Donald Curtis

Ten down; reflections postscript

2009-06-22T02:33:00.000-07:00

These essays have been about governance, public management and that very odd thing called modernisation.

Reflection, as against bits of research or theoretical exposition, lets thoughts arise as they will; allowing concern to define what is valuable. I find, when I have let it happen - on the canal side, aeroplane, art gallery, night time wakefulness - that reflection draws upon different pools of thought; bits of experience in ‘doing’ public management, or attempting to be an active citizen, or being an academic and consultant who necessarily peddles current ideas or practices in the trade, as well as what comes to mind when ‘walking the dog’. Like research, reflection grounds observation in comparison, but is free to discover likenesses and contrasts in everyday experience, media reports, journals as well as the occasional poem, picture, or wayside landscape[1]. Reflection on events and happenings at home - wherever counts as home - is sharpened and brought into focus by seeing sameness and difference in other people’s societies; known or half-known as traveller, consultant, friend, in several interesting corners of the world.

Findings? No knew theory, thankfully, but, looking back on the series - incomplete as it is - I suppose that I can be pinned down to some observations. Modernisation I still find to be an almost entirely unhelpful word into which politicians and other advocates pour both inconsistent meaning and high moral enthusiasm - which academics then elaborate; a very dangerous substitute for thought-through ideologies or consistent social, economic or environmental objectives and strategies.

The much used governance word, on the other hand, usefully expands the idea of social control for public wellbeing. From a bounded thing called ‘government’ we now must recognise the roles of other agents in the process. A good economy, a sound environment, a participative democracy is always the outcome of a balance of contradictory agents; a triumvirate of hierarchical, collective and individualistic agents, variously labelled ‘State, Market and Civil Society’ or Public Management, Private Sector, and Community, etc[2]. They represent distinctly different sets of social values and ways of thinking about priorities and loyalties in coordinating social life. The only sociological generalisation used in this set - well, the most important anyway - is that all three are always present, always conflicting, always necessary and often failing in different ways.

Both New Labour’s Third Way and the World Bank’s post 2000 policy commitments were promoted as a response to this enlarged idea about what makes for governance in society. Both sound logical and, when not wrapped in too much jargon, quite convincing but in fact allow for new forms of policy perversity. Third Way perversities include; centralisation in the name of ‘decentralisation’, ‘managers free to manage’ but tightly controlled by mechanistic target setting and monitoring, the ‘measurement’ imperative driving out immeasurable value, ‘choice’ leading to dithering[3], and an overall tendency to detach established meanings from once respected words.

To detach meanings from words is to go a stage beyond what is useful. It is useful, in fact necessary, for there to be some elasticity in the labelling of roles, institutions and structures; this because these social institutions have to be lived in, argued about and fought for[4] if they are to remain vital. As soon as they become reduced to mere abstractions they can be taken for granted, corrupted or simply ignored and no longer serve their purpose. Parliament, for instance, with associated roles; MP’s, Ministers, Speaker, etc, and familiar processes; PM’s Question Time, etc. is largely ignored by most of the electorate most of the time, until some crisis calls for action[5]. Then the life-blood of democracy stirs. Nevertheless, abstraction is unavoidable; once a principle is established, a rule enacted, a precedent created, we have a structure and a structure is an abstraction. Another generalisation: expect tension between established structures and processes, with several consequences.

Some structures have evolved, some are adopted through imitation, some are transplanted and thrust upon an unsuspecting population - the colonial experience everywhere but not unknown elsewhere - think of recent UK imports form American. Whichever: they are inevitably complex. Being complex they don’t ‘work’ without a bit of rule bending or informal recognition of contradictory principles that I label, ‘eccentricity’[6],[7]. Too much rule bending and they don’t ‘work’ at all. Complexity is enhanced due to the multiple functions that arise in any formal institution - getting things done, maintaining the system, exercising authority, motivating and rewarding staff, dealing with others, etc.. Complexity can lead to the almost complete detachment of institution from purpose, the use of power to defend the interests of power rather than purpose[8], the misapplication of power to negate purported outcomes[9]. Oh, yes; the obverse too, the hope that charisma can transform[10] and the fear that it can’t.

[1] See; ‘‘N’ ways of modernisation; not all bad’
[2] See; ‘Monocrops, etc., mindsets in governance’
[3] See; ‘The Other Side of the Fence: the perversities of choice’
[4] See; ‘Constitutionalism and rolling roads’
[5] See; ‘Sense, sound and fury, the dialectic of public choice’
[6] See; ‘Let local be different’
[7] See; ‘The sometimes missing Jester’
[8] See. ‘Walking the dog’; how and how not to control
[9] See; ‘Governing the Professors’
[10] See; Dangers and hopes in charisma’

Mono-crops, etc.; mindsets in governance

2009-06-22T02:28:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

The Third Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Garden as a metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mono-crop model

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

Successful Mono-cropping requires:

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

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

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

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

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

The canal side landscape

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

The problem of implementation

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

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

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

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

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

More than metaphor

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

Conclusion

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dangers and hopes in charisma.

2009-06-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

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-

The Sometimes Missing Jester

2009-06-19T09:28:00.000-07:00

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

Sense, Sound and Fury in Public Choice

2009-06-18T05:58:00.000-07:00

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’.

Governing professors

2009-06-18T05:49:00.000-07:00

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

‘Soil’, ‘Wind’ and Real Apples

2009-06-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

How to Let Local be Different?[1] Structural solutions, such as decentralisation don’t seem to work. This note examines two eccentric, ‘third sector’ approaches, one Japanese, one English and their links to government. Post modernism in play?

Country rambles and visits to remote islands provide for urbanites - Japanese as well as British I was happy to discover - a necessary degree of mental displacement. Things can be seen in a new perspective. Things happen at a different pace. Things insignificant in one context take on significance in another. This can be mentally refreshing in itself. It is also the basis, I find, for refreshingly open, pluralist, approaches to public policy formation; all very necessary in an over-standardised, over-centralised modern world. This note outlines and contextualises two similar approaches, one in Britain and one in Japan, that address what seems to be a dilemma for contemporary governance; how to let or enable local to be different. Both countries, with otherwise differing histories, cultures and political systems, experienced rapid industrialisation and extension of ‘modern’ social and governmental systems through the 20th Century, with rising standards of living but increasing problems of uniformity and increasing marginality for some. To find relative advantage in difference provides a ‘post-modern’ escape route; but the question is, how to do it or to let it happen.

In both countries some people have tried to do something about these problems and in doing so encounter the same dilemma. You cannot, as a central agent, tell people how to be different. So the issue becomes how to set up non-prescriptive processes that enable people in rural communities to break out of modernisation-induced lethargy and which enable modern government delivery systems to allow non-standard things to happen. In Japan, Jimoto-gaku process facilitators resort to metaphor. They seek to relate Soil [local] and Wind [outsider] to discover local Treasure. In the UK, Common Ground - to single out one NGO amongst others - points people to local history, to fruit varieties, to festivals and traditional games, to stimulate local responses. The UK national government seems to be supportive but is so intent upon post-modern deconstruction and system reinvention that [for me] reality becomes virtual, or virtual unreality. I get lost in verbiage. Somewhere in the midst of these processes is an old community development formula that needs new and simple forms of expression to enable diversity to happen.

