Britain needs a shot in the arm!

I left the UK 29 years ago. Three of my daughters and 2 sons-in-law still live in a country I once admired and whose fortunes I still care about and follow closely.

This is the week of the British General Election – early Friday morning will give us the result. My rights to vote in a British General Election expired 15 years ago – but no one I consider a friend could possibly vote Conservative in this election.

It’s not just the support that the Tory party gives to the class system and to all that’s worst in greed and jingoism. Even Conservative ex-Prime Ministers and Ministers currently feel unable to vote for the present British Government – headed as it is by a man universally agreed to be a liar and a cheat and with a Cabinet of self-confessed neoliberals.

I never knew the country under New Labour – when Tony Bliar was rising in the Labour party, I was part of the old Labour system which was deeply suspicious of his motivation. Our reservations were confirmed by his pursuit of a “modernisation” agenda which was a translation of neoliberalism into Orwellian Newspeak – culminating in his enthusiastic support for the US-led Iraq war

The moral disgust for all this was eventually felt even by the British public who may not have been able in 2010 to give the Conservatives a full victory - but managed to do so in 2015, only to recant in 2017.

Britain (or rather England) is a country which has always been at war with itself – with an electoral system designed to give power to one side or another. “Compromise” and “consensus” are swearwords in the english lexicon.

The UK has a reputation for pragmatism – so surely it should now have penetrated even the dullest heads that “strong leadership” does not seem to produce the goods! For every Churchill there has been a Stalin and Hitler….   

The “self-belief” of those such as Thatcher and Bliar soon morphed into arrogant conceit and moral blindness. Atlee was famous for his modesty and willingness to delegate. Even Harold Wilson understood that the other beasts of his cabinet – such as Dennis Healey, Anthony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and James Callaghan – needed space to roam. But leaders such as Bliar are driven by control freakery.

The current (English) Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn has been an MP for almost 40 years and has never been a Minister or shadow Minister. Corbyn is – and always has been - a rebel. Not quite of the Oxbridge-educated Michael Foot sort but a rebel nonetheless - always ready to support the downtrodden and to express unfashionable opinions. It was therefore easy for the corporate media to demonise him – although the conspiratorial “story” which appeared in this week’s “Sun” (bringing back memories of the infamous “Zinoviev letter”) does demonstrate the desperate lengths the corporate elite will go to retain power. George Monbiot gives another powerful example here of the lies being perpetrated in this campaign by a combination of the conservatives and the media

Of course Corbyn doesn’t look like your average Prime Minister – except perhaps Atlee. But that is precisely his strength…The literature on leadership now understands the dangers of strong leadership but lazy political journalists haven’t caught up with the new insights about power – which needs to be “transformational” rather than “transactional” as the academic like to put it…  

Corbyn came to the leadership of the Labour party in 2015 not from any ambition – but simply because it was his turn to be the left’s sacrificial lamb….

In my book that was one the best motivations for becoming a leader – reluctance. Compare it with the ambition which was driving Gordon Brown from an early age – when I knew him and indeed contributed to two of the books he edited. Sadly, however, I thought of him when I read this generalisation –

Our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besotted effrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like being compelled to cede the steering wheel to the drunkard in the back seat loudly proclaiming that he knows how to get us there in half the time.

More to the point, since our perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies, we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer world—the world that cannot be—ambition would be an absolute disqualification for political authority.

We may know little of the team which might form the Corbyn Cabinet – but we do have a good sense of the programme which they will try to implement.

The manifesto which Corbyn presented for 2017 set many of us alight – and the new one is even more appropriate and necessary.

Networks, networks everywhere....

In “The Square and the Tower”, Niall Ferguson admits that, as an historian, his focus had been written archives and that official documents rarely mention the informal processes. The “operating system” in which he operated was the world of power and of hierarchy. It was his work on biographies of people like Warburg the banker and diplomat Henry Kissinger which alerted him to the significance of networks. The book is therefore an act of contrition – to make amends for his failure to pay proper tribute in his earlier books to the importance of networks.

It’s an easy read – with none of its 60 chapters being longer than 5-6 pages.

