From the Stable State to total Disruption?

We live in chaotic times and I have been trying in recent weeks to map how various authors have tred to make sense for us of the changes which our societies have been experiencing simce I was a boy. My drafts never seem to finish but I am reasonably content with the new one I now present - From the Stable State to Disrupted Societies (with a short 14-page version being available here) 

My own focus has tended to be on the institutional and political aspects of change – but as this paper has developed I realised that I had largely neglected the technological and commercial aspects of change. And, as more and more titles have appeared about the pending collapse of the western system. I have included these – as well as samples of the scientific writing which suggests that, in the face of the complexity of the world, we all require a huge dash of humility.

Table One suggests these are the key fields of writing – and offers a few examples

The Level	The Focus	Example
1 individual	Psychology Self-help,	In Over our Heads – the mental demands of modern life Robert Kegan 1995
2. techno-logical	Engineering and economic	The Discoverers; Daniel Boorstin (1983) The collected works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 2014 (on creativity) The Technology Trap; Karl Frey (2019) Rethinking Humanity James Arbib and Tony Seba 2020
3 organisation -al	2.1 Commercial – managing change, Organ Development	In Search of Excellence Peters and Waterman 1982 Managing Change in Organisations Colin Carnall (5th edition 2007) Management challenges for the 21st century Peter Drucker (2001) Managing Change; Bernard Burnes (2004)
	2.2 Public – new public management, public value	Reinventing Government Graeber and Osborne (1992) Change here – managing change to improve local services (Audit Commission 2001) Appraising public value; past, present and futures (2011) useful (academic) summary article Public Value Management – governance and reform in Britain; John Connolly et al (2021)
	2,3 Non-governmental	Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world J Bryson and B Crosby (2015)
4 societal	Social change complexity, the adaptive cycle	Change the World Robert Quinn (2000) Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition) Can Democracy be Saved? - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013) Panarchy – understanding transformations in human and natural systems N Gunderson and C Holling 2002
5 Networked	The dynamic between the levels	Life and How to Survive it R Skynner and J Cleese 1993 The Rise of the Network Society; Manual Castells (1996) The World We Create Tomas Bjorkman 2019 Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

I have already drawn attention to the fact that there are few papers on the all-embracing nature of change. It is a subject which is highly compartmentalised and table 1 of From the Stable State to Disrupted Societies is the core which describes each of the schools of writing

The UK slides to a new Nadir

With the UK pound now in free-fall, the Minister of Finance, with a name that sounds like a suicide pilot, has announced huge tax advantages to the rich - and giving apoplexy to commentators such as prominent radio commentator James O’Brien who is one of his beneficiaries

And Francis Coppola, one of the most objective economists, can’t understand what the government is up to

Reflections on...CHANGE

A couple of decades ago I did an annotated bibliography for change agents which you can still access. I have just put up a rather different, more reflective paper on the nature of Change – which recognises that the “field” is actually composed of four very different disciplines which have very little to do with one another –

• the individual - where psychology is used but self-help tends to dominate

• the technological as enabled by calculations of commercial prospects.

• the organisational - with various types of OD and management gurus being in evidence as organisations react to the technological changes

• the societal – where sociologists offer description of emerging realities and activists protest and try to reform

Each is therefore a strange mixture of the scientific and the intuitive

I first wrote about this earlier in the year and have been thinking about it for much of the time since then. What amazes me is how few papers or books have tried to challenge this rigid separation. “Life and How to Survive it“ was about the only example I could think of before 2000 – written jointly by a UK social psychologist and comic – although Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” and Donald Schon’s “Beyond the Stable State” from 1970 and 1971 did a certain amount of useful trespassing

But things have been looking up recently – particularly in 2008 when the NHS tried to elicit help from the literature in social movements to encourage innovation in the system (Bevan and Bate in table 3 of the attached paper). And, in 2014, we got What About Me? the struggle for identity in a market-based society by a Dutch psychotherapist, Paul Verhaege - a real gem which 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 “The Saturated Self”, Robert Kegan’s “In over our heads”– let alone “Life and How to Survive it”). Even the psychologists, it seems, suffer from memory loss!

But it was 2021 before we got the first book which quite explicitly attempt to link the 3 levels together in an integral way – with Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

In the 1990s, western confidence about its ability to manage change was positively hubristic. And with such pride usually comes a serious fall Little wonder that, within 25 years, the mood is now one of downright despair.