* * * * *

John Stewart, early in his career as luminary of British local democracy, said that the function of local government is to ‘legitimate difference’. Yet, as he and others have well recognised, the thrust of 20th Century modernisation in Britain and other advanced industrial countries was to promote uniform goods through the mass production methods of big corporations; while governments followed suit with centrally defined services, delivered bureaucratically, assessed by standard measures, and demanded as rights by citizens[2]. Japan has been no exception to these tendencies.

The 21st Century has seen the beginnings [or is it continuing rumblings?] of dissatisfaction with the outcome. There have been dramatic increases in standards of living as a result of these processes but for people at the economic margin or in remote rural places there has also been;
· deskilling as crafts are replaced by mass-produced goods,
· devaluing of local knowledge in the name of ‘science’[3],
· disempowerment as local forums are replaced by more remote hierarchies
· and homogenisation of cultures as mass communication extends its reach.

‘Modern’ sometimes presents itself as a mirage that disappears as people grope towards it.

The same central forces and agents have been at work in the so-called developing countries, though often less successfully so that much political and professional energy within the ‘development industry’ is still, perhaps correctly, directed to seeking to extend the benefits of large scale, science based, mass production process for food-crops, goods and services to places that have so far been excluded. In this mind-set local initiative is often associated with people having to fend for themselves; a recipe for survival perhaps but not usually for wealth. However Japanese awareness of the limitations of successful modernisation, evident in the One Village One Product (OVOP) movement, may in fact be a useful pointer to diversification strategies in many countries that can still benefit from industrialisation.

Modernisation has everywhere been driven through big, bureaucratic, central institutions. A century of institutionalisation is difficult to change. Even in Britain, where New Labour came to power advocating change and promoting a Third Way that would involve the private and voluntary sectors, bureaucratic values and monitoring practices continue to extend their control over these agents. Central politicians daily make pronouncements as to what the nation needs, while both press and citizens confine their engagement in public affairs to grumbles about standards. ‘What, Minister, are you doing about it?’ demands John Humphries on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, morning after morning, reinforcing centralist expectations[4].

If this is the reality of ‘modernisation’ then what or where is ‘post-modern’?[5] In art, postmodernism involved deconstruction, breaking out of familiar forms and images as well as making use of divergent materials in surprising ways. Is the same break-out or deconstruction required in social institutions before there can be local difference? The British government certainly behaves as though, as a matter of principle, no institutional structure should survive more than a handful of years beyond its conception. Old institutions such as the Trust, are given new shapes and functions. Reform is its central mantra. No supplier can be allowed to become complaisant [some would say competent]. To me the bigger question is about demand[6]. Deconstruction - if that is what it is – can be approached from above or below, dismantling from above [by the state] or articulation and re-construction or institutional ‘bricolage’ from below [by civil society]. In UK we have seen plenty of governmental deconstruction, the main consequence of which has been that a vast field has been created in which people are able to contest relationships. We have also been treated by our authorities to a plethora of words such as ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’, ‘representation’, ‘democracy’. But, as political scientists note, such words can be fronts for power-play games. In this context ideas about how to create or enable difference, diversity, the unique; are always going to be in tension with both social group tendencies to conformity and hierarchical demand for compliance. How these ideas and tendencies play themselves out within the complexes of state / non-state, mutual and private institutions is not always clear, particularly when proponents claim to be inverting established norms.

* * * * *

In this note I pay particular attention to the One Village One Product (OVOP) movement in Japan and to Common Ground UK - a small charity – which appear to have in common a concern to stimulate / allow / challenge a revival of local economic and social life and culture. While there are differences in scale and approach, common features include
· outside [non-local] origin and stimulus
· imaginative, non-prescriptive means of intervention by these stimulating agents
· but outcomes intentionally reliant upon responsive local initiative and agency
· probably also – though this is not specified - networks of individuals that officially or unofficially link public, private and community institutions

Common Ground UK has its home in Shaftesbury, Dorset. It is a registered charity and is active through an elegant and complex website[7]. Each page picks up ideas, examples and a bit of philosophising about different aspects of ‘distinctiveness’ that can enrich aspects of rural life. I came across Common Ground UK through researching apples in preparation for a visit from Professor Nishikawa. Common Ground is responsible for the Apple Day festivities that are now practiced on September 21st in many parts of the country. But enter the website and there are links to field days, poetry, community orchards and many other surprises. The charity sponsors campaigns for growing ‘real fruit and vegetables’, protecting old trees, using local materials for property boundaries and protecting rivers from canalisation. People entering the website can find their way to a site that revives the annual calendar as a significant feature of life in the countryside, pointing to typical festivals and inviting readers to submit information about their own localities. The site also promotes a number of techniques for stimulating responses within local rural communities such as parish mapping; though campaigning seems to be its strategy for gaining local engagement.

The OVOP movement also employs stimulation techniques including the ‘Treasure Hunt’ that is described below. However exponents emphasise that technique is incidental to the process[8]: the important thing is to enable people to find and appreciate what is special about a place and to live satisfying lives. In contrast to Common Ground UK, its participative method avoids any structuring of the minds of participants through calendars or ideologies (organic commitments, etc.,), or other devices. The locally significant must be allowed to emerge.

The OVOP movement in Japan was initiated by Morihiko Hiramastu while he served as governor of Oita Prefecture (1979-2003). His frustration with the growing disparities in incomes and opportunities between the prosperous cities of Japan and the hinterland as well as the draining away of resourcefulness from rural to urban led to his initiating a movement with three key principles;
First: ‘Local yet Global’.
Second: ‘Self-reliance and Creativity’.
Third, and to him most important: ‘Human Resources Development’[9].

The same speech emphasised that the key to success is an ability to engage local people in identifying the potential of their own areas, through finding its material or non-material ‘treasures’, encouraging local leaders to persist till they have managed to take the local through local decision making to the wider social or market context. With this origin it is not surprising that OVOP has been taken up by the Japanese government and is now being promoted internationally both from Oita Prefecture[10] and through Japanese overseas development assistance[11].

In Japan itself a number of academics, NGO leaders and consultants have been working on a parallel set of ideas about stimulating local difference and can now be engaged as the external facilitators within rural communities, funded sometimes by local government, sometimes community bodies. One method of search involves the Jimoto-gaku or Treasure Hunt approach[12].

As explained by Kazuhisa Matsui, a Research Fellow at The Institute of Developing Economies, Tokyo, the Jimoto-gaku approach was developed in Japan to stimulate processes of social initiative. In some ways this is an anti-scientific, post modernist philosophy. It has some parallels in the Participative Rural Appraisal (PRA) philosophy, very popular on the Indian Sub-Continent, or in the Planning For Real technique that is found in Britain. In all cases the emphasis is not so much on technique as upon establishing proper dialogue, giving priority to voices from the community, constraining the voices of the outsider professional. The Jimoto-gaku movement see this as a relationship between ‘Soil’ – local, and ‘Wind’ – outsider, the ‘Soil’ being there, the established and the ultimate resource. Wind blows in with questions that might or might not help ‘Soil’ to see what has hitherto not been seen[13].

The Treasure Hunt method involves external recourse persons brought together with local citizens. They are divided into teams, armed with cameras and sent off to walk around the community taking pictures of anything of interest. This process is deliberately non-directional – not guided by economic ideas of relative advantage, or of socio-cultural differences. So when the teams reconvene at the assembly point and each team produces a map and a commentary on the pictures that it has taken, it is hoped that internal / external differences in perception of what is ‘interesting’ will produce surprise ‘treasure’ of development potential. Neither of the two exercises that I witnessed personally[14] actually came up with treasure, thought they possibly did have some impact at what the purists take to be the more important level of impact; strengthening local confidence and HR capacity [Dr Hirimatsu’s emphasis above].

