The ever-growing irrelevance of Pluralism

A few years after I started to work (in institutional development) in central Europe, I got the chance of a short sabbatical at the Urban Studies journal of Glasgow University which allowed me to produce a more definitive statement of the lessons which I felt had emerged from the Social Strategy work. I remember presenting this in 1995 to a Human Rights conference in Bratislava – but it was 1999 before it was incorporated into a book I used as my calling card for my 8 years in Central Asia - In Transit – some notes on good governance

But the model of change it contains was perhaps not as clearly presented as it might have been - with a brief references to Kurt Lewin's freezing/refreezing approach and only the briefest of references to a more relevant 1977 article entitled Community Development – its administrative and political challenge which I had published in a Social Work journal This actually gave a much better sense of the thinking which drove some of us in our thinking about conditions in the West of Scotland - arguing that

Our society is hardly what one would call a participatory democracy. The term that is used - "representative" democracy - recognises that "the people" do not take political decisions but have rather surrender that power to one tor several) small elites - subject to infrequent checks. Such checks are, of course, a rather weak base on which to rest claims for democracy⁴ and more emphasis is therefore given to the freedom of expression and organisation whereby pressure groups articulate a variety of interests. Those who defend the consequent operation of the political process argue that we have, in effect a political market place in which valid or strongly supported ideas survive and are absorbed into new policies. They further argue that every viewpoint or interest has a more or less equal chance of finding expression and recognition. This is the political theory of pluralism.

Community development disputes this view of the operation of the policy process. At its most extreme - in some theories of community action - it argues that the whole process is a gigantic confidence trick. In its more liberal version it merely wants to strengthen the voice of certain inarticulate members of society.

There is, I would suggest, a relatively simple way to test the claims of those who argue that there is little scope for improvement in the operation of our democratic process and that any deficiencies are attributable to the faults of individuals rather than to the system. It involves looking at how new policies emerge.

The policy process

A key question is: How does government hear and act upon the signals from below? How do "problems" get on the political "agenda"? The assumption of our society, good "liberals" that most of us essentially are, is that

• the channels relating governors to governed are neutral and

• the opportunity to articulate grievances and have these defined (if they are significant enough) as "problems" requiring action from authority is evenly distributed throughout society.

"Problems" emerge because individuals or groups feel dissatisfied and articulate and organise that dissatisfaction in an influential way which makes it difficult for government to resist. "Grievance" or "dissatisfaction" is not. however, a simple concept - it arises when a judgement is made that events fall short of what one has reason to expect. Grievance reflects the relationship between “expectations” and “perceived performance” – with working-class people being bludgeoned to expect mere crumbs and to be grateful.

Community development staff were, in a sense, the shock-troops to help make the pluralist system work again.

As we were drafting our first slim attempt at a strategy in 1975, the Labour government was winding down what had become an increasingly critical Community Development Programme – reflected in John Bennington’s Local Government Becomes Big Business; (CDP 1976); and Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) Little wonder the Labour government regretted opening the Pandora's box of community development! By then, the country was being increasingly assailed with economic problems which are usefully outlined in this article

And then, in 1979, that Labour government came to an ignominious end – brought down by a combination of industrial action and Scottish nationalist insouciance, allowing Margaret Thatcher her 11 year reign. So we no longer had a government sympathetic to our endeavours. But Strathclyde Region was not one of the overtly leftist councils which aggressively flaunted its opposition to government policies. We played a very different game and were assisted by a sympathetic Scottish Office and “wet” Ministers such as George Younger, Malcolm Rifkind and Lynda Chalker. It is, however, still noticeable that my 1977 article is sympathetic to Ralph Miliband’s critique of parliamentary democracy!

At this point in the story, I should perhaps be more open about where exactly I stood on the left. I was seen as right-wing but had taken part on a fair number of ant-nuclear demonstrations and was an avid reader of New Left Review. But my university reading of Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” had built in me a suspicion of left-wing rhetoric - although I was more than happy once to share a platform with Tony Benn and attended a Conference in Sicily in the late 1970s with Stuart Holland of Socialist Challenge fame. That critique of his had been published the same year, 1975, that Gordon Brown’s Red Paper on Scotland came out. And there were many similarities. But I was now in power – with all the constraints that involves – although still burning with a deep sense of the injustices deeply inherent in UK society of the 1970s.

