Snowy sunday in Sofia

So much for my theory about the warmer weather in the south – I awake at 05.00 Sunday to the sight of the streets and buildings suffused in the yellow glow of street lighting with snow which has followed me south. I count my lucky stars that I decided to make a break for it yesterday rather than delaying until today when the road conditions will be horrific. Good also that I have brought my mountain boots in the car which I’ll need to struggle to the galleries and Knigomania bookshop today. But first another trip to the detested Mall – arriving just before it opened at 09.00 and had the place to myself. One of the cleaners was very helpful in taking me to get the papers stuff – I shook his hand – such kindness is becaming rare. Perhaps my (collapsible) aluminium stick helps!
I try to avoid the wine section – but, after picking up rye bread and gorganzola cheese, am drawn like a moth to a flame to the section – of course just to check what new brands there might be a year or so since I had the leisure for such an aesthetic trip. Katarszynski wines had something new but its too pricey – so I buy a Chardonnay from the Magret range I found a couple of years ago produced in the gangster lands at the Greek and Macedonian borders (3 .50 euros a bottle) and what purports to be a 2006 Brestovitza merlot reserve which I used to get from my wine cave on Macedonski Bvd (3 euros a bottle). The bottles are entirely for scientific purposes (!) – to test against the 2 euros a litre Romanian wines I have brought with me (the Romanian Recas white scores; and so does the Brestovitza which has a buttery finish) . Having dumped the produce in the flat, I found the ticket booth for the tram tickets open and was able to get a 22 tram to just beneath the lovely Alexander Nevsky Cathedral – few antique touts were braving the weather conditions in front – so I went on to the City Gallery which had just started an exhibition of Nikolay Boyadjiev (what’s the connection with Petar I wondered) – but it did not open until 11.00. Graffiti outside the empty little art kiosk just to the Gallery’s left tell me that „Danes are racists” What’s that about ??
So on to the Knigomania bookshop – near the British Embassy. Glad to see it’s (still) open – but slightly disappointed with the range (and prices). After an hour of browsing (and tempted only by Katharine Mansfield, Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway) I emerge with a nice edition of Louis de Bernieres Birds without wings about the emptying of the Greek Anatolian villages a century ago - I had left my hardback copy in the library of the Azeri Civil Service Agency. My knees are beginning to ache – but I wanted to get back to see the City Gallery’s special exhibition – picking up a couple of discs to have for the music system (Cesar Franck; and Giuliani) and also an update of the great little guide of the Bulgarian Association for alternative tourism www.baatbg.org which gave me a couple of years fantastic prices (12 euros) for superb rural accomodation here. A must!! And prices are still very reasonable.
I was very taken with the N Boyadjiev exhibition – the first, it claimed, since his death in 1963. He was born in 1904 and, according to the publicity sheet, was kicked out of the Painters’ Association just before his death for refusing to toe the line on socialist realism (as so many of the younger PhD generation is now toeing the line on EU integration!!).

