Three fellows who lunch keep a wary eye on President Obama, fearing charismatic precedents, seeing the need for transformation in the public management of the world economy, the environment and international politics but hoping for nothing more than for common sense to prevail.
The seasons change. In our Northern hemisphere, as inversely in the Southern, the days lengthen and shorten. Yet, what were once the reassurances of nature these days often fail to reassure. Serious uncertainties assault us;
In the environment;
- an ‘unseasonable’ cold spell in Britain: a sign of the slowing Gulf Stream?
- a time without rain evidence of Global Warming?
- normal ‘grey’ a sign that grey will forever prevail’…..?
Serious economic disruption;
- the banking crisis; management failure
- or systems failure within the global financial institutional set-up
- or end to capitalism as we know it?
Serious noise in the world of politics;
- the ‘war on terror’, what is this?
No, on this one we know; a self-fulfilling prophesy. Hate breeds hate; the only question is why? In whose interest is it to stimulate this socially reproductive process? What power is protected by its pursuit? What weakness or fear is thereby perpetuated?
And most disturbing of all; the understandings that have sustained normal behaviour no longer explain; no longer enable. We look for change. Where will it come from?
Three fellows who lunch: a report.
Long experience in the real worlds of advertising, the law or the odd byways of academe, incline a fellow to wariness if not weariness. All is never as it seems, even when the signs are positive. So when three persons of a certain age - defined by the orange coated card that does wonders at London’s ticket barriers - meet to discuss the state of the world over lunch we were of course wary; even about President Obama.
I doubt if we were alone in enjoying a strange feeling of disbelieve - that did not yield to the usually normalising effects of a glass or two of red - that the American public had chosen an apparently sensible man to lead their nation. The normal expectation of democratic processes after all is that if there are two or more candidates for high office Jo Public will choose the dud. Yet here we are with a man of apparently moderate views working his way into the White House and issuing his first words - press releases and so on - and they too are of moderation.
Not that the dud always turns out bad. When Ronald Reagan was elected, we remembered, such was the despair of the rest of the World (we claim to be competent representatives) that we had to grasp at the slightest whiff of hope. A contemporary spoof film poster had adorned a colleague’s office wall. Reagan had Maggie Thatcher in his arms as if in a scene from Gone with the Wind; text reading “She promised to follow him to the end of the earth; He promised to organise it”. It captured the mood. This screen cowboy had stomped the electoral stage, rhetorical six guns blazing. We took refuge in the wisdom of a contemporary wit: the rest of the world would take note and ‘load blanks’. As things turned out they did. Or perhaps it was simply the coincidence of the emergence of an apparently sensible Soviet leader on the side of the ‘Indians’ - not by election of course - Mr Mikhail Gorbachev. And the rest is history. At least we have been allowed a continuation of that messy process.
Serious contemplation of an Obama era had also to overcome a second level of suspicion if not disbelieve. The man is so eloquent and hansom. Our discussion became a bit difficult at this point. We confessed without problem that it was the universal view of our wives that this man had what it takes. (Note that, as a matter of equity, we grant our three wives a higher status in representative-ness that we claim for ourselves - they the universe, we just the globe…).
But are we allowed the suspicion that superior appearance and way with words is a dangerous adjunct to those who hold the reigns of power in America? Some election analyst may yet demonstrate that what tipped the balance in America were the votes of women, abandoning prejudice and responding to deep urges to associate with alpha male power. A touch jealous perhaps, we put aside such suspicion and thought instead of the nurturing and safeguarding wisdom of women in choosing one who uses words with sincerity and moderation.
For me the big problem is how to respond to apparent charisma. I may now be deviating from the conversation of the three - the third glass, as Shakespeare might have said, increases eloquence but decreases the effectiveness of memory. But it is a worrying issue. A certain seniority - indicated in travel passes - allows us to have rather vivid memories of the last American charismatic, JFK. Not just his end - an end that had clearly been exercising the minds of America’s security officials as well as the reflective public over the election - but his reckless postures in relation to America’s foes. “Ich bin ein Berliner” was a great line for use at the Brandenburg Gate but did not add one jot to a fellow’s sense of security. Heading for the moon was fine, but has allowed successive American Presidents to dream of Star Wars. And the more we have learned about how John F carried on in his public-private affairs the less sense of retrospective well-being we live with. Will the charismatic Obama do better? [The evidently sensible Michelle may see to one aspect of it]. Or is there something inevitably dangerous in charisma?
An aside here; we in Britain have had our own, not very encouraging, ten year long brush with charisma: our Tony Blair. New Labour promised a new land. Its wordsmiths coined new slogans. Tony emerged as a dexterous manipulator of the media: nothing quite as simple as “yes we can”, but a touch of the same charm nevertheless. But it did not take very long before sound-bites, spin, ‘quick on the feet repartee’ and undoubted rhetorical powers ceased to disguise quite normal leaden feet and a sadly blinkered vision when it came to war or peace, or other real-world vexations.
We have to ask then, was it charisma that Americans were looking for in the recent elections or was the outcome simply a result of the binary nature of modern electoral politics? People perhaps thought, ‘whatever he is inclined to say or how he is inclined to say it, he cannot be worse than what went before’. Or was it indeed what he said during the seemingly endless electoral process? What in the words of the man - as selectively reported of course - could have encouraged us to hope?
* * * * *
A digression here to link this discussion of charisma back to my overall focus upon processes of governance: How do we locate charisma within the formal structures and processes of government, or within the processes of identity and collectivity, or within the competitive individualist thrust in public life? What kind of authority comes from or results in charisma?
These were questions for classical sociology. I am groping here; back to the intellectual giants, those who commanded the heights in the great contests of ‘60s’ sociological disputation. I need some reminding and find on line a very helpful essay by a Professor Charles Lindholm[1]. Max Weber and Emile Durkheim were the two early 20th Century thinkers, one German, one French, representing contrasting perspectives and methods around whose standards 60s Sociologists tended to rally - Weber to some degree sanitising Marx for those nervous of Marxian polemic. Both Weber and Durkheim were interested in kinds of thought and kinds of action as these define kinds of society.
Weber was much taken up with what he saw or perhaps hoped for as the increasing rationality of early 20th Century society in which scientific thinking and law would progressively guide behaviour and traditional thinking would wither away. The charismatic for Weber was a unique character, not altogether rational, not followed because of apparent clarity of ideas or vision but because of personal magnetism.[2] Such beings he thought have an authority that does not fit within traditional leadership, or rational or bureaucratic authority patterns but could be instrumental in achieving change from one state to another; he hoped positively. Of course he did not live to see or hear Hitler do his bit to damage the reputation of charisma.
For Durkheim, father of the ‘social construction of reality’ school of thinking, and I would guess for his follower, Mary Douglas - of whose ideas more below - charisma would be much less problematic, because the processes through which societies of different kinds generate ideas are not assumed to be entirely rational anyway; hence Professor Lindholm’s interest in analysis of crowd behaviour or the emergence of religious or other sects under the guidance of an apparent charismatic. To sway a crowd or inspire a group of people and lead them out into the wilds of the American mid-West - which seems to happen quite often - makes for an interesting social phenomenon but it not does not transform society as a whole. Indeed, the resultant sects can probably be seen as reactions against dominant social values. We have insipient crowd swayers in London. Tourists and a few native Brits go by bus or tube to Hyde Park Corner weekly to hear them. The speakers’ licence to say what they like how they like is widely regarded as some kind of safety valve, defusing forms of social tension; when not simply allowing an egotist an opportunity to be egotistical.
For Weber the role of the charismatic in social transformation fascinated but his analytic powers were largely focused upon world religions or trends in the history of far places [such as India], assuming that contemporary transformation in Europe would follow the path laid down by the Enlightenment thinkers. For Durkheim and more significantly for followers in the Durkheimian tradition such as Talcott Parsons or Edward Shills, social transformation came to be seen as a self-correcting process of differentiation and re-integration that - surprise, surprise - would lead with apparent inevitability towards a condition called modernity. In this process there is no apparent need for charisma at all.
Interestingly, much sociological analysis has moved on from considering the individual qualities of the charismatic to pondering the social or economic or political circumstances in which such qualities are called for. Crudely; the old question; was Hitler an outcome of conditions or a cause of another mindset?
So where does charismatic leadership or follower-ship fit into contemporary political processes?
We should note that there are two parts to any political equation; the part of the governor and the part the governed. Both halves display matching mindsets. Let me set that out in terms of the types of governance that have been outlined elsewhere; the hierarchical, the groupist and the individualist approaches to maintaining order and, at the same time, expand upon the framework to include an element so far neglected, namely the isolate, the alienated, the sufferer from ‘atomised subordination’; an individualist culture that is so because its adherents feel themselves miss-fits, a category into which most of us, at some time or another, may feel we fall[3].
The hierarchical mindset matches an assumption of the virtues of super-ordination with an equal assumption of the benefits that stem from willing subordination; disguised in industry as a legal-rational contract, in politics as a rather vaguer social contract between state and individual. The social contract leaves the subject (even if called citizen) free to take solace in whatever “lies, flattery and entertainment”[4] the authorities deign to dish out and to grumble when perceived entitlements under the contract are not delivered to acceptable standards. .
Groupism is sustained by locating virtue in the values of the group and vice in the values of ‘other’, all others. The groupist mindset in politics allows every individual to balance the delights of mutuality - the sense of belonging to community, political party, tribe or nation - with the acrimony, rancour and spitefulness that follows when ‘group’ fails to deliver. Card carrying political party loyalists will identify with the ‘ferrets in a sack’ picture that I paint here. To group together is a comforting way of distancing difference but has its costs.
The individualist mindset in politics is a rather easier animal to deal with - except perhaps by aspirant leaders [herding cats being the possible metaphor here]. Each individualist is only looking for individual advantage, his/her alignment with others a pragmatic deal to achieve a mutually convenient objective, her/his commitment confined to a handshake, his/her need for belief or ideology happily limited to metaphor - ‘level playing field’ or a vaguely inclusive, ‘turn to in time of need’ religion - such as is provided perhaps by the Church of England.
To be outside each or any of the above three types defines a condition of marginality that generates a fourth type of culture. Mary Douglas who started this game, herself a committed Catholic, often ignored this logically necessary category, as I have done heretofore. She was herself inclined to see hierarchy and its associated rituals as the norm from which ‘other’ cultural types deviate, abandonment of hierarchy and ritual leading towards inward looking religious sects, abandonment of both ritual and group loyalties, to the individualist culture of the opportunist network or market. But this left a range of behaviours that are evidence of a response to dominant ideas or regimes that she initially saw as fatalist, only later, as it emerged from her continuous re-workings of key texts[5] variously adding the notions of ‘atomised subordination’, or ‘insulated’ individualism, or ‘backwater isolation’[6]. As other writers took an interest in her Grid/Group matrix the words alienation - linking to Marx or to Weber and anomie - normlessness - linking back to Durkheim became associated with this box. The evident behaviours that she and others see as outcomes of this cultural type included student protest, dropping out of society, Millenarian movements, and - back to our theme - a tendency to follow charismatic leaders.
It is satisfactory in any framework of thought to be reasonably consistent and I think that Mary Douglas eventually got there[7]. But this last category is admittedly a bit of a catch-all. The least satisfactory aspect of such exercises in typology is that they identify but do not explain. Why the culture of alienation or anomie? Marx and Weber provided a rationale, something to do with forces in history, or with spread of scientific thinking. Durkheim and Douglas stick with the essentially circular model of causality in which societies produce mindsets and mindsets reinforce societies. All we can take from the Grid/Group framework as such is that charisma is associated with the least well defined and perhaps least stable social configuration. This will not do. Let us go back to the beginning of this little piece.
The thing which the environment, the economy and the international polity share at the present time is that the understandings that have sustained our use of natural resources, or the international as well as domestic and personal flows of funds, incomes and expenditures, or international relationships have suddenly - perhaps not so suddenly but nevertheless disturbingly quickly - become untennable. What were reasonable sureties for many of us [of course many were wiser] are now alien. In Grid/Group terms, huge numbers of us will have moved from comfort zones in a bureaucratic hierarchy box , or in a collective zone of GreenPeace membership, or in an ‘I look after myself and subscribe to charity’ box, to say ‘This no longer adds up’.
The sociological underpinning of this shift is rather complex and not quite captured in either of the classical interpretative approaches that we have been considering. There is a relationship between ways of thinking, the ways in which social agents have behaved and outcomes for society, but, as far as I can see, in each of these spheres the implicit behavioural models that make these linkages have to be supplemented by a good dose of Chaos Theory, before they make sense. Something ‘out there’ takes hold;
Thinking about the environment - in the Christian tradition in any case - has been dominated by the biblical assumption of man’s dominion over nature, resulting in extractive property rights, uninhibited consumption, random disposal of waste and painfully slow adjustments to the growing evidence of feedback links in global warming, declining soil fertility, oceanic pollution and acidity……
Thinking about the international economy over recent years has been dominated by a neo-libertarian philosophy granting precedence to market forces over state controls, encouraging developing country governments to increase their exposure to foreign investment that would ensure the benefits of trade; making the poor think ‘micro-credit’ without always thinking ‘micro-savings’; allowing the marketisation of ‘financial products’ that fuelled spirals of expansion but are now deemed toxic; forgetting that bubbles burst……..
Thinking about international relations? Well this is a bit different. American Neo-Con pre-eminence in international relations under George W Bush was of shot enough duration for many of us to have known a time when it could be presumed that national interest would be the motive force in international relations and that the powerful would exercise their power but that naked greed and belligerence would not be their favoured strategy; that peace agreements were worth working for and that taking weapons of mass destruction out of the equation was also for the best. So when the Neo Cons changed all that we were shocked.
The War on Terror followed providing a way of thinking that pervades international relations at all levels, to this day; encouraging the Sri Lankan government in the view that the Tamil Tigers can be eliminated; demanding of the Pakistan government that the Pakistan Taliban be eliminated…. No, we did not believe in that way of thinking but are still looking for something better to turn up[8].
Which brings us back, I think, to some musings on the likely outcome of the election of President Obama.
Actually we had learned very little of Barack Hussain Obama’s intentions on any specific policy area while he was at the hustings. On matters of international import; the things that concerned us most out here in the big wide world, there was only a word or two. What we did pick up was a few simple things that encouraged a hope of moderation. He would talk to ……, have open conversations with ….., hold out his hand towards, ….all indicative of a reasonable man. Sure: a contrast with what went before. But can he stick to it?
A few days later as Obama was getting himself established we had further evidence. He had avoided triumphal gestures; no transformation of the White House - as a French email joke had it - into its negative, a Black House. Time has freed me from any attempt to faithfully represent the discourse of my friends over some Arabic Mezze and a bottle or two of modest red so now I can voice my own hopes and fears without contradiction. Put it another way. I am free to contemplate what I see as the contradictive demands of and on leadership at the present time: which are these:
- what we call the world order is in disarray and its supportive economic and political logics and doctrines are proved false. We need some dynamic leadership to bring new vision and help shake us out of old understandings and into new. That might sound like a demand for charisma
- but a charismatic - as argued above - is a dangerous being unless open to challenge and possessed of a willingness to modify her/his views and opinions in exchange with others. A ‘lets talk’ posture might be a good start.
Can he stick to it? We don’t know. I find myself encouraged by the modesty of his beginnings in office. He, like the rest of us, can “screw up”, and acknowledges the same. On the other hand I note with mild alarm the transformation of what appeared to be an unconditional ‘talk to’ into “if they unclench their fist first”. That is an old game and does not equate with either secular or religious approaches to peace.
The secular formula for cooperation is called ‘tit for tat’[9]. Game theory players arrived at the formula through repetitive simulations of a conflict and cooperation scenario. It turns out that a successful, stable, formula is simple. Cooperate with your opponent on the first move then follow your opponent’s last move for all subsequent moves. The success of the strategy is attributed to the fact that it combines, as the blurb says, ‘nice’ (cooperating on the first move), ‘retaliatory’ (in following punishment with punishment) as well as ‘forgiving’ (immediate return to cooperation after one cooperative gesture by your opponent). So, Mr Obama, please be the first to stick out your hand.
