Ideas or Interests?

I had wanted to pursue the question of managerial power but found myself returning instead to the battles of the 1930s from which amazingly – thanks to Keynesianism and trade union strength – capitalism emerged in the postwar period with a complete facelift.

This positive experience lasted precisely 30 years before governments were undone - by a combination of the oil shock of the 70s and globalisation - and trade unions by post-industrialism. 

The fall of communism revealed once more the ugly side of capitalism – to which social democratic governments responded with little more than a shrug of their shoulders. Social democracy since then has been in tatters. 

It all reminded me of a table I had doodled which tried to identify, for each decade since the 1930s, the central issue(s) of the time. It is, of course, entirely subjective – it makes no mention, for example, of Freudianism. It is, however, a useful reminder of the ebb and flow of fashionable intellectual debate and, indeed, raises the question of what exact social conditions crystallised a focus on a topic which previously had aroused little interest. The first excerpt takes us to the 1980s. 

Decade	Themes of intellectual discussion	Key names
1930s	End of capitalism Fascism	John Strachey, Harold Laski Sorel, Gramsci
1940s	The managerial revolution Keynesianism International relations	J Burnham JM Keynes R Niebuhr, EH Carr
1950s	Totalitarianism Brainwashing Meritocracy Revisionism Private affluence/public squalor	H Arendt; Z Barbu. Talmon V Packard Michael Young A. Shonfield; Tony Crosland JK Galbraith
1960s	End of ideology Corporate planning, management Modernisation of society Participation critique of professionals	Daniel Bell R Ackoff, Peter Drucker Peter Berger C Pateman; Ivan Illich
1970s	Costs of economic growth Public choice theory Small is beautiful Change Corporatism Feminism	EJ Mishan, club of rome J Buchanan E. Schumacher; L. Kohr S. Beer; A. Toffler; D. Schon A Cawson Betty Friedan
1980s	Deindustrialisation Privatisation ecology decentralisation globalisation racial equality	Blackaby; Dyson Consultancies; World Bank James Lovelock, Club of Rome OECD J Stiglitz, Martin Wolf B Parrekh

Adam Curtis is a documentarist who has acquired a reputation for splicing film, music and voiceovers to suggest that we are being manipulated by elites with agendas often influenced by writers of the past. I’m no friend of conspiracy theorists – but I do like the idea of writers having influence and it’s in that spirit that I mention a couple of the writers who figure in my table. 

Peter Drucker is universally recognised as the father of modern management. But he was much more than this – as the link recognises. Born in 1909 in Austria, he was first a journalist before moving into teaching and academia and was, at one stage, spoken of as a successor to Joseph Schumpeter. His first book The End of Economic Man – the origins of totalitarianism came out in London in 1939 and won praise from both Winston Churchill and JB Priestley.

By then he had moved to the US where in 1943 he published The Future of Industrial Man - a conservative approach leading to an invitation from General Motors to study the company’s policies and structures which produced “Concept of the Corporation” (1946) and his subsequent amazing consultancy and writing career. 

Unable to classify his work as belonging naturally to any particular discipline within the social sciences, Drucker describes himself as a ‘social ecologist’ who is ‘concerned with man’s man-made environment the way a natural ecologist studies the natural environment’, a discipline in which he also places Alexis de Tocqueville and (among American thinkers) Henry Adams, John Commons (the intellectual mover behind economic and social reforms in the state of Wisconsin which foreshadowed parts of Roosevelt’s New Deal), and ‘above all’ Thorstein Veblen. 

But it was James Burnham who had, just 4 years earlier, written The Managerial Revolution which was to have such a profound effect in the post-war period on our perception of capitalism. Burnham, at the time, was actually a revolutionary socialist and the previous couple of decades had, of course, given the system of capitalism a very bad name. But he was able to use an important book which had come out a decade earlier - The Modern Corporation and Private Property written by Adolf Berle - which had argued that managers now had more control than owners.