It reminded me of my reaction, in the early 1990s, when a new word entered our vocabulary – “governance”. I remember very vividly the scorn I poured on the word at the time. Why, I muttered, did we need a new word when “government” had served us well for at least a couple of centuries. And, if there was something new around, it was clear that most people didn’t appreciate the difference and were using the words interchangeably.

But that didn’t prevent me from using the phrase “good governance” in 1999 in the subtitle of my little book about public administration reform In Transit – notes on good governance

So let me take you on a tour of an intellectual idea whose origin, I would argue, can be traced back to the 1960s. an earlier post referred to the community action of that period first in America and then the UK – which led to the new fashion in the 1970s for “participatory democracy”. This may have been a manipulative tool for government but it led to the notion that citizens were not just bundles of trouble and expense but also sources of ideas - from whom organisations could learn, if they cared to.

Indeed the thesis of the part-time MSc I did in the early 1980s was on “organisational learning” – anticipating (in a sense!) the work of Peter Senge.

That, of course, was the decade of Thatcherite managerialism and privatisation when the private sector’s energies, skills and insights were also sought inside government for wicked issues such as urban regeneration and training 

Whatever happened to public administration? Governance, governance everywhere was a famous article by H George Frederickson which appeared in 2004 and traced the first use of the word to Harlan Cleveland who argued as far back as 1972 that -

The organisations that get things done will no longer be hierarchical pyramids with most of the real control at the top. They will be systems – interlaced webs of tension in which control is loose, power diffused and centres of decision-making plural

“Governance” in other words is “networked government” – best exemplified in Rod Rhodes’ 1996 article “The new governance – governing without government.

Rhodes is the British political scientist who first noticed that western government were being “hollowed out” – although privatisation in some ways has replaced what were previously state functions with new regulatory ones. But for the “policy networks” of this new political science  literature, we might read also “lobbying” and commercial penetration of the state..   

That was also when another article appeared which isn’t referenced in Ferguson’s copious notes but which helps place the idea of networks in a far more insightful context than Ferguson’s book – namely Tribes, institutions, markets, networks – a framework for societal evolution by David Ronfeldt (RAND Corporation 1996). It's an important article which argues that each form is necessary – one does not replace the other….With a great table of which I have selected some excerpts -

Comparison of the 4 models

	Tribe/clan	institution	market	Network
Key realm	Family/culture	State/government	economy	Civil society
Essential feature	Give sense of identity	Exercise authority	Allow free transactions	Share knowledge
Key Value	Belonging	order	freedom	equality?
Key risk	Nepotism	corruption	exploitation	Group think
identity	Solidarity	sovereignty	competition	Cooperation
Motivation	Survival	rules	Self-interest	Group empowerment
structure	Acephalous	hierarchical	atomised	Flat

All this reminds me of some other typologies - 

In the early 20^th Century, Max Weber had considered that the fundamental question of our time was why people were prepared to obey those with power and suggested that we granted legitimacy to those endowed with “traditional”, “charismatic” or “rational-legal” authority.

Etzioni (1975) also identifies three types of organizational power: coercive, utilitarian, and normative, and relates these to three types of involvement: alienative, calculative, and moral

Charles Handy and Roger Harrison had a 4 part typology – but as it focused only on different types of managerial system (or cultures) it will not detain us here.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas developed what she called the “grid-group” typology, consisting of four very different “world views” – what she calls hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist. This came to be known as “Cultural Theory”

I came across Mary Douglas’ theory only in 2000, thanks to public admin theorist Chris Hood’s “The Art of the State” which uses her typology brilliantly to help us understand the strengths, weaknesses and risks of the various world views. I was delighted just now to find his book now fully accessible on the internet – just click the title and then click the appropriate button again. 

I am aware of only one book-length study which compares and contrasts these various models “Way of life theory– the underlying structure of world views, social relations and lifestyles” – a rather disjointed dissertation by one, Michael Edward Pepperday (2009) which I was able to download a year or so ago but whose introduction is here.

I can't quite explain the fascination this sort of analysis has for me....It clearly has something to do with needing to tie things up in neat packages.....

Those wanting to know more can read this post which might encourage them to have a look at this short article “A Cultural Theory of Politics” which shows how the approach has affected a range of disciplines.
Grid, group and grade – challenges in operationalising cultural theory for cross-national research (2014) is a longer and, be warned, very academic article although its comparative diagrams are instructive

Clive James RIP

For the past decade we have known that Clive James was living on borrowed time…his life since then has been one long tribute to the books he had read - in so many languages...

