Do we have Agency – or not?

I have never understood those who used the language of revolutionary change – they seemed to live on another planet. I was actually a young Fabian – even before I learned about Karl Popper’s falsification principle and read his “Open Society and its Enemies”.

My theory of change was once expressed as a simple “pincer” one – “get them from both above and below” but then moved to that of the “windows of opportunity” expressed initially thus -   

• “Windows of opportunity present themselves - from outside the organization, in crises, pressure from below
• reformers have to be technically prepared, inspire confidence – and able to seize and direct the opportunity
• Others have to have a reason to follow
• the new ways of behaving have to be formalized in new structures.

And then developed a more detailed formulation which put more emphasis on the individual, moral responsibility – 

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity”. And the preparation is about analysis, mobilisation and trust.

·         It is about us caring enough about our organisation and society to speak out about the need for change.

·         It is about taking the trouble to think and read about ways to improve things – and

·         To help create and run networks of such change.

·         And it is about establishing a personal reputation for probity and good judgement 

·         that people will follow your lead when that window of opportunity arises”.

I am not a fan of Malcolm Gladwell but his popularisations have included the important notion of the Tipping Point -  where he suggested (in 2010) that there were three key factors which determine whether an idea or fashion will “tip” into wide-scale popularity - the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. The “Law of the Few” proposes that a few key types of people must champion an idea, concept, or product before it can reach the tipping point. Gladwell describes these key types as –

·         Connectors,

·         Mavens, and

·         Salesmen.

(And a maven – in case you didn’t know - is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word maven comes from the Hebrew, via Yiddish, and means one who understands, based on an accumulation of knowledge).

But I have never been able to get my head around complexity and systems theory – perhaps because it offended by sense of human agency. I have never been able to accept the fatalism that seems embedded in it. I certainly agree that effective change doesn’t come from the “ya-boo yo-yo” system of adversarial power blocs of the UK and USA – it comes from a combination of sustained dialogue; coalitions of change; and grassroots activism and protest.

And, often, it starts with an experiment – rather than a grand programme…Take, for example, what is now being called the Dutch model for neighbourhood care – started by Buurtzorg a few years back which is now inspiring people everywhere. That is a worker cooperative model… which, quite rightly, figures in Frederic Laloux’s  Reinventing Organisations.

I last wrote about this a couple of years ago – when I had pulled titles from my library (real and virtual) which appeared to deal with the issue. These, I emphasised, didn’t claim to represent anything except the vagaries of my purchases and interests. They do, however, seem to reflect important stages in the very slow understanding which has overtaken us in the past half century that we have allowed a perverse linear/mechanistic model of society to occupy our minds…….

The date of the first book is 1967……. That’s 50 years ago….a long time for an idea to gestate and develop….

 