And it was this argument that was taken up in the postwar period by European leftist revisionists in the German and British Labour parties such as Anthony Crosland who produced in 1956 the famous The Future of Socialism. And in 1959 Germany’s SDP adopted the Bad Godesburg programme which duly expunged its Marxist heritage.

Typically, it was almost 40 years later before the British Labour party managed to do the same – and the struggle between the British New Left and labour party revisionists is superbly explored in this article. 

So “ideas” do matter – and so do “interests”. 

Further Reading

The British Labour Party in Opposition and Power 1979-2019 Patrick Diamond (2021) it looks a very detailed and balanced analysis of a critical period

Futures of Socialism – the pandemic and the post-Corbyn era; ed Grace Blakely (2020) a short book with no fewer than 27 articles from the left

Shaking Off Managerial Power

Fellow blogger Dave Pollard’s latest post catches the mood perfectly – 

The US is clearly sliding into fascism. The western media seem to have given up all pretence of serious journalism. Climate and ecological collapse are accelerating and completely out of control. Inflation, threatens to deep-six our utterly debt-dependent economy, when interest rates soar to catch up to it and monthly minimum loan and mortgage payments triple. And then there’s the pandemic…

In times like this, I need an uplift. And I got it from a small book I pulled off the shelf and reread from cover to cover – one of the many advantages of small books! The cognoscenti may look down on this format but I’m a great fan. If writers can’t compress their thoughts into 120 pages or so, then they have no right to inflict their verbiage on the rest of us. After all, if they feel they need more pages, they can always try my idea of the “expandable book”

The uplifting title was “Letting Go – breathing new life into organisations” (2013) from the Postcards from Scotland series which first explores the fundamental question of what motivates us before challenging the entire basis of ‘command and control’ management as well as the “tyranny of modern day ‘performance management”. 

They argue convincingly that effective leaders and managers should ‘let go’ of their ideas on controlling staff and instead nurture intrinsic motivation. The book shows that good managers need to develop management systems which actively support the human spirit, enabling creativity and allowing staff to perform their jobs properly. The ideas in this book could breathe new life into struggling organisations and are a breath of fresh air for thinking about the world of work. 

This was just before Frederic Laloux’s famous “Reinventing Organisations” took us by storm in 2014 (followed in 2016 by an Illustrated Version no less). And also before we were aware of the inspiring model of social care offered by the Buurtzorg social enterprise whose website is here. Almost a decade has passed since the critique of managers contained in “Letting Go” came out and a lot has happened since – we’ve become much more aware of algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and the threat of robots whose cause has been advanced considerably by the pandemic.  

And rereading it has certainly encouraged me to go back to the draft of Change for the Better? A Life in Reform and make sure it deals more effectively with the question of how on earth we gave managers so much power. “The Management Virus” forms chapter 4 of that draft and did ask that question but gave no reply…. 

We take managerialism for granted – even although it didn’t exist in the 1960s. “Managerial” then was only an adjective and, thanks to James Burnham, followed by the word “revolution” (at least in the immediate post-war period) to refer to what he first argued in 1941 was the growing influence of senior managers in America’s larger Corporations vis-à-vis its shareholders.

An argument sustained by the likes of Tony Crosland and Andrew Shonfield who persuaded us that the system had now been tamed - although history has demonstrated that this was a brief truce in the struggle between state, corporate and union power. And, further, that shareholders and the importance of "shareholder value" came back with a vengeance in the 1980s....

In 1956, William W Whyte’s classic Organisation Man may have painted a picture of docile managers but change was in the wind - and was prefigured in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) which analysed vague social forces, not deliberative organisational change. Even Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty didn’t envisage significant social engineering – although the power of the economists and number-crunchers was beginning to be felt in the likes of Robert McNamara 

And yet, however slowly, the 1970s saw in Britain the first signs of a new management ethos in both central and local government which, by the late 80s had become a gale-force wind. To most people at the time, public sector reform was a graveyard for reputations….there seemed no mileage in it.

