Is blogging useful only to the blogger?

The last few days have been glorious – I was sunning myself on the terrace yesterday afternoon – and today has dawned bright and cloudless. With the extra hour’s gift this morning from summer-time ending during the night, I skimmed through the blogs I have bookmarked. It made me think about their value. Many books have been written recently about blogging – its nature and its possible social and intellectual consequences The New York Review of Books reviewed some of the books and blogs at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21013 and http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22960

My "About the blog" section tries to explain my motives for this blog - I'm trying to make sense of my professional life and to see what I can usefully pass on to to others! So the blog is a discipline on me - not yet perhaps offering the reader very much (except pretty pictures!)

What about the blogs I look at - how useful do I find them? Of course my bookmarking is a highly selective activity – reflecting the interest I have in books and organisational change. The book-bloggers are a special breed – generally retired people who have the time to pursue and share their passion for reading – generally novels. For a sample see - http://www.britlitblogs.com/
I have, so far, bookmarked a hundred-odd general bloggers whose writing reflects some of my interest in understanding social, economic and organisational forces in the world – and in contributing to “positive change”. Who are they?
The first category is those who are paid to write – journalists, think-tankers, academics. They write well – but generally in specialist mode. They focus on a specific event and then relate this to some more general principles. Journalists (such as Ian McWhirter) and think-tankers (such as Matt Taylor (RSA Head) and Gerry Hassan) find this an effortless task. Academics such as Paul Krugman also have their journalistic side.
Then there are the overtly “political blogs” – politicians and party supporters – most of which confirm how low politics has fallen. So much self-centred and petty comment. Of course there are exceptions and I will add a link when I can find one!!

Then there are more theoretical blogs which have an interest in a discipline such as economics or sociology on theory and are generally written by struggling post-graduates. For example http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/ or http://thesociologicalimagination.com/ or http://www.themonkeycage.org/. They give an insight into the soulless world of academia!

Some blogs are like helpful librarians – referring you on to interesting articles you would otherwise miss eg http://don-paskini.blogspot.com/ And there are digests of blogs eg http://scottishroundup.co.uk/These I enjoy.

Blogging, I seem to be saying, may be good for the blogger - in raising their profile or helping articulate inchoate thoughts - but what does is actually give the reader? The gems I look for are the free-spirits – those not attached to institutions such as the BBC, academia or think tanks who have had some experience of the real-world; are not specialists and continue to have an open mind. One such person seems to be Scott London - see his comments on dialogue http://www.scottlondon.com/blog/archives/61

economics and management - the modern religious doctrine

One of my heroes has always been the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’ tale "The Emperor’s New Clothes" – the only person able to break the hypocrisy, fawning and lies around him and speak the truth. I was very happy therefore a few days to come across Steve Keen’s 2001 book “Debunking Economics – the naked emperor of the social sciences”. The last decade has, of course, seen many books critiquing the basic assumptions of economics and trying to build a more realistic discipline – but Keen’s seems to go further is being almost an alternative textbook. You can get a good sense of it here
For my sins, I not only studied economics, I actually tried to teach it at a polytechnic for several years. At University I had had the greatest of difficulty with some of the basic ideas (particularly the theory of the firm!) and would, occasionally, feel that I was studying a set of religious texts. )(Incidentally, this is an idea brilliantly explored in 1994 in Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli's Faith and Credit - the World Bank's Secular Empire).

I stuck with the subject only because of my interest in regional and urban development for which I could see some practical application. Eventually my disillusionment became too great and I switched my work to urban management. The other part of my Degree had been Politics and political sociology - with John Mackintosh (of "Cabinet Government" fame) one of my tutors. Here I felt on stronger ground - and was particularly excited to read books such as Heclo and Wildavsky's The Private Government of Public Money and EH Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis - both of which stripped away rhetoric to expose the realities of power.

But Britain has retained its mythical attachment to its form of "liberal democracy" - and developed a similar mystique around economics. Almost the same day I found the Keen book, I found a marvellous statement of the reality of the British political system - produced a few months ago by the UK Thinktank Democratic Audit
It is easier nowadays to make the point that economics is a religious doctrine - resting, as people beyond the classrom are slowly recognising, on dogmatic assumptions. The same is true of the even more popular field of management - which I have seen grow in my lifetime from a few (American) departments and books to a series of global industries In reality it is a new Roman Catholic Church - with its interdoctrinal disputes. Sad that there are so few demystications available in that field - Zuboff's The Support Economy (2001) was one of the few.
But back to economics - one of the latest Nobel prizewinners, Paul Krugman, asked last month why the economists got it (the finanical crisis) so wrong. He suggests that mathematical modelling is the answer - but the question which should be asked is why noone pays attention to the answers which have been available for 20 years or so? Paul Ormerod wrote his Death of Economics in 1993 - and that reflected a decade or so of private, professional concerns which could not be voiced for fear of losing tenure etc. A good resource for crtiqiues is post-autistic economics which was set up in 2000 by French students objecting to the irrelevance of economics