Titles from 1967	Clarity Factor	Significance	full book?
The Costs of Economic Growth; EJ Mishan (1967)	2	The first time an economist warns of this – accessible here	yes
The Limits to Growth; Club of Rome (1972)	2	The book which made the warning global
The Sane Alternative – a choice of futures; James Robertson (1978)	1	“Small is Beautiful” (1973) was seen as partisan, if not extreme. James Robertson’s book put the case in more balanced terms	Yes
The Whale and the Reactor – the search for limits in an age of high technology; Langdon Winner (1986)	2	Amazingly prescient book -	Yes
The Fifth Discipline; the art and practice of the learning organisation; Peter Senge (1990)	3	Made the concepts of systems and of “the learning organisation” fashionable
The Development Dictionary – a guide to knowledge as power; ed W Sachs  (1992)	2	A powerful challenge to “the western view”	Yes
The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook; Peter Senge 1994	2	The sub-title says it all - strategies and tools for building a learning organisation
The Web of Life Fritjof Capra 1996	4	A well-intentioned presentation of systems thinking – but tough going
Deep Change; Robert Quinn 1996	2	Quinn’s first draft of what became the superb “Change the World”
Leadership and the new Science – discovering order in a chaotic world Margaret Wheatley 1999	2	An early classic in the attempt to present a new world of complexity
Dialogue and the art of thinking together; William Isaacs (1999)	3	One of many focusing on dialogue…
Change the World; Robert Quinn (2000)	1	I simply don’t understand why this book is so seldom mentioned….perhaps because it makes a moral case?
The Ingenuity Gap – how can we solve the problems of the future? Thomas Homer-Dixon (2001)	1	A fascinating book which focuses on the complexity of the contemporary world – with a powerful narrative
Towards Holistic Governance – the new reform agenda; Perri 6, Leat, Seltzer and Stoker (2002)	4	Cooperation in government is an important topic but is dealt with in an over-confident and technical manner by these academics
Systems thinking – creative holism for managers; Michael Jackson (2003)	4	Very comprehensive but – at 378 pages – not immediately user-friendly….	Yes
Critical Mass; Philip Ball (2004)	3	A popular attempt to look at systems issues which probably tries to cover too many areas
Building the Bridge as you walk on it – a guide for leading change; Robert Quinn (2004)	2	Note quite as good as his “Change the World”	yes
An End to Suffering – the Buddha in the World; Pankaj Mishra( 2004)	1	A delightful idea and easy read
Presence – exploring profound change in people, organisations and society; P Senge et al (2005)	3	A conversation between 4 friends which reflects their uncertainties. Just a bit too self-indulgent and self-referential
The Dictionary of Alternatives – utopianism and organisation; ed M Parker, V Fournier and P Reedy (2007)	3	A nice idea – which I have still to read Accessible here	yes
Thinking in Systems – a primer; Donella Meadows (2008)	2	the discussion about “leverage points” is an immensely important one. The early pages are a delight to read –	Yes
Exploring the Science of Complexity; Ben Ramalingam et al (ODI 2008)	5	Almost incoherent – but see “Aid on the edge of Chaos” below	Yes
The Master and His Emissary – the divided brain and the making of the Western World; Iain McGilchrist (2009)	4	Apparently a very important read but, with more than 500 pages, too big a challenge for me….
Deconstructing Development Buzzwords (2010)	3	Clever…	Yes
Power and Love; a theory and practice of social change; Adam Kahane (2010)	2	Most authors would avoid a title like this - but Kahane’s south African experience makes this a great story, read here	yes
The Dance on the Feet of Chance; Hooman Attar (2010)	4	A bit too technical – but honest
Mastery; Robert Greene (2012)	1	An important topic, nicely presented by a craftsman of his trade. Read here	yes
Aid on the Edge of Chaos; Ben Ramalingam (2013)	3	A very comprehensive treatment of the various strands but ultimately (at 450 pages) indigestible
Embracing Complexity – strategic perspectives for an age of turbulence; J Boulton, P Allen and C Bowman (2015)	1	At first glance, wonderfully clear
How Change Happens Duncan Green (2016)	1	With its focus on the marginalised of the world, this may not immediately attract but it’s one the best discussions of change…	Yes
Can We Know Better?; Robert Chambers (2017)	1	What could be final reflections from the development scholar who wrote “Whose Reality Counts? putting the Last First”…	Yes
Doughnut Economics – seven ways to think like a 21st century economist; K Raworth (2017)	1	Didn’t seem part of this discussion – but the clarity of her exposition of how certain ideas first came to be developed blows you away!!
Commanding hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril; Thomas- Homer-Dixon (2020)	1	One of the first books which takes the environmental crisis as a given and concentrates the discussion on the reasons why people resist the message – or don’t follow thro in actions	yes

 

Nothing to Lose but the Chains on our Minds

How can we engage in collective action when we are living a more and more individualized existence? Jeremy Gilbert’s delightful little book Twenty first century socialism (2020) brought this question home to me when I looked at it over the weekend 

Today most people have very little regular experience of working effectively in groups with other people. They probably don’t know their neighbours. Their co-workers won’t be their co-workers long enough for them to get to know one another.

Even if they do, what they have in common with their co-workers is probably a ‘bullshit job’, which none of them wants to be doing and over which they feel no sense of control. In many sectors they may be working on short-term contracts, so their current co-workers will be their competitors in the labour market once the present contract runs out.

When they have to attend meetings, those meetings are boring, bureaucratic and frustrating, seeming to prove the neoliberal hypothesis that people acting together can achieve nothing.

 

They fill their hours with social media, communicating with people most of whom they will never meet and with whom they will almost never do anything more substantial than share memes. They find pleasure and satisfaction in their private lives, as consumers, on holiday, maybe pursuing solitary hobbies,31 probably just watching television.

Neoliberalism says that people are happier this way – consuming, competing, pursuing their private interests. They are not. They use platform technologies and a vast range of drugs to try to make themselves feel better, to feel some connection with other people and the wider world.

 

But this experience of daily life often makes it feel to them as if actually getting things done with other people is impossible, especially if those things have any objective other than making money.

If socialism in the twenty-first century has a single objective, that objective is to turn people’s desire for connection into real social and cooperative action for the greater good. And, if it has a single obstacle to overcome, then it is the feeling that no such thing is possible – a feeling that the whole machinery of neoliberal culture deliberately inculcates in people.

