Mono-crops, etc.; mindsets in governance

Third Way thinking should have opened up a plurality of ways of ‘doing’ governance - as varied as gardens, fields, meadows and wild margins of the rural English landscapes, viewed from Midlands canal tow-paths - but somehow didn’t.

I realise that in this piece, with meadows and wild margins in the title, I could be accused of Wordsworthian reverie[1]. But elevated thought can be quite utilitarian. A managed landscape is after all an instance of public management styles applied.

Rural English landscapes these days, as I find on my daily cycle excursions on the local canal towpaths, are often dominated by mono-crops of one kind or another; fields of look-alike cows, uniform yellow oil seed rape, short stemmed wheat or whatever. But urban back gardens set a different pattern and in deep country settings the dominant mono-crop of the farmland is broken by the multicoloured splendour of an old fashioned hay meadow or, on low lying swampy land, the reeds, rushes and wetland plants of a water meadow; these places often now subject to restoration by environmental activists. Where the canals leave the suburbs and the influence of the motor mower wanes, the banks are free to take on the dissolute appearance of the wild, inadvertently sharing with railways and motorways the role of linear wilderness in an otherwise heavily managed environment. It is this diversity of landscape that canal users admire. Is there a parallel in public management?

The Third Way

Anthony Giddens would certainly have argue so. Mono-crops, meadows, gardens and wild places have of course to be taken as symbols. Mono-crops have the uniformity, imposed order, and planned regularity that 20th Century bureaucrats imposed on housing estates, schools and health care regimes, employing the logic of the mass production processes of their contemporary industrial magnates. Meadows signify the plurality of the open market, where plants, nature’s agents, jostle competitively for position, revealing diverse qualities - deep roots and shallow, tall and short stems - but also compliment each other, some symbiotic - let us call them partnerships, some finding strength in clumped association. Gardens are more varied of course, displaying the temperaments of their owners, but are characterised by purposeful diversity. The wild, in this piece will be identified as the sphere of the undecided – the political arena, where raw forces of civil society are at play.

Inspired by the Labour Party landslide victory at the poles in 1994, Anthony Giddens came down from the intellectual heights of modernist and post-modernist sociological discourse to give us a plain person’s guide to a new kind of thinking. He sought to define the scope of public policy after the ‘death of socialism’ and, he nearly said, the taming of capitalism. The Third Way, subtitled the Renewal of Social Democracy (Giddens 1998) set out a new programme for political action for a left of centre government. The tone of the piece is quite rhetorical – as might be expected[2] - for an avowed polemic. The substance of the programme appears in simple lists such as the following that appears on page 70;

The third way programme
The radical centre
The new democratic state (the state with no enemies)
Active civil society
The democratic family
The new mixed economy
Equality as inclusion
Positive welfare
The social investment state
The cosmopolitan nation
Cosmopolitan democracy

To catch the nuanced meanings to some items on this list requires a lot of turning of pages (Marx and Engels were more succinct in their polemic). In several instances it was clearer that these phrases indicated ‘a good thing’ than a defined condition. In need of creative in-exactitude perhaps, ‘new’ was used as a substitute for ‘good’. In the text as a whole ‘modern’ was likewise applied as indicator of an unquestioned virtue. But what remained clear and innovative was that, in this new order, the state was not to be the sole responsible actor; the market was accepted as an active agent, and civil society an expected – if ill defined - player[3]. The Third Way programme described a diverse social landscape as a desirable as well as inevitable response of British society to the social and economic forces that would be at play in the 21st Century.

I will want to conclude that, despite these Third Way aspirations and modernisation assumptions, public management in the UK is still pervaded at all levels by an essentially mono-crop mentality but - whatever its limitations – the New Labour ‘project’ did attempt to address a recognised dilemma; how to harmonise state hierarchy, market actors and collectivist forces in civil society. The experiments have been many. However, whether one looks at health care, schools management, policing and security or, now, policy for the growing numbers of pensioners and elderly – for which I find I have a particular interest – stable new forms do not seem to have emerged.