more recent influential books

The booklist I gave recently was, I failed to mention, of those books which had made a major impact on me at an earlier stage of my life – which, in a sense, shaped my attitudes. For example the powerful Camus and Koestler essays against capital punishment. So far I would add only one to the list EJ Mishan's "Costs of Economic Growth" (1967) which was a gentler Kohr critique and a forerunner to Schumacher’s writings on a different economics.
Tony Crosland’s books were elegant attacks on the inequalities of British society – but with a different “take” on how to deal with them than the build up of the state offered by the traditional left. Popper gave me the horror I have of an overbearing state – and people like Illich gave me my anarchistic streak. However it was Bernard Crick’s "In Defence of Politics" I suspect which persuaded me that politics was an honourable and necessary pursuit.
The collection of books therefore gave me both my political activism (as Brecht said – “So ist die Welt – und must nicht so sein”) – and some of the approaches which might be able to deal with the injustices (and inefficiencies) I wanted to deal with. For the first 22 years of my adult life I chose to pursue a political role – but at a local and regional level with my commitment to community development and community enterprise giving vent to the anarchistic element.
For the past 20 years, I have been operating as a consultant (although critical) – and perhaps reaching the point when I need to change/raise my game.

And I should now refer to the books/authors which have “spoken to” me in that last phase. My publicadminreform website http://www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform/mentions a lot of books – and has indeed several large bibliographies In “key papers”) which are worth looking at. But the following are the first which come to mind -
Stepen Covey; The Seven Habits of Effective People (1991) In the early 1990s this was the only management book which I could find translated into the various languages of central europe in which I was working – and therefore an ideal focus for some discussions.
Robert Greenleaf; On Becoming a servant leader (1996)
Charles Handy; all his writings
Paul Hawken etc Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution (1999)
Christopher Hood; The Art of the State (1998)
Will Hutton; The State we’re in; The world we’re in (2002)
David Korton; When Corporations rule the world (1995)
Ronnie Lessem; Management Diversity through cultural diversity (1998) and all his other books
George Monbiot; Captive State the corporate takeover of Britain (2000)
Guy Peters; The Future of Governing – four emerging models (1996)
Susan Strange; Mad Money – when markets outgrow governments (1998) Casino Capitalism etc
Theodor Zeldin; An Intimate History of Humanity (1998)

living each day....

The snow melted very rapidly – and today is a typical blustery but bright autumn day. The wolves are already here – devouring this week a small foal. As I waited at the station for my significant other, I read Thomas a Kempis’ The Inner Life – thanks to Penguin’s Great Idea series. Very powerful! I was amazed to find this passage – “You should order your every deed and thought as though today were the day of your death.......each morning remember that you may not live until evening – and in the evening not assume to promise yourself another day"!
I remember being so impressed by Stephen Covey’s exercise in imagining that we were observing our funeral – and hearing what people were saying and thinking of us!

We do indeed need to celebrate the past much more – while remembering (as writers such as Marcus Aurelius and Tolstoy have emphasised) that we do and should live only in the present. I suppose this is one reason for this blog – wanting to put my thoughts in order – aware of my frustration at how little, for example, of my father’s thinking had been left in writing. I have a few of his notebooks – but they are either of journeys he took with his own father or lists of quotations that he could use in his sermons. It was the same with Geoff Shaw when he died – he had been so busy succouring the poor and, latterly, trying to put a new quality into politics that he had no time to write anything.

I am reading a very thoughtful book which I donwloaded recently – “Questions of business life” which is result of one churchman’s humble attempt to answer the question of what Christianity can offer to those in the middle of business affairs. It is both a helpful summary of relevant literature and theological principles and their application to dilemmas such as accountability (the stakeholder debate), corruption and alienation. The book came out of the discussions held at Ridley Hall - which is an Anglican theological college in Cambridge. Its primary task is training people for the ordained ministry, and part of the author’s job is teaching them courses in Ethics and Leadership. But Ridley has also spawned a number of projects which reflect a concern to relate Christian faith to key aspects of contemporary culture. Business was one of these projects - with many seminars on concrete issues facing businesspeople successfully held. 

