Visual and other Links I Liked

1. When enforced isolation makes internet text even more seductive, this article reminds us of the painting treasures which are now so easily available a mere click away. Curiously, it makes no mention of my favourite ArtUK - which teamed up some years back with the BBC to put much of the nation’s paintings online. Here’s a wonderful example from my home town of Greenock. The painting which graces this post is John Knox's famous 19th century view of Ben Lomond just across the river.....

Another site offers a selection of art available on the net

And this is a very instructive art almanac – offering vignettes of key dates in the lives of artists

2. Photography is another visual art – practised by such giants as Cartier-Bresson 

Andre Kertesz, Paul Strand and John Parr (who was part of a superb MOMA exhibition on English photography under Thatcher)

My friend Keith (before and after his retirement) has been a keen mountain walker and photographer - and his blog must by now be the richest source of Scottish mountain-scape photography. If I’m the King of hyperlinks, Keith is the King of Scottish mountain vistas photography

He has been blogging as long as I have – more than a decade – and each post records his every scaling of every Scottish peak over 3000 feet (known as Munros – of which there are 282) – replete with superb photographs which give an amazing sense of the wonderful world at that level which most of us simply don’t see and indeed are not even aware of……And this is a good example of the occasional political comment his blog makes

3. Talking of mountains, the Bergahn journal resource which they have just kindly made available to us all – temporarily of course but in the spirit of “Open Access” - revealed this nice article on the UK and Carpathians 1862-1914 in their Journal of Travel and Travel-writing      

4. And still on painting, I began to read a little book about John Berger by one Andy Merrifield and was sufficiently intrigued by the author’s writing style to want to see more of it – and duly discovered this little cache

One of the essays in that little collection is called Searching for Guy Debord -Debord being the author of the famous The society of the spectacle (1967) which railed – rather more philosophically than Jerry Mander and Neil Postman – against the social and political effects of the entertainment industry…..  

The spectacle has now “spread itself to the point where it permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory what has been quickly and universally demonstrated by practical experience of economic reason’s relentless accomplishments: that the globalization of the false was also the falsification of the globe.”

Merrifield is so taken with Debord that he seeks out his widow, still living in the house with the special high wall Debord built to keep the world out. I can’t say I share Merrifiels’s enthusiasm for the book – with its 221 theses  and an equivalent number of explanatory notes which an editor has subsequently (and necessarily) added….It’s not my sort of writing

The integrated spectacle, Debord said, has sinister characteristics: incessant technological renewal; integration of the state and economy; generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; and an eternal present. Gismos proliferate at unprecedented speeds; commodities outdate themselves almost each week; nobody can step down the same supermarket aisle twice. The commodity is beyond criticism; useless junk nobody really needs assumes a vital life force that everybody apparently wants.

The state and economy have congealed into an undistinguishable unity, managed by spin-doctors, spin-doctored by managers. Everyone is at the mercy of the expert or the specialist, and the most useful expert is he who can best lie. Now, for the first time ever, “no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant.”

For gluttons for punishment Debord added, 21 years later, Comments on the society of the Spectacle

5. Visual Capitalist may not be the best of names but its great use of tables and visual warms my cockles. Here’s a typical example – 24 Cognitive Biases warping Reality

My readers will be bored by my emphasis on the importance of text being visually illustrated….

6. Hold Everything Dear – dispatches on survival and resistance; John Berger (2007)

If you’re looking for an example of the poetic power of John Berger’s writing, read this! It’s a series of short essays sparked off by 9/11. The subtitle brought back memories for me of Albert Camus’ Resistance, rebellion and Death (1960) whose “Letters to a German Friend” moved me greatly when I first read them in the early 60s

7. Last month I posted an updated list of the English-language journals which I had tested with 5 demanding criteria - for having (i) depth of treatment; (ii) breadth of coverage (not just political); (iii) clarity of writing; and being both (iv) cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon); and (v) sceptical in tone. 

The post analysed more than 30 journals - regretting the disappearance in 1990 of Encounter.

This morning an article arrived in my mailbox celebrating that selfsame journal – what it doesn’t tell you is that Encounter’s entire archives can be accessed here – courtesy of the quite amazing UNZ Review – an alternative media selection – “A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media”. 

And if you click “pdf archives” you’ll find a quite wonderful collection of journals inc The New Yorker from the 1930s to 2010!!

Finally, I am no great fan of George Galloway's - but his one saving grace is the clarity of his diction.....and here he is with another great communicator Dr John Campbell 

Peripheral - rather than tunnel - Vision….

My faithful readers know that at the end of each year, I make a collection of the year’s posts and make them available - scroll down the right-hand column of the blog until you see the section "new material" which lists the E-books. 
I offer these collections simply because the lack of topicality means that most posts are still worth reading…..even years later. Brexit was, of course, the one big exception to that rule of mine but, even there, a lot of the posts were treating the UK more as a case-study - and trying to understand what made it distinctive.