And, Mr Obama, if you need encouragement to follow a secular directive don’t forget the religious dicta. The American religious right probably would swallow hard - perhaps preferring the thunderous front end of the Good Book - but ‘Turn the other cheek’ is in their somewhere. And if an Islamic text could be useful at some stage try the Surat-al-Anfal (8), ayah 61, which the web assures me translates as “But if they incline to peace, you also incline to peace and trust in Allah”.
This is a topic that will not go away and it is not the only ailment that besets the world. As fellows who lunch our aim, in a modest way, is to help to right some wrongs. More monitoring will be necessary in the near future requiring my colleagues to get out their bus passes again. But, Mr Obama, we are not asking for charisma. Charm yes. Extraordinary powers, no. Just a bit of common sense and decency please. The signs are good. On this one we stick with ‘hope’.
[1] ‘Charisma, Crowd Psychology and Altered States of Consciousness’ http://www.bu.edu/anthrop/faculty/lindholm/ASCCharisma.html
[2] S.N. Eisenstadt, Introduction in S.N Eisenstadt, ed. Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building, Selected Papers 1968
[3] Not the ‘Ring the bell conductor, I’m on the bus’ of the ME generation but ‘Stop the bus; stop the World I want to get off’, sad but it happens.
[4] As C. Wright Mills - another 60s icon Sociologist - put it somewhere
[5] Natural Symbols editions in 1970 and 1973, Essays in the Sociology of Perception 1982, How Institutions Think, 1986/7
[6] see Richard Fardon’s analytic biography Mary Douglas (London and New York, Routledge 1999) page 224.
[7] Many others think that her erudition ran away with her, but there are still many scholars in quite different fields who have made use of her basic framework
[8] I was working in Bangladesh at the time and penned the following; Subdued.
The mighty leaders of the West / with powers of rhetoric are blest / to set the World to moral right / a right supported by their might. / They quite disguise material gain / for which they’re quite prepared for pain / to fall on others. Others who / if wise enough, will then subdue / their shame and self disparagement / but naturally will soon resent / the pious claim that betterment / can come battle blasted. / That leaves the little likes of me / to face covert hostility.
[9] http://brembs.net/ipd/tft.html-3k-
Friday, June 19, 2009
The Sometimes Missing Jester
We do not find a slot labelled ‘Jester’, ‘Joker’, ‘Fool’ or ‘Praise-singer’ on present day government organisation charts, but such characters have cropped up historically in many parts of the world. They have apparent purpose; to speak truth to power. If power is with the people then, we the people, need the truth. Jesters there are but do we listen?
Academic theorising about contemporary governance can make heavy reading. It is not just that the subject has an air of high seriousness about it; there are after all serious issues or situations that need to be governed. It is not simply the endless questioning of other people’s meanings while attempting to pin new meanings onto thoroughly slippery concepts. No, it is more likely that the mental constructs that we build and seek to share must not only explain but be able to provide a moral base for action: for making war, building peace, doing business or - my theme here - fixing the environment. Theories of governance are never purely positivist; norms are hidden in there somehow. Explanations have to serve also as justifications. My present reflection might appear to be an escapist indulgence in this respect. I want to talk about the Joker, the Fool, the Praise-singer who can also blame and various equivalents. Indulge the thought that these social roles are totally marginal to our governance theme. But note that such characters recur in literature, history and anthropology with some regularity and be prepared to think otherwise.
My mind runs back to Christmas Day or was it Boxing Day, 1971, or was it 1972, no matter. The scene was the kgotla - the village assembly in Mankgodi Village, Botswana. I was the resident Anthropologist - in those days many villages seemed to have them. My task was to understand how village society ‘worked’, its politics, its economics, its processes of social change; in particular how external agents of change might inject ideas about better farming and such like; very much part of the prevalent ‘modernisation’ theme. So I had not taken particular interest in the choirs that I had heard rehearsing in different parts of the village. ‘Missionary influence’ I had thought and since I am a bit allergic to hymns I nearly stayed away when informed that choirs would be singing in the kgotla over the festive occasion. But I didn’t. Hymns or no, the choral tradition in Southern Africa is stunning. But as I dived into the melee with my tape recorder I realised that I was on to something else. The trigger came as I was attempting to talk to the Chief and saw his face turn to thunder. The song being sung at the time was questioning whether it was he, the chief, who had stolen the post from the village post box or whether it was the elected Councillor who had done it, perhaps to discredit him[1]. On the face of it the song was an open confrontation with authority, yet the singers were evidently immune from the normal, well established principles of Tswana jurisprudence. Chief Tobega could apparently do nothing about it[2]. An aspect of social order had been inverted for the occasion. Clearly there was a political dynamic behind these harmonies that I might have missed. Maybe the upside down bit of governance is as important as the upright.
What do I take from this? It is not going to be simple. Social life can probably rival biological life in its connectivity and complexity. James Lovelock with his Gaia concept was ridiculed back in the 1960s by professional biologists[3], each into his or her own kind of worm or plant or aphid, but eventually won recognition as each worm studier found that changes in worm nourishing conditions mattered, not a bit but fundamentally to the success or failure of said worm and that these conditions are shaped by other worms or plants or aphids that in turn …. Life in other words is a big and complicated thing. So, I recognise, is our social means of getting a place in it.
Lovelock’s big idea was that the Earth is self-regulating. Kick it and it will kick back. We humans are kicking it with over-consumption and pollution and it will kick back with - he might have said - storms, pestilence and things unpredictable. That is how his Gaia image has entered common minds - such as mine. And there it echoes the cries of a deranged King who, having botched his relationships with his three daughters, stomps the moors with his friend the Fool - Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The grand theme in all this is regulation: a theme much talked about in the field of government and governance. Our modern or post-modern governments - perhaps particularly the British government - are very keen on ‘putting in place’ regulatory systems through which to control the price of gas, the frequency and timeliness of trains, the disposal of waste, the performance of schools or the extraction of fish from the North Sea. The problem with such ‘put in place’ systems, I argue, is that they do not always fit. They assume a rather mechanical model of connectivity: that all the bits behave as did the bits of James Watt’s steam engine, the speed of which was governed by a regulator - a device that sat atop the machine and responded to acceleration by centrifugal expansion to slow its rotation. James Watt’s governor worked for slow, stationary engines - though not very well apparently. In the mechanical world the governor concept has been theorised and refined over a century and a half to provide a range of useful devices. A governor can be fitted to curb the exhuberance of drivers of fast cars and some such could be used to enforce motorway speed restrictions - if there were the political will to do so. Aye, there’s the rub; at a certain point regulation becomes a social matter rather than mechanical, introducing other dynamics entirely.
Many things have no machine-like connectivity at all. In these cases, putting in place a so-called independent regulator with powers to demand information on this and that and to set limits upon behaviour of this kind or that kind can have quite perverse consequences. Between declining fish stocks in the North Sea and the rate of extraction of fish from that stock and the behaviour of fishermen or their unions and the propensity of consumers to consume fish, there are innumerable linkages and feedback processes that are not really understandable by, or reducible to, a readily applicable formula. What a regulator then does can have quite perverse consequences. When the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission and the European Union enforcers set limits on the size, type and quantity of permitted catch their rules sound logical but vast quantities of fish, deemed ineligible for landing, finish up being thrown back dead into the sea. French fishermen protest and block harbours at the thought of any restriction on their rights to fish[4]. A seemingly endless process of attempted conflict resolution follows[5]; which might just be missing the point. Catch limitation is not necessarily the most effective way of controlling a wild stock. Exclusion zones might work better. Rotating catchment zones might allow for accelerated recovery after intensive extraction[6]. Regulatory systems have to reflect sophisticated understandings of underlying technical possibilities. They also have to be compatibility with feasible social processes, the main criterion of which is that the perpetrators have some interest in successful outcomes. Ordinary minds would see the weakness of a crude ‘putting in place’ approach to regulation if an Atmospheric Pollution Regulator decided that - to control CO2 emissions - citizens should be licensed to breathe only on alternate days. System survival and human survival within our biosphere requires more sophisticated understandings to drive more sophisticated processes.
Is there not scope for self-regulation?
The idea of self-regulation is very attractive and has been adopted in various disciplines. In economics the idea that the market is self-regulating has been central to the discipline since its founding and has survived the plentiful evidence that history has thrown up to the contrary. Many people responding to price signals, supply responding to demand, ought to do the trick; other things being equal; which of course they seldom are. When markets crash there are always two plausible interpretations;
- ‘they would have been self-correcting had not governments intervened’ and
- ‘look what happens when external regulation is inadequate’.
The first survives mostly in the minds of believing economists. The latter recurs in the minds of sceptical stateists. Crashes happen when market players don’t self-regulate because they are testing the boundaries of government indulgence [moral hazard]. Slumps follow when government bail-outs fail to re-establish the risk sharing basis of trust. Might it not have been better had some Joker on the sidelines ventured;
(rubbish) + (rubbish) = asset?
In the functionalist tradition of Anthropology and Sociology the idea that social systems are self-regulating is built into the underlying methodological suppositions. Not only do courts function to restore ordered relations in society - which might be obvious enough - but witchcraft accusations or other allocations of blame[7] function to maintain the credibility of authority and it’s supporting beliefs or ideologies. While functionalism as such is out of fashion, the basic observation that people in society seem to like self-confirming accounts is itself confirmed by post-modernist fascination with discourses and narratives; particularly those of people in power.
Among the 60’s Sociologists Talcott Parsons was the most prominent functionalist. A little quote from a Wikipedia entry may help us to understand his method;
In Parsons' theory of history and evolution, the constitutive-cognititive symbolization of the cybernetic hierarchy of action-systemic levels has in principle the same function as the function of genetic information in DNA's control of biological evolution but this factor of meta-systemic control does not "determine" any outcome but it defines the orientational boundaries of the real path-breaker, which is action itself.
- on the other hand it might not. I think that what this says is that people are free to act, within social constraints, constraints being societies’ means of regulation. Note however that such regulation is a supposition of method rather than an observation of fact. All actions of all social agents - in this conceptualisation - tend towards socio-stasis. [If the Jester is there, he is ipso facto necessary, if not there, ipso facto unnecessary.]
Parsons was a particular hate-figure for the other kind of 60’s Sociologist - Rex, Darhendorf, others - who wanted to account for conflict and to give individuals the mental liberty to be outsiders, the other side of the police lines, even if such freedom often petered out in smoke. For them, society was a construct, real enough to be oppressive to the rebel, real enough also to make that rebel reach for collar and tie when unemployment struck. For conflict theorists regulation was a matter for fisticuffs. Well, we can see it in the streets. It is real. It is also something that many, perhaps most people in most societies try, pragmatically, to find some way to do without. Hence the search for opportunities to debate, mediate, resolve; perhaps leaving room on the edge for the Jester, to ease things along a bit when debate gets sticky.
The Gaia model was built upon the idea of self-regulation, again with huge functionalist suppositions. It made the rather anthropomorphic assumption that Earth can behave in a manner that responds to human behaviour; our misbehaviour prompting vengeful returns. Earth System Scientists have refined the model, making it comply with the established objectivist tenets of the scientific tradition, and finding facts to take the place of suppositions. The outcome still allows them to see human behaviour as the driving force that threatens chaos. And what is chaos? Is it an end to self-regulation or an interim phase between one self-regulating regime and another in which human populations may not feature? Not many of us want to hang around to await the outcome of this drama. We would like voice, choice, a touch of agency. But how? A well placed word in edgewise? But where?
Shakespeare builds his dramas around similar assumptions about social and natural order, tin sheets in the wings rattling thunder as King Lear or that Scottish fellow are exposed for their unnatural social ways as they walk the wilds. In Shakespeare’s case however Nature has no agency. Unnatural human behaviour is the driver; reflected in unnatural events in nature. The sun will only shine again when proper social order is restored. In the theatre, caught up in a tale of human folly, the mind is quite prepared to suspend disbelief in this pattern of implied causality. We also note that King Lear, having handed his kingdom to his avaricious daughters, has a voice in his ear, the Fool, who says, without much disguise, ‘who is the fool here, you or me?[8]
The Fool, Jester or Joker of the Medieval European court seems to have been a ubiquitous character. By most accounts these characters had some licence to speak truth to power. Southern African societies have also featured similar characters, there referred to as Praise Singers. A South African Zululand tourism website makes the point [9] that such singers could also, in round about ways, temper praise with criticism. Tswana society historically had also recognised Praise Singers. One man, in the other village in which I lived for a while [Manyana], attempted the style, standing on occasion to deliver a staccato flow of high oratory. He was much enjoyed by the assembled men, but lightly dismissed since he was regarded to be slightly ‘touched’, with a history of mental illness. How authentic his efforts were I could not say, mostly because his diction left me behind, but, as I read now, to be ‘touched’, simulated or real, may often have been self - protection, justifying the licence to speak their mind that Jesters and such-like characters in different historical settings seem to have enjoyed.
What is apparent about the license that the Jester or Praise Singer is allowed, is that it always seems to require a touch of artistry. Lear’s Fool uses a riddle-like form to make his point.
Fool. Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell? Lear. No.Fool. Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.Lear. Why? Fool. Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns with-out a case.
King Dingane’s Praise Singer wrapped his comment on the King’s short temper in a charming butterfly picture. The choir that stood before Chief Tobega to test the implications of the stolen post, harmonised their tale in verse.
A different protective technique would to approach the truth obliquely, using a typical joke - like inversion, even when humour was not called for;
Jesters could also give bad news to the King that no-one else would dare deliver. The best example of this is in 1340, when the French fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Sluys by the English. Phillippe VI's jester told him the English sailors: "Don't even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jester#Political_significance
That such a person was entitled, or might be expected to speak out of turn would also have been indicated by deviance from proper dress code; adopting for instance the three-pointed hat and motley garb that still graces the odd card within the pack; the Joker, which can take, or be given, exceptional powers when it sits alongside the King, Queen and Jack in a pack of playing cards.
Functionalist Sociologists would no doubt just say that a Jester role was a necessary adjunct to hierarchical authority, functionally necessary for the maintenance of society in that form. But that tautology does not tell us much. Conflict theorists would say - much the same thing really - that jesting statements of awkward truths provide an escape from the everyday realities of power and domination; leaving that power in place. I think I am inclined to put a slightly different caste upon it, but first another question. Has not society, our modern, post-modern or whatever we now label it, changed so much that it no longer needs the Jester?
My rhetorical question needs putting more precisely. In whose ear would a Jester now speak his riddles or rhymes? Since power has been wrested from monarchs in most parts of the world there is no point in focusing upon kings. The Duke of Edinburgh can be left to his own wisecracks. But - insofar as ‘sovereignty of the people’ is the dominant idea in the democratic variant of modern society, is it not ‘we the people’ who now need the occasional word of truth?
If by ‘we the people’ in Britain we mean us couch potatoes who hunt through the channels on a Friday evening for a bit of light humour at the expense of government, society and just occasionally ourselves, then we have been nourished by a long tradition of such stuff - going back three centuries to Hogarth, Thackery, Dean Swift, Dickens. They did pictures and books. That Was the Week That Was (TW3), which flourished briefly in the early 1960s, brought the mass audience provided by television the kind of humour that had previously been confined to the Cambridge Footlights on the one, upper-crusty, hand and the Music Hall or the stand up comedians’ turns on the other, working class hand. The two had merged briefly on stage in Beyond the Fringe. In so far as TW3 material could be called satirical, calling upon us to question our daily suppositions and values - commentators question how far this was the case[10] - it could indeed be seen as a means whereby a Jester put some wittily self-critical words into the ear of the electorate. TW3 also made fun of authority, delighting in the Edwardian mannerisms of the Prime Minister of the time Harold Macmillan. But the program was closed down before the 1964 election not, it is said, because the government was agin it but because it had run out of steam (Sandbrook p588). In any case neither Macmillan nor the public needed a critical word in the ear when ‘events’ of the time - the Profumo scandal in particular - did so much to question the credibility of government.