I admire such retreats - I have been invited both to St George's Hall at Windsor and to the Ditchley Foundation for weekend sessions on Urban Regeneration.
One of the principles behind that last workshop (Jan 1989) was to bring people together from sectors which did not normally speak to one another. Religion; trade unions; military, for example, were represented. As a result of that weekend, I had an amazing day (and lunch) in New Jersey a year later - courtesy of Monsignor William Linder whom I had befriended at Ditchley. He ran a series of community initiatives there - one of which was a restaurant in a converted church! The Priory Restaurant. As we ate with some of his selected colleagues for a discussion, I learned the meaning of "companion" - con-pane - those you eat bread with. Just as Marlyn Fergusson taught me the meaning of "conspirator" - con-spire - "those you breath with"!

a bible for our times

The outage lasted all day and allowed me therefore to read the entire Kohr book ("The Breakdown of Nations") - without the distractions of the internet! And what a book!! It pulsates with clarity, originality ...and wit.
Part of his argument is that – just as companies grow large and inefficient and have to be broken up by Monopoly Commissions – so have States grown to a size that makes them dangerous.

Remember he was an economist – and drafted the book in the early 1950s! He quotes the evidence there was even then that innovation came from small companies – and that decreasing returns of scale sets in early (evidence continues to accumulate that few company mergers are successful – and yet they continue).

In similar vein, he shows that cultural excellence was produced in small states – who may not have always been peaceful but whose wars with one another were short and limited in their damage. His early chapters are powerful statements that, when an organisation reaches the point of domination, it will always succumb to the temptation of aggression.

And he anticipates the contemporary arguments of writers such as Fridjof Capra and Margaret Wheatley about what students of organisations can learn from physics and the new insights into “chaos” – by a simple observation about “atoms”.

His main challenge, however, is to the principle of specialisation and you will find in chapter 6 – “The Efficiency of the Small”. There he is merciless in his critique of the “wealth” of the “modern” world – daring to suggest that most of is useless and counter-productive and that people were happier in medieval times! “The more powerful a society becomes, the more of its increasing product – instead of increasing individual consumption – is devoured by the task of coping with the problems caused by the rise of its very size and power”

I always have pencilled underlines, ringed sections and exclamation marks in the good books I read – and my copy of this book is almost disfigured! Two insights I found particularly relevant – one which he produces as one of the reasons for the intense cultural productivity of the small state –

 “in a large state, we are forced to live in tightly specialised compartments since populous societies not only make large-scale specialisation possible – but necessary. As a result, our life’s experience is confined to a narrow segment whose borders we almost never cross, but within which we become great single-purpose experts”... “A small state offers the opportunity for everybody to experience everything simply by looking out of the window" – 

whereas a large state has to employ a legion of soi-disant experts to define its problems and produce “solutions”. The other striking comment he makes is –

“the chief blessing of a small-state system is ...its gift of a freedom which hardly ever registers if it is pronounced.....freedom from issues....ninety percent of our intellectual miseries are due to the fact that almost everything in our life has become an ism, an issue... our life’s efforts seem to be committed exclusively to the task of discovering where we stand in some battle raging about some abstract issue... The blessing of a small state returns us from the misty sombreness of an existence in which we are nothing but ghostly shadows of meaningless issues to the reality which we can only find in our neighbours and neighbourhoods”

Most people would probably see this as utopian – and yet its argument is ruthless and very much in what I would call the “realist” mode (one of the reasons why I was taken with several of the books in my earlier list). As he puts it at one stage in the argument –

“many will object to the power or size theory on the ground that it is based on an unduly pessimistic interpretation of man. They will claim that, far from being seduced by power, we are generally and predominantly animated by the ideals of decency, justice, magnanimity etc This is true, but only because most of the time we do not possess the critical power enabling us to get away with indecency”.

This is the bible for both new management and the “slow-food” movement! The writing sparkles – and includes a good joke about a planner who, having died, is allowed to try to organise the time people spend in Heaven into more rational chunks of activity, fails and sent to help organise Hell. “I’m here to organise Hell”, he announces to Satan – who laughs and explains that “organisation IS hell”.

I once said that all courses relating to government should have Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation - the conquest of the middle east on their reading list. This is a book which portrays both the victims of the slaughter and their families and also those in the Western bureaucracies – both private and public – who make the slaughter possible and ignored the lessons of history. Their words are closely analysed – and their actions held to account in a relentless way which restores one faith in journalism. I would now add Kohr’s book to that reading list – not least because it offers an answer to the question we ask from time to time “When will they ever learn?”