Through two terms of office the New Labour administration in Britain sought to turn vision into programme and a further window of opportunity opened with its unique third term. Problems have arisen both with administer-ability; how to actually do a Third Way programme (Curtis 2005), as well as political saleability; how to generate public support. Arguably these – as well as the normal proneness of grand visions to stumble over events - have led to the Third Way programme diverting considerably from the initial vision. Certainly, prophets of the Third Way, Will Hutton conspicuously and even Giddens himself, have reverted from advocates to critical commentators. I attempt to explain why.

The key to this thing I believe lies in the concept of agency: who are the expected actors, who has the freedom to act; who exercises responsibility. The sociological tradition from which Giddens emerged had taken as its problem the question of free will in society. It reacted against Neo-Marxist determinist views in which people were portrayed as passive, alienated beings, subject to the will of others; people who might daily struggle with class, state and industrial systems but could not be expected to dent prevailing structures. In the new thinking choice had to be factored in. Modernist sociologists and contemporary economists of course came at this issue from opposite sides. Sociologists came to say [in extraordinarily convoluted ways it has to be said] that ‘there is more room for people to influence social outcomes than we used to think’. Economists – for whom choice had always been central to their favoured notion of market rationality – began to see institutions as sets of precedents and rule bound procedures that constrain information and hence choice. But both sets of gurus had sufficient focus upon real world processes to feel that they had something to contribute to the world of the practitioner – when the door was opened for them. New Labour opened that door – for a moment in any case. Prompted by the gurus, choice was promoted all over the place; parents as school governors, ‘managers free to manage’, civil servants facing competition for postings, local authorities able to choose how to provide services. But has this produced meadow-like diversity?

Meadow as a metaphor
A meadow, to the English mind, is a pasture lush in variety and abundance. Aesthetically it is the seasonal flowers that impress for their magnificence of diversity and colour. For the herbivore animal it is no doubt the healthy succulence of the foliage and the wholesomeness of the nutrients that such variety can provide.

As a metaphor that captures a view of the common good and the process through which it might be achieved, the meadow has a lot to offer;

q Variety: multiple products offering choice to varied consumers with varied tastes
q No grand design, though plentiful opportunities to influence, through seasonal variations of grazing patterns
q Dispersion, an outcome of plants jostling for a place in the sun, individual members of a species accommodating other species, seeking or giving shade, deep roots complementing shallow, thin fellows finding room between fat; as a consequence members of each species spreading out across the meadow.
Outcome: the good meadow is a consequence of the behaviour of multiple choosers.

This is an individualist’s view. The good society, to a hearty individualist, accommodates diversity and is built up from multiple choices of many people. Such a view has a long history in many cultures – that subsumes but goes way beyond the idea of market. In England the idea that the town is the place of ‘the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker’ will die hard, though it now has more sophisticated expression in the concepts of town planners and civic leaders[4]. There remains the idea – in the rationalist mind of the planner - that the creation of one job, say in manufacturing, will have the effect that multiple others will be created or sustained as that newly employed person creates a demand for a house, a car, a school and so on. In late capitalist society, planners do not attempt to map that demand in total but are content to leave it to the ‘hidden hand’ of the market. The multiplier idea is a nice one because it allows full scope for the consequences of personal choice. Limited demand for candlestick makers, as against light bulb suppliers, does not need to be specified in a master plan but is left to the good judgement of the suppliers. Equally satisfactory is the idea that bad judgement has a beneficial effect for the social weal. People making judgements that turn out to be bad are testing the boundaries of the feasible.

