The Debate about Political Culture

Last year the blog had three posts on this issue – identifying a range of material I needed to get my head around and which is summarised in the table of the previous post. The balance of argument was clearly in favour of those who considered that national political cultures exist. But then, last week, I came across a management thinker (Brendan McSweeney) who disputed this and had, for the past 15 years at least, been conducting a strong critique of the work of Geert Hofstede (1928-2020) who surveyed IBM personnel in various parts of the world in the 1960s and  then started to generalise his findings and suggest certain national characteristics.

Hofstede and his younger Netherlands colleague Frans Trompenaars were the focus of the critique – but not others such as the World Values team whose work has enjoyed a high profile in the last 30 years, or individuals such as Howard Wiarda, Lawrence Harrison or Richard Lewis (although the latter may have been judged to be too pop management to be worthy of critique) 

Time clearly for one of my tables in which I list and summarise the key texts in a particular field. I’ll start with the books which vary tremendously in accessibility – with one 2014 intellectual history standing out as quite exceptional in its comprehensiveness – not just of disciplinary fields but in its summary of popular texts about such nations as the Italians, Japanese, Russians and Spaniards. That is Howard Wiarda’s Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance which so impressed me that I wanted to have a conversation with him – only to learn that he, very sadly, died in 2015. And other key figures have also passed away recently – Lawrence Harrison also in 2015, Geert Hofstede in 2020 and Ronald Inglehart less than a year ago.

In the spirit of Wiarda’s book, my table includes titles which appealed to both the general reading public and more specialised readers and even includes a few titles which reflect the “zeitgeist” such as Peter Gay and Daniel Rodgers. There are 30 books in the list so I’ll start with the first ten 

Book Title	Takeaway
On Germany; Madame de Stael (1813)	The link gives excerpts from the first of what is a 3 volume analysis of the customs, literature, philosophy and religion of the country as it was at the beginning of the 19th century. That’s a remarkable 1000 pages and more!
Democracy in America; Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)	A book which resonates still - after almost 200 years. Amazing insights
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards – an exercise in comparative psychology; Salvador de Madariaga (1931)	An early effort in the comparative field
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword Ruth Benedict 1948	Benedict was one of the founders of US anthropology and is one of many Westerners to try to penetrate the Japanese soul
The Authoritarian Personality Theodor Adorno 1950	Adorno moved his Frankfurt school from Nazi Germany to New York and used the surveys the School had done of workers of the period to try to understand how Nazism had taken root
Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology and patterns of life  Zevedei Barbu 1956	Barbu was Romanian and my political sociology tutor at Glasgow University in the early 1960s. The book has 3 parts – starting with the “democratic personality”; then looking at “the psychology of Nazism” where he has comments on Adorno; and finally “the psychology of communism”
The Civil Culture – political attitudes and democracy in five nations; Almond and Verba (1963)	The first real comparative studies of political culture – by US political scientists
The Italians Luigi Barzini 1965	One of the early best-sellers
Beyond Culture Edward T Hall (1976)	Hall was another US anthropologist but his writing shows great sensitivity and draws on wide reading in other fields
Hidden Differences – doing business with the Japanese Edward and Mildred Hall 1990	A short guidebook to doing business with the Japanese which starts with a summary of the general approach used by Hall

making sense of public sector reform

A decade ago, I had a few months to prepare for a major new assignment in central Asia – which turned into a 7 year spell in that part of the world. I used those few months to write a small book about what I thought I knew about my discipline. Some of the chapters of that book are “key papers” one, six and thirteen on my website. And what I think I learned from those 7 years is reflected in key paper 3.
Now I face another new continent – and am trying to do the same thing. Perhaps not a book – but a series of reflections. When you’re in the middle of an assignment working with a beneficiary, you have to be very practical. The last thing you want is an academic article. But – between assignments – academic journals can give you perspective; help you catch up with changing fashions (“skirt lines are falling this year”); and brief you on development in countries about which you know little.
My language and background is English/UK – so US and Commonwealth developments in public management have been easier to follow in the international journals than French and German. Low country and Scandinavian writers are more comfortable in English and their developments have, therefore, been easier to follow.
Even so, it’s obvious from looking at the back numbers of the UK journal Public Administration, for example, that I’ve missed a lot of useful writing about European developments recently. A particularly useful issue was one on traditions of government – and how they’ve changed recently under the onslaught of NPM.
The UK authors I’ve found useful are Hood, Pollitt, Stoker and Talbot (academic) and Mulgan and Peri6 (think-tanks) Today I found another - Martin Evans'Policy transfer in a global age
All countries, of course, are different - in their values, traditions and structures (see de Hofstede and Trompenaars for more) but the UK is quite exceptional in the ease (speed and extent) with which it can and does change its systems.

