The UK Puzzle

The last post didn’t do justice to the seriousness of the question it raised. It was a rather self-indulgent whinge at the rage most of us Brits feel about the English upper-class twits who pollute our political culture. We think ours is a democracy – when, deep down, we know that it is no such thing and are humiliated by the realisation.

I had actually wanted to bring the story slightly up-to-date with a few comments about how managerialism (in both the private and public sectors) had somehow managed to insinuate a semi-feudal element into our organisational systems. In schools and the health system – as well as the industrial and financial sectors – the power of managers seems to have become all-pervasive - for no obvious reason.

We experience this in the workplace as a malevolent form of bullying – but we need to be more aware of the real evil which is senior managers taking millions in buy-back share options which artificially inflate share prices to their (short-term) benefit

I was, of course, aware that the Netherlands, as an old Imperial power, posed an immediate threat to my argument about class and Empire - but Boffy (my old friend and fellow-blogger) was soon on the trail and suggesting that the real issue is the development of what Christopher Bett calls “rentier capitalism”

Governments enable and support rents and rentiers in many ways -they help shield assets from competition – through the granting and enforcement of strong Intellectual Property rights, for example. They also shield rents from tax, most notably via generous treatments of capital gains and of income from property.

The main problems with rentier capitalism are twofold. First, rentiers are inclined to sit on and sweat their income-generating assets, rather than innovate; it is a recipe for economic stagnation. And second, because incomes accrue disproportionately to the asset-owning elite, it is an engine for growing inequalities of both income and wealth. You only have to look at the London housing market to see that process in action.

Rentier capitalism is not unique to contemporary Britain. It exists, and has existed, much more widely, geographically and historically. But, courtesy of policies that have been almost unimaginably rentier-friendly since the 1970s, the UK is rentier capitalism’s apotheosis, where its prototypical ills – vast inequalities combined with entrenched stagnation – are on full display.

“Let’s talk about the real money,” George Monbiot wrote in 2014. “The Westminster government claims to champion an entrepreneurial society, of wealth creators and hard-working families, but the real rewards and incentives are for rent.”

I’ve taken this table from Bett’s 2020 book on the subject to explain the multiple forms which rent extraction takes these days. When we talk about “the economy” we are simply unaware of what I agree with Boffy is a dramatic new form of extractive power.

Table P.1 Forms of contemporary rentierism

Asset	Primary means of gaining asset control	Principal income streams
Financial	Creation of credit money by private banks Acquisition of financial assets in primary and secondary markets	interest Dividends Capital gains
Natural resource reserves	Leasing agreements with mineral rights owners	Product sales
Intellectual property	Registration of rights (e.g. to patents, trademarks) with state intellectual property	Product sales Royalties
Digital platforms	Organic creation	Commissions Advertising fees
Service contracts	Bidding processes (various)	Service fees
Infrastructure	Privatization of state-owned enterprises licensing by government	Service fees Licensing fees
Land	Acquisition in markets Privatization of public-sector landholdings	Ground rent

Not enough of us understand these now forms of power – the question, however, is how exactly such developments account for the implosion of political power in the UK?

One book which may help answer the question is The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s ed A Davies and B Jackson et al (2021)

Why has the UK fallen so far – so fast?

They say that understanding is 90% of problem-solving or – as Einstein once put it -

“if I was given an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes trying to understand it and just 5 minutes to solving it”.

The UK may have been the first country to industrialise and certainly had in the 19^th century a very good record for scientific understanding but – since then – it has had a deplorable attitude to critical thinking. My question today is why the country finds itself with its reputation in total tatters?

Brexit, of course, is the immediate reason but, in the spirit of the five why s, I want to go much deeper and to explore what it is about british/english institutions that might explain the disaster which has overtaken the country in the 15 or so years. We were, after all, always “semi-detached” from the EU project. “Decline” has been a favourite conversation piece since the 1960s reaching a pinnacle in the debate surrounding Martin Wiener’s 1981 English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 which argued that the Victorian middle class had been seduced by the values of the aristocracy and lost its edge to the competence of the Germans.

