergen’s “TheSaturated Self” or “Life and How to Survive it”)

In the same spirit, I was disappointed to notice that William Davies’ Nervous States – how feeling took over the world (2018) didn’t mention Verhaeghe;s book