Institutional Architecture

Geoff Mulgan has appeared fairly frequently on this blog – as you can see from the posts listed at the end. The reason is simple – whether writing about Capitalism, Artificial Intelligence, State power or public Strategy, his books are all extremely thoughtful and comprehesive. He recently submitted this brief note to Parliament on strategic thinking in government and, in anticipation of a Labour government, wrote in May this short memo about the task of designing new public institutions

The UK has a great history of creating public institutions – from the Post Office and BBC to the NHS, the Metropolitan Board of Works to the British Library, the Arts Council and the Open University. Some were very much part of government, while others were designed to serve the public interest while remaining independent. Some became part of the furniture of everyday life, while others soon disappeared. 

Winston Churchill famously commented that we shape our buildings, but they then shape us. The same is true of institutional architecture – we shape our schools, courts, hospitals, regulators and parliaments, but they then shape not just what we do, but also how we think.

Institutions exist because distinct tasks - running libraries, hospitals, armies, supporting science or providing welfare services – require a distinct ethos, methods and capabilities rather than generic bureaucracies. It follows that new tasks will often require new institutions too – and as I show there is a lot of activity globally around tasks ranging from the governance of AI to decarbonisation and mental health.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, there are no centres of expertise in institutional architecture, either in the UK or globally, and political parties, and governments tend to default setting up committees or commissioning consultancies to help with design, which often leads to a recycling of traditional models rather than fresh thinking about what might work best.

Things look very different in the world of business, which is served by hundreds of centres interested in organisational innovation and feverish debate about new forms. These have contributed to dramatic change in how organisations are structured, including vast global businesses centred around search engines (Google), algorithms (TikTok) and platforms (Amazon, Alibaba). A generation ago, few imagined that the world’s biggest taxi companies (Uber and Didi) would own no taxis or that the world’s biggest provider of accommodation (Airbnb) would own no hotels. By contrast, there has been relatively little creativity in the public sector where thinking about institutional design has not advanced much in recent decades.

Some of the institutions which have survived longest combined a strong moral ethos and sense of mission along with competence and excellence. Some – notably BBC and NHS - had a direct relationship with the public, including very regular direct communication. Others were more technocratic but won over key stakeholders and experts (The National Instotitute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) is a good example) or were lucky with their enemies (such as the OBR which was greatly strengthened by its brief interactions with the Truss Premiership). A tentative conclusion might be that some mix of moral purpose and mission, perceived competence and strong relationships is key to survival.

A Mulgan Resource
The Art of Public Strategy – mobilising power and knowledge for the public good Geoff 

Mulgan (2009)
The Open Book of Social Innovation ed G Mulgan et al (2012)

Other posts about Geoff Mulgan’s work

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-state-and-democracy.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2024/03/can-governments-think-strategically.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/07/collective-intelligence-part-ii.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/07/have-we-lost-our-collective-intelligence.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/strategy-whats-in-name.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/12/have-we-become-too-fixated-on.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/12/another-world-is-possible.html 

SILENCING THE JOURNALISTS

I have to return to the monstrous arrest of individuals who are exercising their rights of free speech to write about the genocide which the Israeli army is flaunting every day in Gaza which I wrote about here last month. The British mainstream newspapers are apparently so cowed by the threat of D notices that they lack the guts to offer even a paragraph about the series of incredible incidents which have been happening recently – with squads of police battering on the doors of innocent citizens. I know about this only because of the much-maligned Twitter and the social media generally. Craig Murray – who has immediate experience of such treatment - has an excellent explanatory post about this on the US Consortium News site which I receive on my Email.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer stepped up the pressure on 

opponents of Zionist genocide last Thursday with the arrest of 

journalist Sarah Wilkinson and the charging of activist Richard 

Barnard, both under the draconian Section 12 of the Terrorism 

Act which carries a sentence of up to 14 years in prison. The UK

MSM has of course ignored these, but is universally carrying 

outrage at the conviction of two Hong Kong journalists for 

sedition, which carries a maximum sentence of … two years.
But they tell us it is China and not the U.K. that is the authoritarian dictatorship. 

(I do view the Hong Kong convictions as also an unwarranted interference 

with free speech. I merely point out the incredible hypocrisy of the British 

Establishment and far worse laws here.)