There is an important story here which has never been told properly….which resolves into three basic questions –

·       Why and how, all of 50 years ago, did the “managerial turn” get underway, contaminating our everyday experiences and discourse?

·       How have we allowed managers to gain such unaccountable power?

·       What we can now do to bring them to heel? 

How many of us have actually taken time to ask - How do we know what we know?

Funny how words get invested, suddenly, with new meaning. Until very recently I’ve used the term “sceptical” with pride – it meant challenging what John Kenneth Galbraith called in the 1950s “the conventional wisdom” and few were, for me, better at this than Bertrand Russell whose Sceptical Essays I remember devouring in the late 1950s. In a new Introduction written recently, John Gray says - 

Russell had great admiration for Joseph Conrad and one of the reasons was surely his suspicion that Conrad’s sceptical fatalism was a truer account of human life than his own troubled belief in reason and science.

As reformer, Russell believed reason could save the world. As a sceptical follower of Hume he knew reason could never be more than the slave of the passions. “Sceptical Essays” (1928) was written as a defence of rational doubt. Today we c,an read it as a confession of faith, the testament of a crusading rationalist who doubted the power of reason. 

But now, thanks to climate and vaccination ”sceptics”, the word has become tainted with connotations of conspiracy, irrationality and tribalism. I want to understand –

-       how this apparent retreat to irrationality has happened and

-       what we can do about it 

Let me offer some tentative thoughts

-       for some reason, we have become more polarised in our thinking

-       the general consensus seems to be that the social media are to blame

-       as a good sceptic, I’m not so sure

-       perhaps increased educational opportunities have simply made us more aware of the subjectivities in our “take on reality” (pop psychology is a huge growth industry)

-       we have certainly become more aware, in the past decade, of the importance of “story-telling” whose importance first became obvious to me only a decade ago although people like Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels have been preaching its significance for almost a century and Alex Evans’ The Myth Gap appeared in  2017.

Evans was also the co-author of one of the most thoughtful pieces about polarisation which appeared in 2019 - Rebuilding Common Ground produced by a group which calls itself variously “Collective Psychology” or “Larger Us”. It’s a great analysis about what’s happened – although I’m not quite convinced by his recipes.

I have a feeling that too much of this is driven by attempts to be different and that we need to return to some of the basic issues of epistemology – namely “how do we know what we think we know”? Completely by accident, I stumbled a couple of days ago on a book entitle From Belief to Knowledge published in 2011 by Douglas and Wykowski. The focus may be organisational change but most of the book is a rare intellectual exploration – by 2 consultants - of a subject I have to confess I’ve spent too little time bothering to understand, put off to an extent by its name – epistemology. It’s not the easiest of reads but, fortunately, I also discovered another (downloadable) book which explores the same issue at a much more practical level - The Knowing-Doing Gap (2000)

Leaders we Deserve

One of the books I’ve been glancing at is the very recent Corruptible – who gets power and how it changes us; Brian Klaas (2021) which deals with four very fundamental questions - 

·       First, do worse people get power?

·       Second, does power make people worse?

·       Why, third, do we let people control us who clearly have no business being in control?

·       How, finally, can we ensure that incorruptible people get into power and wield it justly? 

The author then goes on to say - 

For the past decade, I’ve been studying these questions across the globe, from Belarus to Britain, Côte d’Ivoire to California, Thailand to Tunisia, and Australia to Zambia. As part of my research as a political scientist, I interview people—mostly bad people who abuse their power to do bad things. I’ve met with cult leaders, war criminals, despots, coup plotters, torturers, mercenaries, generals, propagandists, rebels, corrupt CEOs, and convicted criminals. I try to figure out what makes them tick. Understanding them—and studying the systems they operate in—is crucial to stopping them. Many were crazy and cruel, others kind and compassionate. But all were united by one trait: they wielded enormous power 