Beating the snow - drive to Sofia

Snow forecast for all Saturday in Bucharest – but just a flurry at 07.00 as I drove off, alone, for first a Russe meeting at 09.00 with Zhechka my great local colleague on the project 2 years ago who has an office both in her home town and in Sofia. The flurries grew thicker as I crossed the Danube at 08.30; bought my Bulgarian road vignette for the year (34 euros not bad) and met up with Z who took me to her office for coffee and briefing - she tells me she managed to get the rent of an office suite (and shared common facilities – an entire floor) dropped to 200 euros a month! The route she led me to exit Russe took me past some great fin de siecle buildings (by the gorge) and, with some trepidation, I joined the snow-flecked highway – thinking I would be lucky to make my 16.00 meeting in Sofia with my Italian friend Enzo’s landlord but in the event – with the snow flakes disappearing as I had anticipated as I headed south - I was able to phone him at 14.00 (on the start of the Balkan mountains highway) to report that I would be an hour early!
I had had some initial difficulty finding a place to rent for 2 weeks when, just over a week ago, the Dicon company announced that my presence would be appreciated on 25 and 26 January for the start of the training activities of the project of which I am (titular) Team Leader.
Initially they said they would be happy to recomend a flat for me (they have, after all, a local office – and experience of people needing short-term rents). I refused the palace their agency first offered me – and accepted the next 2 (they had problems paying a deposit for me!) but, when I said I wanted a small dining table to celebrate Rabbie Burns’ birthday, the letting agency warned me that their flats were not suitable for „meetings and parties”!
My bawdy reputation of laughter and poetry must have spread from 2001 Tashkent and 2008 Sofia! Assuring them of my respectability and sobriety (and calling my previous landlady here into the lists – the widow of a Bulgarian Ambassador), they first graciously accepted and then (after overnight reflection) rescinded. I consider this quite a feather in my cap at my age!
And (to continue the metaphor) hats off to Enzo – whose friend Blago came to the rescue (at very short notice) with a flat they normally don’t offer for short-term rentals. It’s for long-term rentals to Bulgarians who normally bring their own facilities – so it lacked the basics – eg kettles, pots and pans, knives and forks, reading lamps, radio, bedding (!!) – so Blago was very good in trekking around with me to get this stuff in. A young man with a majority shareholding in his own (property company), he drives a plush Mercedes – as do all the best young men like my friend Ivo (I almost said Iago!). And Zhechka tells me that my young (ever so diplomatic and skilful) friend from the Institute of Public Administration here in 2007/08 is not only still there – but is now the Director!!
I’m always happy to drive down the pass from the Balkans into the bowl of Sofia – the first time I saw it (on my way to Thassos in early summer 2007), I was horrified by the smog which concealed the famous Vitosha mountain which towers over the central pedestrian st (Vitosha) where our office was. But I’ve seen glorious views of the mountain as I’ve completed my drives from Bucharest (to emulate the painting I have). Today fog and smog prevented vision. Another disappointment was the experience of yet another fucking shopping mall (Siderca – 10 minutes walk away from the flat). But this latest is so huge that we actually got lost in it. Typically neither the flat nor the mall had any reading lamps (stupid man! But the Bucharest IKEA has such fantastic deals so there have to be some readers here!). At least there is a wine barrel shop nearby (from Divin no less – not far from Romanian Recas the other side of the Danube whose Pint Griș/Riesling I have actually brought with me – for Burns’ night - in a 5 litre drum)
Neither the central heating nor the internet is yet operational in the flat – but heating is adequate – and 48 hours without access to the internet is an excellent discpline – not least encouraging me to read some of the large volume of stuff I:ve downloaded in the last few months!
The painting is a Dobre Dobrev

academic amnesia

I mentioned some time back O Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias – whose entire book I had downloaded (for free). I had read the first few pages; (literally) skimmed the rest to get a sense of its coverage (Mondragon and Port Alegre looked worthy case studies) and kept it on desktop rather than placing in my „alternatives” file to encourage reading. But it has not, since, drawn me in – and a very tough review on what should be a sympathetic site – Dissent - tells me that my laziness has saved me from wasting my time! Apart from the other faults listed in the review, the book’s 287 pages have apparently less than 40 pages on the 4 case studies (whose haphazard selection is not justified); even worse, desite the title, there is no referencing to other writing on „realistic”utopias! The book apparently reflects the incestuous, self-referencing world of an academic (American) sociologist.
We are so overwhelmed by books and learned articles that one of the first things I look for in such works is an indication that the author is familiar with and references what has gone before – as Google Scholar puts it – „stand on the shoulders of giants”. Otherwise we are reinventing the broken wheel - going round in circles – letting the blind lead the blind – whatever metaphor you care to use. I criticised Will Hutton’s most recent book for this weakness in relation to recent discussions about inequality. A recent article in Political Quarterly (by an Australian Professor – Ian Marsh) displayed the same amnesia. I can't give a link to the article but you can get a sense of his particular intellectual baggage here. His review looked at the change mechanisms behind the „deliverology” of the last New Labour Government as justified in books by Michael Barber and Julian le Grand. Le Grand (who has the better pedigree) suggests there are 4 basic mechanisms - professional trust; targets; voice and markets. Barber has three - command and control (targets); quasi-markets; and devolutiona and transparency.
The three authors seem unaware of two classification schemes produced 15 years ago by the 2 key writers about public reform – Guy Peters and Chris Hood.
Peters suggests that administrative reform can be reduced to four schools of thinking - "market models"; "the Participatory State"; "Flexible Government"; and "Deregulated Government". Like Peters, Hood attempts to reduce the whole literature on admin reform to four basic schools. He uses grid-group theory (“grid” denotes the degree to which our lives are circumscribed by rules – “group” indicates the extent to which we are governed by group choice) to give a matrix of -
- Hierarchist (high on both)
- Individualist (low on both)
- Egalitarian (high on group; low on grid)
- Fatalist (high on grid; low on group)