For the past 30 years, the country seems to have been in a never-ending process of administrative change.

It's easier to explain the "how" than the "why" of this . Despite the setting up in 1999 of a Scottish parliament and government, the country remains centralised in the worst sense of the word (it was a Conservative Minister who called the system "an elective dictatorship" – and that was in 1976 before the Thatcher and Blair regimes). What this means is that there is no effective political, ethical, social or intellectual force left to challenge the foibles of the executive. Charter 88 recognised this truth long before the rest of us – but it still seems too intellectual a point. Other countries have coalitions and constitutions to deal with.

Margaret Thatcher thought that markets were the answer - New Labour think central managers are. Although Newlabour is right-wing in its economic approach, it has compensated by the Stalinism of its social and organisational interventions. For all the talk in the 1990s of a third way, of partnerships and networks, NewLabour has not begun to understand what an organic approach to administrative change might look like. The Cabinet strategy unit has basically given rulers a new vocabulory of progressive words to use - behind which hides the old leviathan.

economic aspects of social transformation

A few blogs back I promised to do a short literature review of those who have diagnosed various malaises of contemporary capitalism and are trying to set out ideas for dealing with them. Who is writing about this – and what change visions and processes do they suggest? What commonalities are there? What gaps? These ideas focus variously on economics and political systems – and on individual psychology (not just the Zohar book I mentioned last Thursday but the underestimated Life – and how to survive it from Skynner and Cleese).
The visit to my mountain house distracted me from that endeavour – not just some work around the house but new book arrivals particularly Richard Nisbett’s Geography of Thought which had me gripped for a few hours and then chasing reviews since his thesis that Asians think differently from us is so challenging. Of course I was familiar with the literature on culture (eg de Hofstede; and Trompenaars) but this argument is even more fundamental and links to the recent literature which critiques our categorisation and celebrates holism.
A post in Daniel Little’s excellent blog Understanding Society brought me back to the issue of the social transformation we need – and in particular this passage -

The past thirty years have witnessed the systematic disassembly of the institutions of social democracy in most countries. And the consequences are predictable: more inequality, more deprivation, more severe disparities of life outcomes for different social groups.
What is truly surprising is that there has been so little continuing exploration of alternatives in the intervening two decades. Democratic theorists have explored alternative institutions in the category of deliberative democracy (link), but there hasn't been much visioning of alternative economic institutions for a modern society. We don't talk much anymore about "economic justice," and the case for social democracy has more or less disappeared from public debate. But surely it's time to reopen that public debate.

Perhaps it might be more precise to say that what work there is receives little exposure? Daniel’s post has given me the necessary incentive to make an initial list of some of the economic work.

1. The moderates
Since When Corporations Rule the World (1995) David Korten has been critiquing the operation of companies and setting out alternatives – using both books and a website. He has just published a new book – Agenda for a new economy - much of which can be accessed at Google Scholar. Peter Barnes published in 2006 a thoughtful critique and alternative vision Capitalism 3.0 based on his entrepreneurial experience - all 200 pages of which can be downloaded from here. At a more technical level, Paul Hawken published in 2000 an important book Natural Capitalism which showed what could be done within existing frameworks. And Ernst von Weizsaecker has long been an eloquent spokesman for this approach see the 2009 Factor Five report for the Club of Rome.

In the UK, Will Hutton has been giving us a powerful systemic critique of the coherence of neo-liberal thinking and policies since The State We’re In (1995) although his latest - Them and us (2010) – is weaker on alternatives and fails to mention a lot of relevant work as I spelled out in my review. William Davies published a useful booklet Reinventing the Firm (Demos 2009) which has echoes of Korten.
These are some of the contributions from what we might call the moderate school (politically).