More recently Spitting Image [using puppetry as its distancing mechanism], as well as programmes such as Bremner, Bird and Fortune have all brought critical humour back to the small screen in the corner of the room. One thinks of satirical elements in such programmes - Bird and Fortune in a mock interview discussing the credit crunch, balancing criticism of the venality of bankers or the foolishness of the Government Treasury with the gullibility of us the ‘punters’[11] - but wonders what difference such awareness makes to us as citizens. Does it not just reinforce a feeling that doing anything about it is hopeless, contributing to citizen apathy rather than stimulating to action?
Of course the awakened citizen is also aware of the limited sense in which democracy is indeed anything like ‘government of the people, by the people’. In varying degrees we still have concentrated powers and government by representatives of an elite. In considering the role of humour, the jest and The Jester we should not perhaps be seeking to locate the necessary injection as being either in the ear of The Supreme Leader [as Private Eye mockingly labels the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown] or as pricking the consciousness of the democratic masses but as a part of the interactions that go on between the two. The same incidentally is true of Tswana society. The singers of the song of the stolen post made their mark on their fellow citizens in the kgotla as much as the chief, no doubt reminding him and them of the well known Tswana / Sotho saying that “A chief is a chief by the people”.
My last take. All systematic thought and - with greater certainty - all attempts at systematic political thought, are limited. Lots of ideas, observations, actions or events, will fail to ‘fit’ or to be explicable within any particular mind-set, action plan or ideology. The function of jest is to test boundaries and credibilities. The Jester is like the flea on the back of the hedgehog - without it there is no life-giving circulation. It is my contention that we, like hedgehogs, can’t do without them: and there should also be one in political entourage of any Supreme Leader.
[1] The mail service often carried remittances. The chief was the licensed agent at the time but the box had been broken into, to cover tracks….?
[2] Other songs had wide ranging but always critical themes. One song encouraged ‘sister’ so and so to go and chase the former school headmaster who had impregnated her before he was transferred to another village. Another urged a group to take an unspecified complaint to Tau Tona [big lion], the then President, Sir Seretse Khama in the capital city, Gaborone; a procedure that would have conformed to traditional governance norms but would be unlikely to be well received by the security details that surrounded the modern head of state.
[3] My mind refreshed on the Gaia theme by the Big Issue, April 13-19, 2009
[4] Press reports 13th April 2009
[5] www.neafc.org/page/743
[6] see Fikret Berkes, Carl Folke and Johan Colding, 1998, eds Linking Social and Ecological Systems Cambridge
[7] as in the tale of Baby P
[8] Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 1 Scene 4
[9] The office of the praise singer, the only professional artist in traditional society, was the most important in the culture of African people. His duty was to recount both the positive and negative deeds of the sovereign. This would include, for example, details on the King's bad temper or his latest misdemeanour. Everyone of the King's battles - victory or defeat, was faithfully recounted in elaborate and ceremonial language. A praise singer had to be an intelligent, deeply spiritual person of the highest repute amongst his society. The songs he sung had to be memorable, composed in such a way that every line which was spoken in classical, poetic language, would be easy to remember. For example, in the praise song of King Dingane his is referred to as the "butterfly of Punga and Mageba" - "the butterfly with very bright colours, a butterfly which, when touched, suddenly darkened its colours." This line, sung by a Zulu praise singer attests to Dingane's very, very quick temper and his displeasure at even the slightest joke. www.warthog.co.za/dedt/tourism/zululand/usiko/singers.htm
[10] Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, A history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles London, Abacus 2005
[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXBcmqwTV9s&feature=related
Academic theorising about contemporary governance can make heavy reading. It is not just that the subject has an air of high seriousness about it; there are after all serious issues or situations that need to be governed. It is not simply the endless questioning of other people’s meanings while attempting to pin new meanings onto thoroughly slippery concepts. No, it is more likely that the mental constructs that we build and seek to share must not only explain but be able to provide a moral base for action: for making war, building peace, doing business or - my theme here - fixing the environment. Theories of governance are never purely positivist; norms are hidden in there somehow. Explanations have to serve also as justifications. My present reflection might appear to be an escapist indulgence in this respect. I want to talk about the Joker, the Fool, the Praise-singer who can also blame and various equivalents. Indulge the thought that these social roles are totally marginal to our governance theme. But note that such characters recur in literature, history and anthropology with some regularity and be prepared to think otherwise.
My mind runs back to Christmas Day or was it Boxing Day, 1971, or was it 1972, no matter. The scene was the kgotla - the village assembly in Mankgodi Village, Botswana. I was the resident Anthropologist - in those days many villages seemed to have them. My task was to understand how village society ‘worked’, its politics, its economics, its processes of social change; in particular how external agents of change might inject ideas about better farming and such like; very much part of the prevalent ‘modernisation’ theme. So I had not taken particular interest in the choirs that I had heard rehearsing in different parts of the village. ‘Missionary influence’ I had thought and since I am a bit allergic to hymns I nearly stayed away when informed that choirs would be singing in the kgotla over the festive occasion. But I didn’t. Hymns or no, the choral tradition in Southern Africa is stunning. But as I dived into the melee with my tape recorder I realised that I was on to something else. The trigger came as I was attempting to talk to the Chief and saw his face turn to thunder. The song being sung at the time was questioning whether it was he, the chief, who had stolen the post from the village post box or whether it was the elected Councillor who had done it, perhaps to discredit him[1]. On the face of it the song was an open confrontation with authority, yet the singers were evidently immune from the normal, well established principles of Tswana jurisprudence. Chief Tobega could apparently do nothing about it[2]. An aspect of social order had been inverted for the occasion. Clearly there was a political dynamic behind these harmonies that I might have missed. Maybe the upside down bit of governance is as important as the upright.
What do I take from this? It is not going to be simple. Social life can probably rival biological life in its connectivity and complexity. James Lovelock with his Gaia concept was ridiculed back in the 1960s by professional biologists[3], each into his or her own kind of worm or plant or aphid, but eventually won recognition as each worm studier found that changes in worm nourishing conditions mattered, not a bit but fundamentally to the success or failure of said worm and that these conditions are shaped by other worms or plants or aphids that in turn …. Life in other words is a big and complicated thing. So, I recognise, is our social means of getting a place in it.
Lovelock’s big idea was that the Earth is self-regulating. Kick it and it will kick back. We humans are kicking it with over-consumption and pollution and it will kick back with - he might have said - storms, pestilence and things unpredictable. That is how his Gaia image has entered common minds - such as mine. And there it echoes the cries of a deranged King who, having botched his relationships with his three daughters, stomps the moors with his friend the Fool - Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The grand theme in all this is regulation: a theme much talked about in the field of government and governance. Our modern or post-modern governments - perhaps particularly the British government - are very keen on ‘putting in place’ regulatory systems through which to control the price of gas, the frequency and timeliness of trains, the disposal of waste, the performance of schools or the extraction of fish from the North Sea. The problem with such ‘put in place’ systems, I argue, is that they do not always fit. They assume a rather mechanical model of connectivity: that all the bits behave as did the bits of James Watt’s steam engine, the speed of which was governed by a regulator - a device that sat atop the machine and responded to acceleration by centrifugal expansion to slow its rotation. James Watt’s governor worked for slow, stationary engines - though not very well apparently. In the mechanical world the governor concept has been theorised and refined over a century and a half to provide a range of useful devices. A governor can be fitted to curb the exhuberance of drivers of fast cars and some such could be used to enforce motorway speed restrictions - if there were the political will to do so. Aye, there’s the rub; at a certain point regulation becomes a social matter rather than mechanical, introducing other dynamics entirely.
Many things have no machine-like connectivity at all. In these cases, putting in place a so-called independent regulator with powers to demand information on this and that and to set limits upon behaviour of this kind or that kind can have quite perverse consequences. Between declining fish stocks in the North Sea and the rate of extraction of fish from that stock and the behaviour of fishermen or their unions and the propensity of consumers to consume fish, there are innumerable linkages and feedback processes that are not really understandable by, or reducible to, a readily applicable formula. What a regulator then does can have quite perverse consequences. When the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission and the European Union enforcers set limits on the size, type and quantity of permitted catch their rules sound logical but vast quantities of fish, deemed ineligible for landing, finish up being thrown back dead into the sea. French fishermen protest and block harbours at the thought of any restriction on their rights to fish[4]. A seemingly endless process of attempted conflict resolution follows[5]; which might just be missing the point. Catch limitation is not necessarily the most effective way of controlling a wild stock. Exclusion zones might work better. Rotating catchment zones might allow for accelerated recovery after intensive extraction[6]. Regulatory systems have to reflect sophisticated understandings of underlying technical possibilities. They also have to be compatibility with feasible social processes, the main criterion of which is that the perpetrators have some interest in successful outcomes. Ordinary minds would see the weakness of a crude ‘putting in place’ approach to regulation if an Atmospheric Pollution Regulator decided that - to control CO2 emissions - citizens should be licensed to breathe only on alternate days. System survival and human survival within our biosphere requires more sophisticated understandings to drive more sophisticated processes.
Is there not scope for self-regulation?
The idea of self-regulation is very attractive and has been adopted in various disciplines. In economics the idea that the market is self-regulating has been central to the discipline since its founding and has survived the plentiful evidence that history has thrown up to the contrary. Many people responding to price signals, supply responding to demand, ought to do the trick; other things being equal; which of course they seldom are. When markets crash there are always two plausible interpretations;
- ‘they would have been self-correcting had not governments intervened’ and
- ‘look what happens when external regulation is inadequate’.
The first survives mostly in the minds of believing economists. The latter recurs in the minds of sceptical stateists. Crashes happen when market players don’t self-regulate because they are testing the boundaries of government indulgence [moral hazard]. Slumps follow when government bail-outs fail to re-establish the risk sharing basis of trust. Might it not have been better had some Joker on the sidelines ventured;
(rubbish) + (rubbish) = asset?
In the functionalist tradition of Anthropology and Sociology the idea that social systems are self-regulating is built into the underlying methodological suppositions. Not only do courts function to restore ordered relations in society - which might be obvious enough - but witchcraft accusations or other allocations of blame[7] function to maintain the credibility of authority and it’s supporting beliefs or ideologies. While functionalism as such is out of fashion, the basic observation that people in society seem to like self-confirming accounts is itself confirmed by post-modernist fascination with discourses and narratives; particularly those of people in power.
Among the 60’s Sociologists Talcott Parsons was the most prominent functionalist. A little quote from a Wikipedia entry may help us to understand his method;
In Parsons' theory of history and evolution, the constitutive-cognititive symbolization of the cybernetic hierarchy of action-systemic levels has in principle the same function as the function of genetic information in DNA's control of biological evolution but this factor of meta-systemic control does not "determine" any outcome but it defines the orientational boundaries of the real path-breaker, which is action itself.
- on the other hand it might not. I think that what this says is that people are free to act, within social constraints, constraints being societies’ means of regulation. Note however that such regulation is a supposition of method rather than an observation of fact. All actions of all social agents - in this conceptualisation - tend towards socio-stasis. [If the Jester is there, he is ipso facto necessary, if not there, ipso facto unnecessary.]
Parsons was a particular hate-figure for the other kind of 60’s Sociologist - Rex, Darhendorf, others - who wanted to account for conflict and to give individuals the mental liberty to be outsiders, the other side of the police lines, even if such freedom often petered out in smoke. For them, society was a construct, real enough to be oppressive to the rebel, real enough also to make that rebel reach for collar and tie when unemployment struck. For conflict theorists regulation was a matter for fisticuffs. Well, we can see it in the streets. It is real. It is also something that many, perhaps most people in most societies try, pragmatically, to find some way to do without. Hence the search for opportunities to debate, mediate, resolve; perhaps leaving room on the edge for the Jester, to ease things along a bit when debate gets sticky.
The Gaia model was built upon the idea of self-regulation, again with huge functionalist suppositions. It made the rather anthropomorphic assumption that Earth can behave in a manner that responds to human behaviour; our misbehaviour prompting vengeful returns. Earth System Scientists have refined the model, making it comply with the established objectivist tenets of the scientific tradition, and finding facts to take the place of suppositions. The outcome still allows them to see human behaviour as the driving force that threatens chaos. And what is chaos? Is it an end to self-regulation or an interim phase between one self-regulating regime and another in which human populations may not feature? Not many of us want to hang around to await the outcome of this drama. We would like voice, choice, a touch of agency. But how? A well placed word in edgewise? But where?
Shakespeare builds his dramas around similar assumptions about social and natural order, tin sheets in the wings rattling thunder as King Lear or that Scottish fellow are exposed for their unnatural social ways as they walk the wilds. In Shakespeare’s case however Nature has no agency. Unnatural human behaviour is the driver; reflected in unnatural events in nature. The sun will only shine again when proper social order is restored. In the theatre, caught up in a tale of human folly, the mind is quite prepared to suspend disbelief in this pattern of implied causality. We also note that King Lear, having handed his kingdom to his avaricious daughters, has a voice in his ear, the Fool, who says, without much disguise, ‘who is the fool here, you or me?[8]
The Fool, Jester or Joker of the Medieval European court seems to have been a ubiquitous character. By most accounts these characters had some licence to speak truth to power. Southern African societies have also featured similar characters, there referred to as Praise Singers. A South African Zululand tourism website makes the point [9] that such singers could also, in round about ways, temper praise with criticism. Tswana society historically had also recognised Praise Singers. One man, in the other village in which I lived for a while [Manyana], attempted the style, standing on occasion to deliver a staccato flow of high oratory. He was much enjoyed by the assembled men, but lightly dismissed since he was regarded to be slightly ‘touched’, with a history of mental illness. How authentic his efforts were I could not say, mostly because his diction left me behind, but, as I read now, to be ‘touched’, simulated or real, may often have been self - protection, justifying the licence to speak their mind that Jesters and such-like characters in different historical settings seem to have enjoyed.
What is apparent about the license that the Jester or Praise Singer is allowed, is that it always seems to require a touch of artistry. Lear’s Fool uses a riddle-like form to make his point.
Fool. Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell? Lear. No.Fool. Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.Lear. Why? Fool. Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns with-out a case.
King Dingane’s Praise Singer wrapped his comment on the King’s short temper in a charming butterfly picture. The choir that stood before Chief Tobega to test the implications of the stolen post, harmonised their tale in verse.
A different protective technique would to approach the truth obliquely, using a typical joke - like inversion, even when humour was not called for;
Jesters could also give bad news to the King that no-one else would dare deliver. The best example of this is in 1340, when the French fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Sluys by the English. Phillippe VI's jester told him the English sailors: "Don't even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jester#Political_significance
That such a person was entitled, or might be expected to speak out of turn would also have been indicated by deviance from proper dress code; adopting for instance the three-pointed hat and motley garb that still graces the odd card within the pack; the Joker, which can take, or be given, exceptional powers when it sits alongside the King, Queen and Jack in a pack of playing cards.
Functionalist Sociologists would no doubt just say that a Jester role was a necessary adjunct to hierarchical authority, functionally necessary for the maintenance of society in that form. But that tautology does not tell us much. Conflict theorists would say - much the same thing really - that jesting statements of awkward truths provide an escape from the everyday realities of power and domination; leaving that power in place. I think I am inclined to put a slightly different caste upon it, but first another question. Has not society, our modern, post-modern or whatever we now label it, changed so much that it no longer needs the Jester?
My rhetorical question needs putting more precisely. In whose ear would a Jester now speak his riddles or rhymes? Since power has been wrested from monarchs in most parts of the world there is no point in focusing upon kings. The Duke of Edinburgh can be left to his own wisecracks. But - insofar as ‘sovereignty of the people’ is the dominant idea in the democratic variant of modern society, is it not ‘we the people’ who now need the occasional word of truth?
If by ‘we the people’ in Britain we mean us couch potatoes who hunt through the channels on a Friday evening for a bit of light humour at the expense of government, society and just occasionally ourselves, then we have been nourished by a long tradition of such stuff - going back three centuries to Hogarth, Thackery, Dean Swift, Dickens. They did pictures and books. That Was the Week That Was (TW3), which flourished briefly in the early 1960s, brought the mass audience provided by television the kind of humour that had previously been confined to the Cambridge Footlights on the one, upper-crusty, hand and the Music Hall or the stand up comedians’ turns on the other, working class hand. The two had merged briefly on stage in Beyond the Fringe. In so far as TW3 material could be called satirical, calling upon us to question our daily suppositions and values - commentators question how far this was the case[10] - it could indeed be seen as a means whereby a Jester put some wittily self-critical words into the ear of the electorate. TW3 also made fun of authority, delighting in the Edwardian mannerisms of the Prime Minister of the time Harold Macmillan. But the program was closed down before the 1964 election not, it is said, because the government was agin it but because it had run out of steam (Sandbrook p588). In any case neither Macmillan nor the public needed a critical word in the ear when ‘events’ of the time - the Profumo scandal in particular - did so much to question the credibility of government.