Blogging is for me both enjoyable and productive – it focuses my mind and disciplines my writing. I totally agree with the 15 benefits enumerated by this blogger. And its search facility allows instant delivery both of what I could only vaguely remember     and relevant material I had completely forgotten about…

Indeed the blog has only one (very small) drawback….The material is back to front…..with the reader presented with my latest musings while even better material is sunk without a trace.

I’ve been particularly active this new year – 30 posts in the 10 weeks.

Some of my readers may be new – I notice, for example, a lot of new readers from Turkmenistan. Welcome!

Others – like the Italians who are now in lockdown – have been with me for some months but may have missed some posts.

So, for all of you, I offer a short book - “Peripheral Vision – the 2020 posts…. so far

Just click the Pcloud file to download

Explaining the blog's title

The blog was ten years old last autumn – making it one of the longest-running (english-speaking) blogs of its kind.  It first saw the light of day as "Carpathian Musings" because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise description of its source.

The blog was therefore, for 5 years or so, called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”.

But neither the word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when they are googling on the topics the blog deals with - such as "the global financial crisis", "organisational reform", "social change", "capitalism" - let alone "Romanian culture", "Bulgarian painting", "transitology"etc.... 
So clearly the blog needed a name which better expresses its content and objectives. I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…

Let’s be clear, I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website) is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”…..Not perhaps so much of my writing – but of the insights of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out and whose significance I’ve both recognized and wanted to pass on……Two crucial but not necessarily connected factors!!

So, let me try to explain why, for the past few months, I’ve been running with the title “Exploring No-Man’s Land”. The images of battlefields this summons up are quite deliberately chosen.

First, an accident of birth had me straddling the borderland of the West and East ends of a shipbuilding town in the West of Scotland – with class, religious and political tensions simmering in those places. 

Then political and academic choices in my late 20s brought me slap into the middle of the no-man’s land between politicians and different sorts of professional and academic disciplines.

Then, when I was almost 50, I became a nomadic consultant, working for the next 25 years in ten different countries

Previous posts have tried to give a sense of how that experience has made me who I am….

I was the son of a Presbyterian Minister (or “son of the manse” as we were known) and received my education in a state school which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition……now, sadly, much traduced.

It would have been easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but, as home was a manse (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End”, that school was fee-paying. And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town.

Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.

When I became a young councillor in 1968 (for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself similarly torn I developed loyalties to the local community activists but found myself in conflict with my (older) political colleagues and officials.

And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..

The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants!

And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower.

It was at that stage that I developed a diagram for my students to make sense of the “conflict of loyalties” to what I saw as 4 very different pressures (audiences) to which politicians are subjected – 

- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);

- the party (both local and national)

- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;

- their conscience.

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – “populist”; “ideologue”, “statesman”,  “maverick”.

The effective politician, however, is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.

And I would make the same point about the different professional and academic disciplines.

Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will see from the table below which looks only at seven academic disciplines

The core assumptions of academic subjects

Discipline	Core assumption	Most Famous exponents (not necessarily typical!)
Sociology	Struggle for power	Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills,Robert Merton,  Herbert Simon, A Etzioni, Ralf Dahrendorf
Economics	Rational choice	Adam Smith, Schumpeter, Keynes, P Samuelson, M Friedmann, J Stiglitz, P Krugman
Political science	Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)	Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, David Easton, S Wolin, Peter Hall, James Q Wilson, Bo Rothstein, Francis Fukuyama
Geography	??	Mackinder, David Harvey, Nigel Thrift, Danny Dorling
Public management	mixed for traditional bodies - rational choice for New PM	Woodrow Wilson, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt, Guy Peters, G Bouckaert,
anthropology	shared meaning	B Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Shore, David Graeber
Political economy	draws upon economics, political science, law, history, sociology et al to explain how political factors determine economic outcomes.	JK Galbraith, Susan Strange, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Geoffrey Hodgson, Yanis Varoufakis,

And, of course, each of these seven fields has a variety of sub-fields each of which has its own specific “take” even before you get to the eccentricities of individual practitioners – let me remind you of this table about 10 sub-fields in Economics which I used in a recent post

Pluralism in Economics

Name of “school”	Humans….	Humans act within…	The economy is…..
Old “neo-classical”	optimise narrow self-interest	A vacuum	Stable
New “neo-classical”	can optimise a variety of goals	A market context	Stable in the absence of friction
Post-Keynes	use rules of thumb	A macro-economic context	Naturally volatile
Classical	act in their self-interest	Their class interests	Generally stable
Marxist	do not have predetermined patterns	Their class and historical interests	Volatile and exploitative
Austrian	have subjective knowledge and preferences	A market context	Volatile – but this is generally sign of health
Institutional	have changeable behaviour	Instit envt that sets rules and social norms	Dependent on legal and social structures
Evolutionary	act “sensibly” but not optimally	An evolving, complex system	Both stable and volatile
Feminist	exhibit engendered behaviour	A social context	Ambiguous
Ecological	act ambiguously	Social context	Embedded in the environment

This is an excerpt only – the full table is from Ho-Joon Chang’s “Economics – a User’s Guide” but can be viewed at diagram at p61 of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)

Please understand, I’m not trying to confuse – rather the opposite….I’m trying to liberate!