Gilbert’s little book has certainly encouraged me to look more closely at his previous book Common Ground – democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism (2014) whose title had appealed to me when I first saw it a few years back (not least because I had used the “Common Ground” as the name of a website I set up that very year). The book’s Preface had been promising – not least because it generously offered a summary of each chapter) viz   

It was arguably the ‘New Lefts’ of the 1960s, and the social movements of the 1970s, which posed the first lethal challenges to the highly conformist, homogenising model of collectivity which informed the political and democratic institutions inherited from the mid twentieth century. These had questioned the legacy of liberal individualism, not in the name of any kind of conservative ideal of community, but in the name of a radical democratic politics.

 

The book’s first chapter – “Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy” - argues that existing systems of representative democracy were relatively effective in the era of ‘Fordist’ industrial capitalism, but that they didn’t respond successfully to the pressure exerted by a new set of social demands emerging in the 1960s (from women, young people, black people, etc.), to the growing complexity of ‘post-Fordist’ societies, or to the mobility of capital in an era of financialisation and globalisation. Weakened by these challenges, governmental institutions have largely been captured by the ideology of neoliberalism, which the political class has normally colluded with in preference to acceding to the demands for more radical and participatory forms of democracy which characterised what the Trilateral Commission1 called the ‘democratic surge’ of the 1960s and 1970s (Crozier,  Huntington and Watanuki 1975).

But that generosity was the book's undoing since it was clear that Gilbert was in thrall to the French deconstructionists (viz Laclau, Derrida and Deleuze) whom I can’t stand. So the book was left on the shelf despite my knowing that Gilbert writes well – as this review of his most recent little book testifies

But I have now downloaded it – and will let you know how I get on with it…..

For the moment let me simply share with you some of useful reference which Gilbert’s references put me on to - 

- “A New politics from the left”; Hilary Wainwright (2018);  a short book by one of the friendliest writers (she has a great annotated reading list). Most books like this are strong on the critique and light on how to get to a better world – but the process of change is at the heart of this one. It’s in epub format which requires conversion for reading 

- “Freedom is an endless meeting – democracy in American social movements” (2002) looks at collective action on the American scene. One of 2 pdf files which can be directly accessed

- “The will of the many – how the alterglobalisation movement is changing the face of democracy” (2009)

-  “No shortcuts – organising for power in thenew gilded age” (2016) looks at trade union actions in the US in epub format which requires conversion 

- A useful article on Deepening democracy which may be from 2006 but has a typology which makes it still pertinent.

Commanding Hope

Canadian Thomas Homer-Dixon is not your typical doom-merchant – although his was one of the first books I read suggesting that the increasing complexity of the world was creating limits to man’s ingenuity viz The Ingenuity Gap – how can we solve the world’s future problems (2001). A few years later he wrote a sequel which offered a bit more hope - The Upside of Down – catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilisation (2006)

I’ve just been reading his latest contribution - Commanding Hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril” (2020) which is one of the very few books I’ve seen which takes the crisis as read - and chooses instead to use our own reluctance to change our habits as the key with which to explore the values and worldviews lying at the heart of the different sense of identity we all have. (I wasn’t aware that, some ten years ago, Clive Hamilton produced Requiem for a species – why we resist the truth about climate change (2010) although only one chapter of the book seems to deal directly with the question in the subtitle).

But I well remember reading (in 2014) “Why We Disagree about Climate Change – understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity” (2009) by geographer Mike Hulme - which used seven different lenses (namely science, economics, religion, psychology, media, development, and governance) to make us aware of the complexity behind climate change. His argument was basically that –

- We understand science and scientific knowledge in different ways

- We value things differently

- We believe different things about ourselves, the universe and our place in the universe

- We fear different things

- We receive multiple and conflicting messages about climate change – and interpret them differently

- We understand “development” differently

- We seek to govern in different ways (eg top-down “green governmentality”; marketing environmentalism; or “civic environmentalism”) 

Little wonder, with such varied and extensive divergences in beliefs, values, fears and messages that we can neither agree about global warming – nor ourselves take but pitifully token ecological steps But that doesn’t stop any of us from priding ourselves on our rationality – nor taking it amiss when told that we are all creatures of habit, intuition and downright prejudice……It was less than a decade ago that psychologists first started to challenge the myths about rationality strongly – with authors such as Jonathan Haidt leading the charge

So Homer-Dixon’s book has appeared none too soon - and tries to deal with the argument of the Extinction movement - that things have now gone too far and there is little we can do to save the planet. For the moment, I’ll just list the main points which caught my eye -

- the successful “women against the Hbomb campaign” of the 1950s (which led to a treaty ban in 1963) was started by the determination of a single woman

- Feedback mechanisms can be both negative and positive (the Hbomb campaign and South Africa’s peaceful transition are examples of the latter)

- 2 megatrends – greater connectivity; and higher uniformity. The trick is to make them work in our favour by challenging what has become in the past 4 years a heavily pessimistic social mood

- the importance of Worldviews – which I’ve covered here  

- the strength of our belief in growth, choice and security

– 2 tools to help challenge that eg Cognitive Affective Maps - Commanding Hope

– worldviews, institutions and technology (WIT) 

By far the hardest transition will involve getting from today’s (economic growth) WIT to another arrangement that drastically reduces the global economy’s consumption of resources and its output of waste.