2. The greens
Perhaps the most readable material, however, comes from the Green corner. And, in particular, from an Irish economist Richard Douthwaite whose 2003 book Short Circuit – strengthening local economies for security in an unstable world is a marvellous combination of analysis and case-studies of successful community initatives. And people at the Centre for the advancement of the steady state economy are doing a good job – as is evident from their latest publication Enough is enough (CASSE 2010).

3. The radicals
And then there are the indefatigable writers on the left who are stronger on description than prescription – although David Harvey’s latest book The Enigma of Capital does try to sketch out a few alternatives. And Paul Kingsnorth’s One No – many Yeses; a journey to the heart of the global resistance movement gives a marvellous sense of the energy a lot of people are spending fighting global capitalism in a variety of very different ways.

Comment
The pity is that there is not enough cross-referencing by the authors to allow us to extract the commonalities and identify the gaps. Each writer, it seems, has to forge a distinctive slant. Douthwaite is one exception. I've just to started to read the latest Korten book on google and his intro establishes the basic need -

Leadership for transformation must come, as it always does, from outside the institutions of power. This requires building a powerful social movement based on a shared understanding of the roots of the problem and a shared vision of the path to its resolution.

This definition contains three of the crucial ingredients for the social change on the scale we need.
But there are others, one of which has to be an understanding and development of the leadership qualities the task requires. The Zohar book is one of the few which explores this - and also the Robert Quinn book I keep plugging away at. Alaister Mant's Leaders we deserve is another neglected masterpiece. Too many good ideas are killed by the personalities of the leaders. Which neatly brings us back to Daniel Little's reference to "deliberative democracy". Clearly the Anglo-Saxon adversarial system of politics affects the way we talk about public issues. But too little of this particular literature (eg William Isaacs' Dialogue currently lying on my desk with The Appreciative Inquiry Handbook )refers to European practices - which are nearer their ideal. It was, after all, the German Greens who tried to deal with the problematic issue of leadership. And let me notice in passing that too many British writers echo contemporary debates in America simply out of laziness (language). Despite the command I have of French and German, I am as guilty as the rest - as is evident from my library and bibiographies. (Although I did buy a short Jacques Attali book last year on the crisis).
And there was a time when people like Colin Crouch drew our attention to the different types of capitalism - but this (and the deliberative democracy theme) seems to have disappeared. Are our attention spans so short? Or is this down to the media need for fashions?
Basically I am trying to suggest that there is a lot of thinking going on - but it is not easily shared and stored. What can be done about this?

The Fourth Dimension?

It’s strange how our mind operates on single tracks but suddenly makes a connection with an idea that has been travelling on a parallel track.

This past year has seen regular posts about the idea behind the blog’s new title – that writers who work across boundaries (be they cultural or intellectual) tend to think more creatively and to express their ideas more clearly than those stuck in the old silos. I even developed a table of some 20 writers to prove the point.

Completely separately, there have also been regular posts about cultural values – referring to the work of people such as de Hofstede; Ronald Inglehart; FransTrompenaars; Richard Lewis (of When Cultures Collide fame) and Richard Nesbitt.  That body of writing emphasises the distinctiveness of cultural values and is most graphically illustrated in the Inglehart cultural map of the world which is best explained in this brochure. Those were the days when a body of literature called “path dependency” was raising important questions about how “sticky” cultural values were…viz how difficult it is to change national behavioural traits

There is one guy who could have helped me make the connection between these two very separate streams of thinking – and that is the rather neglected figure of Ronnie Lessem. Ronnie who? I hear you asking. I first came across his work in the early 1990s when I bought a copy of “Global Management Principles“ (1989) which impressed me very much. It - 

classifies the management literature (and styles) of the twentieth century using the points of the compass.   North" is traditional rational bureaucracy: "West" celebrates the animality of the frontier spirit: "East" the developmental side of the collectivity; and "South" the metaphysical He then goes on to argue that organisations and individuals also go through such phases. It is undoubtedly the most inter-disciplinary of the management books: and gives very useful vignettes of the writers and their context. 

