Do “Progressives” CHOOSE to be on the losing side of arguments?

My introductory remarks about the author of the new book about Big Change were a bit caustic – I just felt Centola was a bit bumptious. But his commitment to significant social change can’t be questioned. Not just because his family raised him to protest against social injustice but by virtue of the range of serious issues he has explored in different parts of the world – which are set out in the book he published in 2018 - How Behaviour Spreads.

Change – how to make big things happen is his reach for blockbuster fame but still deserves serious (as distinct from MM) attention for its focus on how positive ideas can have a greater impact.

My feeling is that not enough so-called “progressives” take this question seriously enough – it’s almost as if they prefer to be on the losing side all the time!

I reviewed a book a few months ago largely because it was one of the few which actually looked at the behavioural aspects of the climate change issue. But it’s been more than a decade since a clutch of publications appeared which seemed to offer new tools for strengthening at least the targeting of progressive messages –

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

-       Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010)

-       WickedProblems and Clumsy Solutions; Keith Grint (2008)

-       HowChange Happens - Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Human Development; Roman Krznaric 2007 -       Probably the most useful 60-page article you can read on the subject which tries to summarise how a range of disciplines were thinking about the question in the early part of the millennium. 

Part 1 describes different approaches to how change happens from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. These include, among others, history, politics, sociology, psychology, economics, international relations, legal studies, and ecology. Each discipline has its own distinctive approach; for instance, political scientists are interested in transformations of political systems, psychologists in individual behaviour, sociologists in worldviews. The section highlights the general factors and conceptual frameworks used to explain change, not empirical content.

The second part sets out a tool for thinking about change, drawing on the various perspectives described in Part 1 – in the form of a table called ‘The rough guide to how change happens’. It then examines an example of major social change – the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in Britain – which illustrates the utility of the ‘rough guide’ as a tool for understanding and explaining how change takes place.

The third part of the paper explores the extent to which contemporary development strategies to tackle poverty and inequality employ the full range of approaches to change proposed in the ‘rough guide’. It examines strategies such as managing markets, reforming the state, empowerment, and corporate social responsibility, and traces them back to their roots in particular academic disciplines.

Current development thinking makes use of only a narrow range of possible approaches to change. The result is that development strategies are limited in five main ways:

-       they are excessively reformist and insensitive to underlying power and inequality;

-       they largely ignore environmental issues;

-       they overlook the importance of personal relationships and promoting mutual understanding as a strategy of change;

-       they fail to fully appreciate the contextual factors that limit change;

-       and they lack a multidisciplinary agility to draw on the broad range of approaches to change that exist outside the narrow confines of development studies. 

Overall there is a need for broader thinking about how change does happen so that we can be more creative and adept at devising strategies to confront the enormous challenges facing our societies and planet.

Typically, however, the blog just noted that such papers existed and did not try to analyse – let alone summarise or compare – them. And the same was true last year when the blog collected together in a table what I considered to themore worthwhile of the key texts for social activists issued in the pasthalf-century. No attempt was made to assess them properly – for which I apologise profusely. Clearly this is long overdue – but requires me to be in the mood. So bear with me!

REFLEXIVITY is something we associate with George Soros – who situates it nicely in this very personal story. Basically it states that our capacity to read about events makes predictions impossible. We can and do take actions to minimise any dangers of which we are warned.  

That’s why I take Centola’s the seven strategic recommendations he makes at the end of his most recent book with a strong pinch of salt. Forewarned is forearmed!

Other Recommended Reading

How Change Happens; Duncan Green (2016)

How Change Happens – why some social movements succeed while others don’t ; Leslie Crutchfield (2018)

Duncan Green’s comment on the 2018 book

Tipping Point at 21

I’ve now finished Damon Centola’s “Change – how to make Big Things Happen” and am trying to understand how it relates to the huge literature which exploded in the 1990s on “change management” – something which the author himself sadly fails to do. Perhaps he feels that the arrival of social media has so revolutionised the world as to make that literature old hat and not even worthy of mention??