The idea that the interactions take place through a market is a powerful influence upon the individualist’s concept of the common good. Adam Smith gave the concept a good start. It is the dominant ideology of the present time. It is not negated by noting that choice takes place within an institutional framework. Just as meadow flowers and grasses are constrained – or liberated: depending upon how one views it – by the contingent characteristics of their neighbours in the meadow, so with personal choices in social life. The market itself requires a set of socially determined rules about who is entitled to sell or buy what. In most societies property law turns out to be fairly complicated; the direct (as in case law) or indirect (as in statute law) outcome of earlier decisions about buying, selling, holding, accommodating, sharing, managing risk, creating security and so on. Beyond the market are diverse rules and principles about how one should behave towards kith and kin, what is a good or bad way of relating to neighbours, how to treat strangers, etc. Through this ever changing microstructure of institutional arrangements we shape the necessary diversity of social life, become secure in the knowledge of our own social structure and make existence sufficiently predictable to be able to get on with life.

So far this picture of the individualist’s good life does not contain any true commons. What about air pollution, flood, etc.? Can these be managed within this framework or will we have to move to collective group or hierarchical solutions? The individualist’s solution to the commons is to negotiate shares – shares in benefits and shares in obligations. Taking shares can be a different solution to dividing into private lots. English kings, in times past, claimed ownership of certain forests; their primary interest being in furry things that they could chase. The penalties for poaching deer were horrendous. But commoners were granted specific entitlements to keep pigs or horses in the forest or to take deadwood for the fire – related to specific needs and non-competitive with the royal interest.

Some privately owned goods such as the internet are not of value unless there is entitlement for other private users to benefit. Taking shares is of course a more readily available solution if there are convergent interests or complementary interests in the good. It may be the case however, that some public goods / bads are such that the sum of individual choices, contests and bargains cannot be made to add up to a complex of rules that provides adequate governance in the common interest. Air pollution may be one such case. But it is equally the case that a common property regime that ignores the diversity of individual interests in that property is doomed to failure.

The view of the good society as accommodating a variety of specific interests has a lot to be said for it. If diversity of perceptions is a necessary characteristic of the good society, many people are likely to see opportunity for themselves to share in the conceptualisation, recognising that what they give/take to/from the society can also be varied, but with equal recognition.

The Garden as a metaphor

A garden is also a thing of variety, though there will tend to be clusters of plants and production processes, products and (in the case of a commercial garden) marketing strategies.

There should be
q responsiveness to contingent opportunities
q within an overall conscious design
q outcome: the good garden is the result of prioritisation and choice around multiple possibly competing objectives, each initiative a struggle in the face of established priorities
q means of achieving harmony: negotiation

It is perhaps not too far fetched to see in this metaphor the group culture’s response to the fact of separate interests and negotiation processes for reconciling these interests for the sake of harmony within a democratic society framework. Hutton (1999) makes a passionate plea for this conception of the good society, arguing that it is deeply embedded in European Social Democratic thought and practice. He contrasts the stakeholder society with both with unbridled individualism of the Thatcherite version of capitalism and with the heavy hand of the hierarchical state.

A different train of thought heading in a similar direction is the ‘Civil Society’ model, stemming ultimately from Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1835) conceptualisation of the plural institutional structures of 19th Century America, Ferdinand Tonnies (1957) revisit of the theme in the early 20th Century, and Robert Putnam’s more recent eulogy (2000).

The Stakeholder society model for the development of the common weal is not an alternative to the market model, rather an elaboration of it, based upon the observation of co-operation within the market place. Co-operation around a shared interest emerges in the face of competition and in response to competition. Workers and managers can find ways of co-operating in the interests of ensuring effective production, in the face of competition. Small firms producing similar products can form associations through which to develop distant markets, or guarantee quality, or negotiate with governments (the North Italy model).

Unions emerge to represent the interests of categories of workers, investors form councils, local governments across the land associate with each other in various ways, not least to organise responses to the exercise of power by the central state. In the more social spheres, artists cluster in certain locations and find some means of exchange of ideas and stimulus; perhaps in a favoured café. Neighbourhood associations emerge, usually in response to a threat of one kind or another.