The reputation of the movement relies in practice upon success stories from different parts of the country – the hot springs that became a magnet for tourists, the community business that developed when a market for decorative coloured leaves in Tokyo restaurants was recognised, distinctive local dishes that attract visitors. Now no doubt other participating countries will be looking for their own stories to sustain the movement. Otherwise the risk in all this official recognition is that experimentation and looking for difference will disappear in ritual and routine.

* * * * *

The government contexts within which these agents or movements have emerged are relevant. Diagram 1 suggests that there can be a straightforward set of relationships between state and civil society over the scope for diversity. These can range over; no diversity – civil society compliance, through the classic representative role for civil society in which its primary function is to demand modifications or adjustments to what will still be a uniform state provision, through negotiating a framework that will allow room for local difference, to a situation in which the state demonstrates a willingness to allow civil society to respond to perceived needs in diverse ways.

Diagram 1 The political scope for diversity

State

Civil Society

Exercises control
Non-negotiated uniformity

Compliance

Willingness to talk / negotiate
Negotiated uniformity

Capacity to influence
Negotiated Framework allowing / constraining diversity

Willingness to ‘let’ or leave alone
Plural responses outwith the control of the state

Capacity to supply

This classification of relationships is unlikely to represent a clean set of options on the ground. In practice it is likely that;
· there is little agreement and plenty ongoing contestation about the desirability of uniform or varied responses to any particular good or service [for instance the education curriculum in UK]
· what is allowed in law can be constrained by money
· the motivation on either side will not be straightforward;
o government willingness to tolerate diversity may increase if by this means responsibility for funding supply is passed to civil society
o and conversely, civil society willingness to accept uniformity may increase if the state can thereby be obliged to fund or supply
· political commitments are often unrelated to implementable options
· any negotiation process can be as long as a piece of string….

The UK government appears to be committed to a very open strategy towards local civil society initiatives. The Japanese government may be less so - I am not in a position to judge. But in neither case is the ideological position adopted by the government necessarily a clear indicator of likely outcomes.

In Japan OVOP was initiated by a Prefecture governor. In any administrative system the local boss or Governor is an interstitial position representing both national government hierarchy and regional or community interests. A governor will be expected to comply with national norms but may nevertheless be able to exercise a touch of ‘blind eye’[15]independence. If there is going to be any scope for exercising difference within the hierarchy this is where it may be expected. The OVOP methodology is not seen as anti-establishment. Its advocates do not condemn uniform crops and are not seen as being against standard government supplied structures or services. So, particularly if there is a Prefectoral precedent, it is not a problem for a municipal official to commission NGO facilitators or academic consultants to initiate a Treasure Hunt or to liaise with community leaders over OVOP stimulated proposals. In both Kamae and Ojika island local government officials were actively involved with and responsive to the local citizens.

Structurally speaking what seems to be required can be represented in the following diagram.

Diagram 2 Community Development Relationships

Local initiator stimulated to see difference and champion it within the rural community in various ways
Facilitator with a non-prescriptive approach that enables locals to see and officials to be open
Official with sufficient executive freedom to be able to respond to / take the part of / local agents while working within an official hierarchy

[Circle = community, stars = individuals, triangle = hierarchy]

The diagram describes a set of relationships that appear simple and in practice must be simple despite the fact that they cross behavioural boundaries that demand conformity in contrasting ways. Although the language changes, the diagram represents the essentials of a longstanding Community Development tradition that has been evident in many parts of the world for decades. Within this tradition the facilitator - the star in the middle - is usually seen as the key figure. If appointed by government he/she may be called Community Development Officer (CDO), or, in the French tradition, Animateur. The problem is deemed to be that ‘communities’ need to be stimulated into addressing their own needs through ‘self-help’. If this ‘star in the middle’ position is taken up by an NGO the language may differ and the problem may well be seen as government rigidity rather than community lethargy. However the diagram above suggests that self-help or local initiative is most likely to take place when active individuals take the initiative within both community and bureaucracy. Norms are challenged on both sides. Room for negotiation is necessary. Success may come from pre-negotiating spheres within which predictable state / local relationships can take place; describing conditions for public funding, defining boundaries of responsibility, or, in the OVOP instance, outlining processes for finding local ‘value added’. When we turn to the current British scene my question is whether an apparently accommodating set of governance structures actually allows for simplicity.

* * * * *

The UK is unexceptional in having a long tradition of local participative planning, such as being advocated by Common Ground UK[16]. With an urban orientation The Neighbourhood Initiative Foundation has developed and promoted the ‘planning for real’ methodology that is adopted by both statutory and voluntary agencies[17]. Rural Community Councils (RCCs) have existed in most parts of England (many established alongside the Counties, the top level rural statutory local governments) – going back to the 1960s in some cases - as voluntary but officially supported bodies that have a range of supportive community development roles. They encourage Parish Councils as well as NGOs to initiate plans and projects and will support such initiatives with some professional or technical advice. Most of these were initially supported by local government but in recent years these bodies - along with other private or NGO bodies in rural or environmental development - have been coordinated and supported through the (charmingly titled) ACRE (Action for Communities in Rural England) which is a governmental agency set up under the National Environment and Rural Communities Act of 2006[18]. This agency falls under the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

How ACRE support works is something that could be investigated, with a bit of patience, on line, but a thorough investigation would really require extensive participative research with actors within the system. Within an overall governance framework about openness, participation, democratic accountability…: note the density of discourse, the uniformity of diction….; note the fashionable partnership working requirements…..; recognise the competitive bidding for funds…. and, not least; register the fact that Defra bureaucrats will take final decisions on funding. Then attempt to answer my question: will this process let local be different? Here is government attempting to turn itself inside out. But I confess myself lost in the innards.

[1] This note arises out of discussions with Professor Yoshiaki Nishikawa of Nagoya University, Japan, on the theme of diversity, its relevance in present day public policy and how it can be supported. My note draws upon field visits with him to remote parts of Japan in 2005 to take part in Jimoto-gaku exercises as well as subsequent excursions into Kent, England in search of diversity in English apples.
[2] Stewart J 2003 Modernising British Local Government Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan

[3] Crop varieties produced in central laboratories replace the land-races nurtured by farming women and men; one outcome being that local is no longer unique.
[4] Guardian columnist, Simon Jenkins, in his book Thatcher and sons; a revolution in Three Acts Penguin 2006, sees the governance reforms introduced by Margaret Thatcher and followed through by her successor Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair as having two contradictory thrusts, one towards devolving power and marketisation and the other, centralisation through regulation and ‘performance monitoring’.
[5] I use the word ‘modern’ or modernisation’ to refer to the industrialisation, mass production / consumption phase of the 20th Century, preferring ‘post-modern’ where Tony Blair and co are inclined to extend the use of ‘modern’.
[6] One has to recognise parallels with the Cultural Revolution in China when Mao Tse Dung, in pursuit of ‘constant revolution’, deliberately let loose the Red Guards against the established Community Party hierarchy which had become set in its ways. The first post-modernist movement of the 20th Century?
[7] www.commonground.org.uk and www.england-in-particular.info/
[8] a point also made by exponents of Participative or Rapid Rural Appraisal (P/RRA)
[9] Morihiko Hiramatsu, PhD., Presidential address, 1st Annual Conference of International OVOP Policy Association: IOPA, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, November 22nd, 2007.
[10] http://ovop.jp/en/ison_p/jissent.html