This new arrangement must explicitly address the three “equivalencies” I highlighted— growth equals happiness, freedom, and peace— because people won’t relinquish conventional growth if they aren’t reasonably sure they’ll be at least as happy, free, and secure as they are under the existing arrangement.

The intellectual and scientific foundation of this new WIT will also need to incorporate a renovated discipline of economics—one that recognizes that human economies are complex systems intimately connected with nature; that markets won’t automatically find good substitutes for some of the most precious things nature gives us, like moderate temperatures and enough water for our crops; and that economics must be grounded in moral principles attuned to our world’s demanding new material and social realities.

 - Sufficiency v feasibility; solutions have to be sufficient – and enough p180

- Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points – one of the most important parts of the book

- from the “Abundance mindset” to the “Scarcity mindset” caused by widening insecurity, migration, climate change and the new pessimistic social mood

- Jonathan Haidt’s 6 “moral intuitions” – care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity (?) and liberty

- three “temperaments” – exuberant, prudent and empathic which match Amartya Sen’s approach

My feeling, on finishing the book, was that it was an important contribution but that he hadn’t succeeded in pulling the various themes and arguments together in a satisfactory way. I’m still left wondering how I can explain it clearly to others.

But that’s one of its strengths – that it makes me want to go back and reread particularly the final part so that I can provide such an explanation….  

PS The book offers neither an annotated reading list nor an index. I had wanted to check whether it mentioned Robert Quinn (a neglected writer on the theme of changing the world)  - but the absence of an index makes that impossible……  You wonder whether that’s deliberate…..

Why we need shorter non-fiction books – with chapter summaries

As I reel under the number of books pouring from publishers, I have come to place more and more importance on three requirements which I look for in any book 

- first a solid Introduction – or Preface. This is the author’s chance to show (s)he understands how overwhelmed we are by the choices; to offer us a convincing argument about why (s)he has to inflict yet another book on us. And the best way to do that is to give a brief summary of what others have written and identify the missing elements which make a book necessary. And I would like, in addition, to see a summary of each chapter…..I have always liked the old habit of prefacing a book chapter with an explanation of what that chapter will deal with. When I got hold recently of George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism; (1928) it was to discover that his Table of Contents has no fewer than 33-pages... 

- the second thing I look for in a non-fiction book is at the end - a (short) list of recommended reading, ideally with notes explaining the choice. Most books have a long “bibliography” which, I’ve taken to calling a “virility test” - demonstrating nothing more than (a barely compressed sense of) superiority. I want instead to see a shorter (and annotated) list for several reasons - partly to smoke out the author’s prejudices; partly to see how honest (s)he is; and partly to see how well (s)he writes   

- the third check I run is for the clarity of writing – with suitable use of graphics and tables which are needed both to break up and to illustrate the text….

All of these requirements are fairly quickly established – the book either offers such features – or it doesn’t. The decline and rise of democracy – a global history from antiquity to today by David Stasavage (2020), for example, is a book I came across yesterday and checked out. It doesn’t bother with any of these features – and is therefore quickly dismissed. It doesn’t even mention John Keane’s classic “The Rise and Fall of Democracy”

But I also need to be persuaded that the book in question has three other features --

- respects the basic facts about an issue;

- has a coherent “narrative structure” (see Richard Evans’ comments in the previous post)

- tries to be fair to the various sides of the key arguments on the issue 

And this can be done only by checking the reviews.

But why, I suddenly thought, do authors insist these days on giving us such hefty tomes?

Everyone’s attention span – we are told – is declining….particularly that of the younger generation.

And so many non-fiction books are just recycling arguments we’re already familiar with…

The obvious thing is to go back to the Victorian habit of summarising the basic argument of a book – along with an annotated bibliography – and to offer it as a TASTER of maximum 100 pages

Take, for example, a superb newly-released book I have been reading today - Commanding hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril; by Thomas Homer-Dixon. It is an easy read; and addresses the issue which few such environmental books do – namely why do people resist the message about global warming? And why indeed do the rest of us do little more than token gestures? 

It’s the first book I’ve come across which is devoted exclusively to this question of intellectual resistance - with 360 pages, its basic argument could be compressed into 100 pages - as a taster - an idea I'm now testing with "Dispatches to the Next Generation - a taster" (see top-right column of blog)

update; I'm glad to see I'm not alone in searching for ways to discover whether a book will be useful  https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/surgical-reading-how-to-read-12-books