And utterly original – as you would expect of someone raised in Zimbabwe in southern Africa who then moved to the UK. His work blazed a trail, however, which few have chosen to follow – it’s just too original! His personal style of writing was a bit daring for academia in those days! And his references sometimes too wide – in the opening pages he quotes approvingly the development style of the ultimately-disgraced Bank for Credit and Commerce

In a way, it embodies the thesis-antithesis-synthesis approach beloved by those who refuse to accept the Manichean view of the world and argue instead for “balance” (Giddens; Mintzberg) - except that it adds a fourth dimension! 

Which is my cue for an (overdue) discussion of this issue of World Views. In the 1970s 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 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) an introduction to which is here. 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

Lessem Resource

Management development through cultural diversity (1995)

Integral Polity – integrating nature, society, culture and the economy (2015)

Ways of Seeing

Each of us has a particular lens through which we look when we’re trying to make sense of the world. The International Relations people have it down to a fine art – with their classification of the subject into no fewer than 8 schools – realism, liberalism, marxism, structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism etc. (Chapter 7 of the link gives the lowdown on the various schools)   

In my youth, I was aware of a tripartite division – conservatives, socialists 

and liberals. I didn’t like the Manichean approach of left/right - there was 

always a third way, be it green or ecological. 
It was only in the new millennium, however, that I became aware of the 

four dimensions of grid-group theory which anthropologist Mary Douglas 

introduced - consisting of four very different “world views” (what she calls

 hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist) which came to be known 

as “Cultural Theory”. I first came across Mary Douglas’ theory in 1998, 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 these various world views. 

But it appears we have yet another way of understanding the world – viz 

“conjunctural analysis”. I agree it’s a bit of a mouthful but it basically denies 

the bias in the various schools and argues that we need to recognise the complexity 

of the world and to accept there are different levels of explanation for the 

way things are. John Clarke sets out the argument in The Battle for Britain – crises, 

conflicts and the conjunctures which, I have to confess, I found very hard going.

Further Reading about “World Views”

- The Battle for Britain – crises, conflicts and the conjunctures John Clarke 2023

- Theories of International Relations ed R Devetak and J True (6^th ed 2022)

- Foundations of International Relations l ed S McGlinchey et al 2022

- Britain’s Choice – common ground and divisions in 2020s Britain (More in Common 

2020) a detailed picture of the british people and their values these days

- Twelve Ways of Seeing the World M Betti (2019 Eng – original German 2001) 

based on Rudolf Steiner's thinking, this offers a curious typology

- Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world; 

Ronald Inglehart (2018) a political scientist,who has been at the heart of discussion 

about cultural values for the past 50 years – and the book and this article summarises 

that work.
- Grid, group and grade – challenges in operationalising cultural theory for cross-national 

research (2014) is a very academic article although its comparative diagrams are instructive
- “A Cultural Theory of Politics” (2011) a short article which shows how the grid-group 

approach has been used in a range of disciplines
-  Consumer Shift - how changing values are reshaping the consumer landscape Any 

Hines (2011) actually much more about values and world views than it is about consumers….

- Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values (2010) a useful little 

manual for charities
- Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) ditto
- “Way of life theory – the underlying structure of world views, social relations and

 lifestyles” (2009) – a rather disjointed dissertation by Michael Edward Pepperday 

and introduction to which is here.

- Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions; Keith Grint (2008) a short very useful 

article by an academic

- The Geography of Thought – how westerners and asians think differently and why; 

Richard Nesbitt (2003) An American social psychologist gives a thought-provoking book

- “The Art of the State” Christopher Hood (1998) A brilliant essay on the usefulness 

of grid-group analysis

- Riding the Waves of Culture – understanding cultural diversity in business; Frans 

Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997) the Dutchman who took on de Hofstede’s 

mantle
-When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures; Richard Lewis (1996) The book which 

introduced us to the field – and gave us marvellous vignettes of the strange habits of 

almost all countries of the world
- Management development through cultural diversity Ronnie Lessem (1995) 

Lessem is a south african who uses the four lens of the compass to show how the 

environment governs our ways of thinking.

Confused about Political Cultures?

It’s more than 40 years since I noticed that concepts have different meanings in other languages. It’s as if each nation carries its distinctive baggage in its collective heads – for example “Chancellor”, “policy” and “accountability”. And the image conjured up by the word “councillor” very much depends on the country’s electoral system and the relative financial power of the municipal system.