Our focus at the time was thoroughly pragmatic – what precise steps were available to us as a Council to show that the strategy of urban deprivation Strathclyde Region had approved in 1976 was to be taken seriously. Our audience was clear – mainly the teachers, policemen, engineers, social workers who formed our 100,000 strong staff. These were the people we had to convince – both that we were deadly serious and with the message the document contains about the need for change. Many of them were members of the Labour party and holding a mental model which actually blamed the victims,

Shortly after the launching of the Strategy - and combining my academic and political roles - I brought together a diverse collection of officials and councillors of different councils in the West of Scotland, academics and others to explore how we could extend our understanding of what we were dealing with – and how our policies might make more impact. It was a regular monthly forum called “the urban change network” and it was probably the single most effective thing I ever did. I still have the tapes of some of the discussions – one, for example, led by Professor Lewis Gunn on issues of implementation!

Google erases common memories - and devalues collective effort

Why do the last 3 posts hark on about events from 50 years ago – let alone apparently going back over material I covered last year? Mainly because of the deep concern I’m developing about the effects google is having on our institutional memory which I first shared last year here – and here

If you’re a celebrity, you’ll find numerous references to your activities on google. If, on the other had, you’re a hard-working, innovative community activist or councillor, you’ll find just a blank – you’re erased from our collective memory. It can happen even to high-fliers - try googling the name of one of the brightest Parliamentary stars (and prolific writer) of the 1970s, John Mackintosh, who died at the tragically early age of 48 and you’ll find so little (admittedly, you have to know to put in his middle initial “P” which produces much more!)

Google rewards celebrities - and whitewashes the rest of us out of history. We deserve better – our collective efforts are important – don’t let the fatalists get to you!

In saying this, I’m aware that I appear to be one of these Jeremiahs railing against the evils of technology. I’ve been a serious blogger since 2009 – even if I succumbed to Twitter only last year and smart phone only a couple of months ago! So you can put me down in the middle somewhere – neither a techno-optimist nor enthusiast. A year or so ago I tried to articulate my feelings on this subject -

There are very few of us who dare to challenge technological change. Most of us fear the ridicule involved – being the targets of taunts of being Canutes or Luddites. It, therefore, took a lot of courage for Jerry Mander in 1978 to produce Four Arguments for the elimination of television and for Neil Postman to follow this up in 1985 with “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. And, with his “In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” (1992) Jerry Mander took his critique our technological society even further.

In this provocative work, Mander challenges the utopian promise of technological society and tracks its devastating impact on cultures worldwide. The Western world’s loss of a sense of the sacred in the natural world, he says, has led us toward global environmental disaster and social disorder - and worse lies ahead. Yet models for restoring our relationship with the Earth exist in the cultures of native peoples, whose values and skills have enabled them to survive centuries of invasion and exploitation.

Far from creating paradise on Earth, technology has instead produced an unsustainable contest for resources. Mander surveys the major technol.ogies shaping the “new world order”, computers, telecommunications, space exploration, genetic engineering, robotics, and the corporation itself and warns that they are merging into a global mega-technology, with dire environmental and political results

Needless to say, none of such book were taken seriously. It took perhaps a BBC television series of technological dystopia Black Mirror – which first hit screens exactly a decade ago – for us to begin to realise that technology (in the shape of the social media) has its perverse side

More recent texts

The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain Nicholas Carr (2010)

From Guttenberg to Zuckenberg – what you really need to know about the Internet; John Naughton (2013)

To Save everything click here – the folly of technological solutionism; Efgeni Morozov (2013)

The Internet is not the Answer; Andrew Keen (2015)

Utopia is Creepy; Nicholas Carr (2016)

Ten Arguments for Deleting your social media right now; Jaron Lanier (2018)

Turning a Crisis into an Opportunity

The early 1970s saw an intense debate about the very future of Glasgow – the rehousing of people from the city’s slums in the 1960s to New Towns in nearby parts of Scotland had resulted in a significant decline of Glasgow’s population and many felt that it was useless to go on ploughing money into the city. And the shocking 1973 “Born to Fail?” report identified not just Glasgow but the entire West of Scotland as a UK leader in “multiple deprivation”.