Once we become aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world suddenly becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the particular lens we use to make sense of it all…

I remember the first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team test. And The Art of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out different types of strategic thinking..

Here’s another example - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/01/framing-capitalism.html

Is Organisational Reform really all that sexy?

The last 2 posts have tried to direct readers to posts they may have missed last year - relating to one of the three subjects which most occupied my thoughts viz the nature of the economic beast which had us in its grips. You can read these thoughts more easily on “To Whom it May Concern” – the latest version of which is accessible by clicking on that title in the list in the top-right corner of the blog’s masthead.

Today I want to switch the focus to the section of the collection which is entitled “What is it about Admin Reform which makes it so sexy?” But first I owe my readers some explanation of why I continue to be so fixated about public management reform….Quite simply I find the writings on the subject less than satisfactory because they are produced either by academics (who reify and obfuscate) or by think-tankers (who simplify and exaggerate). It’s very difficult to find material written by practitioners – or, even better, by those who straddle boundaries of discipline, nation or role.

I came to full adult consciousness in the 1960s, getting my first taste of political power in 1968 and of political responsibility and innovation in 1971 when I became Chairman of a Scottish Social Work Committee.

“Reform” was very much in the air – although no one could then have imagined what an industry public administrative reform would become. Indeed, in those days, the only management author you could find in the bookstores was Peter Drucker. And the only books about reform were American….

The opening pages of my How did Administrative Reform get to be so Sexy? try to convey a sense of what it was like to be an early pioneer of organisational change in the country. My position in academia encouraged me to develop a habit of publishing “think-pieces” often in the form of pamphlets in a Local Government Research Unit which I established in 1970 at Paisley College of Technology – this 1977 article gives a good example of the style.

The same year I published a little book about the experience of the new system of Scottish local government and, for the next decade, musings on my experience of running a unique social strategy in the West of Scotland. 

In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) were the reflections which resulted from my first decade living and working in the countries of post-communist central Europe. Eight years then followed in three Central Asian countries and strengthened a feeling about the inappropriateness of the approach we “foreign experts” were using in our “technical assistance”.

In 2007 I tried to interest people in the NISPace network in a critique called Missionaries, mercenaries or witchdoctors – is admin reform in transition countries a religion, business or a medicine? – but to no avail.

I started blogging in 2008 with a website which is still active – publicadminreform - clearly signalling that I wanted to use it to reach out to others. Sadly that has not happened…but it has not stopped me from continuing to “talk to myself” on this blog and from trying to produce a book which does justice to the thoughts and experiences I’ve had in about 10 countries over the past 50 years….

So let me try to summarise why I persevere with this fixation of mine –

-       Authors in this field focus either on students or experts in government, academia and think tanks.

-       I know of only a handful of books which have been written for the general public

-       Most writers about PAR have known only one occupation – whether academic or think-tanker – and one country

-       I’ve occupied different roles (political, academic, consultancy) in different countries and can therefore see the issues from many sides

-       few authors have bothered to try to explore the possible reasons for the stratospheric and continued rise in interest in administrative reform

-       New cohorts of politicians, public servants and even academics arrive in the workforce without a good sense of the history of this subject

Post	What sparked it off	Why it’s worth reading
Time to reclaim public services Time to get the Finger out	Oxfam report for Davos Rereading last year’s draft book about administrative reform	Gives us the encouraging lessons from the experience of those who have rolled back privatisation
The invisible power of managerial ideology	Going back to Burnham	Explores the question we rarely ask
How did it happen? part II	My 1999 book “In Transit – notes on Good Governance”	Looks at how reform was seen in the 1990s
a Rare voice of clarity – part III	Gerald Caiden	A prescient voice
Machiavelli’s Warning – part IV	A reminder of the strength of organ inertia	A first stab at an answer to the question
The Managerial Turn - part V	Clarifying professionalism	First we rubbished the professionals
“Not with a bang, but a whimper” - Part VI	We don’t seem to have learned much in 40 years……	Key lessons are however extracted
Chris Pollitt RIP	Belated acknowledgement of a great scholar	Those who express important truths in a clear language deserve honour
Looking for purpose	“The Puritan Gift” is a rare critique of how modern management has poisoned us all	Has a good summary
Peter Drucker’s Deadly Sins of PA – part VII	The Grand Old Man of management says it better	Important proverbs
Wresting politics back from the technocrats	an article being hyped as “the new practice of public problem-solving”	Technocracy is the new enemy
Workforce management – an idea whose time has come	Laloux book	Summary of one of the most important books about organisations in recent years
Let the Fingers do the Talking	an article being hyped as “the new practice of public problem-solving	Good references
Real Control	Workforce management again
The Virus affecting the world	Neoliberalism
Blowing up departmental silos	Hilary Cottam’s book	Time to take this issue seriously
Plain speaking - words and PAR	A rare article about translation  should leave us wondering why international summits are not more conflictual..