But, very curiously in the light of all his travels and effort, he doesn’t appear to have done the basic thing – which is to look at how other people have dealt with these questions. The book lacks even a short list of useful or recommended reading – and his index ignores most of the literature on the subject – the most important of which, for me by a long chalk, is Leaders we Deserve produced almost 40 years ago by Alistair Mant and which I was delighted to be able to access on the Internet Archive. This actually tries to understand what it is in leaders which makes them generally so ineffective 

Mant is a fascinating character – originally from Australia but working in Britain from the late 1970s and producing a delightful little book The Rise and Fall of the British Manager in 1977 whose introductory comments already give us a sense of the author’s originality - "The book represents the confluence of four distinct streams of personal experience:

-       Hoving read history and never quite recovering from the force of the experience.

-       A long association with some of the great figures out of the post-war Tovistock Institute and thus, on association with those tenuous links between the human sub-conscious and the strange things people do at work.

-       A 'career' in industry and the inevitable fund of anecdotes arising out of this, from the surreal to the grisly.

-       A life-time's fascination with words and the uses and misuses to which they are put.

 

I count myself an amateur in history, social science, management and linguistics but the combination of all four provided, for me, a slant on the topic of 'management' which I have missed elsewhere".

At least this useful collection of articles from practitioners and academics recognised the usefulness of Mant’s work – in the introduction to Leadership and Management in the 21^st century  ed G Cooper (2005). But it makes you wonder – how on earth can KLAAS even imagine he can do justice to an issue when he demonstrates that he hasn’t even bothered to read some at least of the relevant literature? Predictably, Machiavelli gets only one entry in the Index – and Madoff (Bernie) two! And, equally predictably, Robert Michels who, arguably, started the modern interest in what power does to people with his “Political Parties” (1911) and “the iron law of oligarchy” doesn’t figure in the index – nor do Hitler, Lenin or Stalin – although, curiously, Mussolini gets 2 pages!

UPDATE - in autumn 2024, I came across this fascinating book which, rightly, challenges the way the literature tends to focus on good leaders when the reality most of us deal with is BAD leaders - Debating Bad Leadership – reasons and remedies ed Anders Oertenblad (2021)

The Language of Anti-corruption

One of the most effective ways for powerful people to stop us thinking about an important issue is to ensure that the issue is made confusing and/or boring. That’s happened on climate change and, arguably, on Corruption. I’ve been looking a lot these past few days at the “discourse” of anti-corruption (sorry about the terminology but, this time, it’s an appropriate term to use). And I find it has only 2 tones – that of emotional outrage, on the one hand, and that of boring and confusing academia on the other. It’s why I found Alina Mungiu-Pippidi’s report so refreshing in my last post. It may be more than 100 pages long and written a decade ago but it was clearly and vividly presented and made me eager to keep reading. 

I was also very taken with a short paper - Doing Anti-Corruption Democratically (2022) - by Heather Maquette which gave an overview of some of the material on the subject written in the past decade and introduced me, for example, to the work of Michael Johnston who has been critical of a lot of the work of what he calls the Anti-corruption industry. Johnston indeed is one the few prepared to call a spade a spade and identify power and its inequitable distribution as the “elephant in the room” in most of the industry’s discourse. He put it very clearly in a 2005 book  

“Affluent market democracies have corruption problems of their own that – along with the conceptions of reform they have fostered – do much to shape the difficulties facing what are better called “peripheral” rather than developing societies”.

“Syndromes of Corruption – wealth, power and democracy” Michael Johnson 2005 

Which brings us to the UK – and a rare resignation by a politician for his failure to curb the fraud and corruption which took place on his watch. Simon Jenkins has the story and youtube has the politician’s short resignation speech. And remember the UK Supreme Court had just found the government guilty of favouritism.  The British judicial system indeed took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” ed by D Whyte appeared followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).  