Update; Significantly, I realised I had omitted one level of change from my typology - namely the technological as enabled by calculations of commercial prospects. I have now amended the paper accordingly - although I will need to include more than the 2 texts which I have so far mentioned in table 1. 

So here’s my Updated Reflection on Change. Tell me what you think

A Bad Start for a new King

Charles III has been in authority over us for some 24 hours and has already succeeded in making me very angry – on 3 counts.

• By crafting an oath that treats us all as feudal “lieges” ie slaves

• by agreeing that Liz Truss, the new PM, should be in tow as he makes ceremonial visits to the 3 other nations which form his kingdom – thereby breaching the principle of royal neutrality which his mother observed so faithfully for 70 years

• by avoiding the 40% succession tax which is normally applied when an heir dies – and by the ease with which the Duchy of Cornwall (worth more than a billion pounds) passed to his elder son.

I have no great feelings one way or another about the British monarchy - although I will confess that when, in my youth, the National Anthem was still played an the end of a cinema session, I would never stand. But there were (and remain) more important things to bother about - one of so many reasons why I can never take Liz Truss seriously for having proposed - some 25 years ago - at a Liberal Democrat Conference the ending of the British monarchy.

So I have a lot of sympathy for the post I received today from Ian Leslie which suggested there were perhaps psychological reasons why such countries as Scandinavian, Netherlands  and UK had managed to remain open, democratic and civilised

One of the country’s best bloggers did a great twitter thread today which indicated the immensity of what is at stake. It starts with questioning the suspension of parliamentary business for an unspecified period

• the continuity of the monarchy requires the business of government to continue - after the appropriate pause for reflection that was provided on Friday and Saturday - starting on Monday morning.

• Other business is continuing next week. Debts will also be chased. Schools and other public services will all operate. But the process of accountable government will be suspended. That is a powerful and worrying symbol suggesting there is no accountability in the UK, after all.

• There have been ample such other symbols, all of which have been troubling. I was astonished that the Accession Council was not asked its opinion on the ascent of Charles III to the throne: not once were the 200 or so Privy Councillors assembled asked their opinion.

• If the so-called ‘great and good’ were present to offer counsel - as is their task - why was their opinion not sought on the matter laid before them? And yet it was not. A simple call for ‘Ayes’ and ‘Noes’ would have sufficed. But it did not happen. So, nor did democracy.

• Instead Charles III ascended as of right. Eugenics trumped democracy here - and our leaders didn’t even pretend otherwise.

• Worse, the accession proclamation said that Prince Charles has ‘become our only lawful and rightful Liege Lord Charles the Third’. A liege is the vassal of a feudal superior, where vassal means a person holding rights on conditions of homage and allegiance.

• I have to say that I object to the idea that I hold anything as a favour from a monarch who did no more to acquire that right than to be born. Every political sensibility that I have is offended by that idea.

• This notion also affronts my senses as a believer in the equality of all. It offends me as a democrat.

• Let’s also be blunt: there is nothing about this that can be reconciled with any declaration of human rights. So the question has to be, why was this wording used?

• unless its use was deliberate and a reflection of what is really happening on this accession. Might it be, in other words, that the language was deliberate, just as the rush to get Charles on the throne whilst the country is still in shock also very deliberate?

• In other words, the whole point of this rushed exercise that emphasises status, inherited power, the perpetuation of wealth and control of the populace, coupled with a wholly unnecessary suspension of parliamentary scrutiny, is to highlight the real power in this country?

• I wondered until it was announced that the new King would do a tour of the capitals of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I cannot object to that. I can when he is to be accompanied by Liz Truss as new prime minister.

• t could, of course, be argued that the King must act in consultation with ministers. But the message is deeply dangerous. First, it seeks to tie the Crown to the Tory party, which is threatening to the monarchy. Second, it makes the Crown political, and it should not be.

• At a time of national crisis all this worries me, greatly. Truss has already made clear that she will allow energy poverty to continue. This was implicit in the statement she made last week. She has also refused to tax the war profits of energy companies.

• Truss could not than have made it clearer, already, that she favours an unfair and divided society. Charles has ascended to the throne on the basis of feudal promises, and deeply divisive oaths pertaining to religion. Associating these things is deeply unwise, but is happening.