Bill McKibben's Deep Economy - economics as if the world mattered (2007) is another book which would be in that list (as well as Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma). I have a short comment on McKibben's book on my public admin reform site. Although he recognises Schumacher, Leopold Kohr gets no mention. Sad!

books which made an impact

The painting is so appropriate at the moment - when I am trying to identify the books which have made an impact on me. The storm which was rumbling all night around the mountains has eventually knocked the electricity out - and I am (even at 08.30) having to write this with the aid of a candle. This is what my first list looks like -

Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals (1969)
Stanislaw Andreski’s Social Science as Sorcery (1972)
Peter Berger’s Pyramids of sacrifice – political ethics and social change (1975)
Albert Camus’ Letters to a Friend (1944)
EH Carr’s What is History? (1961)
Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics (1962)
Tony Crosland’s The Conservative Enemy (1962)
Ralf Dahrendorf’s Class and Class Conflict in industrial society (1959)
Marlynn Fergusson’s Age of Aquarius (1980)
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society (1971)
Leoplod Kohr; The Breakdown of Nations (1957)
Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its enemies (1945)
JR Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards (1992)
Donald Schon; Beyond the Stable Society (1971)

Doubtless there will be some additions....To save my battery, I shall now have to switch off the PC battery - and work by pencil and notebook two further questions (a) why did they make an impact? and (b) what books would I now recommend to anyone with an open mind who wanted to understand the world better and play a role in improving it?

is small beautiful?

Painting is Rusi Ganchev's(1895-1965) "A Park "

Interesting that I bought recently a reissued version of Leopold Kohr’s classic The Breakdown of Nations which argues that all major problems would be minimised if the world’s major countries were to dissolve back into the small states from which they came.

It was written by him in 1951 although he did not manage to find a printer for it until 1957 – and it made an impact only with the appearance in 1986 of a paperback version which is when I first read it.

He was an economist and had an influence on his great friend EF Schumacher who wrote the much better-known Small is Beautiful in 1973.

You can get a sense of Kohr’s argument from these excerpts
It is a convincing read – and should make a Scottish nationalist of me. But one of my hesitations has to do with the perverse social processes which seem to contaminate and undermine efforts to change our value systems and structures for the better. Feminism was and remains a worthwhile project – but so far the promise of it bringing a softer more humane set of values into government and the work-place has not been realised. Instead the women have had to show they are “plus royaliste que le roi” – ie tougher and more masculine.
I see the same happening to the nationalist project – as the Scottish nationalist government prepares for the promised referendum in 2010 on independence. Instead of offering a new vision of government and society, their First Minister seems to offer more of the same – not just in terms of policies but in terms of thinking about the form and role of the state - even down to the prospect of useless Embassies! Scottish opinion-makers likes to think of the country belonging to the Scandinavian fringe – and should therefore follow through the logic – ie decentralise powers to local municipalities. However, this is currently a vote loser – since Scottish municipalities are now so large (average 150,000 population) and (apart from the 4 cities) no longer relate to perceptions of community. Perhaps that is why Kohr-type arguments are not heard in the nationalist argument – since they would point to something smaller than a population of 5 million.
But there is one issue in Britain capable of making people think about this problematic of scale in a different way – and that is the “political expenses scandal” which I wrote about in July on my other blog (and again yesterday) and which shows no sign of going away. People are beginning to ask critical questions such as
- Does the UK need 625 MPs (when we have Scottish and Welsh devolution)?
- do MPs play any useful role any more? For decades the complain has been that they are simple ciphers of the Executive – and this situation has got worse. Their classic claim to hold the Executive to account is risible these days – and now they need to be held to account!
- Perhaps the whole notion of “representatives” is basically flawed – and the people need to take more direct Swiss-like control? Open Democracy has opened a campaign 2010 on this whole question and one interesting contribution is here 

See also this essay  

measuring one's eco footprint

An Italian woman offering “eco-holidays” in Sicily – in a neglected village on the edge of a town (Cefalu) which has been able to exploit mass tourism. It sounds a dream – with the amazing properties she owns having her personal touch not just in their design but in the way she has tried to attach the (declining) village skills and economy to the project. Visitors are taken to see (and taste!) the making of the goat-cheese, wine and bread; to use scooters and horses rather than cars. She personally has led the drive to waste recycling etc But there is a eco-downside which the article doesn’t mention – the fact that all the (highly satisfied) visitors are zoomed in and out by plane! Add the plus and minus eco columns – and out comes a negative.
I suppose she could argue that her visitors would have flown anyway and that her contribution is therefore positive. She has not only created a more sustainable environment in the village – she is also trying to demonstrate to its younger people that they don’t necessarily have to leave the village to get jobs since the old skills do, with suitable marketing, offer a sustainable life. Perhaps also she can “sell” a different vision of life to some of her visitors. But, at least for the visitors, the eco-footprint is negative – and they are being dishonest in buying their holiday as an eco-venture! Interesting issues....check it out at http://www.sicilianexperience.com/

In a small way, the issue relates to another website I came across yesterday “Front Porch Republic” which is a celebration not only of the pleasant North American architectural feature I first came across in Pittsburgh but of the social and political benefits of small towns and “smallness” generally.
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=707. I want to explore this theme of smallness – but in my next post.