But let me return to the question of the “discourse of anti-corruption”. I started by suggesting it knew only two tones – the first of which we hear in mass media coverage which, in a sense, tells us what we already knew, namely that people will always take advantage of opportunities/loopholes/weaknesses to rip off the system. People shrug their shoulders and settle in to fatalism.

The second tone is more academic – and boring. And I want to explore why – and whether change is possible. A few years back I referred to one of the first books to deal fairly and squarely with the question – Mark Billig’s “Learn to write badly: how to succeed in the social sciences” 2013 of which this is the Intro – and this the first chapter. So – short reads!

But this morning I came across a great video which I would strongly recommend to my more scholastic readers – a lecture on Writing Effectively . That may sound a bit paradoxical - how can you lecture on writing? But the guy is chatting to students in a very interactive way, inviting their comments and using the blackboard to record the ideas which come out of the discussion. He’s challenging the students to think more deeply about what readers want to get from stuff they read – and to realise that the writing process is horizontal (thinking out aloud) whereas reading is vertical – from the text to the world the reader is trying to understand. The guy is very provocative = and amusing. Great viewing – enjoy! And the website actually gives notes and blackboard shots as aide-memoires. 

While we’re on the subject, I’ve just recently stumbled on a blogger whose writing really makes an impact and I’d like to offer as an example – despite the occasional swearword.   It’s https://indi.ca/ and scrolling down will give you the range of topics he covers. He’s actually a Sri Lankan – but born and brought up in the US and now back in Sri Lanka and making a living from his writing. This is his latest https://indi.ca/how-white-empire-is-a-thing/  

Did Transition have to be so corrupt?

 “When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' Alice in Wonderland

Discussions about “rule of law” and of “corruption” are never easy – since (like “populism” or “neo-liberalism”) it’s not at all clear what the terms mean. There’s a fragility about the words which tend to convey simply our feelings about the relevant issues - positive about the first term and negative about the others. 

When I arrived, all of 30 years ago, in the post-communist world, an early bit of homework I had to do was in the new field of “transitology” which was occupied by the academics of the Soviet and Eastern European Studies University departments whose previous focus had been watching the Kremlin power-plays. They did at least have the contextual understanding of the different countries of the Soviet bloc - although the only experience people could draw on about the transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy was actually to be found in Portugal, Spain and Latin America – with Philippe Schmitter’s “Transitions from Authoritarian Rule – prospects for Democracy” published in 1986 being much studied after the Wall fell and “Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe” by Linz, Juan J. and Alfred Stepan becoming the new map in 1996.

And it was 1998 before the first exclusive studies of the transition progress being made in central and eastern Europe namely Jon Elster and Claus Offe’s famous “Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea” and David Stark’s Postsocialist Pathways – transforming politics and property 

But this was the precise point that the EC took the decision that the central European states who had applied for EU membership could – despite (or because of?) their 45 years’ experience of communism - be treated seriously as potential members. Of course, conditionality was strongly applied – in other words, the countries were required to demonstrate their compliance with the requirements of membership – meaning in particular rule of law and competition. I was in Romania at the time writing  In Transit – notes on good governance (1999)  which captures well my perceptions at the time – about the scale of the challenge facing these countries; about transitology; and about the lessons I felt Britain had learned about its reform efforts. It's a fairly unique book since very few other westerners had actually moved to the Region or were trying to capture key messages to convey to the reformists in ex-communist countries

And in due course, some 6-7 years later, 8 of the countries were admitted – with Bulgaria and Romania following in 2007. Once they had become members of the club, of course, the new states could - and did - relax. My blog started in 2009 when I was alternating between Bulgaria and Romania and able to get a sense of “progress” – such as it was. There’s more English-language material available about Romania which has therefore been the subject of more posts – perhaps the most interesting and insightful (if pessimistic) being one entitled When will it ever change? which 

- reminded readers of Ralf Dahrendorf’s Reflections on the Revolution in our time in which he had made the optimistic prediction that it might take 15-20 years for those countries to create the rule of law but two generations to have a fully functioning civil society.  