He first made an impact on me in the 1970s – with the poetic lyrics he wrote to Pete Atkin’s lovely melodies.

But his real fame came with his journalism, his television commentaries and his hilarious multi-volume memoirs.

He was Erasmus, Rabelais, Proust and Dorothy Parker rolled all together - an epigrammist supreme...

Only an outsider could write sentences like his - you could almost feel the intelligence subjecting every half-drafted sentence to intense scrutiny to see how it could be crafted better, with a twist to make the reader explode...

And that went also for his vignettes of European cultural figures of the 20th century (in "Cultural Amnesia" for example - although he has several other superb collections of serious essays)

Clive James resource
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/remembering-clive-james-1939-2019/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/clive-james-waking-up-in-europa/

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/nov/27/clive-james-obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/nov/28/my-debt-to-clive-james-the-howlingly-funny-critic-who-made-tv-writing-sing

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/nov/27/clive-james-on-trump-war-and-peace-and-furry-bears

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/nov/29/heavens-what-fun-what-it-was-like-to-be-clive-james-editor

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/01/jonathan-miller-clive-james-playful-pair-pricked-grim-respectability-of-postwar-british-culture

My role in the Networking of society

Niall Ferguson is not normally an author whose imperialist histories would interest me but I hadn’t heard of his latest (?) title The Square and the Tower – networks and power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018) and was intrigued to find out what a historian had to say about networks – particularly when its intro brought back memories of my own involvement in the early days of the “networked society”.

“The Square and the Tower” claims to present “a new historical narrative, in which major changes—dating back to the Age of Discovery and the Reformation, if not earlier—can be understood, in essence, as disruptive challenges to established hierarchies by networks.”

Social networks “have always been much more important in history than most historians, fixated as they have been on hierarchical organizations such as states, have allowed,” and never more so than in modern times.

The first “networked era” followed the introduction of the printing press in Europe in the late fifteenth century.

The intervening period, from the late 1790s until the late 1960s, saw the opposite trend: hierarchical institutions re-established their control and successfully shut down or co-opted networks. The zenith of hierarchically organized power was in fact the mid-twentieth century—the era of totalitarian regimes and total wars.

And, we might add, of large corporations such as General Motors…

The second such era—our own—dates, according to Ferguson, from the 1970s, and the pace of change has accelerated along with new communication technologies. A review in the New York Review of Books tells us that -

Niall Ferguson believes that until recently networks have been neglected by historians, who prefer to study institutions that leave well-preserved and accessible archives. He confesses that he has only recently come to appreciate that his own books “were also books about

networks.”

For many years the British-born financial historian, chronicler of the Rothschild banks, television broadcaster, and prolific journalist had been “casual” in the way he thought about networks. When writing about the career of Sigmund Warburg, he had in his mind’s eye “a vague diagram that connected Warburg to other members of the German-Jewish business elite through various ties of kinship, business and ‘elective affinity.’”

Yet it did not occur to Ferguson to “think in a rigorous way about that network.” He had yet to adopt “formal network analysis.” This book, he writes, “is an attempt to atone for those sins of omission.”

Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock was amazingly prescient in 1970 about what the winds of technical change were about to bring; and Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy (1981) confirmed this. Both books repay close study…..

It was in 1976 or so that my involvement in a research project made me aware of my own role as a networker – just (in a sense) as Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain’s philosopher tutor made him realise he had been speaking prose for most of his life.

I had become a community activist in the late 1960s - inspired by Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals which was, astonishingly, written in 1946 but became a bible for activists during the American War on Poverty of the 1960s.

My elevation in 1971 to the chair of a new social work agency which had been given an important preventive role by the Labour government of 1964-70 gave me a profile at a Scottish level – to which I owed my selection in 1974 to one of the top positions in the new Strathclyde Region covering half of Scotland’s 5 million people.  The “Born to Fail?” report exposing the scale of poverty in the West of Scotland had appeared the previous year - and a few of us managed to make this issue the central strategic one for the massive new Region.