[11] www.jica.go.jp/english/resources/announce/2007/dec.03.html

[12] The Jimoto-gaku or Treasure hunt technique http://www.japanfs.org/en/public/education03.html
[13] from personal notes December 2005
[14] One in Kamae, Saiki-City, Oita Prefecture and the other in the Ojika island cluster off the coast of Kyushu in Nagasaki Prefecture
[15] The liberty or risk that a leader can take in prioritising local knowledge over central direction; inspired by Admiral Lord Nelson when, before the Battle of Copenhagen (1801), he put his telescope to his blind eye in order not to see a signal instructing him to call off the action.
[16] In relation to ‘Third World’ development the practice of participative planning is well developed; at best leading to a truly plural approach to solving very real problems of public well-being and environmental sustainability - see Robert Chambers, 2008 Revolutions in Development Enquiry London, Sterling VA, Earthscan
[17] www.nif.co.uk/planningforreal or www.communityplanning.net

[18] ACRE www.acre.org.uk/index.html

Known ways and labyrinths: third way governance

2009-06-17T03:20:00.000-07:00

Public managers should be goal oriented, purposeful, active and responsible for outcomes. This is the mantra of the drivers of modernisation. To this chant they have intentionally broken up many of the formal structures and processes of government that had come to dominate the 20th Century in UK, deconstructing into agencies, splitting policy from provision, provision from supply as well as supply from regulation; introducing market principles and forces all over the place; shot-gunning people into partnerships; sometimes making appeal to community values into the bargain. The same deconstruction has happened in many other parts of the world though often as a result of failure rather than policy. There, formal structures have fallen into disrepute or disintegrated altogether and reform agendas have to be sought through which they can be replaced.

This note is concerned with one aspect of this. What happens when known ways of doing things are replaced with unknown or uncertain; when what institutional economists term path dependency is replaced by a plurality of possible paths? Are the prized goals of efficiency and effectiveness lost in a labyrinth of possible routes to implementation – multiplying the transaction costs of administration?

The crude fact would seem to be, though it is not easy to document, that the administration element of public services in the UK has expanded throughout the modernisation era, after Thatcher’s initial economy drive. In the health services, so it is claimed, there are now more administrators than nurses. As early as 1995, the late Professor Kieron Walsh was pointing out that Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) in UK local government could only be considered to be an economising measure if the costs of contract monitoring were ignored (Walsh 1995). Something seems to be wrong here. The argument in this note, to be supported by my currently favourite analogy, is that choice in administrative means, as in many other things, is no doubt good, but hesitation in front of the signposts has a high cost. In other words, it is better to make a choice and get on with it than to constantly revisit (or be obliged to revisit) the options.

England’s canals are not perhaps the first or most obvious sources of analogy in a discussion of predetermined routes or choice of journey. Apart from a fairly dense network in the West Midlands, canals go where coal, or clay, or crocks, or iron was needed in the 18th/19th Centuries when they were built. To travel them now is to be obliged to take an interest in the splendours of decayed industrialism. Yet choices face the traffickers of the cut which are in fact the same kinds of choice as public managers are obliged to face. They are not so much about where they should be going, as about the means of interacting with others in the process. These choices are the less obvious because they are routinised. What would happen if routine were abandoned in favour of choice; this is the analogy.

Negotiating the passage of the cut

Canals are curious environments. Somehow the slow movement of the barges - somewhere between the walking pace and the running pace of pedestrians on the towpath; much slower than my bicycle – sets the pace for thought. Slow thought, I find, allows room for contemplation of the less obvious. Sometimes the less obvious can turn out to be significant. Let me try one on you.

Novices at the helm, as I observe from a vantage point above the lock gates, can make heavy weather of the business of manoeuvring their barges along the cut or into the locks that will convey them from one level to another through England’s rolling landscape. Some boats are very long. There can be curious ‘canal effects’ that suck a moving boat towards the bank. But, by and large, much of the movement in this environment is predetermined and much of the rest can be learned within a few hours, allowing for relaxing passage.

Time was when public management had the same predictability. Its critics would protest; it had the same slow pace. This may have been a mythical time but let us try to pin the notion onto an era – between the wars perhaps – sufficiently far back to be able to bear the strain (between factual reality and mental image). A time certainly, before the modernisers got to work or ‘The Third Way’ was invented.

Predictability in administration

Predictability in our mythical era was achieved through the establishment of a limited set of rules. Officials were appointed to fulfil a role, to which attached a job description. The relation of that job to other jobs would also be specified. It would be clear who is boss and who is subordinate. Authority would be formalised through a set of responsibilities and delegations. How decisions should be taken and enforced was also specified, along with formal procedures for dealing with derelictions of duty or misdemeanours. OK, not so limited perhaps, certainly when compared with the rule of the road for canals – ‘keep right’ would appear to be sufficient there – but nevertheless predictable. A person launching themselves into a public service career anywhere in the UK in those days, knew their position and knew what to expect. In principle this was an ordered existence. It was a system for which Max Weber [1864-1920] was both analyst and luminary. Once inducted, a novice would find that the set of rules and practices, learned at the beginning of employment, could be expected to apply for life; leaving him or her to get on with the job. Or so it would have seemed.

Of course nothing would have been quite as static as this model implies. New demands upon the public service would have required new responses and adjustments to standard procedures, just as the contemporary changeover from horse drawn to motorised barges would have changed the practice if not the rules on the cut. In fact, one of the complaints about ‘traditional administration’ was that it was always easier to add new rules than to get rid of old ones. Crozier (1964) studying French administration, found that accretions of rules inhibited adaptability and paralysed performance. He famously re-labelled bureaucracy – praised by Weber for its “Precision, speed, unambiguity, …..” (Gerth and Mills, 1952, p214) – as “an organisation that fails to learn from its own mistakes”.

But the norms of hierarchical administration persisted, not seriously challenged until the modern assault. Many studies however demonstrated that the hierarchical, linear structures and process of administration had increasingly to be got around by informal processes that did not necessarily contravene the rules but found ways around them. Crozier himself found that sophisticated individuals could work the system, deal with its contradictions and complexities; becoming ‘political leaders’ (Crozier quoted in Etzioni 1961, p359) rather than allowing the logic of rationalization to reduce them to cogs in the machine.

In spite of such accommodations, the hierarchy of rules provided a predictable environment in which an official could operate and expect others to operate. It remained a known environment.

Safe passage

It is so with transactions on the waterway. A guidance note called ‘Safe and Friendly Cruising’ (SFC), helpfully presented on the internet, expands upon the simple ‘keep right’ rule of passage. The discussion is couched in terms of etiquette. It is good manners to communicate intentions to other users. While a ‘first come first served’ principle governs passage through bridges and other narrow places, it is courteous to judge this precedence generously, not accelerating in order to get there first, for instance. In many circumstances, even the formal rule of the road may need to be negated;
Whilst the general rule is pass 'port to port' (i.e. to the right), there may be situations where it is safer not to do this - e.g. passing in a lock pound when one boat has got seriously out of position, where the lock or bridge is at a difficult angle, or where one boat is preparing to moor. Watch out for situations to pass 'wrong side' and indicated your intention by using the recognised sound signal (two blasts on the horn). Many experienced boaters are not familiar with sound signals, and it would do no harm if they were to learn! If you do overtake, generally do so on the left.
Remember to allow for larger craft. The wider or longer a boat is the more room and time it needs to manoeuvre, especially at bridges, on sharp bends and at locks or moorings.
In other words, smooth passage in the narrow confines of the cut is facilitated by responsible action from the helm, in some cases requiring contravention of the formal rules, always governed by courtesy and by a shared knowledge of the proper procedure that is being circumvented.