Where big government pertains, civic institutions emerge as protest organisations, and can be seen as countervailing forces to the over centralised hierarchy of the state. However, the pure model of the good stakeholder society, is not about protest but about building up the common good on the basis of negotiation between well articulated and represented interest groups. It is about exploiting synergies. The Stakeholder Society may be what Tony Blair is hunting for in his insistence upon partnerships in the provision of public services – though it has to be questioned whether synergy can be achieved by compulsion. Partnership by shotgun is certainly far from Will Hutton’s concept.

Can the pluralism of stakeholder society deal with the true commons? The answer would seem to require that the common in question is put into collective ownership, governed through a council at which the different parties sit and negotiate. A widespread European practice in ‘pre-modern’ times put the management of cities into the collective responsibility of trades associations (Guilds) under Royal Charter. All the monarch had to do was to issue this charter as a legitimating instrument, allowing the collective organisation the right to raise funds, spend, own, and exercise necessary sanctions in the common interest. On a world scale, to take the example of climate change, we are now attempting to achieve negotiated agreement between the nations, through the Rio Conference and its successors. Bargaining is slow, outcomes are uncertain, but it is often the best that we have got.

The Mono-crop model

It will be clear that I have a ‘thing’ against the culture that produces the mono-crop. So let me start with some praise. Cultivation of single species of rice, or maze or, in this country, wheat in large fields under controlled conditions and with appropriate doses of fertilisers and pesticides was one of the wonders of the 20th Century. Bigger volumes of food produced at lower prices have, it can be argued, fed more people. But the strength of the Mono-cropping system is also its weakness. Where every one plant is a replica of its neighbour the vulnerability of the one is the vulnerability of the others and some individualist bug will find this weakness, replicate itself in response to this golden opportunity and thrive.

Successful Mono-cropping requires:

q a constant process of centrally managed innovation: to keep ahead of the pests and to defeat the diminishing returns that results from negative entropy
q control of all ‘inputs’ in the hands of the master, to create ideal conditions for growth
q control of the natural environment, so that control of inputs is possible
q complete knowledge of both production environment and process
q a production cycle of known periodicity and predictability
q a monitoring system that will ensure that deviations or unforeseen happenings do not distort outcomes
q and, usually, machinery

As the human environment becomes more man made this model of orderly management has gained in appeal. It is a hierarchical order. One set of decisions has to suffice, otherwise there will be conflicts of information or interest, the outcome being that most people find themselves following orders.

In what sense is this a model of the common good? Can such a controlled system create the ‘greatest good of the greatest number? Can central control and uniformity (standing in lines or queues) satisfy multiple needs? The State Socialist countries that in many ways dominated the middle years of the 20th Century were built upon this assumption. We now mock their plans and organisations, forgetting that, many such countries achieved the fastest rates of industrialisation experienced in the 20th Century. It is also one of the many ironies in public management that over the same period, capitalist society, while built upon more individualist suppositions, also relied upon massive, bureaucratically managed production systems to produce uniform goods for the mass market [with massified consumption tastes] while the bureaucratic machinery of state doled out uniform and universal welfare goods.

The same stateist philosophies that relied upon hierarchical organisation to produce goods and distribute services found it no problem to think that the pure common goods could be dealt with by centralising decisions in these areas as well. The quality of water and the control or river pollution is decided by national governments and administered by centralised agencies of the state (or superstate). The risk of flood is met, not by individuals in flood prone areas building houses on mounds or stilts and keeping a boat handy (as is the culture in flood prone Bangladesh): not by getting together in groups under local leadership to build protective embankments (also a Bangladeshi habit) but by centrally administered controls or centrally conceived earthworks.

And these stateist philosophies have not gone away. Direct bureaucratic control may have been replaced by agencies of various kinds and armies of inspectors, but the tell-take thinking can still be found underlying much official documentation. Ranking systems reveal central categorisation and judgements. They are about uniformity, and set supposedly free agents into a flurry of activity to achieve that uniformity.