When the Wall fell, central and south-east Europeans had to learn what such previously reviled concepts as capitalism and democracy meant – both in practice and in theory. Thirty years on, it’s assumed they know – although political cultures in countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania – let alone Italy – do not operate in quite the way of those in NE Europe.

It’s Bulgaria and Romania I know best – from living in them for some 15 years and have tried during that period to convey to my readers a sense of their political culture.

Since 1990 I have lived in about a dozen countries and have tried to keep up with the literature on cultural differences. Indeed earlier this year I did a series of posts on this which I have this week reviewed – resulting in a short (10,000 word) paper which you find here and which I hve tried to summarise thus -

1. The words and concepts we use have different meanings in different cultural contexts – some subtle, some profound

2. Until recently, the western interpretation was accepted as the holy grail

3. The origins of the field can be traced back to Almond and Verba’s “The Civic Culture” of 1963 which looked at various democratic societies.

4. The subsequent literature uses a variety of terms – political culture, national culture, world values, world views and cultural theory – which may or may not refer to the same phenomenon.

5. De Hofstede used his base in IBM to carry out survey work on its plants in various parts of the world and popularised in the 1980s a series of measures showing the power of distinctive national contexts

6. This work was taken up by a variety of consultants to multinational business such as Richard Lewis, Frans Trompenaars, Charles Hampden-Turner and Erin Meyer to reinforce the argument about national traits

7. Something seemed to happen at the turn of the new millennium. Anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists somehow started to feel that discussions about cultural differences are no longer politically acceptable.

8. Indeed the World Values Surveys take great care to create clusters which blur national divisions and focus instead on such things as tradition and self-expression

9. And yet we persist as citizens in maintaining – and arguably accentuating – our cultural identities – see the section on the Scots

Cultural differences

I have quite few websites about the EU on my favourites bar – but don’t often access them since they are either too technical or too predictable. I’ve just looked at the two which are in my “links” on this site and have to wonder why I put them there! Neither gives any real sense of what’s going on in the EU. But I’ve just hit (through the Social Europe site) a blog which seems genuinely informative about a range of EU activities; gives links for further reading; and which resists the temptation of self-indulgent raving to which too many blogs succumb (“yours truly” excepted, of course!)
I mentioned recently “The geography of thought” – the book which reports on the experiments which take the writing of people like de Hofstede and Trompenaars about differences in cultural behaviour a stage further – to suggest that Europeans and Asians literally see the world differently and think differently. By coincidence I read in parallel Lucy Wadham’s The Secret Life of France – which is a delightful dissection of the mental and behavioural DNA of the Parisian bourgeois. She uses the country’s interesting mix of Catholicism and Revolutionary principles to offer an explanation of why the English (I use the term for obvious reasons!) and the French find it so difficult to understand one another – whether in matters relating to infidelity or diversity. Have a look at some of the 77 reviews on the Amazon site to get a sense of her argument.
The differences between Bulgaria and Romania is a fascinating issue for me. The Danube does not just act as a geographical but as a cultural and even physiognomic (?) boundary. Witness the way the voice timbre of women drops and their “sini” (glands) grow in the 2 minutes it takes to cross the great bridge which connects Giurgiu from Russe! Another difference I noticed the other day is that all the plastic Bulgarian pepper pots seem to be recyclable (the tops unscrew to allow you to top up) – whereas the Romanian ones are not! Very significant! I was also interested to read that the Romanians share with the Serbians a feature which I find most annoying – a search for blame and an almost sadistic delight in pointing out apparent contradictions in their interlocuteur’s conversation. A classic example was this week when I told my partner about the crack which had developed in the mountain house toilet. “No”, I replied, “I remember very clearly flushing the toilet after I had turned off the water in January; and not only did I put salt in the toilet water remaining but I remember squeezing the water in the toilet basin with a cloth!” “But”, Came the suspicious query, “Why did you need to add salt if you had squeezed the water out?”! I rest my case!
And let's not talk about the various ways people conduct arguments - with the tentative explorative style fitting very ill with the aggressive debate which seems to characterise what we might call Latin nations???

When will it ever change???