More than 20 years ago I took the opportunity of what was euphemistically called “resting” between gigs to to summarise the key messages of that literature (in a chapter of In Transit – notes on Good Governance pp177-202) That gives a useful sense of what the debate was like in those days – but didn’t include the writings of my favourite Robert Quinn whose “Change the World” (2000) was published too late for inclusion (I really need to update “In Transit”) 

I’m not a fan of strongly-marketed books which describe experiments conducted by psychologists and data-scientists – particularly when they trumpet how these dismantle myths that have apparently long held us in their grip - perhaps I’m overly suspicious that such experiments have not been properly peer-reviewed. Rutger Bregman’s recent Humankind did a great hatchet-job on many such experiments – so much so that I set them all out in a table you can find here. But, as I said in the last post, Centola’s book raises important questions about the process of social change – even if some of the examples he uses seem a bit trivial - with a bit too much use, for my liking, of trending on Twitter and Facebook. The way, however, he uses real-life examples of health-care in Africa; the Manhatten. Apollo and Genome projects; the “Black Lives Matter” campaign; and solar energy uptake to develop ideas about what approaches to social change work – and why – is thought-provoking.

The new element, of course, which the data-scientists bring to bear to the subject is the number-crunching power which cheaper computers now bring to bear on Big Data. The field of change management is dominated by a famous book published in 2000 - The Tipping Point  in which essayist Malcolm Gladwell argued that the point at which something – a product or idea – tips into fashion requires  the confluence of a number of influential types of people - not just a single "leader". Many trends are ushered into popularity by small groups of individuals that he classified as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different realms and act as conduits between them, helping to engender connections, relationships, and “cross-fertilization” that otherwise might not have ever occurred.
Mavens are people who have a strong compulsion to help other consumers by helping them make informed decisions.
Salesmen are people whose unusual charisma allows them to be extremely persuasive in inducing others to take decisions and change their behaviour.

“Stickiness” is an important concept for these discussions - the quality that compels people to pay close, sustained attention to a product, concept, or idea. Stickiness is hard to define, and its presence or absence often depends heavily on context. Often, the way that it is generated is unconventional, unexpected, and contrary to received wisdom. Context is enormously important in determining whether a particular phenomenon will tip into widespread popularity. Even minute changes in the environment can play a major factor in the propensity of a given concept attaining the tipping point.

I’m not sure if Centola’s new book actually adds all that much to the discussion although his opening point is clearly an important one – that the spreading of ideas is NOT like a virus (in which loose, casual connectors are crucial to the spreading of disease). To change behaviour (or norms) - as social campaigns attempt – requires a very different approach – one which depends on mutual support

His work suggests that the process of change can be quantified – and that the “tipping point” for change is when 25% of a relevant population starts to adjust its behaviour.

But otherwise his reference to “relevance” is not all that different from Gladwell’s rather vague use of “context” - although I did enjoy the metaphors Centola uses for different strategies – “shotgun”, “silver bullet” and “snowball” – with his suggestion that the latter is generally the most successful in maximising the concentrated force of related people.

His concluding chapter tried to leave us with 7 strategies but is very weak – you rather feel he ran out of energy,

Windows of Change

One of the issues which fascinates me is social change – how alliances can and do reach sufficient “critical mass” to force governments to change direction. My background is political science but, when in 1990 I moved into consultancy on “capacity development” I did my homework on the “change management” literature which was then so fashionable.

The pandemic has given us a “new kid on the block” to contend with – the social network theorists - whose father and inspiration has been Spanish sociology Professor Manuel Castells.

“The Rules of Contagion - why things spread and Why they Stop” by Adam Kucharski (2020) is a typical of this new genre. It’s actually been lying on my shelves for a few weeks and it is only a much-hyped book by Damon Centola “Change – how to make Big Things Happen” which has made me aware of the questions now being raised in this field.

I have to confess that I am reading it with a jaundiced eye. I am not impressed with the conceit of an author who tells me in the opening pages 

“I have a unique perspective on these ideas….in fact, over the past decades, my ideas have helped shape this new field” and that “I directly manipulated the behaviour of entire populations”

Hasn’t this guy heard of hubris? Or of Icarus who got burned when he flew too high?