A colleague provides me with an example of the same accommodation from his experience as a project officer in government; in post colonial Zambia in this instance[1]

“I learned the hard way in the Ministry in Zambia. At the time it was close enough to independence for the old [way of doing things] to hold.. sway. I needed to buy some cement for a project – 200 100lb bags to be precise. They were purchased by LPO from a supplier and I set about making arrangements for transport. Notice was then served on me that cement should not be bought from suppliers but from the Government Stores Organisation and I should now give reason why I should not be surcharged for it (that is, pay for it) according to the relevant sections of the Financial Orders, etc., etc.. My boss, who was learned in these matters, heard me out. He then gave me …. a helping hand… he would certify to the audit people that the exigencies of the service – which never need to be specified – made it imperative to obtain cement from an external supplier. With one bound I was off the hook but a sadder and wiser being.”
(personal communication)

Such accommodation, on land as on water, is quite different from absence of rules or multiplicity of options. If, facing an oncoming vessel, there was no shared understanding of the ‘pass port side to port side’ priority, the result would be a lot of hesitancy; much shouting, hooting of horns, waving of hands and the odd head on collision. This; in a situation in which the options are only two; ‘pass to port side to port side’ or ‘starboard to starboard’. How much greater the hesitancy in today’s public administration where the options are now several.

Multiple options in public management

In rapid succession public managers in UK local authorities have been required to open up the options as to how they go about providing public services, such as transport, housing or social services. In the ‘good old days’ they owned the busses and employed the drivers, built the houses and acted as landlord to large numbers of tenants. Social Services built buildings, employed staff and catered for their old, young (and often difficult) clients. Then came privatisation, contracting out, Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT), Best Value, PFI and recently, Comprehensive Spending Reviews, in which the outcomes of multiple choices are held up for central scrutiny. Along the way the notion of partnership working has been added. Now UK local authorities are expected to work with different agencies and other stakeholders, so that all can in principle have a voice in the decisions as to how services can be best provided.

Here is a piece of guidance from New Zealand which, I suggest signals a similar labyrinth of options, although purportedly doing the opposite. Claire Austin, Chief Executive, RNZCGP posts a statement on the internet under the title ‘The Public / Private Interface’ that presumably is an attempt to establish a clear position for public managers to follow in the primary health care sector there;

Where to from here?
In order to stabilise the primary care workforce, and achieve the intended outcomes of the Primary Care Strategy, it is essential that the interface between the private and public sector be more robustly and explicitly addressed. Primary Health
Organisations, whilst retaining their not-for-profit status, have the potential to provide a legitimate interface between public and private sector provision and resourcing of care.

Explicit principles of engagement are an important beginning point. There are
international examples of principles of engagement between public and private actors
at a development and international aid levels. There is no reason why such an
approach could not be applied at a more local level.

For instance, principles of engagement could require all crown agencies to pay
particular attention to both policy development and contracting.

In the area of policy the questions that should be routinely addressed could include:
• How is this policy to be implemented?
• Which stakeholders are to be involved?
• Who is responsible for the administration, measurement and reporting of the
process? What is the potential impact upon the sector?
• What resources and infrastructure will be required?
• Who will meet the cost of these resources and infrastructure? – In the short,
medium and long term?
• What are the different visions, intentions and drivers of the parties involved?
And how can these be reconciled?
• What is the impact upon employment and professional relationships? How are
these to be addressed?
• What outcomes are to be expected to be achieved and within what
timeframes?
• Who carries risk? What is the nature of this risk? How is the risk managed?

In the implementation and service delivery, funding is channelled through PHOs, which would then have an agreed framework that addresses these same areas. This
provides a framework that explicitly identifies provider accountability, risk, cost visibility and cost sharing, services types and sites, and recognises both private and public provision.

It is questionable whether New Zealand has the resources to provide full public
services. The foundations of primary health care have been firmly planted in the
private sector. We have however, moved to a mixed model of delivery. By
recognising, resourcing and supporting such a framework, we would be far more likely to be able to address underlying tensions and the risks that create barriers to
successful implementation of the Primary Care Strategy. It is therefore critical that
such a framework is developed as soon as possible and explicit models of
engagement become an essential part of any Government policy development, or
contracting process with non-government providers.

This also has the potential to validate different approaches to service provision,
provide more transparency, develop explicit quality frameworks and promote greater
collaboration. Finally negotiated, explicit private/public partnerships in the delivery of
primary health care have the potential to depoliticise the process and provide
sustainable relationships and positive health outcomes.

(Austin 2004 – original emphasis)

So, New Zealand health managers, like their UK counterparts have plenty to think about; no doubt justifying the salaries of plenty of middle level managers. Reading between the lines, the thrust of public policy in New Zealand, where primary care is “firmly planted in the private sector”, would appear to be the opposite of that in the UK, where provision of primary health care remains firmly in the public sector, but subject to innumerable changes in contractual arrangements. The “mixed mode” notion in New Zealand would seem to me to open the door to precisely the “underlying tensions and ..risks” that Ms Austin assumes will be removed. Her emphasis (italicised) on the need to develop a new framework would appear to be an acknowledgement of this fact. Whether all the bulleted ‘routine questions’ could conceivably be addressed in a simple framework is another matter. They may simply be itemised as an agenda that will, by intention or default, leave the ultimate power in the hands of centrally imposed inspectors. Implementers will be left to struggle with the mixture.

Of course, cooperation between agencies of different kinds should not in theory be a problem and – apart from the options being wrapped in modernisation speak – to decide between direct employment and buying services from someone else should also be straightforward, though each choice would still need to be planned and discussed before it becomes embedded is a agreed known way. The commonsensical tone of the canal user guide to cooperation (or partnership) would however be difficult to capture. Note the guidance on sharing a wide lock.

Always try to share wide locks between two (or even more!) narrow beam boats - it makes less work for a start![2] If one crew seems to be less proficient, use the opportunity to share your experience productively. There are no rules about who goes in first - you can't close the gates until you are both in! Some thoughts are - full length boat first and get behind gate, boat with bow thrusts first - it may have more control over bows whilst the second boat comes in; longest boat first; steel boat before fibreglass etc. Discuss your options with each other and have a plan, especially for a flight of locks. Then you'll be efficient, safe and have fun!

‘And adjourn to the pub afterwards’ it might have added.

The transaction costs of public management

For public managers life is not so straightforward:
What needs to be done in any public sector is seldom simple.
The options for doing it (contracting out, etc.) remain several; the problem we are discussing here.
The partners are usually many
(As alluded to above) Whitehall (or its equivalent) is usually monitoring (adding the costs of this monitoring to agent budgets in two ways, though the bill its inspectorate sends to the agent and the bill the agency runs up in assembling the data required by the inspector (Hood et all 1998)[3]).

Stages in strategic public management Navigation

A. What is the problem / where do we need to go? Destination
· Central prescription
· Public consultation
· Stakeholders in the political field
· Political decision

B. What needs to be done to get there? Route
· Technical design
· Economic appraisal
· Social assessment

C. How does it need to be done? Rules of the road
· In-house supply
· Contract out
· Partnership
· PFI
· Etc

D. How to give account? Courtesy and good manners
· Political accountability
· Public ballot
· Central audit and/or
inspection

The administrative load experienced in respect of any public undertaking consists in the actions and interactions – the transactions - that need to be undertaken at each stage in its achievement. These transactions are cumulative so an objective assessment of costs would have to add A to B to C to D.