The research project I referred to earlier was managed by a branch of the famous Tavistock Institute (one which, perhaps curiously, deal with operational research) and very much focused on the negotiations which took place as the Region initiated rounds of discussion not only with its own departments such as Police, Education and Social Work but the housing authorities, health boards and even universities and teacher training bodies – in an effort to try to gain support for a new social justice strategy which brought citizen activists together with officials and politicians (and local budgets) to determine a better future .

I’ve described this work in Case Study in Organisational Development and Political Amnesia – and am pleased to say that the Scottish government continues this work to this day…..

Networks have primarily been of interest to sociologists – with sociometrics mapping the influence of key individuals in systems and Manuel Castells being the guru of the subject with his writing about “the network society”. But economists such as Paul Ormerod have also been active – with his Positive Linking – how networks are revolutionising your world (2011)

Although the management of change became very popular in the 1980s and 1990s – as you can see from this Annotated Bibliography for change agents I did on the subject - it was 2000 before a little book The Tipping Point by journalist Malcolm Gladwell made everyone fully appreciate the significance of networks and the different roles played in the diffusion of fashionable products or ideas….You can read the book in full here

In the next post, I’ll have a look at how other intellectual disciplines such as political science have tried to deal with the idea of networks

More surveillance - less capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff is a highly respected academic who has been investigating the effects of information technology on the worlds of work and, latterly, of our social being for at least 30 years – from a sociological/ethnographic perspective.

Her first book In the Age of the Smart Machine – the future of work and power (1988) made such an impact on me that I can actually remember where I read it (in my Glasgow office) all of 30 years ago.

The future of work had become an  issue of deep concern since Charles Handy’s book of that title, published in 1984 -  the year which gave many the opportunity to reflect on how  Orwell’s “1984” had panned out, compared, for example, with Huxley’s Brave New World - although it was the following year before the phrase “the surveillance society” was coined. And almost a decade later before we saw a proper study -  The Electronic Society – the rise of surveillance society; David Lyon (1994)

Zuboff’s next book was published in 2002, written with her husband J Maxmin (a progressive CEO of an engineering company) and carried the title The Support Economy – why corporations are failing individuals and the next version of capitalism (2002) whose purpose she explains here

So her new, large, sprawling and highly-acclaimed book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power completes a trilogy of books on this subject. She may not have invented the phrase “surveillance capitalism” (John Bellamy Foster had an important article with that title in July 2014) – but she has, in recent years, become one of the key “go-to” academics for journalists wanting to understand the sort of world being created by companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.

And the picture she paints is a pretty devastating one – all the more powerful because her patient note-taking exposes the business practices of companies which are highly secretive. Zuboff outlines, for example, six astonishing principles which Google famously let slip on one occasion to justify its strategy.

·       “We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking. On the basis of this claim, we can ignore considerations of individuals’ rights, interests, awareness, or comprehension.

·       On the basis of our claim, we assert the right to take an individual’s experience for translation into behavioural data.

·       Our right to take, based on our claim of free raw material, confers the right to own the behavioural data derived from human experience.

·       Our rights to take and to own confer the right to know what the data disclose.

·       Our rights to take, to own, and to know confer the right to decide how we use our knowledge.

·       Our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide confer our rights to the conditions that preserve our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide”

(p179)

I’ve said enough, I think, to indicate that I have a very high respect for this academic who has devoted 30 years of her life to a painstaking analysis of the nature and effects of the new technologies.

But be warned that this latest book of hers suffers from several large flaws –

-       It is extraordinarily badly-written

-       It completely lacks a framework to warrant the claim in the title to be about “capitalism”

It’s never easy to prove bad writing but readers are helped when they can clearly see the subject and object of a sentence ie who does what to whom. Writing is bad when sentences are cluttered by long qualifying diversions; adjectives piled on one another; and unusual words introduced. Zuboff is guilty of all three.   

Her 525 pages of actual text could have been easily reduced in half with judicious editing – of the sort which Steven Pinker suggests in The Sense of Style – a thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21^st century which I explored in this 2014 post

Even more serious is the charge made by this political economics blogger that the book lacks proper scholarship. The post refers to the book’s longest (at 22 pages) review – by enfant terrible Efgeny Morozov but concentrates its argument on an exposition of why scholarship is important -

Academic writing works on a formula. There are a certain number of things you have to do in order to prove that your work is legitimate and worthy of attention.