• The point I am making is that democracy, equality, and the right of the citizen to be who they wish is under varying challenges in these arrangements, promoted when parliament, and so democratic accountability, is suspended.

• This is not the working of a functioning state. Nor is it the work of what I think a parliamentary democracy should be. There is instead in all this an ancient regime seeking to remind the country where power lies, backed by a prime minister all too willing to reinforce division

John Harris is one of the rare journalists who gets out of the metropolis and makes a point of finding people whose opinions generally give a better sense of how social values are changing. He’s been out and about these past few days and has an interesting take.

At the time of her coronation, the idea of a tightly bound national community with the monarch at its apex made an appealing kind of sense. The left’s social democracy had fused with the right’s patrician instincts to produce the postwar consensus. In 1953, a Conservative government built nearly 250,000 council houses, the largest number ever constructed in a single year. By modern standards, most employment was relatively secure. Even if lots of people were excluded from this dream, and many lives would subsequently take a turn into insecurity and uncertainty, the postwar era inculcated enough faith in the UK’s institutions to keep the monarchy safely beyond criticism.

And now? The social attitudes that defined that period, and lingered into the 1990s – a strange mixture of solidarity and deference, and a widely shared optimism about the future – seem very quaint. If you are in your late teens, just about all of your memories will be of the endless turbulence that followed the financial crash of 2008. Your most visceral experience of politics will have been the opposite of consensus and harmony: the seething polarisation triggered by Brexit.

For many of those aged under 40, home-ownership is a distant dream, and hopes of job security seem slim. Meanwhile, perhaps because society and the economy have been in such a state of flux, space has at last been opened to talk about things that 20th-century Britain stubbornly kept under wraps: empire, systemic racism, the plain fact that so many of the institutions we are still encouraged to revere are rooted in some of the most appalling aspects of this country’s history.

The result of that change is a kingdom with two distinct sets of voices: one that reflects Britain’s tendency to conservatism and tradition, and another that sounds altogether more irreverent and questioning. In all the coverage of the Queen’s passing, the first has been dominant: how could it be otherwise? But as the period of mourning recedes, and a new monarch tries to adapt fantastically challenging realities, that may not hold for long. The post-Elizabethan age, in other words, is going to be very interesting indeed.

Is this Class War?

Boris Johnson has gone – for the moment at least

His replacement is the current Foreign Secretary Lizz Truss, a loyal follower who has remained faithful to him until the bitter end – announcing at her victory speech that he was admired “from Kyiv to Carlisle” – thereby confirming that the political class was aware that Scotland (and Northern Ireland) had seen through Johnson’s lies. These lies were so many and so bad that Peter Oborne (normally a reliable right-winger) devoted last year an entire book to them

Truss has just announced a new and extraordinarily right-wing Cabinet - reflecting the promises which had been made to the 140,000 Conservative party members whose votes were counted and to whom she was appealing during the 6 weeks of the contest. It should be noted that she obtained the support of only 47.2% of the members – and yet government requires a plurality in trade union voting and announced an intention to require that in any future Scottish referendum. Three out of four of the great Offices of State may have gone to brown-skinned people – but they are all privileged and privately educated right-wingers. 23 of the 31 cabinet members were privately educated. 

“The New Statesman” has just published that it is the least experienced Cabinet of the past 50 years. With such inexperience always goes arrogance – and downfall. Richard Murphy gave us today an interesting Twitter thread about the clear signals the country has been given that the main issue for the future is a smaller state

James o’Brien is one of the UK’s most eloquent and outspoken radio broadcasters and gave the country yesterday a passionate assessment of the Johnson regime. He led with a basic question – people have know for years about his basic dishonesty. Why, despite this, have so many people continued to support him? Indeed a majority of the Tory membership still prefer him over any of the candidates in the recent contest. Liz Truss continues not only to support him but to demonstrate every day her ability to outdo him in false claims.

After Brexit, I spent many posts trying to understand what it was about English society that had created the anti-European mood in which Johnson personally had played such a crucial role – with his dispatches from Brussels. I may just have found the key – it is Chums – how a tiny caste of Oxford Tories took over the UK; by Simon Kuper (2022) with the author interviewed here

• By 1984, emboldened by the twin forces of Falklands-era Thatcherism and “Brideshead Revisited” on the telly, archaic Tory voices – carefully laced with ironies by Johnson – were raucous again.