More recently Spitting Image [using puppetry as its distancing mechanism], as well as programmes such as Bremner, Bird and Fortune have all brought critical humour back to the small screen in the corner of the room. One thinks of satirical elements in such programmes - Bird and Fortune in a mock interview discussing the credit crunch, balancing criticism of the venality of bankers or the foolishness of the Government Treasury with the gullibility of us the ‘punters’[11] - but wonders what difference such awareness makes to us as citizens. Does it not just reinforce a feeling that doing anything about it is hopeless, contributing to citizen apathy rather than stimulating to action?
Of course the awakened citizen is also aware of the limited sense in which democracy is indeed anything like ‘government of the people, by the people’. In varying degrees we still have concentrated powers and government by representatives of an elite. In considering the role of humour, the jest and The Jester we should not perhaps be seeking to locate the necessary injection as being either in the ear of The Supreme Leader [as Private Eye mockingly labels the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown] or as pricking the consciousness of the democratic masses but as a part of the interactions that go on between the two. The same incidentally is true of Tswana society. The singers of the song of the stolen post made their mark on their fellow citizens in the kgotla as much as the chief, no doubt reminding him and them of the well known Tswana / Sotho saying that “A chief is a chief by the people”.
My last take. All systematic thought and - with greater certainty - all attempts at systematic political thought, are limited. Lots of ideas, observations, actions or events, will fail to ‘fit’ or to be explicable within any particular mind-set, action plan or ideology. The function of jest is to test boundaries and credibilities. The Jester is like the flea on the back of the hedgehog - without it there is no life-giving circulation. It is my contention that we, like hedgehogs, can’t do without them: and there should also be one in political entourage of any Supreme Leader.
[1] The mail service often carried remittances. The chief was the licensed agent at the time but the box had been broken into, to cover tracks….?
[2] Other songs had wide ranging but always critical themes. One song encouraged ‘sister’ so and so to go and chase the former school headmaster who had impregnated her before he was transferred to another village. Another urged a group to take an unspecified complaint to Tau Tona [big lion], the then President, Sir Seretse Khama in the capital city, Gaborone; a procedure that would have conformed to traditional governance norms but would be unlikely to be well received by the security details that surrounded the modern head of state.
[3] My mind refreshed on the Gaia theme by the Big Issue, April 13-19, 2009
[4] Press reports 13th April 2009
[5] www.neafc.org/page/743
[6] see Fikret Berkes, Carl Folke and Johan Colding, 1998, eds Linking Social and Ecological Systems Cambridge
[7] as in the tale of Baby P
[8] Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 1 Scene 4
[9] The office of the praise singer, the only professional artist in traditional society, was the most important in the culture of African people. His duty was to recount both the positive and negative deeds of the sovereign. This would include, for example, details on the King's bad temper or his latest misdemeanour. Everyone of the King's battles - victory or defeat, was faithfully recounted in elaborate and ceremonial language. A praise singer had to be an intelligent, deeply spiritual person of the highest repute amongst his society. The songs he sung had to be memorable, composed in such a way that every line which was spoken in classical, poetic language, would be easy to remember. For example, in the praise song of King Dingane his is referred to as the "butterfly of Punga and Mageba" - "the butterfly with very bright colours, a butterfly which, when touched, suddenly darkened its colours." This line, sung by a Zulu praise singer attests to Dingane's very, very quick temper and his displeasure at even the slightest joke. www.warthog.co.za/dedt/tourism/zululand/usiko/singers.htm
[10] Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, A history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles London, Abacus 2005
[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXBcmqwTV9s&feature=related
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Sense, Sound and Fury in Public Choice
When can we expect good sense to be the outcome of political contestation? Amidst much noise, the Hegelian dialectic seems over-optimistic; the Marxian variant overtaken by history, present day network theorists ambivalent on structure, Professor Moore and his ‘public value’ notwithstanding. I look to the dogs for enlightenment.
Sitting on the sidelines, attempting to understand what is now fashionably referred to as the discourse of politics and public management, one cannot but be aware that the voices of ‘those set in authority above us’ are sometimes more convincing, sometimes less, sometimes apparently triumphant, at other times intent upon self-defence. I here explore the idea that advancing the public good or what is now referred to as increasing public value, is a risky business. From the sidelines such lofty notions are about making sense of the many difficult things that seem to crop up to disturb our neighbourly or worldly complacency. Making sense is the business of politics. Making sense work out in practice is the business of public management. These are overlapping spheres with plenty of room for ‘things’ to go wrong, evoking the old adage ‘You win some, you loose some’, bringing to mind ‘Where there is risk there will blame’. Regardless of the issues, success, risk and blame are close bedfellows. Can we expect good sense to prevail?
Prime Minister’s Question Time in the UK House of Commons is well known as an occasion for gladiatorial exchanges between PM and Leader of the Opposition. Others are permitted to exercise their oratorical skills at each other’s expense on the same occasion, but exchange between PM and Leader of the Opposition is the main attraction. But what does it amount to? It is an event of sound and fury, sometimes humour, but seldom light. Citizen participants in the village assembly in Botswana that I experienced many years ago employed high oratorical skills but would have been astonished at the manner or rather, to them, bad manners of the exchange in the self-styled mother of parliaments. For village elders, contestation might well be required but the main task was to interpret and elucidate the current public interest and find sensible solutions to social problems. Their task they saw as finding the form of words that would capture the sense of the situation that would work for them and gain support; what the French would term ‘Le mot juste’. Such support could lead to action. What, I ask myself, governs the manner of exchanges in such arena and how is it that in some occasions or contexts they are so apparently more about noise than sense? En route to an answer I come across a paradox. Rhetoric is most extravagant when the initiator is actually most constrained, least so when least constrained.
My underlying question is about the workings of democracy when confronted by the big issues of our day. Issues such as climate change, terrorism or banking crises on a world scale or, on the domestic scene, substance misuse and gang warfare, do not seem, on the face of it, to lend themselves to polarised argumentation. They are complex. There is room for serious doubts about present interpretations of cause and effect. Current remedies have obvious shortcomings. Even if positions can be taken for or against particular propositions it is not clear how their reconciliation into something sensible can be expected to emerge from the heat of parliamentary debate. What I want to explore here is the possibility that the development of new understandings out of old arguments is more likely to take place out of the heat, in draughty corridors, bars, or outwith the institution entirely, amongst peripheral members or networks of loosely linked concerned citizens. This is an issue that has been widely explored by Rod Rhodes[1], amongst others, but without clear resolution.
If I may be permitted a parallel that I know would be quite unacceptable in many cultures, my opening observation about extravagance actually came to me while observing dogs. Two dogs on leads will tear at each other in full voice, to their owners’ consternation but without damage to each other – given that their owners have strong right arms. One dog on a lead and another free will put a note of anxiety into the barks of the tethered animal and, in probability, an air of indifference in the free. Two dogs free and un-pestered by their owners will circle each other with sniffs and exchanged signals. A wide repertoire of possible outcomes can follow but not usually involving loss of hair.
To draw a parallel with the House of Commons requires an extension of the usual anthropological assertion that institutions frame the thought patterns that are permitted within social settings. The extension is this: under constraint, the more that institutionally permitted logics are at apparent variance with free floating observations or facts the more there will be a need for dogmatic assertion [excuse the pun] or artful deviation from the question.
People with other disciplinary backgrounds, or of a commonsensical turn of mind, may find this starting point in anthropological analysis - that thinking is constrained by institutional setting – to be rather far fetched. Without wanting to claim that it always works, the theme is well illustrated by UK politics. The party structures and leadership roles of bi-partisan politics require a confrontation of ideas. Interpretations become polarised. Fact is constructed in such a way that it can be contradicted by an apparent opposite. What is right for one party then has a fair chance of being deemed wrong by the other and a game of reassuring familiarity can take place. A free trade party has historically been opposed by one arguing for protection. Climate change recognition by one party encourages climate change denial by another; or if that is difficult to defend, carbon trading advocacy will be challenged by technical fix advocacy, with ‘facts’ assembled appropriately to support the opposing arguments. In times or on issues of extreme uncertainty of course there may be a polka-like changing of sides and partners, as well as stealing of opponents ideas, but debate still has to be expressed in oppositional terms.
To put predictability into proceedings MPs are expected to take the appropriate side in debate and ‘tow the party line’. Certain party members on either side are appointed as ‘whips’ to ensure compliance. Most members do comply but sometimes they struggle to do so. After all, the issues that we, the citizens, expect them to resolve for us are seldom simple, but politics without some simplification of understandings would be without resolution. The fact that MPs are, on rare occasions, allowed a ‘free vote’ – unrestricted by the party whips - on what are deemed to be ‘matters of conscience’, [to do with sex, death and religion mostly], clearly shows that for other matters, conscience; perhaps even consciousness, is expected to be subordinated to party discipline.
Polarisation nevertheless oversimplifies. Political analysis that is presented as a matter of black and white – or left and right – is often actually rather grey. A promise to achieve outcome x turns out on implementation to be x - or x +, or something else entirely. When the PM stands at the Dispatch Box he is constrained by past commitments to policies and practices that will almost certainly have not all turned out as intended. His/her opponents are less constrained, since, by definition their ideas have not been put to the test. Time is unkind to politicians. Harold Macmillan (UK PM 1957-1963) only had part of the story. It is not only “events, dear boy, events” that challenge stable government but also the inevitable misfit of polarised ideas with the churn of everyday reality. Gordon Brown’s much criticised performance in the Commons is as much the result of time catching up on New Labour promises as it is of his leaden, perhaps too honest, style. Tony Blair was more witty as well as more devious and surrounded by more dexterous spin merchants but was also lucky to be on the delivery end rather than the receiving end of New Labour promises.
When least challenged? Back to the dogs
But before we conclude that all politics is morally compliant with bipartisan norms we should explore the possibility that it is simply the voting climax that reduces the matter to a contest of opposites. The other half of my opening hypothesis about behavioural extravagance is that it is least so when least challenged. Are there parts of the political arena that allow less extravagant, more flexible modes of political interaction? Might it be that full-on confrontation between gladiatorial champions[2] actually allows non-champions some freedom of thought and action.
Allow me to go back to the dogs for a moment. Doggie confrontation in a dog walking context can actually have positive consequences for human sociability[3]. Some forms of parliamentary discussion might do likewise. On visits to relatives on the South coast I am sometimes admitted to a charmed sphere of early morning dog-walking sociability. Chit-chat breaks out spontaneously between strangers about the supposed charms of their respective mutts. This may have little bearing on the actual appearance or behaviour of the animals. ‘He is really very friendly’ can be an opening gambit, even when the evidence is to the contrary. Stranger status is rapidly abandoned in favour of a permissive dog-walker companionship. You may become known initially as ‘owner of so and so’, but that too can give way to an easy exchange of first names and mutual gifts of treats to respective dogs. Walking the same way awhile can lead to tacit ‘same time same place assignments’, safe in the assurance that conversation can always return to canine behaviour and, of course, also assured by the doggie chaperone. For the charmed hour, I noted, workaday restrictions of class and gender disappear and behaviours that might be quite threatening in another institutional context – such as marriage [‘to him/her back home’] – have special licence[4].
It is difficult to know how far the ritual displays of the leaders across the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons actually allows lesser members of the house to have a sphere of informal exchange in which the big battles are put aside. Having brayed in support of their principals from the backbenches at Prime Minister’s Question Time, do backbenchers from either side then sit down together in one or other of the innumerable places of refreshment in the House and lighten the debate with the odd joke? There is certainly some room for relatively friendly exchange. If one tunes into the House of Commons TV channel at odd times of the day or night one is quite likely to find an ongoing debate being sustained by a handful of MPs from across the parties. Each contributor may be seeking to ensure that their contribution is recorded in Hansard, as a loyal follower of their party leader, but they will readily allow points of information or order from opponents. More than once I have encountered situations in which one speaker from across the floor seems to be encouraging another along. For some issues, particularly perhaps those being advanced in support of individual member’s legislative proposals, the contributors from all points of the house may be people who have a special interest in the subject and have conducted research into it. While their views may differ they share a depth of knowledge that others within their parties do not share. Probably such occasions of openness are rare but they do point to a possible route for non-polarised policy change.
The Select Committees through which MPs carry out their scrutiny of government policy are another potential location for non-confrontational policy or performance investigation. The primary dividing line in this context is not between parties but between the executive – the government of the day - and the legislature. Members of different parties sit together, sometimes chaired by an opposition member, to examine documents, cross examine witnesses and draw up reports. Theirs is a scrutiny function in which the aim is to take a policy issue, examine programmes and other measures through which implementation has been pursued, consider outcomes and pronounce on policy effectiveness. But while such scrutiny can be very effective in finding weaknesses in governmental performance it does not necessarily take debate beyond polarisation.
A problem in knowledge about knowledge
An underlying problem in knowledge should be recognised here. The Hegelian model of argumentation, to which my title alludes, sounds simple but isn’t. Thesis opposed by antithesis should, in theory, lead to a third condition that is a synthesis of the two. But the social or intellectual process that should have this outcome has always been difficult to pin down. Even Karl Marx had difficulty envisioning what would be the outcome of antagonism and class conflict between the working classes and the bourgeoisie. Looking backwards he could give a somewhat persuasive account of the emergence of this new bourgeois class out of the contradictions of feudal relations; merchants, traders and professionals breaking free from the restricted social contracts that bound peasants and artisans to their overlords. Looking forwards his imagination failed him. He could give no clue as to what would happen when the worker immiseration that he predicted eventually led to the overthrow of the capitalist class. His sole contribution was the weak idea that all would be free to hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon (German Ideology, 1845) – a remarkably pastoral, even pre-pastoral view of the material conditions of post-industrial revolution society. Without clearer prophesy or prescription the way was free for Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Stalin and others to come up with their own prescriptions, state power and big bureaucracy eventually winning the argument. But this was in no way the logical outcome of the dialectic.
The interesting thing about Marx’s use of the dialectic is that it is not about argumentation or what we now call discourse at all, but about how people respond to changing material conditions. There may well be struggle as the newly dominant social forces carve out a sphere of power and influence but the self-justificatory ideas by which they cement their power do not necessarily emerge from previous understandings. To a capitalist it matters that property is conceived as being unfettered by social obligations. This idea does contrast with the prior European feudal notions of entitlement and obligation that bound together master and servant or Lord of the Manor and serf. It also contrasts with Hindu notions of jajmani relations that survived into recent times, or, from my own field experience, the social obligations that one could find underlying ‘traditional’ society in Botswana. But the supporting logic of capitalism – market economics - cannot really be said to have emerged out of pre-capitalist relations. It needs no backward referral to any system of productive relations that went before.
If we turn to Hegel himself (1770 – 1831), whose ideas Marx borrowed and inverted, we find that the dialectic was supposed to take place in the sphere of consciousness. It was conceived to be a matter of ideas. Do we find a model here upon which to hang our discussion of progress or change in political ideas? According to Wikipedia, Hegel himself did not like the idea that the dialectic was interpreted by some of his contemporaries as debate between the bearers of opposed ideas that would somehow be synthesised through argumentation. What he thought was that internal contradictions within propositions would lead logically to a rethink. He was a bit of an idealist, it seems to me. Human agency disappears almost entirely. We are looking for ‘Deus ex machina’ or a ‘hidden hand’. This is all far away from the sound and fury of debate in the House of Commons. Debate there is. Debate there has to be, because no one packaging of ideas and no attempt to counter a hegemonic establishment with another package can avoid disagreement. What we are looking for is the process or processes whereby new interpretations of conditions and new solutions to problems can emerge out of interaction between human agents. This is about people as promoters of ideas. So we have to go back to the forums and processes of decision making to find our answer.