Another long post whose basic argument I can perhaps best summarise thus –

- People were overly optimistic in 1990/91 when they talked of one or two generations being necessary for a democratic culture to take hold in central europe

- most locals in Bulgaria and Romania are fatalistic about the glacial pace of reform

- but know exactly where the blockages are

- few external academic or consultants have even bothered to look at progress in improving state capacity in this part of the world – in the ten years during which billions of euros of European Structural Funds has been under local control...

Ralf Dahrendorf was a famous German sociologist/UK statesman who wrote in 1990 an extended public letter first published under the title “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” and then expanded as Reflections on the Revolution of our Time. In it he made the comment that it would take one or two years to create new institutions of political democracy in the recently liberated countries of central Europe; maybe five to 10 years to reform the economy and make a market economy; and 15 to 20 years to create the rule of law. But it would take maybe two generations to create a functioning civil society there. A former adviser to Vaslev Havel, Jiri Pehe, referred a few years ago to that prediction and suggested that 

“what we see now is that we have completed the first two stages, the transformation of the institutions, of the framework of political democracy on the institutional level, there is a functioning market economy, which of course has certain problems, but when you take a look at the third area, the rule of the law, there is still a long way to go, and civil society is still weak and in many ways not very efficient.”

He then went on to make the useful distinction  between “democracy understood as institutions and democracy understood as culture” 

“It’s been much easier to create a democratic regime, a democratic system as a set of institutions and procedures and mechanism, than to create democracy as a kind of culture – that is, an environment in which people are actually democrats”.

These are salutary comments for those with too mechanistic an approach to institution-building.  Notwithstanding the tons of books on organisational cultures and cultural change, political cultures cannot be engineered. Above all, they will not be reformed from a project approach based on using bodyshops, cowboy companies, short-term funding from the EC Structural Funds and the logframe.

The European Commission made a decision in 1997 which shocked me to the core – that EC technical assistance to central European and Balkan countries would no longer be governed by “developmental” objectives but rather by their ability to meet the formal legal requirement of the Acquis Commaunitaire (AC)…….ie of EU membership

In the mid 90s, the Head of the European Delegation to Romania (Karen Fogg 1993-98) used to give every visiting consultant a summary of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in modern Italy (1993). This suggested that the “amoral familism” of southern Italian Regions (well caught in a 1958 book of Edward Banfield’s) effectively placed them 300 years behind the northern regions.

Romania, for its part, had some 200 years under the Ottoman and the Phanariot thumbs - but then had 50 years of autonomy during which it developed all the indications of modernity (if plunging latterly into  Fascism). The subsequent experience of Romanian communism, however, created a society in which, paradoxically, deep distrust became the norm – with villagers forcibly moved to urban areas to drive industrialisation; the medical profession enrolled to check that women were not using contraceptives or abortion; and Securitate spies numbering one in every three citizens.

The institutions of the Romanian state collapsed at Xmas 1989 and were subsequently held together simply by the informal pre-existing networks – not least those of the old Communist party and of the Securitate. Tom Gallagher’s “Theft of a Nation” superbly documented the process in 2005.

These were the days when a body of literature called “path dependency” was raising important questions about how free we are to shake off cultural values…. Authors such as de Hofstede; Ronald Inglehart; FransTrompenaars; and Richard Lewis (in his When cultures collide were telling us how such values affect our everyday behaviour.  

Sorin Ionitsa’s booklet on Poor Policy Making in Weak States (2006) captured brilliantly the profound influence of the different layers of cultural values on political and administrative behavior in Romania which continue to this day. His focus was on Romania but the explanations he offers for the poor governance in that country has resonance for many other countries and therefore warrant reproduction  

- “The focus of the political parties is on winning and retaining power to the exclusion of any interest in policy – or implementation process”

- “Political figures fail to recognise and build on the programmes of previous regimes – and simply don’t understand the need for “trade-offs” in government. There is a (technocratic/academic) belief that perfect solutions exist; and that failure to achieve them is due to incompetence or bad intent”.

- “Policymaking is centred on the drafting and passing of legislation. “A policy is good or legitimate when it follows the letter of the law − and vice versa. Judgments in terms of social costs and benefits are very rare”.