• They had all been educated at private schools such as Eton

• Though the clique around Johnson believed they were born to power, unlike the swashbucklers of empire they admired, they lacked a cause to fight for. Prime Ministers such as Atlee, MacMillan and Eden had fought in the First World War where they had commanded working -class men. Other PM in the 2^nd World War

• Kuper’s book details how that “cause” was eventually drummed up by other near contemporaries at Oxford, all of whom fell under the sway of Norman Stone, the polymathic history professor, alcoholic and sometime adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Eg Dan, now Lord, Hannan, and the most intense of undergraduates, Dominic Cummings.

• And it;s also good on psychological aspects – inviting us to imagine how such people, bloated on tales of empire and then becoming Ministers, reacted on their increasingly frequent visits to Brussels to the translated technocratic discourse 

I have just listened to Truss’s first speech as Prime Minister as she returned from accepting the Queen’s invitation to form a government. There was not a single word of conciliation – nothing about reaching out to represent everyone in the country. Everything in the speech was about her agenda of tax cuts, enterprise and opportunity. I sense we are in for a taste of class war.

On the same spot, 43 years earlier, Margaret Thatcher – after an equally difficult period in UK history - had used a very different tone

“And I would just like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope” and to all the British people—howsoever they voted—may I say this. Now that the Election is over, may we get together and strive to serve and strengthen the country of which we're so proud to be a part

Subsequent experience indicated that it may have been a bit hypocritical – bit it was gracious. But grace is not something our new PM does

My friend Boffy is much better on economics than I am – and has an excellent analysis here https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/trusss-plan-to-bankrupt-britain.html

Cultural Values ...again

When I started, some 40 years ago, to move in European circles, I was stunned to realise that words and concepts had such different meanings in other languages eg “accountability”, “Chancellor” let alone “local government” and “democracy”!

The more I listened to the simultaneous translation, the more amazed I was that there could be any mutual understanding – and that was before the Wall fell and the central and south-eastern Europeans were suddenly exposed to strange concepts of capitalism, democracy and multiple variants thereof. And it’s not just that our talk reverbates in different ways – the very way we think is also so very different according to people such as Richard Nesbitt. Johan Galtung wrote an important paper as long ago as 1981 in which he analysed the different intellectual styles of the Saxons, French, German and Japanese. These days he would think twice before venturing into this territory.

A post last week mentioned that I was working on a paper trying to make sense of various terms such as “political culture”, “world values” and “cultural theory” which go back almost 100 years to the 1930s as anthropology became a discipline to be reckoned with, producing academics of the stature of Frans Boas, Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead and Mary Douglas. The second world war produced a demand for anthropological understanding – although the Frankfurt School social psychologists were also involved in the interpretation of Nazism. But it was not until the 1950s that the political scientists muscled in.

1968 saw a values revolution – a famous author actually used the phrase “narcissistic” – although others called it “post-materialism”. The idea of national cultural traits was never a fashionable one in academic circles – there was always something a bit embarrassing about it. But, from the 1990s, it became very acceptable as business globalised and popular interest has never waned.

As I mentioned in the previous post, since 1990 I have lived in about a dozen countries and have tried to keep up with the literature on cultural differences. Indeed earlier this year I did a series of posts on this which I have these past couple of weeks developed into a 30 page paper which is almost finished - and I’m previewing here

The core of the paper consists of some 50 books in the field on which I’ve made brief notes and structured into 3 tables to make the reading easier.

As I waded through the reading for the paper, certain books made more sense to me than others – they just seemed better at explaining things. I’ve picked these out for a final table – there are nine of them.

And I make an amazing discovery – four of them focus on an issue which is not one of the terms with which I started this inquiry, that of VALUES. And, furthermore, “Political Culture” ties with “Values” – also with four, with “Cultural Theory” coming in with only one representative. Now this could simply reflect the fact that they are all (with the exception of the final EC document) much better written than the World Values Survey material which does tend to be heavy on statistics and verbal pomposity

Is the UK becoming a failed State?

How quickly a country can collapse – socially and economically. Lebanon and Sri Lanka are the latest examples.