The already mentioned Professor Rhodes would take us even further away from the Prime Minister in Parliament. His major contribution to the discourse on how decisions get taken in the public weal has been to move the locus out from parliament, cabinet and PM or the civil service into centre-less networks. He and other network theorists[5] find that public policy outcomes are the result of intense exchanges within informal networks that cut across formal government structures and link with non-governmental institutions. Through such networks many actors are able to exercise an influence upon policies. Such nets are not entirely unstructured - although the world-wide web is a close approximation. There are nodes within the nets. The innumerable think tanks that have set themselves up in all quarters of the political spectrum aim to be such nodes. NGOs, lobbyists and pressure groups are others. Prominent individuals in the media, sport, cultural institutions, universities, also know how to network and through such networks aim to make their mark. In UK ‘the Great and the Good’ emerge as such precisely by looking after their personal reputations, by knowing other Great and Good, by ‘having a word’ in the right place but also by thinking the right thoughts and knowing when and how to register an alternative thought. They network; nothing new in that: just a new expression of the old dirge; “Lloyd George knew my father, father knew Lloyd George”[6]. Such linkages have known value in securing personal advantage. But can such network links add public value or advance the public good?
Politics, Public Value and the Perversities of both
Mark Moore, an American professor of entrepreneurial spirit, would answer; yes, as long as the actors use their initiative and network contacts to promote ‘public value’. Moore borrows a market notion to put forward ideas about the potential of plural agency within the public sector[7]. He argues that public value will best be advanced if many public managers with sound public values act in pursuit of such values. His definition of public manager is broad, including not only civil servants and professional appointees to public office but also lobbyists and others who seek to exercise influence, so he is inclusive of most of the networkers that Rhodes asks us to include. By using the term public value rather than public good he is also getting us used to the idea that the good things that we, the public, value are many rather than one. It is not just the decisions of the Prime Minister that matter.
If his logic fits the facts Moore provides a model of public decision making that legitimates a plural field of influence. As long as all these people are pursuing good ends through good values the outcome for society should be good. This however is a big IF. Critical commentators suggest Moore idealises and sanitises the behaviour of public managers and may even be ignoring the role of elected politicians[8]. The many voices advocating public values of one kind or another may be promoting quite contradictory things. The real world of politics and public management is full of mendacious behaviour and deliberate misrepresentation of opponents’ views. Furthermore, in public management as in all things ‘Sods Law’ applies: ‘if it can go wrong it will go wrong’[9]. So who should have the final say?
Professor Rhodes, with colleague John Wanna, now comes back into the discussion, this time arguing for the primacy of politics over administration and influence seeking networkers, thereby reverting to a suspiciously conformist view of legitimate decision making. In Westminster type government, they argue, the managerialist bias behind Moore’s interpretation of how public value is produced denies politicians their role and hierarchical priority in deciding which public values amongst the many to pursue. Is Rhodes now seeking to squeeze the debate back into a conventional separation of politics and administration and into a formal hierarchy?
Moore is accused of naivety in thinking that creating public value is a matter of good will or intent and that administrators can do it uninhibited. He does not acknowledge that administrators doing it might marginalise politicians, pushing them into particularist representation – i.e., allowing them to favour friends and causing them to behave badly in relation to the public good. Rhodes / Wanna, on the other hand now seem to be suggesting that separation of powers is sufficient; an old theme in constitutional theory which British practice fudges and American defines and then subverts[10].
Part of the Westminster fudge that applies to all UK governance institutions is the fiction that politicians and civil servants maintain separate powers and functions. Under this construct Ministers / Leaders ‘do’ policy but have ‘oversight’ [a term which once meant neglect and now means supervision] of administrative effectiveness while administrators administer but can be creative advocates of different feasible policy options. There are also specific overlapping accountabilities [Section 151 officers in Local Government]. Similarly the boundaries between formal institutions of governance and ‘outside’ influences such as the think tanks or the press tend to be fluid; open to active flows of information but subject to continuous negotiation or legal testing, usually around sensitive issues. Pushing these boundaries from different sides can allow for creativity; defending their integrity should ensure the primacy of public value. Systems that would simply disempower this plurality make for trouble.
The Rhodes / Wanna article uses case studies of some notorious failures in public management - the handling of the UK mad cow disease, the outing of David Kelly over the Iraq dossier and a number of Australian cases - to illustrate the fact that no part of any government can be trusted to focus solely upon ‘advancing public value’. Their point seems to be about the danger of allowing muddled responsibilities. But to me a broader point is raised by these notorious cases. They are evidence of Sods Law. Even with the best of intentions and the best laid schemes, things will go wrong. When things go wrong; through unpredicted risk, or simply ‘events’, one side will tend to blame the other and reinterpret the situation to protect their own ‘butt’ and seek to ‘kick ass’ elsewhere. A sophisticated theory of public management needs to recognise blame as well as risk and the tendency of each party, politicians, officials, and others to defend itself against blame.
Conclusion
How to conclude? The conclusion seems to be that constitutional structures and formal systems are unlikely to guarantee good behavioural outcomes. Decision making in the public realm is inevitably a bit messy. There is no trace of a clean-cut dialectic here. Moore’s insistence on the idea of individual responsibility in adding value is based upon a moral assertion. Individuals should be committed to public values and should be judged by others on this basis. There has to be some virtue in this position. Certainly one cannot, from the sidelines, advocate a Machiavellian scepticism about approaches to responsibility in public life. My quarrel with the concept is that it makes out that all actors are only good actors if angels. Where the public good is threatened the solution is - yes - advanced by something that is valued but only if it also ‘works’. This in fact was Machiavelli’s point. It will be valued in part because it works. So when Gordon Brown, facing the worst banking crisis for nigh on a hundred years, stands at the dispatch box to announce - completely contradicting hitherto prevailing public values - the effective re-nationalisation of the banks (October 2008), suddenly his bite is as powerful as his bark. Sign of a true statesman?
[1] RAW Rhodes ‘Governance and Public Administration’, Ch 4 in John Pierre 2000 Debating Governance, OUP
[2] Roman gladiators were of course constrained by their slavery: denied the freedom to shake hands and make up, so for them it had to be to the death.
[3] As noted in Buster’s Diary [Roy Hattersley]
[4] I am not sure if dogs are the key to this. It may be the hour. Early morning is also the time when old men in China gather with their caged canaries but most Chinese achieve the same boundary breaking intimacy through their tie-chi gatherings in which no pets mediate. However it is achieved, the fact is that behavioural patterns differ in different social contexts.
[5] Kickert WJM, Erik-Hans Klijn and Joop FM Koppenjan 1997, Managing Complex Networks London New Delhi, Sage
[6] Sung repetitively to the tune of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’; though out of fashion now.
[7] Moore M 1995 Creating Public Value Cambridge, MA :Harvard University Press
[8] Rhodes, RAW and John Wanna, 2008 ‘Bringing the Politics back in’ in Bennington J and Moore M From Private Choice to Public Value Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave, Macmillan; Gains, Francesca and Stoker, Gerry, (n.d.) ‘How Politics Works: Understanding the New Realities of the Political Process in Public Management’ Paper for the Work Foundation
[9] The Scottish poet Robert Burns put it more eloquently in his famous address to a mouse.
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane / In proving foresight may be vain: / The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley, / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, / For promised joy
[10] See my ‘Constitutionalism and rolling roads’.
Sitting on the sidelines, attempting to understand what is now fashionably referred to as the discourse of politics and public management, one cannot but be aware that the voices of ‘those set in authority above us’ are sometimes more convincing, sometimes less, sometimes apparently triumphant, at other times intent upon self-defence. I here explore the idea that advancing the public good or what is now referred to as increasing public value, is a risky business. From the sidelines such lofty notions are about making sense of the many difficult things that seem to crop up to disturb our neighbourly or worldly complacency. Making sense is the business of politics. Making sense work out in practice is the business of public management. These are overlapping spheres with plenty of room for ‘things’ to go wrong, evoking the old adage ‘You win some, you loose some’, bringing to mind ‘Where there is risk there will blame’. Regardless of the issues, success, risk and blame are close bedfellows. Can we expect good sense to prevail?
Prime Minister’s Question Time in the UK House of Commons is well known as an occasion for gladiatorial exchanges between PM and Leader of the Opposition. Others are permitted to exercise their oratorical skills at each other’s expense on the same occasion, but exchange between PM and Leader of the Opposition is the main attraction. But what does it amount to? It is an event of sound and fury, sometimes humour, but seldom light. Citizen participants in the village assembly in Botswana that I experienced many years ago employed high oratorical skills but would have been astonished at the manner or rather, to them, bad manners of the exchange in the self-styled mother of parliaments. For village elders, contestation might well be required but the main task was to interpret and elucidate the current public interest and find sensible solutions to social problems. Their task they saw as finding the form of words that would capture the sense of the situation that would work for them and gain support; what the French would term ‘Le mot juste’. Such support could lead to action. What, I ask myself, governs the manner of exchanges in such arena and how is it that in some occasions or contexts they are so apparently more about noise than sense? En route to an answer I come across a paradox. Rhetoric is most extravagant when the initiator is actually most constrained, least so when least constrained.
My underlying question is about the workings of democracy when confronted by the big issues of our day. Issues such as climate change, terrorism or banking crises on a world scale or, on the domestic scene, substance misuse and gang warfare, do not seem, on the face of it, to lend themselves to polarised argumentation. They are complex. There is room for serious doubts about present interpretations of cause and effect. Current remedies have obvious shortcomings. Even if positions can be taken for or against particular propositions it is not clear how their reconciliation into something sensible can be expected to emerge from the heat of parliamentary debate. What I want to explore here is the possibility that the development of new understandings out of old arguments is more likely to take place out of the heat, in draughty corridors, bars, or outwith the institution entirely, amongst peripheral members or networks of loosely linked concerned citizens. This is an issue that has been widely explored by Rod Rhodes[1], amongst others, but without clear resolution.
If I may be permitted a parallel that I know would be quite unacceptable in many cultures, my opening observation about extravagance actually came to me while observing dogs. Two dogs on leads will tear at each other in full voice, to their owners’ consternation but without damage to each other – given that their owners have strong right arms. One dog on a lead and another free will put a note of anxiety into the barks of the tethered animal and, in probability, an air of indifference in the free. Two dogs free and un-pestered by their owners will circle each other with sniffs and exchanged signals. A wide repertoire of possible outcomes can follow but not usually involving loss of hair.
To draw a parallel with the House of Commons requires an extension of the usual anthropological assertion that institutions frame the thought patterns that are permitted within social settings. The extension is this: under constraint, the more that institutionally permitted logics are at apparent variance with free floating observations or facts the more there will be a need for dogmatic assertion [excuse the pun] or artful deviation from the question.
People with other disciplinary backgrounds, or of a commonsensical turn of mind, may find this starting point in anthropological analysis - that thinking is constrained by institutional setting – to be rather far fetched. Without wanting to claim that it always works, the theme is well illustrated by UK politics. The party structures and leadership roles of bi-partisan politics require a confrontation of ideas. Interpretations become polarised. Fact is constructed in such a way that it can be contradicted by an apparent opposite. What is right for one party then has a fair chance of being deemed wrong by the other and a game of reassuring familiarity can take place. A free trade party has historically been opposed by one arguing for protection. Climate change recognition by one party encourages climate change denial by another; or if that is difficult to defend, carbon trading advocacy will be challenged by technical fix advocacy, with ‘facts’ assembled appropriately to support the opposing arguments. In times or on issues of extreme uncertainty of course there may be a polka-like changing of sides and partners, as well as stealing of opponents ideas, but debate still has to be expressed in oppositional terms.
To put predictability into proceedings MPs are expected to take the appropriate side in debate and ‘tow the party line’. Certain party members on either side are appointed as ‘whips’ to ensure compliance. Most members do comply but sometimes they struggle to do so. After all, the issues that we, the citizens, expect them to resolve for us are seldom simple, but politics without some simplification of understandings would be without resolution. The fact that MPs are, on rare occasions, allowed a ‘free vote’ – unrestricted by the party whips - on what are deemed to be ‘matters of conscience’, [to do with sex, death and religion mostly], clearly shows that for other matters, conscience; perhaps even consciousness, is expected to be subordinated to party discipline.
Polarisation nevertheless oversimplifies. Political analysis that is presented as a matter of black and white – or left and right – is often actually rather grey. A promise to achieve outcome x turns out on implementation to be x - or x +, or something else entirely. When the PM stands at the Dispatch Box he is constrained by past commitments to policies and practices that will almost certainly have not all turned out as intended. His/her opponents are less constrained, since, by definition their ideas have not been put to the test. Time is unkind to politicians. Harold Macmillan (UK PM 1957-1963) only had part of the story. It is not only “events, dear boy, events” that challenge stable government but also the inevitable misfit of polarised ideas with the churn of everyday reality. Gordon Brown’s much criticised performance in the Commons is as much the result of time catching up on New Labour promises as it is of his leaden, perhaps too honest, style. Tony Blair was more witty as well as more devious and surrounded by more dexterous spin merchants but was also lucky to be on the delivery end rather than the receiving end of New Labour promises.
When least challenged? Back to the dogs
But before we conclude that all politics is morally compliant with bipartisan norms we should explore the possibility that it is simply the voting climax that reduces the matter to a contest of opposites. The other half of my opening hypothesis about behavioural extravagance is that it is least so when least challenged. Are there parts of the political arena that allow less extravagant, more flexible modes of political interaction? Might it be that full-on confrontation between gladiatorial champions[2] actually allows non-champions some freedom of thought and action.
Allow me to go back to the dogs for a moment. Doggie confrontation in a dog walking context can actually have positive consequences for human sociability[3]. Some forms of parliamentary discussion might do likewise. On visits to relatives on the South coast I am sometimes admitted to a charmed sphere of early morning dog-walking sociability. Chit-chat breaks out spontaneously between strangers about the supposed charms of their respective mutts. This may have little bearing on the actual appearance or behaviour of the animals. ‘He is really very friendly’ can be an opening gambit, even when the evidence is to the contrary. Stranger status is rapidly abandoned in favour of a permissive dog-walker companionship. You may become known initially as ‘owner of so and so’, but that too can give way to an easy exchange of first names and mutual gifts of treats to respective dogs. Walking the same way awhile can lead to tacit ‘same time same place assignments’, safe in the assurance that conversation can always return to canine behaviour and, of course, also assured by the doggie chaperone. For the charmed hour, I noted, workaday restrictions of class and gender disappear and behaviours that might be quite threatening in another institutional context – such as marriage [‘to him/her back home’] – have special licence[4].
It is difficult to know how far the ritual displays of the leaders across the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons actually allows lesser members of the house to have a sphere of informal exchange in which the big battles are put aside. Having brayed in support of their principals from the backbenches at Prime Minister’s Question Time, do backbenchers from either side then sit down together in one or other of the innumerable places of refreshment in the House and lighten the debate with the odd joke? There is certainly some room for relatively friendly exchange. If one tunes into the House of Commons TV channel at odd times of the day or night one is quite likely to find an ongoing debate being sustained by a handful of MPs from across the parties. Each contributor may be seeking to ensure that their contribution is recorded in Hansard, as a loyal follower of their party leader, but they will readily allow points of information or order from opponents. More than once I have encountered situations in which one speaker from across the floor seems to be encouraging another along. For some issues, particularly perhaps those being advanced in support of individual member’s legislative proposals, the contributors from all points of the house may be people who have a special interest in the subject and have conducted research into it. While their views may differ they share a depth of knowledge that others within their parties do not share. Probably such occasions of openness are rare but they do point to a possible route for non-polarised policy change.
The Select Committees through which MPs carry out their scrutiny of government policy are another potential location for non-confrontational policy or performance investigation. The primary dividing line in this context is not between parties but between the executive – the government of the day - and the legislature. Members of different parties sit together, sometimes chaired by an opposition member, to examine documents, cross examine witnesses and draw up reports. Theirs is a scrutiny function in which the aim is to take a policy issue, examine programmes and other measures through which implementation has been pursued, consider outcomes and pronounce on policy effectiveness. But while such scrutiny can be very effective in finding weaknesses in governmental performance it does not necessarily take debate beyond polarisation.