The canal side landscape

The UK countryside is still dominated by the mono-crop, but things may be changing. One has to go to the farms themselves or to listen to the farming programmes on the radio to realise that many farmers are thinking their way out of dependency upon one crop, one supply chain and one agri-business based outlet to market - to realise also that the government edifice that supported this simplicity is gradually being replaced, both in terms of its structures and its thinking. The 20th Century version of the ‘modern’ is making way for something else, far more varied, more diverse in its expectations of active agency, more harmonious – at least in some of its thrusts – with the ways of nature. The other day I met a man – ex schoolteacher, now farmer who is growing saffron crocuses. “Saffron is the only product worth more than its weight in gold” he said. Now there is an idea; and there a good example of active agency.

The problem of implementation

To have a vision as to what the good modern or post modern society should be like is one thing, to develop the means of achieving it is another. The Third Way book was strong on the idea of the good society as being one that would harness the market, revive community and transform the public sector but contributed little to the debate that must have taken place within the civil service as to how to achieve it.

If we look first at the question of what the New Labour government attempted to do, a contradiction which, I argue, came to dog the process, quickly emerged. What central government gave with one hand it sought to control with the other. Managers might be shaken out of line administration and made responsible for outcomes; they might be ‘free to manage’, but their performance came increasingly to be regulated and inspected using thoroughly mono-crop methodologies. As a supposedly free agent the headmaster [liberated from local education authority ‘tyranny’ I suppose] came to have a standard national curriculum imposed and performance against it assessed by an enhanced national inspectorate. A civil servant, transformed into agency chief executive, is told precisely what his agency must achieve, to what timetable, and a tick-box national audit becomes her/his monitor.

In the [relatively] small world of international assistance – my personal encounter – aid management has also become subject to competitive tendering. Fair enough, that might be read as encouraging diversity [although it is rapidly becoming a game that only the big players can play]. But it is also subject to innumerable performance strictures monitored from central places. All these performance requirements sound good – about poverty, gender, environment, and so on [and a huge international effort has gone into the development of hopefully shared Millennium Development Goals]. Public participation is often a requirement. A range of measures have been designed to promote the interest of the poor. Some processes have been specifically introduced with the idea of restoring ‘agency’ to the poor and dispossessed. Yet, for the project manager, these are in tension with the same tick-box performance monitoring procedures that that have become the public management norm. Tick boxes belong to mono-crop monitors; the poor by contrast are supposed to be allowed, encouraged, supported, to become agents of their own meadow-like development (Curtis 2003). These things do not reduce to tick boxes.

Amongst present day public agents the hospital doctor is probably the most thoroughly confused being. It is in this sector that the plurality of contradictory principles is most apparent. Market like mechanisms have been tried to regulate the use of drugs. Performance targets have been introduced to speed up the processing of patients. Administrators have been introduced by the dozen to rationalise this processing. The hospital does of course lend itself to factory comparisons – and therefore factory designed management process. As long as patients can be persuaded to come to the right entrances with the right complaints a speedy system can be developed to inject the right fluids or cut the appropriate pieces – and even to feed and water as necessary, monitored by people with clip boards. Fortunately factory management systems have become very sophisticated and fortunately also there are standard complaints; faulty appendices, hernias, varicose veins that can be more or less dealt with through appropriately organised queues. But good health is also a thing of gardens - beds of tender care; bring back the Ward Sister, meadows, places where we choose where to get advice; if not the wild; countenance alternative medicine.