However; at each stage of the journey the parties to the interaction or the stages may be several, requiring several interactions to achieve the stage. So, A, B, C and D are each compound factors, interacting through a complex algorithm – which it is quite beyond me to work out. In our step C, for instance, (ignoring the ‘etc.’) there are four stated options, each of which would require investigation of an unknowable number of agents before the comparison is complete; requiring 16 comparisons – enough to keep several middle level managers on the pay role.

Furthermore, the apparent rationality of any public decision-making process overlays the fact that competing values and logics bear upon the decisions involved (Curtis 2002). The primary function of the formal decision making model adopted by an authority is in fact to serve as a high level ‘known way’ through which the authority reduces the chances of a particular decision becoming subject to possibly irreconcilable disputes – a failure of agreement at this level having potentially catastrophic consequences[4].

Life would have been easier for the public manager if, for any one kind of deliverable;
Any one of the implementation approaches or initiatives had displaced what went before it, rather than adding to the options
AND if the parties involved had been free to work out which single, agreed, mutually convenient approach should prevail.
AND if pace of change had been slow enough to allow the new to be accommodated and the old to fade away[5].

This would have still leave the authorities with the problem of knowing what is the best solution to their ‘seldom simple’ public service quandary. The journey for a public authority is not just up or down the cut after all. But then, public authorities are granted authority status and powers precisely for that purpose. If there are going to be costs in decision making – as there will be - this is where they should lie, not in deciding, from first principles or against centrally established guidelines, as to whether to pass ‘port side to port side’ or the other way.

Known procedure and the costs of uncertainty in public management

What Max Weber saw and sought – to continue the above quote on bureaucracy - was “reduction of friction and of material and personal costs” (ibid 214). We may all agree that friction, such as resort to fisticuffs, is a bad thing, to be avoided in the office as much as on the cut. If we include endless meetings, emails, text messages, discussion papers,…. , press releases,….., consultant reports…., academic journal articles[6], as evidence of personal costs, and piles of paper as the material waste to which he objected; then modernisation has probably made worse.

This discussion should not be read as a plea for return to ‘the old ways’ of simple hierarchy and line administration. Even with appropriate accommodations to meet the exigencies of the service, this old formula had its limitations. However, it did have known ways. When a pothole needed filling the Chief Engineer told the Deputy Chief, who told the Assistant Deputy and so on until someone with a wheelbarrow went to fill it (lampooned as this procedure may have been by A.A. Milne, as early as the 1920s: ‘The Kings Breakfast’[7]). There are other known or knowable ways and there is no reason why the public/private partnership or another arrangement cannot become the new known way. No one way will be perfect. Any one way will require appropriate, equally known, accommodations, which have to be lodged in wise heads that can then instruct the inexperienced. But the fact that one way is not perfect should not be used as a pretext for opening up innumerable options. While the person at the wheel remains uncertain as to whether to go left or right there will be delay, anxiety, and the need for innumerable support persons to give advice, assess risk and other time consuming and middle rank expanding activities. That does not make for a passage that is easy or ‘fun’ for anyone.

References

Austin C, 2004, ‘The public and private interface in New Zeeland’s Primary Health Care’ http://www.rnzcgp.org.nz/PDF/Public_private_0504.pdf.

Crozier M, 1964 The Bureaucratic Phenomenon Chicago, The University of Chicago Press

Curtis D, 2002 ‘What Kind of Imperfection Gives you Best Value?’ Local Governance, Vol. 28 No 4 287-297

Etzioni A, ed, 1969, A Reader in Complex Organisations (2nd ed), NY, Holt Rinehart and Winston

Gerth HH and Mills CW, 1948 From Max Weber London Routledge and Kegan Paul

Hood C, James O, Jones G, Scott C & Travers T, 1998, ‘Regulation Inside Government: Where New Public Management Meets the Audit Explosion’ Public Money and Management Vol. 18, 2, p61ff.

Ostrom E, Gardner R, and Walker J, 1994, Rules, Games and Common Property Resources, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press

Ostrom E. 1992 Crafting Institutions for Self Governing Irrigation Systems ICS Press, Institute for Contemporary Studies San Francisco, California.

SFC ‘Safe and Friendly Cruising’ http://www.ownerships.co.uk/owners/saftey.htm

Walsh K, 1995, Public Services and Market Mechanisms, Basingstoke, Macmillan

[1] I am avoiding direct UK reference in this note to allow readers who are better acquainted than I with the realities in the office to adopt an ‘if the cap fits wear it’ position.

[2] The canal authority – on behalf of the public users as a whole - also benefits from this cooperation in that when two boats use the lock together less water is released from the upper levels.
[3] Professors Hood, James, Jones, Scott and Travers in a seminal and well placed article see the expansion of central audit and inspection (stage D) as contrary to the logic of modernisation in public management and a cause of increased load. My argument is that uncertainty is generated within earlier stages in the cycle and is only exacerbated by inspection.
[4] Professor Elinor Ostrom sees the necessity of a hierarchy of rules as the basis of coordination in any institution – sets of rules about constitutions and ‘collective choices’, being the higher level rules that have to be agreed and embedded before the operational rules of day to day business can have a secure foundation (Ostrom 1992).

[5] Perhaps this is the key lesson from games theory (Ostrom, Gardner and Walker 1994).
[6] The dearth of academic discussions of the obvious uncertainty / transaction cost / growth of administration relationships may have to do with the fact that academics are interested parties: the number of professors of governance studies also expands in proportion to the increase in uncertainty.
[7] Which begins, if you remember..
The King's Breakfast The King asked / The Queen, and / The Queen asked / The Dairymaid: / "Could we have some butter for / The Royal slice of bread?" / The Dairymaid / Said, "Certainly, / I'll go and tell the cow / Now / Before she goes to bed. / "The Dairymaid / She curtsied, / And went and told / The Alderney: / "Don't forget the butter for / The Royal slice of bread. / "The Alderney / Said sleepily: / "You'd better tell / His Majesty / That many people nowadays / Like marmaladeInstead."

On Walking the Dog: How and How Not to Control

2009-06-17T03:17:00.000-07:00

This note is being written to help me (in the first instance) gain some conceptual clarity about relationships in public management; a field of thought and experience that has become more confused by applying the word ‘modern’ to it. The ‘walking the dog’ notion, which will be explored below, provided instant illumination when it came to me (actually as a cyclist). The issue in that instance is about how best to coordinate potentially divergent interests in the use of public space - a canal tow path - a clear public management problem. At an obvious level it is about the dog management regimes and the inter-person relationships that facilitate a mutually acceptable use of the space (and not about the duty of scooping). At a less obvious level the instance can be used to raise questions about social controls, how they are expressed in partnerships or contracts, and what are the likely behavioural outcomes.

But first, my problem with public management relationships. My experience here is both as a teacher and as a manager of aid assisted projects in developing countries. Development does have its own problems but most of the issues are not dissimilar to those of – let us say – urban regeneration undertakings in the UK. In UK government assisted development projects, as in UK proper, the language of modernisation is pervasive, whatever their country context. Indeed some of the preoccupations of modernisation in the UK – with partnerships, agencies, contracted out services and so on, can also be found in the strategies of the multi-lateral agencies such as the World Bank (World Development Report 2004).