A problem in knowledge about knowledge
An underlying problem in knowledge should be recognised here. The Hegelian model of argumentation, to which my title alludes, sounds simple but isn’t. Thesis opposed by antithesis should, in theory, lead to a third condition that is a synthesis of the two. But the social or intellectual process that should have this outcome has always been difficult to pin down. Even Karl Marx had difficulty envisioning what would be the outcome of antagonism and class conflict between the working classes and the bourgeoisie. Looking backwards he could give a somewhat persuasive account of the emergence of this new bourgeois class out of the contradictions of feudal relations; merchants, traders and professionals breaking free from the restricted social contracts that bound peasants and artisans to their overlords. Looking forwards his imagination failed him. He could give no clue as to what would happen when the worker immiseration that he predicted eventually led to the overthrow of the capitalist class. His sole contribution was the weak idea that all would be free to hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon (German Ideology, 1845) – a remarkably pastoral, even pre-pastoral view of the material conditions of post-industrial revolution society. Without clearer prophesy or prescription the way was free for Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Stalin and others to come up with their own prescriptions, state power and big bureaucracy eventually winning the argument. But this was in no way the logical outcome of the dialectic.
The interesting thing about Marx’s use of the dialectic is that it is not about argumentation or what we now call discourse at all, but about how people respond to changing material conditions. There may well be struggle as the newly dominant social forces carve out a sphere of power and influence but the self-justificatory ideas by which they cement their power do not necessarily emerge from previous understandings. To a capitalist it matters that property is conceived as being unfettered by social obligations. This idea does contrast with the prior European feudal notions of entitlement and obligation that bound together master and servant or Lord of the Manor and serf. It also contrasts with Hindu notions of jajmani relations that survived into recent times, or, from my own field experience, the social obligations that one could find underlying ‘traditional’ society in Botswana. But the supporting logic of capitalism – market economics - cannot really be said to have emerged out of pre-capitalist relations. It needs no backward referral to any system of productive relations that went before.
If we turn to Hegel himself (1770 – 1831), whose ideas Marx borrowed and inverted, we find that the dialectic was supposed to take place in the sphere of consciousness. It was conceived to be a matter of ideas. Do we find a model here upon which to hang our discussion of progress or change in political ideas? According to Wikipedia, Hegel himself did not like the idea that the dialectic was interpreted by some of his contemporaries as debate between the bearers of opposed ideas that would somehow be synthesised through argumentation. What he thought was that internal contradictions within propositions would lead logically to a rethink. He was a bit of an idealist, it seems to me. Human agency disappears almost entirely. We are looking for ‘Deus ex machina’ or a ‘hidden hand’. This is all far away from the sound and fury of debate in the House of Commons. Debate there is. Debate there has to be, because no one packaging of ideas and no attempt to counter a hegemonic establishment with another package can avoid disagreement. What we are looking for is the process or processes whereby new interpretations of conditions and new solutions to problems can emerge out of interaction between human agents. This is about people as promoters of ideas. So we have to go back to the forums and processes of decision making to find our answer.
The already mentioned Professor Rhodes would take us even further away from the Prime Minister in Parliament. His major contribution to the discourse on how decisions get taken in the public weal has been to move the locus out from parliament, cabinet and PM or the civil service into centre-less networks. He and other network theorists[5] find that public policy outcomes are the result of intense exchanges within informal networks that cut across formal government structures and link with non-governmental institutions. Through such networks many actors are able to exercise an influence upon policies. Such nets are not entirely unstructured - although the world-wide web is a close approximation. There are nodes within the nets. The innumerable think tanks that have set themselves up in all quarters of the political spectrum aim to be such nodes. NGOs, lobbyists and pressure groups are others. Prominent individuals in the media, sport, cultural institutions, universities, also know how to network and through such networks aim to make their mark. In UK ‘the Great and the Good’ emerge as such precisely by looking after their personal reputations, by knowing other Great and Good, by ‘having a word’ in the right place but also by thinking the right thoughts and knowing when and how to register an alternative thought. They network; nothing new in that: just a new expression of the old dirge; “Lloyd George knew my father, father knew Lloyd George”[6]. Such linkages have known value in securing personal advantage. But can such network links add public value or advance the public good?
Politics, Public Value and the Perversities of both
Mark Moore, an American professor of entrepreneurial spirit, would answer; yes, as long as the actors use their initiative and network contacts to promote ‘public value’. Moore borrows a market notion to put forward ideas about the potential of plural agency within the public sector[7]. He argues that public value will best be advanced if many public managers with sound public values act in pursuit of such values. His definition of public manager is broad, including not only civil servants and professional appointees to public office but also lobbyists and others who seek to exercise influence, so he is inclusive of most of the networkers that Rhodes asks us to include. By using the term public value rather than public good he is also getting us used to the idea that the good things that we, the public, value are many rather than one. It is not just the decisions of the Prime Minister that matter.
If his logic fits the facts Moore provides a model of public decision making that legitimates a plural field of influence. As long as all these people are pursuing good ends through good values the outcome for society should be good. This however is a big IF. Critical commentators suggest Moore idealises and sanitises the behaviour of public managers and may even be ignoring the role of elected politicians[8]. The many voices advocating public values of one kind or another may be promoting quite contradictory things. The real world of politics and public management is full of mendacious behaviour and deliberate misrepresentation of opponents’ views. Furthermore, in public management as in all things ‘Sods Law’ applies: ‘if it can go wrong it will go wrong’[9]. So who should have the final say?
Professor Rhodes, with colleague John Wanna, now comes back into the discussion, this time arguing for the primacy of politics over administration and influence seeking networkers, thereby reverting to a suspiciously conformist view of legitimate decision making. In Westminster type government, they argue, the managerialist bias behind Moore’s interpretation of how public value is produced denies politicians their role and hierarchical priority in deciding which public values amongst the many to pursue. Is Rhodes now seeking to squeeze the debate back into a conventional separation of politics and administration and into a formal hierarchy?
Moore is accused of naivety in thinking that creating public value is a matter of good will or intent and that administrators can do it uninhibited. He does not acknowledge that administrators doing it might marginalise politicians, pushing them into particularist representation – i.e., allowing them to favour friends and causing them to behave badly in relation to the public good. Rhodes / Wanna, on the other hand now seem to be suggesting that separation of powers is sufficient; an old theme in constitutional theory which British practice fudges and American defines and then subverts[10].
Part of the Westminster fudge that applies to all UK governance institutions is the fiction that politicians and civil servants maintain separate powers and functions. Under this construct Ministers / Leaders ‘do’ policy but have ‘oversight’ [a term which once meant neglect and now means supervision] of administrative effectiveness while administrators administer but can be creative advocates of different feasible policy options. There are also specific overlapping accountabilities [Section 151 officers in Local Government]. Similarly the boundaries between formal institutions of governance and ‘outside’ influences such as the think tanks or the press tend to be fluid; open to active flows of information but subject to continuous negotiation or legal testing, usually around sensitive issues. Pushing these boundaries from different sides can allow for creativity; defending their integrity should ensure the primacy of public value. Systems that would simply disempower this plurality make for trouble.
The Rhodes / Wanna article uses case studies of some notorious failures in public management - the handling of the UK mad cow disease, the outing of David Kelly over the Iraq dossier and a number of Australian cases - to illustrate the fact that no part of any government can be trusted to focus solely upon ‘advancing public value’. Their point seems to be about the danger of allowing muddled responsibilities. But to me a broader point is raised by these notorious cases. They are evidence of Sods Law. Even with the best of intentions and the best laid schemes, things will go wrong. When things go wrong; through unpredicted risk, or simply ‘events’, one side will tend to blame the other and reinterpret the situation to protect their own ‘butt’ and seek to ‘kick ass’ elsewhere. A sophisticated theory of public management needs to recognise blame as well as risk and the tendency of each party, politicians, officials, and others to defend itself against blame.
Conclusion
How to conclude? The conclusion seems to be that constitutional structures and formal systems are unlikely to guarantee good behavioural outcomes. Decision making in the public realm is inevitably a bit messy. There is no trace of a clean-cut dialectic here. Moore’s insistence on the idea of individual responsibility in adding value is based upon a moral assertion. Individuals should be committed to public values and should be judged by others on this basis. There has to be some virtue in this position. Certainly one cannot, from the sidelines, advocate a Machiavellian scepticism about approaches to responsibility in public life. My quarrel with the concept is that it makes out that all actors are only good actors if angels. Where the public good is threatened the solution is - yes - advanced by something that is valued but only if it also ‘works’. This in fact was Machiavelli’s point. It will be valued in part because it works. So when Gordon Brown, facing the worst banking crisis for nigh on a hundred years, stands at the dispatch box to announce - completely contradicting hitherto prevailing public values - the effective re-nationalisation of the banks (October 2008), suddenly his bite is as powerful as his bark. Sign of a true statesman?
[1] RAW Rhodes ‘Governance and Public Administration’, Ch 4 in John Pierre 2000 Debating Governance, OUP
[2] Roman gladiators were of course constrained by their slavery: denied the freedom to shake hands and make up, so for them it had to be to the death.
[3] As noted in Buster’s Diary [Roy Hattersley]
[4] I am not sure if dogs are the key to this. It may be the hour. Early morning is also the time when old men in China gather with their caged canaries but most Chinese achieve the same boundary breaking intimacy through their tie-chi gatherings in which no pets mediate. However it is achieved, the fact is that behavioural patterns differ in different social contexts.
[5] Kickert WJM, Erik-Hans Klijn and Joop FM Koppenjan 1997, Managing Complex Networks London New Delhi, Sage
[6] Sung repetitively to the tune of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’; though out of fashion now.
[7] Moore M 1995 Creating Public Value Cambridge, MA :Harvard University Press
[8] Rhodes, RAW and John Wanna, 2008 ‘Bringing the Politics back in’ in Bennington J and Moore M From Private Choice to Public Value Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave, Macmillan; Gains, Francesca and Stoker, Gerry, (n.d.) ‘How Politics Works: Understanding the New Realities of the Political Process in Public Management’ Paper for the Work Foundation
[9] The Scottish poet Robert Burns put it more eloquently in his famous address to a mouse.
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane / In proving foresight may be vain: / The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley, / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, / For promised joy
[10] See my ‘Constitutionalism and rolling roads’.
Governing professors
Subtitle: Non-linearity and the elusive gift of [academic] immortality. This one about why it is that UK universities have chosen - or had thrust upon them - a performance management regime that stifles creativity.
The question that I want to address here is both practical and academic. The question is this. Why is it that universities in Britain have chosen performance management techniques that are more suited to mass production processes in industry than to advancement of knowledge? It is clear that academics in universities do need to perform and that an individual’s contribution to overall performance and reputation is important. Information about performance is therefore a serious issue. Some system is necessary; but what?
I had been contemplating this issue for some years before I was invited to become a visiting scholar in a Japanese university for a three month spell. Colleagues there were curious as to how universities in UK or departments within them are managed and whether there were things that they could learn. I have to confess that my reaction was ‘No, please No’. I could see that they may have felt that they had problems. In many ways my host university had what one could term old fashioned industrial management rather than new; academics having to clock in and out every day and fit whatever thought processes were going on in their minds into prescribed categories in their time-sheets, but actually this could be fairly readily accommodated without too much obvious subversion. New Public Management was nevertheless in the air. They thought that my erstwhile UK university might have it and they wanted to know. So I was obliged to put pen to paper, though I doubted that they would appreciate my anxieties.
These things were mulling over in my mind when I found myself in an art gallery. The Nagoya / Boston Museum of Fine Arts had an exhibition called ‘The Brilliance of Bird-and-Flower Painting: Gems of East Asian Art’. It was there that I encountered – in picture no. 18 – ‘The Daoist Immortal Magu with Crane and Flower Basket’ and experienced my own little bit of enlightenment. This is what I wrote home.
Inside, when I had mastered the umbrella rack technology, I came across this exhibition. I was handed an English blurb but I suspect the Japanese version was more helpful and that Japanese visitors probably carried more in their heads and heritage[1]. But the pictures did speak for themselves and were very lovely. In No. 15, Mandarin Ducks under Peach Blossom [China, 13thC] for instance, Him and Her duck do seem to be speaking to each other harmoniously [an unmentioned Chaffinch looking on from said peach tree]. No.16: Two Magpies Playing in a Willow Tree, [China 17thC] has magpies clearly making noises the way that magpies should.
In Nine Herons by a Willow Tree [No. 20, China, Ming Dynasty] one can guess at 9 being auspicious somehow and in any case the birds have both mobility and elegance. And so it went on: one artful delight after another; each speaking of order and expected relationships. It was all, if not entirely intelligible, certainly Confucian: birds should behave like that, butterflies do add grace to blossoms like that, and Minor Birds do dispute in that way. Everything was in proper proportion [and perspective, which surprised me – I had thought it a later invention].
Then around a corner I came across something rather different: The Daoist Immortal Magu with a Crane and Flower Basket [China 14th Century]. Much in this picture is of the same order as the others: there is a suitably contorted pine tree and other evidence of forest. The flower basket could be a still life. But the man, centre stage; the Immortal Magu is skipping in inelegant delight. The crane by contrast, is all disdain. It stands there, clearly having said or done what was required, its head turned away. I had to laugh. Next day I consulted a companion in the Visiting Scholar’s room, Dr Li – the man studying the Winged Horse in Tibetan and Japanese mythology. He seemed to be the right person. The traveller in the forest he said, has just been granted eternal life by the crane. Both he and the crane are central figures in Taoist iconography apparently. Well, that got me so far; but, I now see laughter in magic or the other way around - magic in laughter. In either case it is a break out from order and perfection. The same joy as one might have in finding a banana skin on a Japanese railway station platform. Never – what never? Well, hardly ever: usually you can eat off them.
It may seem odd now but this artistic encounter was curiously liberating. What I now felt able to look for in the search for appropriate university governance could have contradictory elements to it, surprises. I could be attracted to the aesthetics of order [not that I now see university management as aesthetically pleasing] but would be setting the ordered against the exceptional. In methodological terms, how would this be? My note went on:
That set me thinking – a slow developing thought about the strange, age-old juxtaposition in this part of the world between Confucianism and Taoism; the one confirming order, hierarchy, linearity, the other hinting at action in inaction, the creative tension of Ying and Yang, non-linearity: the possibility of surprise. And, I now think, laughter.
The sciences and social scientists have been rather slow to come to non-linearity. Physics got there the empirical way but not without a stretch of the imagination as things became too small to see and left the oddest of traces in the sand – so to speak. Actually economics was sort of there from the start, leaving to metaphor – ‘the hidden hand’ – what the logic-choppers of the market could not fully explain. [The hand is still at work stirring the spirals of inflation, popping the dot-com bubbles…] Sociology, I now find, has some serious things to say about it……
I was referring to some writers on the management of ecosystems who made a point that could be applied to the knowledge business as a whole;
….“In principle .. there is an inherent unknowability, as well as unpredictability, concerning these evolving, managed ecosystems and the societies with which they are linked”[2].
How do we expect universities to manage their professors in ways that enable them to approach the unknowable or the unpredictable?
To address this question we have to put the particular issue into a wider context. Organizations, of which universities are one example among many, are complex things. All sorts of different things have to be done within them and therefore we may expect to find different bits being governed or managed in differing ways. Management techniques are varied, evolving from practice but subsequently thought about and written about as stand alone ideas. Out of context, however, they may appear to be of universal application, when perhaps they are not.
Universities exist to advance knowledge. Some form of assessment of ‘contribution to knowledge’ would seem to be appropriate. But knowledge is diverse and pluralistic. There are many kinds of knowledge; innumerable subjects and divisions and subdivisions within a subject and no clear boundaries. What appear to be hybrids, such, as bio-chemistry, can suddenly take on a centrality to current intellectual concerns.
How to assess a person’s contribution to knowledge is also difficult. Knowledge changes. A person may work at a problem of apparent obscurity, assessed as irrelevant, [and so not get published] only to make a break through and reveal a new way of thinking that becomes central to the discipline. By contrast, someone working at the apparent centre can fade into obscurity in the longer run.