- You have to show how you connect with the larger, ongoing conversation in your area of interest.

- You have to present your evidence carefully.

- You have to show the framework you used to conduct your analysis.

Missing these steps is a signal that there are very likely problems with the work in question, but the steps are also important in their own right: they’re necessary in order to construct a sound argument, and not just a lawyer’s brief.

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” has problems on all three accounts. Taken together, they help to explain, or maybe contextualize, the blind spots that Morozov noted in his essay.

The post is worth reading in detail since it suggests that Zuboff’s book commits four serious sins against good scholarship –

-       Exaggerated claims to novelty

-       Absence of relevant literature references - particularly on "capitalism"!! A failing on which readers know I'm a bit of a pedant

-       Unclear framework

-       hyperbole

Certainly the 130 pages of detailed bibliographical references Zuboff offers simply alienates the average reader. What the book is crying out for is a short, annotated literature review…

Reviews of the Book (including interviews)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook; the Guardian’s IT correspondent explains the significance of the book and asks the author 10 questions
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/rob-lucas-the-surveillance-business - a clear 10 page review (apart from the last couple of pages) which usefully shows how Zuboff’s perception of capitalism has dramatically changed over the past 30 years

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/04/09/bigger-brother-surveillance-capitalism/ which makes my point about the book’s appalling style and jargon but forgives it for the emphasis it gives to power

https://bryanalexander.org/tag/zuboff/ book club assessment of most chapters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJwf6oLvc2Q&feature=youtu.be; 80 minute presentation

https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/380 – hour long interview with editor of IT journal which allows Zuboff to explain the book

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jacc.13051; helpful 10 pages summary of the key arguments presented in the book. Probably the most thorough and readable review – if a bit uncritical

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/13238/8503; great interview with the people from the Canadian Surveillance Centre people which helps us understand why Zuboff crafted the book the way she did.

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/13126/8502; a short critical review of the book which considers it adds little to what we already knew. Bit too academic and envious….

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review; another Guardian review – with a discussion thread

http://mediatheoryjournal.org/review-shoshana-zuboffs-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-by-william-morgan/; an academic communications journal offers a typically tortuously-written assessment which makes little sense

https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov; the field’s enfant terrible puts the book in context and explores its gaps (20 pages)

https://www.cigionline.org/articles/shoshana-zuboff-undetectable-indecipherable-world-surveillance-capitalism; a Canadian think-tank interviews the author

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-how-google-and-facebook-corrupted-capitalism/; a very clear and jargon-free analysis (which also notes the stylistic infelicities) from one of the field’s specialists

http://www.michaeljkramer.net/fall-2016-course-the-computerized-society/; useful to see the list of recommended reading for a course on the “US digitised culture”

https://thoughtmaybe.com/topic/surveillance/; a documentary site shares its videos on the surveillance theme.

https://prospect.org/power/how-neoliberal-policy-shaped-internet-surveillance-monopoly/ good overview of key issues
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/17/google-workers-rights-coding-chrome-unions

For new readers

The clocks went back an hour during the night – as they did ten years ago as I was starting this blog which then bore the name of “Carpathian Musings”.

Blogs are unusual in beginning …. with the author’s latest thoughts – random and unsystematised.

But we are used to books having a clear logic to their structure – which is why, a few years back, I decided to produce an annual version of the posts. The masthead, after all, clearly states that 

“old posts are as good as new” 

and that readers should not expect the blog to offer “instant opinions on current events”    

Four years ago I started the habit of doing a bit of prior editing of the year’s posts for their annual edition; and last year they had more of a thematic structure…..for the first time, they departed (a bit) from their usual chronological order. And this more obviously seems this year a good idea - since there have been so many posts about Brexit…..I will therefore be working on that in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, however, I offer the present version of the 2019 posts as they currently stand – all 220 pages - starting in January. 

For new readers, this will show you what you have been missing!

I still have to think of a title….

A Rare example of inter-disciplinarity

Readers know how distasteful I find the ever-increasing narrowness of academic disciplines. The very second post this year's blog posed a question which has bothered me for years –  

Why so little energy seems to be spent attempting to get consensus on the way forward for the deficiencies which have been so visible over the past decade in the economic system which we know, variously, as “globalization” or, increasingly, as “capitalism”.