Marsh seemed to think that the answer lies in the work of C Sabel whom I vaguely remember writing in the 1990s about the modern northern Italian craft complexes and who is now into deliberative discourse stuff which again makes little or no reference to the theories of administrative reform and organisational change (Gerry Stoker is much better on this.)Instead it gets us into the highly incestuous and opaque field of European studies – many of whose contributors seem to be young, with no experience of life and living off European Union grants.

I realise that, by now, I should know better than to bother with Google Scholar and the academic turds it fishes up. But (like consultancy) there are so many hundreds of thousands of robots being churned out from the academic factories that some of us have to keep track of the poison. And yes - I will admit to some prejudice here (!) – and would be happy to be persuaded out of my cynicism. But I am happy to have the chance to use a (1940s Port Glasgow) Stanley Spencer painting so quickly after mentioning the series he did. It's "Riveters" - and so appropriate!

West of Scottish bards, comics and painters

First, congratulations to the West of Scotland poet and dramatist, Liz Lochhead, who was yesterday appointed to the position of national poet (or „makar”) – a position invented a few years ago by the First Minister of the new Scottish Government and held first by Edwin Muir. Ironically the only poem of Lochhead’s which seems to be online is the entitled "Poets need not be garlanded":

Anyway, it’s a nice idea – although I’m a great fan of Tom Leonard’s poetry myself but he generally writes in a strong West of Scotland accent – the good thief will give you the idea (you need to know that the thief is hanging on a cross and speaking to Jesus!).
That poem led me onto the Billy Connolly’s scabrous humour In addition to explaining some of the words, I also pointed out to Daniela one of the historical specialities of these quality West of Scotland comics (Greenock-born Chic Murray was the best) who simply took the meaning of common phrases and words apart – eg „Ï rang the bell – what else can you do with it?”.

Interesting that the poet WS Graham (much admired by TS Eliot)who so focussed on words and their fragility should also (like me) be from that town. And also quite a clutch of writers - John Galt, Davidson, George Blake, Alan Sharp,Ian Banks (briefly and in Gourock), playwright Bill Bryden and David Ashton(ne Scott) - the last 2 classmates of mine.

I realised that I will be in Sofia on January 25th – the birthday of Scotland’s real national bard – Rabbie Burns - and will try to arrange a small „do”for my friends there to celebrate the man and his life and works (and Bulgarian, Italian, Romanian and Scottish poets – Italian for my friend Enzo will be present). Doubtless the hapless Hristov Botev will be one of the Bulgarian poets – the”romantic revolutionary” (against Ottoman rule) who must vie with Bonnie Prince Charlie for the title of The historical figure who "couldn'ae manage a menage” ("hopelessly impractical” in West of Scotland patois – except that I can’t find it online!

Haggis then jumped to mind ("it has that habit" - as Connolly or Chic Murray might have said) and I remembered that Sofia had an outfit which delivers British products to the door. Sure enough Andy was quick to reply and a couple of haggi (??) will duly wing their way to the flat next week - provided that is that I can find a flat! The local company with which I am working - Dicon - has proved very inefficient so far in that respect.
But, with 10 litres of good Dealu Mare and Recas red and white wine from Romania, we will toast absent friends such as Daryoush, Jacek and Zulfiya – with whom I have celebrated these evenings.
This - plus some Bulgarian wine which I have missed - should be enough for 8 people!!