Centola is a Professor (of Sociology in a school of Communications and Engineering) who has done a lot of work on both social movements and epidemiology – so clearly has something to say and I will read the book carefully. Indeed I can already spot where I need to amend my own theory of change which currently runs as follows - 

“I have a theory of change which emphasises the individual, moral responsibility as well as the dynamic of the crowd. 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 integrity.

·              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

·              which mobilise social forces

·              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”. 

Centola’s presentation presents evidence which disputes that final point – showing that key actors in the Egyptian Spring with such reputations failed a week before the crucial catalyst. The key events were triggered by others…..

One of his central points is that social change 

“is not about information……it’s about norms……social networks are not merely the pipes…but the prisms that determine how we see those behaviours and interpret the ideas”

I’ll let you know more about the book once I get through it…..

afterthought;

The last book I read about networks was probably Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower –networks, hierarchies and the struggle for global power (2017) which was actually a historian’s fascinating take on the issue. My comments on the book ranged pretty widely and had more to do with my own discovery of the importance of networks but a subsequent post referred to another article not referenced in Ferguson’s copious notes but which place the idea of networks in a far more insightful context than Ferguson – namely Tribes, institutions, markets, networks – a framework for societal evolution by David Ronfeldt (RAND Corporation 1996). It's an important article which argues that each form is necessary – one does not replace the other….With a great table of which I have selected some excerpts - 

Comparison of the 4 models

	Tribe/clan	Institution	market	Network
Key realm	Family/culture	State/government	economy	Civil society
Essential feature	Give sense of identity	Exercise authority	Allow free transactions	Share knowledge
Key Value	Belonging	Order	freedom	equality?
Key risk	Nepotism	Corruption	exploitation	Group think
Identity	Solidarity	Sovereignty	competition	Cooperation
Motivation	Survival	Rules	Self-interest	Group empowerment
structure	Acephalous	Hierarchical	atomised	Flat

Those Clever Romans – the tactical Playbook of the Corporate Elites

That’s half a dozen posts I’ve done in a row on the apparent increased divisiveness in our societies – without any real attempt at either explanation or prescription. Indeed the blog’s focus on political frustration can be traced back to the first mention of the pending election in Bulgaria at the beginning of April. The posts since then have argued that -

- few (if any) societies can any longer claim to be democratic

- we need, very loudly, to be exposing such claims to be the falsehoods they are

- a better vision of democracy needs to be articulated

- pressure groups should coalesce around the demand for citizen juries – initially at a municipal level to demonstrate their benefits

- political parties no longer serve any useful purpose

- we should be insisting that governments start focusing on the big issues - which governments currently seem incapable of even attempting to deal with

- using citizen juries

- governments, in other words, should govern

So let me try to pull the posts together by questioning the way the media has placed the issue of political polarisation on the agenda. It’s clear that social media have increased the rancour of the tone of conversations - - certainly since Twitter started in 2006.

But can we really blame the social media for the strong and sustained political divisions? The fact that 70% of US Republican party members still cannot accept the validity of Jo Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential elections certainly indicates not just a very significant shift in the US political mood but a major question about the resilience and legitimacy of that country’s basic political system. This may or may not be part of “American exceptionalism” but is certainly very serious.

But the wider populist backlash against elite rule is part of something much deeper – and was there for anyone with any sensitivity to see some 20 years ago. I don’t profess to have any particular skills of foresight but in 2001 I drafted a short note which forms the first seven pages of this longer paper (written a decade later). I summarised the basic message at the time thus

·       The “mixed economy” which existed from 1950-1980 was an effective system for the West.

·       It worked because power was diffused. Each type of power – economic (companies/banks etc), political (citizens and workers) and legal/admin/military (the state) – balanced the other. None was dominant.