The UN had its fingers burned when, in 2009, it organized the first and only Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis. The G77 group of 130 developing countries tried to insert text that mandated a major role for the UN in dealing with the crisis and backed a comprehensive set of reforms, but northern countries including the US and the EU played a blocking game. Joseph Stiglitz was the author of what remained a Preliminary Report

That post praised the Club of Rome for having the courage to produce Come On! Capitalism, short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet; (Club of Rome 2018) -  superbly summarized in this article in the fascinating Cadmus journal. And went on to say that I understood the reluctance of professionals to get engaged in such work – knowing how aggressively they would be accused of “leftism”, “populism”… and even greater crimes….

I am, of course, aware of The Great Transition Initiative which encourages individuals to comment on a monthly question and paper. It’s perhaps only nerds that me who read it – but at least it is reaching out to form a network…

The Next System is also a good source of well-written material - project of the US Democracy Collaborative. It had an initial report – The Next System Report – political possibilities for the 21st Century (2015) and references to good community practice in various parts of the world. It has since followed up with a series of worthwhile papers.

But, thanks to the current issue of the journal Political Quarterly, I have just learned of a very worthwhile endeavour called The International Panel for Social Progress (IPSP) - a bottom–up initiative launched by a group of researchers from different disciplines, whose first congress was held in 2015 in Istanbul.

While its basic structure and operational principles are similar to those of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its remit is rather different. The aim of the IPSP is to

‘harness the competence of hundreds of experts about social issues’ and ‘to deliver a report addressed to all social actors, movements, organizations, politicians and decision-makers, in order to provide them with the best expertise on questions that bear on social change’.

It may not offer an agenda for change - but it does something which is actually even more important - it offers an impartial and wide-ranging picture of social, economic and technical trends as you are likely to get from any other single source. 

The IPSP is not the first panel to analyse social and economic issues of pressing relevance. Various international organisations regularly monitor, for example, labour market conditions (ILO), or the dynamics of inequality and poverty (World Bank), or social inclusion, across the globe (UN Sustainable Goals). But the IPSP

does not just talk the talk when it comes to interdisciplinarity, it actually provides a shining example of what social scientists can do when they pool their skills, freely crossing disciplinary boundaries and combining quantitative analysis and qualitative approaches.

You can download and read the Executive Summary as well as each chapter here -

Part I deals with socio-economic transformations, focusing on economic inequalities, growth and environmental issues, urbanisation, capitalist institutions of markets, corporations and finance, labour, concluding with a reflection on how economic organization determines wellbeing and social justice. Here is its chapter on social trends

Part II focusses on political issues, analyzing the current trends in democracy and the rule of law, the forms and resolutions of situations of violence and conflicts, the mixed efficacy of supranational institutions and organisations, as well as the multiple forms of global governance, and the important role for democracy of media and communications. It concludes with a chapter on the challenges to democracy raised by inequalities, and the various ways in which democracy can be rejuvenated.

This is the chapter on Paradoxes of democracy and rule of law; and the one on governing capital, labour, nature

Part III is devoted to transformations in cultures and values, focussing on cultural trends linked to ‘modernisation’ and its pit-falls, as well as globalisation, the complex relationship between religions and social progress, the promises and challenges in ongoing transformations in family structures and norms, trends and policy issues regarding health and life–death issues, the ways in which education can contribute to social progress  and finally, the important values of solidarity and belonging.

The report offers a refreshingly balanced view of the state of social progress and the perspectives for change. It embraces neither a ‘doom and gloom’ perspective, nor neoliberal optimism. Societies do face significant problems, and the report hides none of them: inequalities are reaching unprecedented levels; in large parts of the world human development shows no signs of improvement; corporations are becoming increasingly powerful; automation leads to the disappearance of good jobs in a number of sectors; low-intensity violent conflicts show no sign of decrease throughout the world; liberal democracies are facing major challenges.

Reading, or even approaching, a scientific report consisting of three volumes, with a total of 850 pages and written by a panel of more than 260 authors, certainly looks like adaunting task. One is tempted to give up without even trying. And yet, such a first impression would be misleading. Not only is this an important contribution summarizing an impressive intellectual endeavour, it is also a genuinely interesting and engaging read.