There is always, however, opportunity lying within a crisis; and those of us who seized this one were those who had been most critical of the performance of Labour councils. They may have had a good record of slum clearance and house-building but couldn’t handle the new assertiveness being shown by tenants. The new Region established in 1974 required, in our view, a new approach, based on the new spirit of participation which the Labour Government had recognised with its Skeffington Report on “People and Planning" (1969).

The very legitimacy of the new Region was in question – partly because of its enormous scale, its services used by half of the 5 million Scottish people. This, after all, was still local government and people were beginning to express some discontent with being taken for granted by too many Labour municipalities. The Scottish nationalists had scored some stunning parliamentary victories in the late 1960s and the talk, by the time the Regions came into existence in 1974, was of the prospects of being “over-governed” – with membership of the EC having been confirmed in the 1975 referendum and active talk of a possible “Scottish Assembly” which was eventually put to a referendum in Scotland in 1979, failing only on a “technicality”.

“What sort of Over-government?” was indeed the title I gave to my contribution to Gordon Brown’s famous Red Paper on Scotland which came out in 1975. I readily admit that the Over-government piece was an angry and academically pretentious one But its stress on the complacency and conservatism of Labour municipalities was an important corrective for the times. The headings give a good sense of the drift of the piece -

• Local government and devolution – a confused debate

• what is wrong with local authorities?

• structural weaknesses

• ideological weaknesses

• the challenge of corporate planning

• paternalism

• Labour Groups

T he Devolution of Power was an important little book produced by Labour MP John P Mackintosh in 1968 which helped produce the Kilbrandon Royal Commission, reporting in 1973. The problem with devolution is that what's conceded can readily be withdrawn and generally is - as we saw with the abolition first of the metropolitan bodies like the GLC in the 1980s and the Scottish Regions in the 1990s.

The basic point is that the 1970s saw great turmoil – and the Region needed to give people some hope that it understood their concerns and would be willing to use its resources to ensure fairer public services.

An initial deprivation strategy was set out by 1975/6 but, over the winter of 1981, was further developed at a series of community conferences attended by 1000 activists who reviewed the initial actions taken by the Region and, with the May 1982 elections, ensured that the subsequent report had a fresh legitimacy

It was printed as an attractive (little red) booklet (complete with poems by TS Eliot, Brecht, Adrian Mitchell and quotations from William James and Alice in Wonderland!) and widely distributed, as was a shorter version in the internal staff Bulletin. The Region's free Newspaper distributed to every household - and more selective monthly "Digest" sent to all Community groups - were both intensively used in the years to come to explain the details of the work. Workshops were held in a variety of public and professional settings over the following years to get the key messages across. And these were simple - if challenging -

"The existing inequalities in service allocation did not happen by accident: they are mediated through the administrative machine by generally well-intentioned professionals and administrators practising apparently fair and neutral principles. To tackle these inequalities therefore requires more than a general expression of content handed over, in traditional style, for implementation. It demands the alteration of structures and the working assumptions".

"What we were asking our staff to do in 1976 was to accept that fairly simple things were needed from them in the first instance; not massive spending but just a commitment, firstly to those who lived in the APTs; secondly to attempting new relationships both with their colleagues in other Departments and with residents. We were also asking for imagination and courage in encouraging staff to bring forward proposals for better practice despite the discouragement we knew they would encounter from the rules, traditions and prejudices which seem deeply engrained in certain departments"

"The majority of staff are discouraged from joint work with councillors, other professionals and residents in APTs by the way the traditional departmental system of local government works. Career advance depends on one's work as a professional or manager in a particular department - and not on the collaborative ventures emphasised in this and the 1976 document. That is the crucial issue which must now be faced and resolved. Exhortations and good intentions are no longer enough"

Previous Posts in this series

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/born-to-fail.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-alive.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/turning-crisis-into-opportunity.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-ever-growing-irrelevance-of.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/performance-v-results-as-measure-of.html

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!”