Certainly the monarchical, imperial and class trappings of the British system are not a pretty sight – and have got up my nose since I became a Scottish politician in 1968. What accompanies imperial success is, of course, a lazy complacency which reveals itself in upper-class English arrogance and, in its political class, in sheer HUBRIS (in my book the worst sin). The old Etonians really still imagine that they are a superior race = and Johnson;s fall from grace has still not persuaded them otherwise. Until the country faces this reality, it is doomed – however much well-intentioned think-tanks put out documents (such as this most recent) trying to persuade us differently

Public intellectuals and the question of british decline is a very good review of th e dbate until 2001 by English and Kenny

The UK self-destructs

Truss has gone - the 4th UK Prime Minister to fall on the sword since 2016. The UK is destroying itself under this latest government. 

The situation is unravelling with such speed that it is difficult to find an article which does justice to the situation. 

Let me rest for the moment with this useful article which picks up all the key points 

An Important Milestone

The blog is proud to announce that it has achieved half a million clicks!

It started in 2009 and I never imagined that it would still be running 13 years later – although my statistic is dwarfed by a friend’s blog which has clocked up three times as many clicks for a highly specialised blog which posts daily with a Marxist exegesis and the occasional contemporary comment.

Most blogs milk the writer’s specialism. And, indeed, that’s how I started – having worked for 20 years in ex-communist countries on issues of “institutional development”. Forgive the jargon – it’s the term used by consultants to describe the dubious processes used to justify the establishment of state structures which then allowed western capital to ravage central European societies. It should be noted that I defined “consultants” in my little, sceptical Just Words as “con-merchants who act as Sultans”. 

I started this blog a few months later – with three objectives

· This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

· I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time nor inclination to read widely.

· A final motive for the blog is more c omplicated - and has to do with life and family. What have we done with our life? What is important to us?

And the blog has become something to which I devote most mornings. I came young to responsibility (becoming a Chairman of a social work authority at the tender age of 28) giving me a certain sense that what I was doing had some wider significance. And by the time I was 32 I found myself one of the leaders of a Region responsible for the public services of half of Scotland. And able to use this position to develop new ways of doing things – and having the luxury of sharing my reflections about our work in academic and other journals. A year ago, I mused about these aims using the johari window to be a bit more personal than I normally allow myself.

It’s appropriate that the 60 page paper I put up recently on the blog focused on how various writers have treated the issue of change since understanding change and making appropriate interventions has been the story of my life since 1968.

Memoirs and autobiographies allow us all to reflect on our lives – and I recently posted a very personal selection of what I considered to be some jewels in this genre. A recent example was a collected tribute (or Festschrift) to one of the true greats of decision-making entitled An Heretical Heir to the Enlightenment – politics, policy and science in the work of Charles Lindblom ed Harry Redner (1993) which takes 110 propositions attributed to him by his colleagues and has him assess their veracity in a final chapter.

Types of Change

When we talk about change, we’re really exploring, firstly, our perception of change and, second, the stories we tell to make sense of it.

Kurt Vonnegut was a great story-teller and this video is his fantastic summary of the basic plots of stories - which we might reduce to the statement that “things go up and down – and roundabout”

Applying the same principle to this issue of change, I would suggest that a useful typology could be -

Name	Its theory	Key reference
civilisational cycles	Societies reach a peak and then decline	The Decline of the West Oswald Spengler 1926 A Study of History (12 vols) Arnold Toynbee (1934-61)
generational cycles	Societies have zeitgeists which are generally every 20 years	“The Fourth Turning – an american prophecy”; William Strauss and Neil Howe (1997)
critical junctures	When the various levels combine to create an irresistable force	Out of the Belly of Hell; Anthony Barnett (2020) Literature review of critical junctures (2006)

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