Richard Barnard has been charged and will face trial, apparently related to public 

speeches supporting the Palestinian right to armed resistance.
Sarah Wilkinson was released on bail after about 14 hours. Like the recent arrest 

and bailing of Richard Medhurst, the arrest and bailing is a device to chill her 

reporting and activism.

The harassment of dissident journalists at ports, using the extensive powers of 

the Terrorism Act for questioning and confiscation of communications equipment, 

has become routine. I myself suffered detention, interrogation and confiscation of 

equipment for “terrorism” last October.
But the Sarah Wilkinson case is an escalation, in that this is a raid on a journalist 

whose home was invaded by 16 policemen at 7.30 a.m., while she was arrested and 

taken to the police station as her home was comprehensively turned over.
More details of the raid have come out which are scarcely believable. 

Armed counter-terrorism police wearing balaclavas were used against a peaceful, 

female journalist. She was manhandled and physically hurt. The ashes in her mother’s 

funerary urn were desecrated in a “search.” And Sarah’s bail conditions include 

that she may not use a computer or mobile telephone.

It is a fascist government that sends 16 police to bust a peaceful journalist at home 

at 7.30am. Like the stopping of Richard Medhurst’s plane on the tarmac by police 

vehicles and his being dragged from the plane (which had just landed and was en route 

to the gate anyway) this is an authoritarian theatre of intimidation, a Nazi stamping 

of the violence of the state.
Richard Barnard is a co-founder of the brilliant Palestine Action, which has done so 

much to disrupt the Israeli arms industry in the U.K. as it continues to send vital 

equipment to carry out the mass destruction of civilians in Gaza. Richard has been 

charged under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act over two speeches he made supporting

 the Palestinian resistance. I have of course said this before, but it bears repeating:

Palestine has the legitimate right of self-defence against the illegal occupation.

The occupying power Israel has no right of self-defence. That is the plain 
 
position in international law.Yet in the U.K., it is legal to offer full-throated support to Israel’s 

genocide and to wish that all Palestinians are exterminated. 

IDF participants in genocide happily move between Israel and the U.K. 

with no legal consequences. Yet it is illegal to support certain Palestinian 

organisations when engaged in legal acts of armed resistance.
The state’s actions against activists have been ramped up — as I predicted 

— since Starmer came to power.

Social Media Coverage

https://x.com/i/status/1830503898051715287 surgeon’s family who went to Gaza harrassed by the police

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1830729753709408299

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GWhPMsQWgAUAb3e?format=jpg&name=900x900

https://x.com/i/status/1830906047810183592

arrest of sarah wilkinson https://x.com/MaryKostakidis/status/1829121415163064534

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjwycG_9Ujo Crispin Flintoff video

UPDATE

https://x.com/i/status/1831849525331554617 Sarah Wilkinson update

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/september/executive-action government refusal to reconsider ban on freedom of expression 

MISSION GOVERNMENT

A recent post on working class writers involved a fair amount of googling on the subject of CLASS which unearthed quite a few articles worthy of sharing but further reflection made me wonder why on earth anyone (apart from sociologists) would be interested in the minutiae of the UK class system. Readers who don’t agree are advised to go the bottom of the post . 

I was far more interested in this guest post on the Comment is Freed blog 

(by Dan Honig) about how the new government might approach public services 

The Institute for Government’s most recent Whitehall Monitor paints a picture of 

declining morale, with increasing numbers of civil servants heading for the exits. 

The tools the UK government employed to achieve  behaviour change are what I call 

“managing for compliance”.  The system is (over)burdened with rules, procedures, 

sanctions, and incentives. All are attempts to get bureaucrats to do what they 

otherwise would not. Compliance puts control and authority, those who set the targets 

and monitor the behaviours, at the top of the pyramid. Those lower down are meant 

to follow orders and respond to the reporting frameworks, carrots, and sticks dangled 

from above.
Tools of compliance sometimes fail to generate the behaviour they seek. Often, 

however, they succeed but only by generating behaviours and actions that can be 

monitored, measured, rewarded or sanctioned. Using compliance to change behaviours 

generates good performance where what is to be done is observable and verifiable. 