·       deindustrialisation has, however, now undermined the power which working class people were able to exercise in that period through votes and unions

·       a thought system has developed which justifies corporate greed and the privileging (through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large international company

·       All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought system which now rules the world

·       People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic

·       Privatisation is a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring wealth to the few

·       Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are now supine before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken and the dominant power ruthless in its exploitation of its new freedom

·       It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us

·       Social protest is marginalized - not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian “security state” ready to act against “dissidence”

·       But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project need more detailed exposure

·       as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power

·       We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation - existing and proposed

·       to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed) 

But the elite - and the media which services their interests - noticed something was wrong only when Brexit and Trump triumphed – 5 years ago. But that was simply the point at which the dam broke – the pressure had been building up for much longer.

If we really want to understand what is going on we have to go much further back – not just 20 years but probably at least 50 years – as Anthony Barnett, for one, most recently argued in his extended essay “Out of the Belly of Hell” (2020)

The demos have been giving the Elites a clear warning – “your social model sucks”. Some may not like some aspects of what the crowd is saying – for example the border restrictions….but we ignore its message at our peril. So far I don’t see a very credible Elite response. Indeed, the response so far reminds me of nothing less than that of the clever Romans who gave the world Bread and Circuses. Governments throughout the world have a common way of dealing with a problem – which runs like this –

-       Deny the problem

-       Rubbish the critics

-       Blame the victim

-       Marginalise the issue – concede a little by suggesting that the problem was caused by “just a few bad pennies”

-       set up an Inquiry

-       But ensure (by its composition and direction) that it goes nowhere

-       Compartmentalise the responsibility – to confuse

-       Sacrifice a few lambs

-       Bring on the games and spectacle

-       clowns and jesters

-       Feed the dogs with scraps

-       Starve any programme conceded of serious funds

-       Take the credit for any eventual concession that there was indeed a problem

Suggested Background Reading

We are so  swamped with books these days that someone like me can offer only what catches his eye. But the OECD, Lakoff and Tarrow are significant sources which should be taken seriously!

Catching the Deliberative Wave (OECD 2020) Executive summary of recent important book Innovate Citizen Participation and new democratic institutions - catching the Deliberative Wave which tries to help the global elite make sense of the latest challenge to their rule

Macron’s Grand Debat; useful article about the French approach

citizen jury experience (2016) german; rather academic

Creating Freedom – the lottery of birth, the illusion of consent, the fight for freedom Raoul Martinez (2016) Fascinating book which starts from the proposition that the current failure of our social systems must lead us to question our foundational beliefs

Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013)  Too much of the discussion on democracy is conducted by anglo-saxon political scientists. Here an Italian sociologist makes the connection to the social movement literature

The New Machiavelli – how to wield power in the modern world ; Jonathan Powell (2011) Tony Bliar’s Chief of Staff does some musing about the government class thinking

Moral politics – how conservatives and liberals think; George Lakoff (1996) an important psychologist sets out our tribal thinking

Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition – first in 1994) one of the key writers in this field

Metaphors we live By  George Lakoff (1980) our very words betray us

What’s Transitional Justice – when it’s at home?

I continue to think about the increasing divisiveness in our societies – and the apparently minimal efforts being made to repair the divisions. Or is this just a mirage – something created by a 24-hour media system which exults in scandals and bad news? Perhaps, under the surface, all is much better than we think. Perhaps the optimists like Stephen Pinker are right after all?

It is, of course, impossible to generalise – the world looks very different from a Chinese point of view. Each country needs its own assessment – ideally from a combination of internal and external sources. The UK, for example, perhaps suffers from a surfeit of such appraisals – of both sorts - starting with the prescient Suicide of a Nation edited by Arthur Koestler in 1963 which attracted Olympian disdain from none less than Philip Hobsbawm

After the Obama years, the USA has had, over the past 5 years, only its negative side portrayed - but two recent books offer the country some ideas for how it might rebuild. They are

- The Upswing – how American came together a century ago and how we can do it again by Robert Putnam (2020) – the country’s best-known sociologist and

       -  A Time to build – how recommitting to our institutions can revive the American dream; Yuval Levin (2020) which builds explicitly on an important but neglected book written in 2009.

For the moment, my interest is focused on Bulgaria and Romania – and how such countries might extricate themselves from the vicious circle of hopelessness into which their citizens seem to be locked.