University academic assessment has to be realistic, and modest, and accept the fact that Albert Einstein would probably have failed any current test of performance. He wrote four key articles that are regarded as the foundations of a new way of thinking. They were all produced within two years, and all before he became an employee in any university – he was in fact a patents clerk.
The problem arises when a centralized management system attempts to rank contributions upon a universal scale. In the UK academic performance is assessed through;
A quality assessment of articles published in leading academic journals
an assessment of teaching - use of equipment, frequency of student contact and the like
an assessment of contribution to university life, committee membership, etc
And as a late runner, some kind of concern for the usefulness of the resultant ideas for society as a whole
Current performance measures each have an evolutionary history, although now contorted by central direction. The value of a piece of intellectual work is in principle established by its recognition by other academics. An article submitted to a journal is only published if peers recognize its contribution to current debate. A scholar is only promoted if peers recognize that her/his work has added value to disciplinary knowledge and institutional reputation. A teacher is recruited to join a faculty if peers think that students will have their minds turned on by his/her ideas. This was a plural social order founded in mutual interest. University governance was a loose way of ensuring that this order could thrive. This order does not survive central direction. In recent decades the approach has been captured by central government which has driven a centrally determined and administered set of nationwide standards and expectations through the university system. Some elements may look the same. Some elements of peer review survive, but central direction alters its character.
The new system attempts to batter a heterogeneous, plural process for estimating individual worth or contribution in relation to the immense diversity of knowledge into a uniform, hierarchical system of ranking. To do so knowledge itself has to be knocked into shape; disciplinary divisions reinforced, journals ranked on the basis of their purity of abstraction, awkward oddities [where innovation might be found] driven to the margin.
An individual’s publication record, to which can now be attached a number, remains at the centre of the new system and it is here that the greatest risks / possibilities of system corruption can be found. There two kinds of risk at least;
Ø publication ‘inflation’; more articles, more journals, same amount of knowledge
Ø standardization; academic review leading to acceptance of conformity with prevailing understandings rather than transformation or paradigm shift
It is quite unlikely that the new system will survive. No, let me put that more positively, it is likely that individual thinkers will find ways around the system or of corrupting the system so that they can again locate their own endeavors in relation to the full complexity of publicly available knowledge in any sphere, asses themselves through the relations that they build with others in their field and be encouraged to persevere through recognition of the frailty and impermanence of centrally driven systems. The system will attempt to put everyone into line, rank them in order and promote them on resultant ‘merit’. Many creative individual minds will not fit. It will be up to them to find their own ways of breaking out of line.
It is nevertheless useful to go back to the opening question. Why did a centralized performance management system drive out, incorporate or subordinate a plural system of peer assessment? Hypothesis one is that it is down to ‘moderisation’, the pursuit of fashionable ideas. Centralization in the name of decentralization is ‘in’. Hypothesis two elaborates upon hypothesis one to note that new the system suits the holders of power. To examine these ideas it is necessary to have a way of thinking about types.
Types of Performance Management
The UK university’s chosen means of performance measurement can be set against a typology of types of performance management. I derive this typology from Cultural Theory (Douglas xxxx, Thompson, Ellis xxxx, Hood xxxxx, Thompson 2009). [and set it out in mandala like structure in respect of the Buddhist influence that seems to be asserting itself in this paper] This theory can be used to note the different values and social dynamics that are to be found in hierarchies, groups, individualistic networks and a fourth type that I here identify positively as charismatic. Performance within social contexts in which one or other of these value systems are dominant will be an outcome of the expression of these values. Types and appropriate performance systems can be summarised as follows:
Bureaucratic;
Performance achieved through
- regulation
- discreteness of tasks
- division of labour
- individual performance target setting
Assessed by ;
- monitoring of targets
- quantitative testing
- conformity to rules
Charismatic ;
Performance achieved through;
- inspiration
- problem solving
- enthusiasm
- risk taking
Assessed by;
- ‘things being better’
Network based;
Performance achieved through
- mutual interest
- energy exchange
- gift exchange
Assessed by;
- effectiveness of outcomes for each
- spin off common
benefits [externalities]
Team structured;
Performance achieved through
- sharing
- participation
- jointness of effort
Assessed by;
- assessment of outcome of the group effort
- mutual appraisal
The first stage of the underlying argument is that different forms of assessment suit different styles of working. Hierarchies will seek performance through setting tasks, demanding conformity with rules and quantitative monitoring of outcomes from the centre. People who are comfortable working in hierarchies will expect this form of task-setting and control. Effective teams work in a group sharing mode, members achieving good performance through monitoring each other informally (controlling free riders through gossip if not through formal mutual review procedures). Individualists undertaking exchange in the market or building social networks are constantly appraising their own performance and that of partners and taking corrective action. Charismatic leadership - most likely in contexts where followers are alienated, and rules no longer work, is also self-assessing. If the outcome is good and becomes acceptable then it is accepted. No external agent can appraise such transformative action.
The second stage of the underlying argument is that different styles of working – and value system – suit different kinds of task. Hierarchies are good at routines, where the value added lies is in the efficiencies to be gained in standardization and repetitive action. Groups can be problem solving and creative where the value to be added is unpredictable and the contribution of each participant is not readily measured. Individualists create value through exchange – the task lending itself to immediate assessment. Charismatic leaders are called for when the task is apparently impossible – something has to be recreated out of breakdown – chaos. Though this situation sometimes exists, even within universities, it is not the norm and will be left aside in the following sections.
What kind of tasks are involved in ‘advancement of knowledge’? If the goal of any university is the advancement of knowledge, it is quite reasonable to suggest that objectives may include to research and to teach. My own bit of a university would also have claimed that 'engagement with the world of practice' is a valid approach to the advancement of knowledge - in this case about governance institutions. But research and teaching - which we also did - also suggest some activity of the mind. So it is plausible to argue for causal links between these and the goal. But are they adequate and if adequate, is the essence of what is to be achieved through them - namely advancement of knowledge - measurable?
Medieval scholars clearly struggled with these issues and came up with contrasting formulae. Besides studying books, all were required to pray. Some took contemplation very seriously and shut themselves away. Others were required to struggle with the things of everyday life such as farming, and some were required also to teach. These techniques had their limitations which the Renaissance sorted out, we are told. But is there not at least a point in having to 'engage with the real world' as a recognized good thing?.
Part of the problem is in the measurement. Research is one way in which knowledge about something can be advanced; no doubt. But is the number of articles published over a fixed time span a measure of this advancement? One way of assessing the value of articles is to think of the half dozen articles in a your chosen field you could identify as having had the most impact over the last decade. The test would be that - after reading such an article - you have had to think differently. In reality, most academics would be very lucky if they could honestly claim that they had written one of them. One article in a much longer period - which they almost certainly will not have written - makes the whole discipline think again. I doubt if there would be serious dissatisfaction in any chosen field if overall advancement were at this rate.
Some of the other stuff that is produced is worth reading. Most people who survive in a university setting will genuinely be able to claim that they have written a few pieces that have been worth reading. But the idea that each researcher should produce two point something articles over a fixed time period is ludicrous. It can only be explained as a mechanistic response to constraints imposed by a management fixated upon mechanistic measures acting within a competitive environment. It is sustained by conspiracies of peer self preservation in discipline based journals. It would not happen were it not for the Vice Chancellors seeking competitive advantage by attempting to prove the vitality, obedience or whatever, of their staff when compared to others. Knowledge is then but a bit player.
What would be much better would be some measure of whether ideas are useful to anybody. Citation indicators go some way in this direction but encouraged a closed academic process - a fall-back to basic binary processes of recognition or reward that will ensure only that “as Humperdink (2008) so pertinently notes…” is reciprocated with “Pumpernickel’s penetrating observation (2009) confirms….” - otherwise known as mutual back-scratching. Ideas being useful to somebody should presumably take into account a wider range of bodies than fellow academics. This is apparently recognized by the latest iteration of government directions to the university performance assessment. xxxxx
The real world does not measure the value of ideas in terms of a quantum of articles in university journals or books, but in innumerable other forms, principally embodiment the resultant ideas in some practical technique for bettering human existence [though that is a bit of an elusive quality]. Many such advancements should be measurable, if they really must be measured. To do these things as well as jump through the performance hoops of mechanistic publication, is not to do anything well - is my judgment [or perhaps my excuse].
Micro Politics and Organizational Perversity
Perhaps the most common of organizational perversities is for the means to become the message. The 20th Century developed three competing models about organizational behaviour - though from all the management hype one would think that there were many more. These are the hierarchy model, the team model and the individualist model. Each has its appropriate form of management.
In terms of motivation there are also two approaches. The one assumes that performance incentive is 'inherent to position’. The incentive to perform should come, in the case of the hierarchical organization, from promotion chances, in the case of the team, from the interdependency of the team in getting the job done and in the individualistic organization from the intrinsic personal reward of a satisfactory job done. The ‘inherent reward’ approach assumes that individuals are themselves goal oriented. Often, they are not. It is also assumed that universities and other organizations allow or encourage these inherent motivation factors to work. Often they do not. As a result universities, along with many other types of ‘modern’ organization find themselves adopting the second approach which is to establish a separate behavioural game.
This game equips a central management with sticks and carrots. It requires externally administered performance measurement. The fact that incentives - rewards and punishments are externalized from the unit of production to an agent of central control - any latent Marxists hidden in the woodwork would recognize this as alienation - means that individual academics are obliged to play the game. In consequence academic performance becomes geared to meeting the measure rather than achieving the purpose:
Ø producing the necessary number of articles in the necessarily prestigious, if perhaps consequentially incestuous journals; rather than searching for a star idea
Ø teaching the requisite number of classes, limiting student contact hours to the minimum required by the teaching performance measure; rather than nurturing a meeting of minds
Ø sitting on the minimum necessary number of committees or undertaking the least onerous collegiate tasks to fulfill the statutory third type contribution to the functioning of the university; rather than experiencing the buzz that comes to self and to others when generating a true learning environment.
.
How did it come to this?
The short answer is that universities, along with many other public bodies have taken their management ideas out of handbooks - decidedly dated handbooks - of industrial management. The broad lessons coming out of the management gurus seem to be that hierarchical organizations can be good at mass production kind of things, while more varied, unpredictable or difficult - dare I say intelligent things, need to be done in teams or sometimes by motivated individuals.
Advancement of knowledge obviously has to have some shape and order to it but it is best done by people who are able and motivated to have their wits about them and to work with a high degree of discretion. Industry, it seems is currently becoming fairly sensible about this. Management gurus are of course currently driving the process to extremes. They are telling industrial magnates that their success in a competitive world depends upon turning whole enterprises into outward looking, customer responsive and above all innovative organizations. This requires decentralized, flexible structures. But even in the bad old days when production lines were commanded from on high, a specialist research and development unit (R&D) was allowed to organize itself into a team that could be goal oriented, flexible, with a degree of independent responsibility.
Universities in Britain now have set production targets and constraints on the teaching side. They have relatively long hierarchies within each university as well as in the tertiary education sector which, in turn specifies how much of different kinds of goods (students of different kinds) are to be produced. The research side of university production might be thought to show a more responsive process. People have to put forward proposals for funding which are competitively judged. Another kind of research comes from enterprising academics forming contracts with businesses or other agencies which share an interest in solving a shared knowledge problem. So this is an area in which we do find individuals, or more often teams, committing themselves to the task and getting the inherent rewards. Maybe this is the way to go. But it is also apparent that that is not good enough for the powers that be. The university bosses are not content to have their institutions assessed on the basis that there are motivated teams at work, even that so much research funding is brought in, but must go for the mechanistic measure of paper output, with the consequence that mechanistic control remains the dominant mode of operation and the dominant culture - to the extent that many enterprising or simply thoughtful academics search for pastures new.
The theory of organizational perversity
But because of size, complexity and an apparent ability to avoid death, universities in Britain as in Japan tend to accumulate other logics, logics that detach the exercise of power from sensible decision making about incentives and controls. Modernisation - as I tried to assert in Japan, against a curious flow of optimism - makes matters worse, adding spurious logics, giving power to bureaucrats turned messianic reformers, quite neglecting task, above all; ignorant of the life giving powers of the Daoist Immortal Magu. Immortality - of mind anyway - has come to Darwin, to Einstein… who else? The Vice Chancellors do not have it in their gift to bestow immortality upon the potential greats of the 21st Century, but they probably have the power to take it away.
What we actually find is one set of rationalizations - those relevant to promoting the power of the bosses in this and many other instances, contradicting those relevant to sustainable small batch or unit production - to put industrial labels on the case in point. We all recognize this kind of situation. Where this contradiction leads to thought, reflection, debate, and corrective action or sensible compromise, we tend to see these contradictions as creative tension. Where it leads to the suppression of creative energy, alienation, token compliance, absenteeism and stress, let us call this a perverse outcome and try to avoid it.
[1] The English text just translated the titles and gave as introduction: “The motifs painted have various connotations such as wishes for good luck or hidden meanings from Confucianism and Buddhism. Birds and flowers were painted to invoke longevity….and, while bird-and-flower painting styles differ in periods and areas, we still understand these motifs today”. In other words: guess.
[2] Holling CS, Berkes F and Folke C, 1998 ‘Science, Sustainability and Resource Management’, in Birkes F and Folke C eds Linking Social and Ecological Systems Cambridge UP, a great read for a Japan winter evening
The question that I want to address here is both practical and academic. The question is this. Why is it that universities in Britain have chosen performance management techniques that are more suited to mass production processes in industry than to advancement of knowledge? It is clear that academics in universities do need to perform and that an individual’s contribution to overall performance and reputation is important. Information about performance is therefore a serious issue. Some system is necessary; but what?
I had been contemplating this issue for some years before I was invited to become a visiting scholar in a Japanese university for a three month spell. Colleagues there were curious as to how universities in UK or departments within them are managed and whether there were things that they could learn. I have to confess that my reaction was ‘No, please No’. I could see that they may have felt that they had problems. In many ways my host university had what one could term old fashioned industrial management rather than new; academics having to clock in and out every day and fit whatever thought processes were going on in their minds into prescribed categories in their time-sheets, but actually this could be fairly readily accommodated without too much obvious subversion. New Public Management was nevertheless in the air. They thought that my erstwhile UK university might have it and they wanted to know. So I was obliged to put pen to paper, though I doubted that they would appreciate my anxieties.
These things were mulling over in my mind when I found myself in an art gallery. The Nagoya / Boston Museum of Fine Arts had an exhibition called ‘The Brilliance of Bird-and-Flower Painting: Gems of East Asian Art’. It was there that I encountered – in picture no. 18 – ‘The Daoist Immortal Magu with Crane and Flower Basket’ and experienced my own little bit of enlightenment. This is what I wrote home.
Inside, when I had mastered the umbrella rack technology, I came across this exhibition. I was handed an English blurb but I suspect the Japanese version was more helpful and that Japanese visitors probably carried more in their heads and heritage[1]. But the pictures did speak for themselves and were very lovely. In No. 15, Mandarin Ducks under Peach Blossom [China, 13thC] for instance, Him and Her duck do seem to be speaking to each other harmoniously [an unmentioned Chaffinch looking on from said peach tree]. No.16: Two Magpies Playing in a Willow Tree, [China 17thC] has magpies clearly making noises the way that magpies should.
In Nine Herons by a Willow Tree [No. 20, China, Ming Dynasty] one can guess at 9 being auspicious somehow and in any case the birds have both mobility and elegance. And so it went on: one artful delight after another; each speaking of order and expected relationships. It was all, if not entirely intelligible, certainly Confucian: birds should behave like that, butterflies do add grace to blossoms like that, and Minor Birds do dispute in that way. Everything was in proper proportion [and perspective, which surprised me – I had thought it a later invention].