This is why fast food restaurants and package delivery companies heavily use the 

tools of compliance: what can be monitored about a burger or a package on a doorstep 

is pretty close to all the firm cares about. Unfortunately, most things Government 

strives to do are not so easily monitored and measured. A teacher with a student, 

doctor with a patient, social worker with a vulnerable child can all be monitored. 

So too can health or education outcomes far down the line. But long-term outcomes 

are very hard to attribute to the individual teacher, doctor, or social worker. 

Too many other factors contribute to their individual performances. It is impossible 

to get those workers to do the right thing through pure compliance.
Indeed, what the ‘right thing’ is also differs. Observably similar patients and student 

will need different amounts of time and strategies from providers. Those strategies 

ultimately require the informed judgment of a skilled practitioner. A heavy reliance 

on compliance does limit the damage an ill-intentioned employee (e.g. one who 

otherwise would not show up) can do, but it often does so at the cost of lowering 

overall performance. If you want systematic evidence that this is the case, in 

Mission Driven Bureaucrats I document how bureaucracies around the world 

over-rely on compliance.

The new British government has bought the idea of Mission Government - 

as espoused by Mariana Mazzucato - hook, line and sinker. She developed her 

ideas a few years ago in Mission Economy – a moonshot guide to changing capitalism 

(2021) which reminds us that governments face -

…. problems ranging from poverty to polluted oceans. To address them, we need a very different approach to public-private partnerships from the one we have now.

This requires a massive rethink of what government is for and the types of capability and capacity it needs. But, more importantly, it depends on what sort of capitalism we want to build, how to govern the relationships between the public and private sectors and how to structure rules, relationships and investments so that all people can flourish and planetary boundaries are respected. It is, as will be argued, about creating a solutions-based economy, focused on the most ambitious goals – the ones that really matter to people and to the planet. This is not about invoking the concept of a ‘moonshot’ as a siloed pet project. It is about transforming government from within and strengthening its systems – those for health, education, transport or the environment – while giving the economy a new direction.

I’ve only now downloaded the book – an oversight on my part since it makes a 

powerful case for government action which has been sorely lacking in the past 

few decades. She then identifies and discusses 5 myths

• Businesses creat value and take risks – government only facilitate

• The purpose of government is to fix market failures

• Governments need to run like a business

• Outsourcing saves taxpayer money and lowers risk

• Governments shouldn’t pick winners

Dan Honig has brought a similar vision to his new book Mission-Driven Bureaucrats 

(2024) which he discussed in this recent interview at the Centre for Policy 

Research. This reminds us all of McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y – viz whether 

you can trust employees or not.

Articles about Class
Beyond Class? D Cannadine British Academy (1998) article which offers a good overview
Class in the 21st Century – a review of “Social Class in the 21st Century (LSE 2013)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_British_Class_Survey which describes the survey 

carried out in 2011
On Social Class anno 2014 Mike Savage et al – which describes the subsequent book
review of Savage book 2015
Breaking the Class Ceiling Sam Friedman et al 2015
End Class Wars Mike Savage 2016
The Class Ceiling date?? 
Elites in the UK – pulling away Mike Savage et al (Sutton Trust 2020) 
Social Mobility – past, present and future (Sutton Trust 2022)

Silent Coup

A post in January revealed that one of my favourite books is “The Capitalism Papers - fatal flaws in an obsolete system” published in 2012 by the famous US activist and journalist Jerry Mander. It has everything –

· The ecological concerns;
· questioning of the legal basis of the corporation and the inequities and iniquities they cause;
· recognition that military spending and advertising supports the whole rotten system
· that democracy is being privatised
· as is our very consciousness
Mander drew it all together in a masterful conclusion in some 35 pages starting 

at page 258 (of the hyperlink given in the title above) which has 4 sub-headings -
· Nature Comes First
· The Primacy of Scale: Not Globalization, Localization
· Experiments in Corporate Values and Structure.
· Hybrid Economics . . 