“This legalistic view leaves little room for feasibility assessments in terms of social outcomes, collecting feedback or making a study of implementation mechanisms. What little memory exists regarding past policy experiences is never made explicit (in the form of books, working papers, public lectures, university courses, etc): it survives as a tacit knowledge of public servants who happened to be involved in the process at some point or other. And as central government agencies are notably numerous and unstable – i.e. appearing, changing their structure and falling into oblivion every few years - institutional memory is not something that can be perpetuated”

His booklet remains one of the few which explores such issues which are so crucial for the development of this part of the world; and he also refers to other “pre-modern” aspects of the civil service – such as unwillingness to share information and experiences across various organisational boundaries. And to the existence of a “dual system” of poorly paid lower and middle level people in frustrating jobs headed by younger, Western-educated elite which "talks the language of reform - but treats its position as a temporary placement on the way to better things".

 “Entrenched bureaucracies have learned from experience that they can always prevail in the long run by paying lip service to reforms while resisting them in a tacit way. They do not like coherent strategies, transparent regulations and written laws – they prefer the status quo, and daily instructions received by phone from above. This was how the communist regime worked; and after its collapse the old chain of command fell apart, though a deep contempt for law and transparency of action remained a ‘constant’ in involved persons’ daily activities.

Such an institutional culture is self-perpetuating in the civil service, the political class and in society at large”. “A change of generations is not going to alter the rules of the game as long as recruitment and socialization follow the same old pattern: graduates from universities with low standards are hired through clientelistic mechanisms; performance when on the job is not measured; tenure and promotion are gained via power struggles.

“In general, the average Romanian minister has little understanding of the difficulty and complexity of the tasks he or she faces, or he/she simply judges them impossible to accomplish. Thus they focus less on getting things done, and more on developing supportive networks, because having collaborators one can trust with absolute loyalty is the obsession of all local politicians - and this is the reason why they avoid formal institutional cooperation or independent expertise. In other words, policymaking is reduced to nothing more than politics by other means. And when politics becomes very personalized or personality-based, fragmented and pre-modern, turf wars becomes the rule all across the public sector.”

Ionitsa’s booklet was, of course, written more than a decade ago but I see nothing to suggest that much has changed in Romania in the intervening period. Since 2007, of course, it has been Romanian experts who have been employed as consultants but they have essentially been singing from the same song-sheet as western consultants

I’ve used the phrase “impervious regimes” to cover the mixture of autocracies, kleptocracies and incipient democracies with which I have become all too familiar in the last 27 years; have faulted the toolkits and Guides which the European Commission offers consultants; and proposed some ideas for a different, more incremental and “learning” approach.

I’m glad to say that just such a new approach began to surface a few years ago – known variously as “doing development differently”, or the iterative or political analysis…….it was presaged almost 10 years ago by the World Bank’s Governance Reforms under real world conditions written around the sorts of questions we consultants deal with on a daily basis - one paper in particular (which starts part 2 of the book) weaves a very good theory around 3 words – acceptance, authority and ability. I enthused about the approach in a 2010 post

But there is a strange apartheid in consultancy and scholastic circles between those engaged in “development”, on the one hand, and those in “organisational reform” in the developed world, on the other…..The newer EU member states are now assumed to be fully-fledged systems (apart from a bit of tinkering still needed in their judicial systems – oh…. and Hungary and Poland have gone back on some fundamental elements of liberal democracy…..!). But they all remain sovereign states – subject only to their own laws plus those enshrined in EC Directives…. Structural Funds grant billions of euros to the new member states which are managed by each country’s local consultants who use the “best practice” tools - which anyone with any familiarity with “path dependency” or “cultural” or even anthropological theory would be able to tell them are totally inappropriate to local conditions..…

But the local consultants are working to a highly rationalistic managerial framework imposed on them by the European Commission; are, for the most part, young and trained to western thought. They know that the brief projects on which they work have little sustainability but – heh – look at the hundreds of millions of euros which will continue to roll in as far as the eye can see…..!!!

Someone in central Europe needs to be brave enough to shout out that ”the Emperor has no clothes!!” To challenge the apartheid in scholastic circles….and to realise the relevance of Ionitsa’s 11- year old booklet and Governance Reforms under real world conditions