Bought a copy yesterday of my favourite newspaper – Le Monde – it said it all that it devoted at least 5 full pages to the development in Tunisia. Can you imagine a british newspaper doing that??

I was trying to find a suitable industrial landscape painting of West of scotland online - but couldn't. Andy Hay did some great stuff a few decades back on shipbuilding (as did Stanley Spencer during the war) but this is the only painting I could find of his. And the great Stanley Spencer is very badly served by the War Museum who have all his Port Glasgow shipbuilding paintings but don't display any of them on their website!

All praise to poetry, the way it has
of attaching itself to a familiar phrase
in a new way, insisting it be heard and seen.
Poets need no laurels, surely?
their poems, when they can make them happen -- even rarely --
crown them with green.

Chinese administrative reforms in international perspective

OK out there – all thousands of you – the moment you have been waiting for has arrived! I have completed my paper for the Euro-Sino dialogue on administrative reform and all 35 pages and 72 footnotes are duly waiting for you here. To be fair, only about 20 odd pages are my own work – the rest is text gratefully borrowed from project ToR; the likes of Colin Talbot (who delivered a lecture in Beijing last year which I have reproduced as an annex); and the lists of books)
I am keen to get up the hill at the back because I leave today – and, typically, it is the most glorious weather of the entire week. Cloudless blue sky (except over the Bucegi peaks) but with a sharp white frost on the ground

The last thing I had to do this morning before converting the text to pdf and zinging it to the website was a Coda which I perhaps too quickly drafted – its peroration goes like this -

One has to respect the dignified way in which national power in China is shared in the party leadership; policies are hammered out behind the scenes in a dialogue which involves academics; and formal positions of nationals leadership pass in a regularised way from person to person every decade.
Perhaps no leaders in world history have ever had the responsibilities and expectations which those of China have today. Having achieved a remarkable economic transformation and wealth, the leaders of this massive country are now expected to deal with pollution and the poverty in which so much of its people still live; the inequity and systemic corruption; and also achieve a peaceful achievement to a system of Rule of Law.
Those who have the combination of audacity and good fortune to go to the country to assist those efforts – whether in teaching or consultancy – should have the humility to admit that they have no answers.
Not, of course, that their hosts expect that from their visitors. They have their own context and processes of and capacity for policy experimentation, deliberation and decision. They are painfully aware of their weaknesses; and look to their visitors for something which, unfortunately, seems to be in short supply – historical understanding. That is to say the ability to articulate the processes by which, for example, Nordic countries transformed themselves into the societies in which they are today. Sadly, western technocrats have colluded in recent decades to destroy a lot of that.
If a Euro-Sino dialogue can restore some memory and respect for what Europe had, it will indeed have been worthwhile.

wood and wisdom

There is little more satisfying in winter than raising a good axe above your head in the open air and bringing it down with a swift, so professional, movement to split a suitably sawn and well-seasoned chunk of wood! I take some pride in having heated myself, in my recent sojourns here, only with the wood from the branches I sawed from the 2 garden trees in the autumn (OK I take the nip off the air in my study with a burst from the electric heater!).
I made the mistake last week of using some logs which had not dried properly in the spare room – and so have now chopped some which have been in the open air and therefore season better. They are now in the bedroom, having a last bit of seasoning in the warmth of the bedroom (whose stove went out 15 hours ago but whose bricks continue to keep the room iincredibly warm). I will not need to light the fire again beforee my departure tomorrow. I’m off to Sofia for a couple of weeks - some business on a small training project I have there; meet old friends (including the wine!); and visit the art galleries for more paintings.
I’ve just taken the laptop out on the verandah after clearing the ashes from the bedroom fire to protect it from the ash particles and find that I can sit comfortably on the verandah – in mid January at 1,400 metres in the Carpathians (well for 15 minutes!) Great sounds – birds, folk music from somewhere and the inevitable sound of a power saw.
I’m now in the last stage of the paper relating to Chinese adminsitrative reform – over the week-end it grew an important section summarising (for me and the Chinese) the last 40 years’ history of reform efforts! This morning, therefore, I had to return to the start and explain the purpose of and audience for the paper. It has been written for anyone engaged in discussions about administrative reform in China – whether Chinese or foreign. The project I was to have led last year there was not only designed to assist indigenous reform efforts – but also service an EU-China dialogue about administrative reform. Perhaps, as a good Scot, I feel guilty about walking away from that – and want to make amends! Right now I am looking at a blank section with the headline „Coda” in which I want to leave some brief, final injunctions about reform endeavours. Any ideas? I think I want to say something about "balance" - relating to recent comments here about that. At the moment I have only two extended quotations – the first a TS Eliot poem which always crops up in my writing; the second Rosabeth Kanter’s 10 rules for stifling initiative.
I’ll sign off with the poem -