And the post suggested that more recent books such as  Silent Coup – how 

Corporations overthrew Democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard (2023) 

"simply repeated what we already knew". That is indeed a serious problem 

for many new texts these days where editors really do need to insist that 

authors prove they have something new to say to us – for example by doing a 

proper literature review of previous work on the subject to prove to us that 

thay have something distinctive to contribute.
But I was wrong in this particular case! Kennard has been producing some 

videos to follow up the theme of the book which have caused me to go back to 

the book and treat it more seriously. Silent Coup deals with an issue which 

most of us have ignored – namely the way Corporations are using a private 

court system (ICSID) within the World Bank in Washington DC. ICSID  stands 

for the International Centre for the Settlement of  Investment Disputes. 

This allows private Corporations to sue governments for what they argue is 

lost revenue when a country’s laws prevent an investment.

The international investment treaties that enshrine the global justice system that protects corporations’ profits; the global welfare system that nourishes them and helps them expand; private carve-outs like special economic zones (SEZs) that have sliced and diced our world; and corporations’ control over force and security – today all of these dynamics affect countries globally.

On one side of this story are rich and powerful people and their elite advisors, lawyers and lobbyists. On the other side is the vast majority of the world’s population. Those hit hardest are often those already struggling.

Overall what we uncovered was dark, and suggested that many of the scandals that occupy our media may actually be quite small in comparison to the silent coup that has been enacted against our democracies.

The book basically recounts the journeys around the world the authors made 

to identify the scale of this racket. So far Kennard has put up 3 videos in a 

series understandably called THE RACKET which are here -
episode 1 of THE RACKET interviews Jeremy Corbyn 
episode 2 interviews an Arab journalist 
Episode 3 has Matt Kennard with Jill Stein, the US Presidential candidate who has taken up the cudgel from Ralph Nader  
 
Other videos about the book are here -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xRrk-cYU-E Chris Hedges report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDsp2apG5zQ&t=627s Novara with Aaron Bastani
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW5dEtjMb-k Politics Jo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsrP162n1S4&t=14s Planet Critical
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxOQJA0UXrM Freedom of the press
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2KeKxv3wo short video

DAVID GRAEBER

I succumbed to Twitter only a year or so ago and, with frequent blocking of advertisements and right-wing rubbish, continue to find it a useful resource. It has just reminded me that it was four years ago yesterday we lost David Graeber to whom I paid tribute in a post which included a list of some of his books (with hyperlinks) and articles about them. 

Graeber Resource
For those who prefer visuals here’s a Youtube session hosted by Baffler 

with David and PeterThiel (!) debating the pace of innovation. For an academic, 

Graeber has a very accessible writing style – although I have to say I found 

his massive "Debt - the first 5,000 years" too detailed for me to absorb. 

It has been sitting, glowering at me from the bookshelves, for the past six years

...Much more accessible are these books (all downloadable)

Possibilities – essays on hierarchy, rebellion and desire (2007)

Direct Action – an ethnography (2009)

Revolutions in Reverse – essays on politics, violence, art and imagination (2011?)

The Utopia of Rules – on technology, stupidity and the secret joys of bureaucracy (2015);

Bullshit Jobs – a theory (2018) the full book – with this being my overview after reading the book. The book attracted a lot of comments viz -

One of the few academic reviews has a tinge of jealousy about it.

This one has a more positive academic take

And this is a serious review which does a good summary

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review – a fair review

a more critical reviewer who ends up agreeing with Graeber

This one is too clever

It was a nice gesture of New York Review of Books to give us another look at the last piece he wrote for them - Against Economics , his very positive review of Robert Skidelsky’s “What’s Wrong with Economics”. And also these tributes from DG's friends - including this one from writer Rebecca Solnit

Class in British writing

What a joy to listen to interviews with working-class writers – whether on the subject of climate change or inequality. And to read books not written by middle-class wankers with clipped accents! Class is one of the barriers I’ve referred to when I’ve argued that being an outsider helps one be a creative writer. If you’re in a middle-class bubble, you simply don’t see the world as it really is! Happily I was saved from such a fate by my membership of the Labour party in my teens and being a Labour councillor for 22 years. Having regular sessions with Clydeside Tenant Associations soon knocks any nonsense out of you!

I viewed 2 videos yesterday – both about books whose authors are proud to 

acknowledge their working class background. The first with Chris Shaw about 

his new book Liberalism and the challenge of climate change which has the 

additional attraction of being only 149 pages long! The very first words in the 

Preface give you a sense of what you are in for -

This book makes a quite obvious point; the language we use and the stories we tell reflect our particular social and historical circumstances. The stories we hear about the solutions to climate change reflect the social and historical experiences of the liberal middle classes of the global North. They are stories intended to reproduce the privilege of the storytellers. I am writing from a subaltern position within the global North, that of someone who grew up in a family who struggled financially and a family with no experience of higher education.