To an academic or a proponent of management theory, the main thrust of public management reform is fairly straightforward; about efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and so on. Each of the concepts can be given an appropriate definition. As a manager however, things are different. Public management is a severely practical matter – although with high moral intentions. It is about getting things done. It is about achieving the necessary degree of co-ordination between diverse parties. It is about finding out how these diverse parties can satisfy diverse interests while achieving common, or at least agreed purposes. ‘Getting things done’ calls for effective working relationships, that come – it can be argued - in three types; command and control, consensual action and decision making or entrepreneurial initiative; or some subtle combinations of these three. Effectiveness is achieved through applying the right type of coordination or a combination suitable to the needs of the situation (Hood 1998).

At first bite the menu available to the modern public manager would seem to be good for social health. Surely there must be ways of achieving new forms of social coordination to meet current management needs. Besides the old fashioned - but sometimes still useful - reliance upon Weberian bureaucratic values and institutions[1], there are now a range of other kinds of structure and relationship through which public purposes can be advanced. Each of these can claim strengths. Partnerships should be effective when there is genuine value added to both sides from an enduring relationship (Hughes and Weiss 2001). Markets should work where the goods and services exchanged are known, specifiable, divisible, etc, as economists indicate. With more difficulty (and often disregarded in current public management discussions) public purpose can be advanced where a representative public body is given responsibility for defining it. Equally, goods that are shared in common between defined beneficiaries can be subject to common or community decision making. However none of the resultant institutional forms (partnerships, markets, public authorities or community institutions) can be regarded as good for all purposes or as good in themselves. Furthermore they are founded in contradictory values; for instance market and community values cannot both govern the same good or service. Yet these terms are applied both widely and loosely in contemporary practice.

The modern public management agenda turns out to be far from straightforward in application. Implementation requires means of achieving coordination as well as values. This takes us to another area of choice; about terms of reference, job specs, performance agreements, and various kinds of contract: spot, classical and relational, the latter two being considered here.

Several writers, who have tried to make sense of modern notions of governance and management, have demonstrated that the great injections of ideas (that came mostly from the private sector (Osborne and Gabler 1993)) were only absorbed with difficulty in the UK (Foster and Plowden 1996), leading to often contradictory outcomes in different parts of the public sector (Hood 1998). Local government in the UK, which tends to be placed at the forefront of the national government’s modernisation thrust, is still engaged in trying to give practicable shape and form to new notions. This is obviously an exploratory process yet would-be innovators often find themselves subject to command and control measures that constrain experimentation (Stewart 2003 p221).

On the international scene there has in fact been a long tradition of experimentation with institutional forms and types of management and self-management (Uphoff, Esman and Krishna 1998; Ostrom, Schroeder and Wynne 1993). The common characteristics of these approaches are that they are experimental, medium term, responsive to an ongoing interpretation of needs and to local political-economy realities. One should add that they are pragmatic rather than ideological and require a high degree of managerial discretion and trust. The development community however - always in a hurry for results - has perhaps been more responsive to the bold claims of the modernisers. It was not until its 2004 World Development Report that the World Bank (World Bank 2004) finally moved away from out and out advocacy of market solutions to a more modulated framework that sought to equate public management institutional forms and strategies with the nature of the public goods that are to be achieved; a ‘horses for courses approach’.

My own experience is that, in current usage, many of these contemporary management concepts confuse rather than clarify. The problem is not so much with the words themselves as with their application. Modernisation, in opening up new public management strategies, has also allowed managers to apply and misapply basic concepts and norms. For instance, a public manager can both be expected by superiors to be entrepreneurial and to meet preset performance targets. The words and concepts become especially slippery when used opportunistically by the power-holders in any context. Let me provide an actual instance; focused upon interpretations of contract and performance – two key concepts within the modern governance agenda.

A thumb nail sketch
My organisation bid for a piece of work in South Africa. As the successful bidder we had had to provide an interpretation of the needs of the situation in the SA government department and express how we would respond to the terms of reference that had been drawn up by the donor and agreed by the recipient department. Although our contract was with the donor, the recipient was involved in the selection of our organisation from amongst the competition. So, in several respects there was an apparently good measure of all-round agreement about goal and purpose as well as desired outcomes and the activities through which they should be achieved. A formal (classical) contract was drawn up by the donor specifying a goal, a range of outcomes expected and activities to be managed – set out in that agency’s favourite management tool, the Logical Framework. However, to cut a long story short, the project did not work out as intended. Any one of the parties could have noted that there were basic design faults in the project from the start that duly manifest themselves in delays and frustrations. The usual suspects came to dominate implementation and inhibit effectiveness;
insistence upon the engagement of third party private sector suppliers of consultancy services to achieve outcomes, multiplying transaction costs
over-complex procurement protocols,
market competition requirements that were then regulated out of existence (by fixing prices)
partnership requirements that were in the end overridden by central prescription

All these can be taken as evidence of an over-commitment to simplistic modernisation concepts. None of the parties, ourselves included, did assert critical judgement on these matters at the right time, with the consequence that relationships became strained to eventual breaking point. Well, good manners more or less prevailed eventually and each party has gone its way. However it is the language through which the parties sought to define the relationships which is of interest, and that changed over time.

The prime relationship was between the donor agency and the government of South Africa. This will have taken the form of an Aide Memoir or other formal protocol specifying the agreed form of exchange. The emphasis in aid relationships these days is upon partnership. Partners agree upon a common purpose – in this case a shared commitment to undertaking certain actions together that will lead to development of local management capacity. My agency had been contracted in to assist the partners to achieve this laudable purpose. We were welcomed into this partnership atmosphere. There were of course the formal performance expectations and reporting arrangements, but it was also clear to all that there were many uncertainties within the innovative management arrangements that had been prescribed for this project, so key stakeholders, including the donor, adopted a ‘work it out together’ culture.

‘Working it out together’ however requires give and take. While we had signed up to a classical contract, looking back upon it, what was really required was a ‘relational contract’, founded in trust and an agreement to openly share objectives and mutual learning, rather than the pre-determined outputs and other formalities of the classical contract (Kay 1993) The existing contract management procedures of this donor however do not generally recognise this distinction, leaving the development of appropriate working practices to good fortune and goodwill. In this case it eventually became clear that some of the project lacunae could not be worked out mutually. Then the true underlying relationships come to the surface. Donor acted unilaterally as principal and sought to hold the supplier of services – us - to the letter of the formal terms of contract, although this had been long overtaken by events. The supposed partner (the South African government) reverted to the role of beneficiary claiming to be ‘in the dark’ on the intentions of the principal.

Cyclist, walker and dog
The basic insight behind the metaphor that I am developing here arose from my experience of cycling the towpath along a nearby canal – a daily form of exercise that just occasionally becomes mental exercise also. On this route I encounter numerous walkers with their dogs. The different behaviour patterns of the dogs, in response (or not) to their accompanying walkers is what triggered these thoughts. To make the metaphor fit as a proto-model of the project management situation that I have been sketching, some role changes are necessary;

The cyclist, the intended beneficiary of good dog / walker relations, is in the position of the South African government.
The walker who would influence the dog, for the benefit of the cyclist, is the donor.
The dog is....me… (the service provider); who would/should behave in a way that benefits the cyclist.

With this simple transposition the metaphor holds.