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

TS Eliot; The Four Quartets

Missing history of administrative reform

Worked non-stop all Saturday on this briefing paper on Chinese administrative reform (Friday’s draft is here). Two developments got the creative juices flowing - first I discovered a method for giving my website papers higher visibility on the internet - I simply choose a title for a blog posting which is the same as one already on the first page of google search and then ensure there is a link in the blog post to my paper! So, as I scribble (or whatever word now captures the key tapping we all do now) I can imagine my phrases and insights hitting a spellbound global audience. Dream on!
Then, as I was grappling with the question of the lessons from 40 years of reform efforts in Western Europe, I was suddenly reminded of my 1999 book - in which I had tried to explain west european public admin reform to a central european audience. I was amazed to find that the argument and text still stands up pretty well eleven years on – and have duly uploaded it to the website - In Transit - notes on Good Governance Part I. What I had tried to do in chapter Four of that book was to emphasise how varied were the „explanations” we had in the 1970s about the sort of problem which required „reform”; and, therefore, how differently (despite the talk of New Public Management - NPM) reform programmes developed in different countries. I had also explained how, in the 1970s, the new breed of policy analysts had almost given up on the hope of getting the bureaucracy to operate in the interests of the public - „disjointed incrementalism” was the best that could be hoped for. And how public choice theory came along to give an ideological explanation and justification for what came to be called NPM. I was fighting bureaucracy in the 1970s and 1980s with a different (and simpler) theory – what I called the „pincer approach”- a combination of community action and strategic management led by politicians and explained in paper 50 of my website – Organisational Learning and Political Amnesia. In the 1980s, I was using the pamphlets of the Institute of Economic Affairs (on issue like road-pricing) with my students to show the practical applications to which economics could be put – never imagining that such neo-liberal thinking would soon dominate government policies. But in the mid 1980s I remember reading a long article by a neo-liberal American academic in The Economist about the need to introduce a split between purchasers and providers into the health system – and sending it with a warning note to the (Labour) Opposition spokesman in Parliament.
The technocratic fix of (young) consultants misses completely this politico-historical side of things – and I realise that my personal history (and extensive reading and international experience) gives me a fairly unique perspective on this issue of administrative reform. Anyway it encourages me to think I have!

And that is a good opening for a bit of trumpet-blowing. I got a very nice note a few weeks back from Tom Gallagher (author of Theft of a Nation – Romania since Communism and Illusion of Freedom; Scotland under nationalism and many other books) whom I had met up with for the first time in Bucharest in late November. He has kindly given me permission to reproduce his note which read -

“I came to Carpathian Musings fairly late in the day but I soon grew to appreciate the intellectual fire-power and also the aesthetic pleasures to be derived from following your thoughts and also your experiences in Romanian city and countryside. Indeed, I can't think of any other blog that works so well at very different levels; you are able to switch (seemingly effortlessly) from discussing the current deep politico-economic crisis, to appraising the books you are reading, casting a beedy eye on the delusional university world, to passing on your experiences as a bon vivant, sampling the cornucopia of seasonal foods, wines and your trophies from the fairs and antique market. You also explore your own life in an honest and constructive way. So you manage to be a cross between JK Galbraith, Fred Halliday, Egon Ronay and Dennis Healey - quite a feat”.

Praise indeed - particularly from such a writer! I have been trying to insert it as one of my list of quotes in the right-hand column of the site but have been foiled so far!