 I may have told the story of Strathclyde’s Social Strategy before – but being given the opportunity to reflect in Zoom conversations almost 30 years later does encourage different perspectives. The tale I told in 1999 was one of success - at least as far as the process of change was concerned. The management of change was, even in the mid-1980s, a largely neglected subject in the UK - indeed no one used such a phrase in those days. The first popular book with that phrase was Managing Change - and making it stick by Roger Plant - in 1989/90. It was the 1990s before the “management of change” exploded into fashionability – with, for example, The Expertise of the Change Agent - public performance and backstage activity (1992) by David Buchanan offering some fascinating insights. But it was 2000 before Robert Quinn gave us the deeply impressive “Change the World”- which coincided with the outbreak of unrest from social movements globally.. Just how fashionable the field became you can see from the Annotated bibliography for change agents I wrote in 1999

Although I started the 1999 paper with a list of the developments which had preceded the creation of Strathclyde Region, I realise now I had underestimated their significance. In particular I had – as most people do – underplayed the positive role of the Labour governments of 1964-1970

• The Labour government of 1964-70 spent much of its period in power exploring how the UK could be modernised; it did this largely via Royal Commissions ie a group of the "Great and the Good" who would take a couple of years to hear evidence and make recommendations

• Its perspective had been very much that of "high modernism" viz a commitment to size, democracy and efficiency

• perhaps no more so than in the literal decimation of the Scottish local government system (albeit with strong support from the Heath government of 1970-74) leading to the creation in 1974 of 9 elected Regions and 53 District Councils

I remember visiting the House of Commons in those years and having a discussion with Willie Ross, the Secretary of State for Scotland, to impress on him the benefits which could accrue the creation of Strathclyde Region – to which, of course, the old Scottish local authorities were utterly opposed. Hansard subsequently recorded Willie Ross's reference to the meeting. In the meantime, the world moved on

• "Born to Fail?" was a 1973 report which exposed the scandal of the scale of multiple deprivation in the West of Scotland ("social disadvantge" was the actual term used but amended in the media to "deprivation"))

• to which SRC responded strongly 2 years later with its deprivation strategy – which it elevated to its top priority

• The Region was seen as a bit of a monster - but some of us saw the "Born to Fail?" Report as an opportunity to demonstrate the difference a well-resourced government body could make to people's lives

• I remember traipsing around the departments of what were then 2 city Universities to try to find knowledgable people – there were none

• this was not only the first municipal strategy against deprivation – it was the first time any UK government body had attempted such a bold step

• It was a remarkably open process – almost certainly because we accepted that, as Labour councils had been responsible for housing and most services for several decades, we had to take our share of responsibility for the results

And we were lucky – a lot of wise people had been developing structures for reform in the previous deacde, expressing itself in at least 4 waves of change

• between 1971-74 a group of individuals led by Ken Alexander produced in 1974 the West Central Scotland plan which contained the basic analysis and recommendations to allow the Region to make the decision to

• one of the Royal Commissions (Wheatley) produced between 1966 and 1968 a radical set of recommendations for Scottish local government

• recognition of urban needs – in the urban programme and CDPs set up in 1968 in partial response to the US War on Poverty

• Special committees of experts were set up by central government in 1971 (Bains: Paterson) to produce - as guidance for new local authorities then being created in England and Scotland - organisational guidelines for better management and policy-making. The main criticism in the reports they produced was the way that local government decision-making focussed (a) on the past (ie continuing to do what it had done before); (b) on itself (making no attempt to explore what those receiving its services thought or wanted) and (c) on single services - rather than the impact on the community.

The new local authorities were therefore advised to -

• appoint a Chief Executive

• set up a Policy Committee (Cabinet)

• establish strategy processes (to ensure a focus on policy issues and on the future)

• have inter-departmental groups (to help that strategic work)

All this reflected what was considered best practice in business and was concerned to concentrate administrative and political power in new structures and posts which were to be used to stamp a strategic purpose on the "ad-hocery" which passed for management. Corporate management and planning structures became fashionable - despite some critiques from those working at a neighbourhood level and a few academics such as John Dearlove.