So, the middle-class world has always felt something of an ‘other’ to me. I am not of the middle-class world.

Not being of that world has provided me with an outsider’s perspective on middle-class ownership of climate change campaigning and communication. This book is the viewpoint of someone stood at the window, looking in. I believe Cormac McCarthy once said that people write in lieu of blowing up the world. That feels an apt description of the motivation for this book. I am not a happy voyeur. Whilst I might characterise the middle classes as complacent in the normal run of affairs, and vicious when their privilege is threatened, I must also own up the anger that motivates the writing of this book. That anger is, I suppose, in some part the resentment of someone who has been turned away from the party, who feels not wanted. Yet also, the anger reflects the feeling of being lied to. Lies are easy to justify, easy to live with when you are the one doing the lying. Lies are more difficult to swallow as the one being deceived.

Shaw works at the University of Sussex (he’s Head of Research of Climate 

Outreach) and has worked in the field of climate change communication for 

over 15 years. I have only started the book but it is already making 

me see the world differently. 

By comparison leftist Brett Christophers whose The Price is Wrong - capitalism 

won't save the planet comes across as rather technocratic in this video.  

The second video was with Darren McGarvey who published last year 

“The Social Distance Between Us – how remote politics wrecked Britain” 

whose writing process he describes in this LRB blog. And a podcast called 

Trigger-nometry has a good interview with him here (just have the patience to 

wait for one minute). Clicking the book’s title links to a rather sniffy Guardian 

review which suggests that -

the book’s key theme, which McGarvey wraps up in the term “proximity”, is the fact 

that even at a local level, power tends to operate far away from the people it kicks 

around and manipulates. When it comes to the central state, moreover, decision-making 

turns even more cold and cruel, largely because in Westminster and Whitehall, the 

domination of political and administrative matters by privileged cliques is at its worst. 

Whether the people concerned are “posh politicians who’ve never tasted desperation” 

or “thin-skinned idealists, too short in the tooth to understand the real world”, 

McGarvey insists that their actions are usually based on groundless assumptions and 

false beliefs. What we really need, therefore, is a return of the kind of rooted working

-class voices that might reorientate government towards everyday reality: an update 

of the spirit of Aneurin Bevan, rather than more George Osbornes, David Camerons 

and Boris Johnsons. But even starting such a turnaround will be a huge and onerous task. 

All of which brings us back to the question of CLASS – a subject which Brits 

are notoriously reluctant to talk about. But, as usual, outsiders can bring a fresh 

(and amusing) perspective - first a French woman Social Classes in Britain 

Isabelle Licari-Guillaume (2019) and then Hiroko Tomida with The history and 

development of the English class system (2009) which contains this recap of 

1960s David Frost skit

The following lines are worth quoting.

the tallest man: I look down on him (indicates the man in the middle) because I am upper class.

the man in the middle: I look up to him (the tallest man) because he is upper class; but I look down on him (the smallest man) because he is lower-class. I am middle class.

the shortest man: I know my place. I look up to them both. But I dont look up to him (the man in the middle) as much as I look up to him (the tallest man), because he has got innate breeding.

the tallest man: I have got innate breeding, but I have not got any money. So sometimes I look up to him (the man in the middle).

the man in the middle: I still look up to him (the tallest man) because although I have money, I am vulgar. But I am not as vulgar as him (the shortest man) so I still look down on him (the shortest man).

the shortest man: I know my place. I look up to them both; but while I am poor, I am honest, industrious and trustworthy. Had I the inclination, I could look down on them. But I dont.

the man in the middle: We all know our place, but what do we get out of it?

the tallest man: I get a feeling of superiority over them.

the man in the middle: I get a feeling of inferiority from him (the tallest man), but a feeling of superiority over him (the shortest man).

the shortest man: I get a pain in the back of my neck.

For more serious analyses of the situation I recommend
Class in Britain David Cannadine (2000)
Who Rules Britain? John Scott (1991)