- and of Head of European Delegation in Romania, Karen Fogg’s giving all consultants a note about Robert Putnam’s book on Italian democracy which had made the point that Italy’s south was trapped in a two-century old culture

- quoted excerpts from a rare pamphlet written  by Sorin Ionitsa on Poor Policy Making in Weak States (2006) which indicated the strength of old ties in his home country of Romania

- made the obvious point that Dahrendorf had been overly optimistic in 1990/91 when he talked of one or two generations being necessary for a democratic culture to take hold in central europe 

I had actually planned to use this post to discuss some excellent new material on anti-corruption which has just been published but, for some reason, my thoughts kept pulling me back to the transitology debate – of which, incidentally, one hears very little these days. The result is a rather confused post which doesn’t do justice to either the transition issue or to anti-corruption - and will therefore require a follow-up. 

Let me finish the post with what I consider the best analysis of all the huge literature on anti-by corruption – and it’s by a Romanian, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, who was commissioned by Norway in 2010 to survey the field and give recommendations. The result – Contextual Choices in Fighting Corruption (2011) - has some very helpful diagrams and tables although it can, on occasion, be a bit abstruse - 

 What is presented in most anti-corruption literature as a principal-agent problem is in fact a collective action problem, since societies reach a sub-optimal equilibrium of poor governance with an insufficient domestic agency pushing for change.

The report argues that the question “what causes corruption” is therefore absurd. Particularism exists by default, since people tend to share in a particular way, most notably with their closest kin and not with everyone else. Modern states are based on universal citizenship, which entails fair treatment of every citizen by the government. But there are very few states that have thus far succeeded in moving from the natural state to this ideal of modernity. The question should change from “what causes corruption” to “what makes particularism evolve into universalism”. What determines a change in the equilibrium?

Her report suggested that societies could be distinguished by their commitment to three very different sets of values

-       Universalism; where the state treats its citizens impartially

-       Neopatrimonialism; which have single rulers who treat the state as their ‘own’ patrimony.

-       Competitive particularism; which hold elections and have freedoms and competing political parties but have similar non-universal allocation systems, including patronage, nepotism, and favours

and then went on to draw 10 lessons from the global experience of which these are perhaps the most important

Lesson number one is that, the battlefield upon which this war is lost or won remains national. Case studies of historical and contemporary achievers show that although external constraints played a large role in inducing disequilibrium in particularistic countries and triggering change, a transformation has to be reflected in a new equilibrium of power at the society level for it to be both profound and sustainable.

 

Lesson number two is therefore that the transition from corrupt regimes to a regime where ethical universalism is the norm is a political and not a technical-legal process. There is no global success case of anti-corruption as promoted by the international anti-corruption community. Successful countries followed paths of their own. Fighting corruption in societies where particularism is the norm is similar to inducing a regime change: this requires a broad basis of participation to succeed and it is highly unrealistic to expect this to happen in such a short interval of time and with non-political instruments.

The main actors should be broad national coalitions, and the main role of the international community is to support them in becoming both broad and powerful. All good governance programs should be designed to promote this political approach: audits, controls and reviews should be entrusted to ‘losers’ and draw on natural competition to fight favouritism and privilege granting. No country can change without domestic collective action, which is both representative and sustainable over time.

 

The media, political oppositions and civil society should not be seen as non-permanent guests taking part in consultations on legal drafts but as main permanent actors in the process of anti-corruption and holding decisive seats in all institutions promoting ethical universalism. Which windows of opportunities to use, which actors are more interested in changing the rules of the game and how to sequence the change depends on the diagnosis of each society and cannot be solved by a one-size-fits-all solution. 

Other relevant posts

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/04/why-transition-will-last-hundred-years.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/07/when-will-it-ever-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/01/roman-romania.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/plus-ca-changeplus-cest-la-meme-chose.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/06/whatever-happened-to-good-governance.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/09/crowds-and-power-in-sofia-and-bucharest_18.html