Then around a corner I came across something rather different: The Daoist Immortal Magu with a Crane and Flower Basket [China 14th Century]. Much in this picture is of the same order as the others: there is a suitably contorted pine tree and other evidence of forest. The flower basket could be a still life. But the man, centre stage; the Immortal Magu is skipping in inelegant delight. The crane by contrast, is all disdain. It stands there, clearly having said or done what was required, its head turned away. I had to laugh. Next day I consulted a companion in the Visiting Scholar’s room, Dr Li – the man studying the Winged Horse in Tibetan and Japanese mythology. He seemed to be the right person. The traveller in the forest he said, has just been granted eternal life by the crane. Both he and the crane are central figures in Taoist iconography apparently. Well, that got me so far; but, I now see laughter in magic or the other way around - magic in laughter. In either case it is a break out from order and perfection. The same joy as one might have in finding a banana skin on a Japanese railway station platform. Never – what never? Well, hardly ever: usually you can eat off them.
It may seem odd now but this artistic encounter was curiously liberating. What I now felt able to look for in the search for appropriate university governance could have contradictory elements to it, surprises. I could be attracted to the aesthetics of order [not that I now see university management as aesthetically pleasing] but would be setting the ordered against the exceptional. In methodological terms, how would this be? My note went on:
That set me thinking – a slow developing thought about the strange, age-old juxtaposition in this part of the world between Confucianism and Taoism; the one confirming order, hierarchy, linearity, the other hinting at action in inaction, the creative tension of Ying and Yang, non-linearity: the possibility of surprise. And, I now think, laughter.
The sciences and social scientists have been rather slow to come to non-linearity. Physics got there the empirical way but not without a stretch of the imagination as things became too small to see and left the oddest of traces in the sand – so to speak. Actually economics was sort of there from the start, leaving to metaphor – ‘the hidden hand’ – what the logic-choppers of the market could not fully explain. [The hand is still at work stirring the spirals of inflation, popping the dot-com bubbles…] Sociology, I now find, has some serious things to say about it……
I was referring to some writers on the management of ecosystems who made a point that could be applied to the knowledge business as a whole;
….“In principle .. there is an inherent unknowability, as well as unpredictability, concerning these evolving, managed ecosystems and the societies with which they are linked”[2].
How do we expect universities to manage their professors in ways that enable them to approach the unknowable or the unpredictable?
To address this question we have to put the particular issue into a wider context. Organizations, of which universities are one example among many, are complex things. All sorts of different things have to be done within them and therefore we may expect to find different bits being governed or managed in differing ways. Management techniques are varied, evolving from practice but subsequently thought about and written about as stand alone ideas. Out of context, however, they may appear to be of universal application, when perhaps they are not.
Universities exist to advance knowledge. Some form of assessment of ‘contribution to knowledge’ would seem to be appropriate. But knowledge is diverse and pluralistic. There are many kinds of knowledge; innumerable subjects and divisions and subdivisions within a subject and no clear boundaries. What appear to be hybrids, such, as bio-chemistry, can suddenly take on a centrality to current intellectual concerns.
How to assess a person’s contribution to knowledge is also difficult. Knowledge changes. A person may work at a problem of apparent obscurity, assessed as irrelevant, [and so not get published] only to make a break through and reveal a new way of thinking that becomes central to the discipline. By contrast, someone working at the apparent centre can fade into obscurity in the longer run.
University academic assessment has to be realistic, and modest, and accept the fact that Albert Einstein would probably have failed any current test of performance. He wrote four key articles that are regarded as the foundations of a new way of thinking. They were all produced within two years, and all before he became an employee in any university – he was in fact a patents clerk.
The problem arises when a centralized management system attempts to rank contributions upon a universal scale. In the UK academic performance is assessed through;
A quality assessment of articles published in leading academic journals
an assessment of teaching - use of equipment, frequency of student contact and the like
an assessment of contribution to university life, committee membership, etc
And as a late runner, some kind of concern for the usefulness of the resultant ideas for society as a whole
Current performance measures each have an evolutionary history, although now contorted by central direction. The value of a piece of intellectual work is in principle established by its recognition by other academics. An article submitted to a journal is only published if peers recognize its contribution to current debate. A scholar is only promoted if peers recognize that her/his work has added value to disciplinary knowledge and institutional reputation. A teacher is recruited to join a faculty if peers think that students will have their minds turned on by his/her ideas. This was a plural social order founded in mutual interest. University governance was a loose way of ensuring that this order could thrive. This order does not survive central direction. In recent decades the approach has been captured by central government which has driven a centrally determined and administered set of nationwide standards and expectations through the university system. Some elements may look the same. Some elements of peer review survive, but central direction alters its character.
The new system attempts to batter a heterogeneous, plural process for estimating individual worth or contribution in relation to the immense diversity of knowledge into a uniform, hierarchical system of ranking. To do so knowledge itself has to be knocked into shape; disciplinary divisions reinforced, journals ranked on the basis of their purity of abstraction, awkward oddities [where innovation might be found] driven to the margin.
An individual’s publication record, to which can now be attached a number, remains at the centre of the new system and it is here that the greatest risks / possibilities of system corruption can be found. There two kinds of risk at least;
Ø publication ‘inflation’; more articles, more journals, same amount of knowledge
Ø standardization; academic review leading to acceptance of conformity with prevailing understandings rather than transformation or paradigm shift
It is quite unlikely that the new system will survive. No, let me put that more positively, it is likely that individual thinkers will find ways around the system or of corrupting the system so that they can again locate their own endeavors in relation to the full complexity of publicly available knowledge in any sphere, asses themselves through the relations that they build with others in their field and be encouraged to persevere through recognition of the frailty and impermanence of centrally driven systems. The system will attempt to put everyone into line, rank them in order and promote them on resultant ‘merit’. Many creative individual minds will not fit. It will be up to them to find their own ways of breaking out of line.
It is nevertheless useful to go back to the opening question. Why did a centralized performance management system drive out, incorporate or subordinate a plural system of peer assessment? Hypothesis one is that it is down to ‘moderisation’, the pursuit of fashionable ideas. Centralization in the name of decentralization is ‘in’. Hypothesis two elaborates upon hypothesis one to note that new the system suits the holders of power. To examine these ideas it is necessary to have a way of thinking about types.
Types of Performance Management
The UK university’s chosen means of performance measurement can be set against a typology of types of performance management. I derive this typology from Cultural Theory (Douglas xxxx, Thompson, Ellis xxxx, Hood xxxxx, Thompson 2009). [and set it out in mandala like structure in respect of the Buddhist influence that seems to be asserting itself in this paper] This theory can be used to note the different values and social dynamics that are to be found in hierarchies, groups, individualistic networks and a fourth type that I here identify positively as charismatic. Performance within social contexts in which one or other of these value systems are dominant will be an outcome of the expression of these values. Types and appropriate performance systems can be summarised as follows:
Bureaucratic;
Performance achieved through
- regulation
- discreteness of tasks
- division of labour
- individual performance target setting
Assessed by ;
- monitoring of targets
- quantitative testing
- conformity to rules
Charismatic ;
Performance achieved through;
- inspiration
- problem solving
- enthusiasm
- risk taking
Assessed by;
- ‘things being better’
Network based;
Performance achieved through
- mutual interest
- energy exchange
- gift exchange
Assessed by;
- effectiveness of outcomes for each
- spin off common
benefits [externalities]
Team structured;
Performance achieved through
- sharing
- participation
- jointness of effort
Assessed by;
- assessment of outcome of the group effort
- mutual appraisal
The first stage of the underlying argument is that different forms of assessment suit different styles of working. Hierarchies will seek performance through setting tasks, demanding conformity with rules and quantitative monitoring of outcomes from the centre. People who are comfortable working in hierarchies will expect this form of task-setting and control. Effective teams work in a group sharing mode, members achieving good performance through monitoring each other informally (controlling free riders through gossip if not through formal mutual review procedures). Individualists undertaking exchange in the market or building social networks are constantly appraising their own performance and that of partners and taking corrective action. Charismatic leadership - most likely in contexts where followers are alienated, and rules no longer work, is also self-assessing. If the outcome is good and becomes acceptable then it is accepted. No external agent can appraise such transformative action.
The second stage of the underlying argument is that different styles of working – and value system – suit different kinds of task. Hierarchies are good at routines, where the value added lies is in the efficiencies to be gained in standardization and repetitive action. Groups can be problem solving and creative where the value to be added is unpredictable and the contribution of each participant is not readily measured. Individualists create value through exchange – the task lending itself to immediate assessment. Charismatic leaders are called for when the task is apparently impossible – something has to be recreated out of breakdown – chaos. Though this situation sometimes exists, even within universities, it is not the norm and will be left aside in the following sections.
What kind of tasks are involved in ‘advancement of knowledge’? If the goal of any university is the advancement of knowledge, it is quite reasonable to suggest that objectives may include to research and to teach. My own bit of a university would also have claimed that 'engagement with the world of practice' is a valid approach to the advancement of knowledge - in this case about governance institutions. But research and teaching - which we also did - also suggest some activity of the mind. So it is plausible to argue for causal links between these and the goal. But are they adequate and if adequate, is the essence of what is to be achieved through them - namely advancement of knowledge - measurable?
Medieval scholars clearly struggled with these issues and came up with contrasting formulae. Besides studying books, all were required to pray. Some took contemplation very seriously and shut themselves away. Others were required to struggle with the things of everyday life such as farming, and some were required also to teach. These techniques had their limitations which the Renaissance sorted out, we are told. But is there not at least a point in having to 'engage with the real world' as a recognized good thing?.
Part of the problem is in the measurement. Research is one way in which knowledge about something can be advanced; no doubt. But is the number of articles published over a fixed time span a measure of this advancement? One way of assessing the value of articles is to think of the half dozen articles in a your chosen field you could identify as having had the most impact over the last decade. The test would be that - after reading such an article - you have had to think differently. In reality, most academics would be very lucky if they could honestly claim that they had written one of them. One article in a much longer period - which they almost certainly will not have written - makes the whole discipline think again. I doubt if there would be serious dissatisfaction in any chosen field if overall advancement were at this rate.
Some of the other stuff that is produced is worth reading. Most people who survive in a university setting will genuinely be able to claim that they have written a few pieces that have been worth reading. But the idea that each researcher should produce two point something articles over a fixed time period is ludicrous. It can only be explained as a mechanistic response to constraints imposed by a management fixated upon mechanistic measures acting within a competitive environment. It is sustained by conspiracies of peer self preservation in discipline based journals. It would not happen were it not for the Vice Chancellors seeking competitive advantage by attempting to prove the vitality, obedience or whatever, of their staff when compared to others. Knowledge is then but a bit player.
What would be much better would be some measure of whether ideas are useful to anybody. Citation indicators go some way in this direction but encouraged a closed academic process - a fall-back to basic binary processes of recognition or reward that will ensure only that “as Humperdink (2008) so pertinently notes…” is reciprocated with “Pumpernickel’s penetrating observation (2009) confirms….” - otherwise known as mutual back-scratching. Ideas being useful to somebody should presumably take into account a wider range of bodies than fellow academics. This is apparently recognized by the latest iteration of government directions to the university performance assessment. xxxxx
The real world does not measure the value of ideas in terms of a quantum of articles in university journals or books, but in innumerable other forms, principally embodiment the resultant ideas in some practical technique for bettering human existence [though that is a bit of an elusive quality]. Many such advancements should be measurable, if they really must be measured. To do these things as well as jump through the performance hoops of mechanistic publication, is not to do anything well - is my judgment [or perhaps my excuse].
Micro Politics and Organizational Perversity
Perhaps the most common of organizational perversities is for the means to become the message. The 20th Century developed three competing models about organizational behaviour - though from all the management hype one would think that there were many more. These are the hierarchy model, the team model and the individualist model. Each has its appropriate form of management.
In terms of motivation there are also two approaches. The one assumes that performance incentive is 'inherent to position’. The incentive to perform should come, in the case of the hierarchical organization, from promotion chances, in the case of the team, from the interdependency of the team in getting the job done and in the individualistic organization from the intrinsic personal reward of a satisfactory job done. The ‘inherent reward’ approach assumes that individuals are themselves goal oriented. Often, they are not. It is also assumed that universities and other organizations allow or encourage these inherent motivation factors to work. Often they do not. As a result universities, along with many other types of ‘modern’ organization find themselves adopting the second approach which is to establish a separate behavioural game.
This game equips a central management with sticks and carrots. It requires externally administered performance measurement. The fact that incentives - rewards and punishments are externalized from the unit of production to an agent of central control - any latent Marxists hidden in the woodwork would recognize this as alienation - means that individual academics are obliged to play the game. In consequence academic performance becomes geared to meeting the measure rather than achieving the purpose:
Ø producing the necessary number of articles in the necessarily prestigious, if perhaps consequentially incestuous journals; rather than searching for a star idea
Ø teaching the requisite number of classes, limiting student contact hours to the minimum required by the teaching performance measure; rather than nurturing a meeting of minds
Ø sitting on the minimum necessary number of committees or undertaking the least onerous collegiate tasks to fulfill the statutory third type contribution to the functioning of the university; rather than experiencing the buzz that comes to self and to others when generating a true learning environment.
.
How did it come to this?
The short answer is that universities, along with many other public bodies have taken their management ideas out of handbooks - decidedly dated handbooks - of industrial management. The broad lessons coming out of the management gurus seem to be that hierarchical organizations can be good at mass production kind of things, while more varied, unpredictable or difficult - dare I say intelligent things, need to be done in teams or sometimes by motivated individuals.
Advancement of knowledge obviously has to have some shape and order to it but it is best done by people who are able and motivated to have their wits about them and to work with a high degree of discretion. Industry, it seems is currently becoming fairly sensible about this. Management gurus are of course currently driving the process to extremes. They are telling industrial magnates that their success in a competitive world depends upon turning whole enterprises into outward looking, customer responsive and above all innovative organizations. This requires decentralized, flexible structures. But even in the bad old days when production lines were commanded from on high, a specialist research and development unit (R&D) was allowed to organize itself into a team that could be goal oriented, flexible, with a degree of independent responsibility.
Universities in Britain now have set production targets and constraints on the teaching side. They have relatively long hierarchies within each university as well as in the tertiary education sector which, in turn specifies how much of different kinds of goods (students of different kinds) are to be produced. The research side of university production might be thought to show a more responsive process. People have to put forward proposals for funding which are competitively judged. Another kind of research comes from enterprising academics forming contracts with businesses or other agencies which share an interest in solving a shared knowledge problem. So this is an area in which we do find individuals, or more often teams, committing themselves to the task and getting the inherent rewards. Maybe this is the way to go. But it is also apparent that that is not good enough for the powers that be. The university bosses are not content to have their institutions assessed on the basis that there are motivated teams at work, even that so much research funding is brought in, but must go for the mechanistic measure of paper output, with the consequence that mechanistic control remains the dominant mode of operation and the dominant culture - to the extent that many enterprising or simply thoughtful academics search for pastures new.
The theory of organizational perversity
But because of size, complexity and an apparent ability to avoid death, universities in Britain as in Japan tend to accumulate other logics, logics that detach the exercise of power from sensible decision making about incentives and controls. Modernisation - as I tried to assert in Japan, against a curious flow of optimism - makes matters worse, adding spurious logics, giving power to bureaucrats turned messianic reformers, quite neglecting task, above all; ignorant of the life giving powers of the Daoist Immortal Magu. Immortality - of mind anyway - has come to Darwin, to Einstein… who else? The Vice Chancellors do not have it in their gift to bestow immortality upon the potential greats of the 21st Century, but they probably have the power to take it away.
What we actually find is one set of rationalizations - those relevant to promoting the power of the bosses in this and many other instances, contradicting those relevant to sustainable small batch or unit production - to put industrial labels on the case in point. We all recognize this kind of situation. Where this contradiction leads to thought, reflection, debate, and corrective action or sensible compromise, we tend to see these contradictions as creative tension. Where it leads to the suppression of creative energy, alienation, token compliance, absenteeism and stress, let us call this a perverse outcome and try to avoid it.
[1] The English text just translated the titles and gave as introduction: “The motifs painted have various connotations such as wishes for good luck or hidden meanings from Confucianism and Buddhism. Birds and flowers were painted to invoke longevity….and, while bird-and-flower painting styles differ in periods and areas, we still understand these motifs today”. In other words: guess.
[2] Holling CS, Berkes F and Folke C, 1998 ‘Science, Sustainability and Resource Management’, in Birkes F and Folke C eds Linking Social and Ecological Systems Cambridge UP, a great read for a Japan winter evening
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