And now comes old age [to all in due course, let me assure young readers] a real public management issue at the present time. A Green Paper posits or re-posits some very Third Way ideas (Department of Health 2005, Society Guardian 18 05 05). Most dramatic is the notion that the elderly could be granted – more or less as a payback for long participation in economy and as a tax payer, I suppose – the right to make decisions about how to use public funds to generate the support that she or he comes to need. It would be a kind of voucher scheme. The professionals however are dubious. They doubt that people would be capable of making the necessary decisions; in some cases mental faculties will indeed have declined. A subsidiary question that bears upon their judgement is how public authorities would be able to assure themselves that the decisions being taken are sensible, qualified people are being employed, etc.. The writers are assuming that professionals in the public service will still have to tick the necessary boxes. Certainly there would need to be a quantum shift in ways of managing. But, who could doubt that diverse meadow-like responses would emerge in response to such a radical proposal. The great hidden army of life-long carers might find new roles. The newly-retired could be found as carers for the longer retired. Persons of sound limb could do errands for persons of sound mind, and someone lovely could read me poetry all day. In other words there is no bounding of the novel social arrangements that could emerge.

More than metaphor

How do I get back from here to my meadows and gardens? A sudden memory comes to me of an evangelistic American forester [attending a UN environmental conference] extolling the virtues of trees. Hospital patients who look out on trees and greenery, he asserted, need less medication and recover quicker than those who face concrete. We do need to get gardens, glades, greenery directly into public management as well.

Conclusion

In this reflection, the shortcomings of Third Way ideology – or more importantly the weaknesses apparent in the ‘doing’ of its diversity - have been made to take the blame for the persistence of mono-crop mentality in public management. This is perhaps not entirely fair. New Labour is too much of a present day phenomenon for anyone to be able to adequately trace influences or attribute blame. But at least a part of the present state of affairs must be put down to popular perception and populist responses in politics. We, the public, have been highly resistant to the idea that we should cultivate our own security, make adequate pension provision, re-invent mutual support, or plant the seeds of home care for our old age. We have not ‘bought into’ this philosophy. We are happy to be individualist consumers. We can hold political parties in distain – another very individualist indulgence. We can even vote opportunistically. But we still expect ‘them in authority’ to solve emergent social problems and blame them when they don’t. We get what we deserve, I suppose.

Like Wordsworth[5], I hanker after evidence of meadow-like diversity (without nostalgia; it was not there in my youth). It is a goal worth striving for but I do not think that it can be hectored into existence by a messianic centre, however inspiring the founding polemic. Nor do I think that an emerging diversity of institutions could survive being subjected to tick box monitor regimes. The problem in the medium term is going to be to hang on to the vision through inevitable disappointment.


References

Curtis D 2006 ‘Mindsets and Methods: Poverty Strategies and the Awkward Potential of the Enabling State’ International Journal of Public Sector Management

Curtis D 2005 ‘Known Ways and Labyrinths in Public Management’, Local Governance Vol 30 No. 4. pp199-208

Curtis D. 1999 ‘Institutional options for Local Governance and Community Self Management’, Local Governance, 3, 153-166.

De Tocqueville A 1835, Democracy In America New York Alfred A Knopf

Department of Health UK, 2005 ‘Independence, Wellbeing and Choice, www.dh.gov.uk reviewed, Society Guardian, 18-05-05].

Giddens A, 1998, The Third Way; the Renewal of Social Democracy Cambridge, Polity Press

Hutton W, 1999, The Stakeholding Society, Blackwell Publishing Co. Oxford UK , Malden MA USA,)

Korten D C, 1990 Getting to the 21st Century, Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda West Hartford, Connecticut, Kumarian Press

Putnam R, 2000 Bowling Alone; The Collapse and Revival of the American Community New York, Simon and Schuster

Tonnies F 1957 Community and Society East Lansing, Michigan State University Press
[1] … And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, /Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, /And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; /A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still /A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; …….[from, William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey]
[2] …as was ‘The Communist Manifesto’ where Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, departing from their scholarly norm, sought to catch the imagination of the readership with an account of the inevitability of the sweep of historical forces towards a new social order.
[3] This may have been new to UK public management but in development studies plural institutional strategies already had their advocates, such as David Korten (1990).
[4] It is the England of G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Reeling road and rolling road that rambles round the shire’; if I may risk getting poetic again.
[5] 'There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, / The earth and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / It is not now as it hath been of yore:- / Turn wheresoe'er I may, /By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.' William Wordsworth