Political leaders of these countries, of course, would not agree with that description – but any reading of the annual Eurobarometer poll of EU citizens is inevitably drawn to the conclusion that the political institutions of central and south-eastern Europe lack legitimacy and public trust. One of Romania’s foremost political analysts – Dorel Sandor – wrote in 2018 a powerful article in which he confessed that he had given up any hope for the country - with this reliable source giving evidence for the loss of trust in the country.

A recent book - Romania Confronts Its Communist Past: Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice; by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan (2018) – reminds us of what lies behind this. Just over a decade ago – after some 15 years of the country being in denial about its past - a maverick President set up a Commission to investigate the communist era. This is the book in which its chairman recounts the experience and impact of the Commission.

I asked a young Bulgarian friend who is a journalist with an interest in Romanian affairs about what efforts either country had made toward “conciliation” in their divided societies – and was, of course, then made immediately aware of the fragility of the words we use when he asked for an explanation of what I meant by the term. I was aware that it is normally used to reference family and minor commercial disputes but I had forgotten that a new field has arisen – of Transitional Justice – into which academics (both Eastern and Western) have been crowding in the past decade. This includes the field of property restitution, lustrace and memory

And I have the feeling that few Bulgarians or Romanians have been let loose with what I would call “mediating skills” of the sort practised by Adam Kahane of the last post

A Short Reading List on Romania

Key Articles on Romania

2020 Freedom House report on Romania; written by reputable Romanian experts

Romania Redivivus (2017) an excellent summary of the social and economic changes since 1989 

A Guide to Change and change management for Rule of Law practitioners (2015) As it says

Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20th century; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2007) The country's finest analyst

Poor Policy-making and how to improve it in states with weak institutions; Sorin Ionitsa (CEU 2006) pity this hasn't been updated

“Fatalistic political cultures” Alina Mungiu-Pippidi 2006 (chapter in Democracy and Political Culture in East Europe in which she argued (a) that it was too easy for people (not least the political elite themselves!) to use the writings of Samuel Huntington to write off countries such as Romania; and (b) that we really did need to look more closely at what various surveys (such as The World Values Survey) showed before jumping to conclusions

Books

Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. borders" Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2019) which looks at the nature and impact of European technical assistance on the development of institutional capacity in central europe and "Neighbourhood" countries

Romania Confronts Its Communist Past: Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice; by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan (2018) – both Romanians. The first who left Romania in the 1980s and returned briefly in the early 2000s to chair a Presidential commission into the impact of communism on the country, the second who still works in Romania. The book is a very personal take on how that Presidential Commission fared.  

In Europe’s Shadow – two cold wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond; Robert Kaplan (2016) - a fascinating book by an American journalist who has had a soft spot for Romania since the beginning of his career. It has an element of the “Common Book” tradition about it with its breadth of reading

The Great Rebirth – lessons from the victory of capitalism over communism ; Anders Aslud and Simeon Djankov (2015) which tells the story from the view point of some of the key actors at the time – with all the strengths and weaknesses that genre involves

Ruling Ideas – how global neoliberalism goes local Cornel Ban (2016) which is a left-wing Romanian critique of how neoliberalism got its grip on countries such as Romania and Spain

A Concise History of Romania; Keith Hitchins (2014) Very readable analysis by the American historian who knows the country’s history best.

Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey; Ronald Young (2014) See section 7.2 at page 31 and all the annexes for the political culture references

Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong; Tom Gallagher (2009) great narrative

Theft of a Nation – Romania since Communism; Tom Gallagher (2005) powerful critique

Romania – borderland of Europe; Lucian Boia (2001) Very readable and well translated study by a Romanian historian

RGY posts

Crowds and Power

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/plus-ca-changeplus-cest-la-meme-chose.html

When will it ever change? (July 2017)

Can Outsiders ever understand what’s going on in Romania? (Jan 2017)

Impervious Power (Jan 2017)

A Divided Country – dangerous times (Feb 2017)

Are Nations really masters of their fates? (April 2017)
Is it people who change systems - or systems which change people? (July 2017)