Mark Blyth is a political economist highly respected across the political spectrum for the clarity and bluntness of his dissection of complex issues. On a 2021 podcast he had expressed the view, in his typically succinct way, that Brexit had been a turning point for the British economy – with the past year in particular suggesting that little was left except an enormous “Rentier Class” living off hundreds of billions of profits of privatised companies. The social media is full of the amazing profits being made by the shareholders and bosses of these companies - which add insult to injury by failing to undertake basic investment in infrastructure. There’s been quite a spate of books recently about “Rentier Capitalism” of which this looks the most interesting

As far as action is concerned, Richard Murphy has been a rare voice pushing in the past decade for tax justice and probably has the most detailed programme. His brief outline is here – and the 30 page detailed programme is here

But forgive me for wanting to focus on the part of the UK I know best – Scotland, from which Mark Blyth also happens to hail. Having been against the idea of Scotland separating in 2014 from the UK, he was “outed” recently on Twitter as having changed his mind – although he has subsequently confessed to finding it difficult “to make a positive case for independence” and has apparently just been axed from the Advisory group he joined a year ago. The Scottish Government last month decided to make a bid for a second referendum on the issue (for October 2023) – with the 2 candidates for the Conservative party leadership both strongly opposed to allowing it.

It’s not easy to find a good discussion on the internet about the issues involved in the idea of Scotland separating – but I’ve just come across a fantastic one superbly chaired by a young trade union woman. All the participants are Scottish and the tone is respectful;

Common Weal is an important Scottish Foundation which has run a podcast for quite some time and here features Richard Murphy to take us back to the UK economy.

The social media are having a great time with such fake ads as this one for the UK government 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1561657960819937282

update; and lo, 2 days later, James O'Brien was also talking of "the failed state" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPduUCpjkNE

26 August - How Chris Grey's latest post put it -

Domestically, that means a rapidly worsening cost of living crisis. Inflation is at its highest since the early 1980s and still rising, with households facing their largest ever recorded fall in living standards, and the Bank of England predicts five continuous quarters of economic recession. There are multiple strikes in the rail network, the docks, the courts, the postal service and elsewhere, and more to come. With a growing ‘Don’t Pay’ campaign in the face of what for many will be impossible energy bills, talk of civil unrest and disobedience does not seem hyperbolic.

There are now chronic labour shortages in almost every occupation, so that even as food prices rise to a 40-year high there is food rotting in fields for lack of people to pick or harvest it. The NHS, and especially the ambulance service, is at breaking point, as, not unrelatedly, is the social care system. In fact it is hard to find any part of the public or private sector which is not, in some way or other, under alarming strain. The beaches are awash with sewage, like a metaphor. And, though you’d hardly know it, we are still living with the effects of a pandemic, including an estimated 1.6 million people in England alone living with Long Covid, and presumably the possibility of a new wave to come.

Throughout all this, the leadership contest means there has been, in effect, no functioning government. The notional Prime Minister, rather than acting as a responsible caretaker, has spent the summer alternating between sulking, holidaying and squeezing the last drop out of the perks of his office. Any chance Boris Johnson had of a final period of dignity to set against the depraved conduct that led to his ejection has been squandered. Most Prime Ministers end up being judged less harshly by history than they are at the time of their departure; I strongly suspect that Johnson will be assessed even more critically in the future than he is now.

Post-Brexit political instability set to continue

When this strange summer ends, it will not herald the end of the period of political instability any more than the events and crises of the summer are peculiar to the season. This isn’t a holiday that has gone horribly wrong, it’s the latest instalment of a reality there is no taking a break from. That political instability began with the 2016 referendum. Having a new Prime Minister is not going to finish, but is a part of, this post-2016 story. I don’t mean that there were no political problems before, but that since then there has been a particular sort of instability and for particular reasons.

It’s not a coincidence that the new Prime Minister will be the fourth in the six years since the referendum, the same number as held office in the thirty-one years between 1979 and 2010. Nor is it a coincidence that within those six years there have also been two general elections, massive churn in the holding of ministerial posts, an illegal prorogation of parliament, a unique judgment that the government was in contempt of parliament, numerous highly unusual constitutional events, a government openly threatening to break international law, massive stresses in the relationship between Westminster and the devolved administrations, significant pressures on the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, and perhaps the most significant rifts between ministers and the civil service in modern history. All these things reflect the way that Brexit has all but overwhelmed the capacity and norms of the UK state and political institutions.