Now what happens on this towpath is this. In four cases out of five the walker calls the dog to heal while in the fourth the dog is left to mind its own business (and the cyclist to mind his)[2]. Where the dog is responsive, the usual consequence is that it pays attention to the walker and stops – as often as not directly across the path of the cyclist. Where the dog is left to its own devices it usually pays just sufficient attention to the cyclist to step out of the way. The outcome is that in two cases out of five the cyclist is stopped dead in his tracks, in two he is put at risk by a non-responsive but still distracted dog while in one the mutual regard between animal and cyclist sees the latter through.

The language in which the crucial dog/walker relationship is typically expressed is instructive. Usually the walker is described as owner, sometimes master. As owner of a dog a person has legal responsibilities to keep the animal under control with the good purpose of benefiting other people who use the same environment. The old fashioned (and certainly politically incorrect) term ‘master’ however suggests that the dog should be ‘slave’ to the masters will. Modern dog training manuals go further, insisting that the person must be top dog / wolf (alpha dog, leader of the pack) and behave in an appropriate manner (always walking first through a door, eating first, leaving the mutt to salivate in expectation) that will ensure that the animal submits to domination. The aim is total compliance. I am a bit of a libertarian on such matters and am quite pleased that most of this does not find expression on the towpath. I would not of course want all the animals that I encounter rampaging out of control, but I do assert that there should be room in our towpath relationships for mutual regard between all three parties.

On being the dog
The consultant as dog: how far can I take this element in the metaphor?[3] The advantage of an animal behaviour metaphor is that politically correct language and wishful thinking generally can be stripped away, to reveal underlying behavioural realities. If, as consultant, I am obliged to follow a contract slavishly, paying attention to my (pay)master and not the end beneficiary, I must realise that this could entail stopping across the latter’s path; quite disruptive to progress. If my performance is to be indicated against compliance with (pay)master set indicators and rankings and my reward / punishment is measured out from his hand, then so be it, I will take this as the trigger that wags my tail, but there is no guarantee that the beneficiary will benefit from my success.

On being the beneficiary
Beneficiaries have an interest in securing benefits and are not generally the holders of power even if they are sometimes consulted as to their needs – as should surely be the case when the partner word is used. As a cyclist on the towpath I am well aware that mismanagement of the person / dog relationship by the walker could land me in the water. So I am cautious and polite to both person and beast. This it turns out can be an effective strategy when there is an element of person to person communication – an implicit if not explicit agreement as to what will be a mutually convenient way forward. Yes; the word partner could then apply. Even better would be a tripartite understanding; person, person and dog; extending out into the community of towpath users. In my experience, this is not an outcome of the walker-person seeking absolute compliance from the dog; performance indicator ‘sit’, ‘heal’ or whatever; because the dog is then prevented from acknowledging me, the cyclist. To be a community there would have to be a shared (and probably actively negotiated) understanding between all parties.[4]

On walking the dog
Public managers, like walkers of dogs, do need to have means of influence. If they are looking to advance some worthy public purpose the collaboration of other parties is probably needed. The public management lexicon has provided the words partnership (man and dog in mutual regard), community (bringing the cyclist into a shared understanding) and many others found in the discourse. But what has re-emerged as the dominant notion in public management is the word ‘compliance’. Its reassertion in relation to my South African project is but a small example. It is attached to innumerable regulations, performance contracts, service level agreements, as well as the accompanying targets and indicators. It has led to a widely recognised tendency for managers in the UK public services to pay attention to the indicator and neglect the purpose, to measure the measurable and thereby deny themselves access to the immeasurable. No, the moral of the story is that we need forms of public management that allow parties to interact in ways that harmonise motivation, purpose and outcome, avoiding hype and allowing the inestimable benefits of trust and mutual regard to re-emerge.

Conclusions
As the beneficiary on the towpath I have evolved views on what is effective person/dog management – as the beneficiary of international aid no doubt has views on the management style of a donor. My views may be at variance with those of the dominant school of dog training experts, perhaps the dominant trend in public management as well. But I suspect that logic is on my side. My request is for consistency. Where command and control (and its classical contract variant) works; fine. Where mutual benefits are required let ‘partnership’ or a relational contract specify the relationship; based on mutual interest, trust and regard, not prejudged by some central authority. Where a community of interest is to evolve, let it so evolve. But not all muddled up; please.

References

Foster CD and Plowden FJ, 1996 The State under Stress, Open University Press, Buckingham
Hughes J and Weiss J, 2001 Making Partnerships Work Vantage Partners, Brighton MA
Hood, C 1998 The Art of the State Oxford UP, Oxford and New York
Kay J 1993 Foundations of Corporate Success OUP, Oxford
Osbourne D and Gabler T 1993 Reinventing Government, Penguin, NY
Ostrom E, Schroeder L and Wynne, S, 1993 Institutional Incentives and Sustainable Development, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado
Stewart J 2003 Modernising British Local Government, Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke
Uphoff N, Esman, MJ and Krishna A, 1998 Reasons for Success Kumarian Press West Hartford ConnecticutWorld Bank 2004, The World Development Report Washington
[1] Bureaucracies that claimed to follow Weberian values relied in practice of course upon personal networks and other informal rules of the game to overcome rigidities, but when managed successfully, the formal framework provided a predictable and stable world of work. The point being made here is that today’s plural value systems allow values to be contested – a recipe for stress and for more inefficiency than managerialist ideology would admit
[2] Note, in this account, my commitment the numerical requirements of evidence based policy.
[3] It does take a bit of imagination to switch roles. One can be led in this by Roy Hattersley or rather by Buster: dog leads politician (Buster’s Diary).
[4] Games theory points to the importance of repeated iteration in building up trust, shared expectations and appropriate behavioural codes in the management of resources that must be held in common. Communication is essential. My bringing the dog into this ‘game’ does of course raise questions about dog to person or person to dog communication that cannot be addressed in this brief discussion. Suffice it to say that if dogs can be persuaded to lead the blind or round up sheep….

‘N’ ways of modernisation; not all are bad

2009-06-17T02:25:00.000-07:00

This one by way of introduction....

Where did ‘Walking the Dog’ come from? A particular canal towpath was the immediate source of dog walking as metaphor. A brother’s dog is my sometime companion. George Gershwin’s chirpy tune provides the actual title and may have influenced the tone and pace of thought[1]. But in actuality the image and the title serves no more than to assert the importance of eccentricity - literally meant - a point outwith the inevitably bounded if not closed circles of thought and action that society sets up to support and justify its means of governing itself. It is a great trick to be able to step outside - made easier in my case by not having to teach the stuff or advise on it any more.

Another question follows: where is it going? Answer; through a discussion, hopefully a conversation that must be ongoing. Several iterations are set out below. As text set out in chunks they are a bit too one sided to be conversation but other friends and thinkers - sometimes they are both - are acknowledged [or not] to have chipped in. Other chips will be welcomed and may be responded to; or ignored. Such is the nature of conversation. And who knows, a conversation started within the chaos of contemporary governance, may change the world; the butterfly behind the storms. Mind you, a gentle wind of change would serve better.

* * * * *

If I were a Chinese leader, which I am not, I would put a number on this ‘N’ in my headline on modernisation. It would be ‘Three Ways’, or five perhaps, numbers that serve to identify a graspable span of mildly contrasting ideas, a list to be rattled off in public speech, signalled, item by item on the digits of one hand. Four points? Never; because four is unlucky, even in a regime that boasts a thoroughly modern commitment to rationality in all things. Seven would be good, though already stretching our basically binary minds beyond practicable limits - requiring the use of more digits or toes. In any case I find, on reviewing the this accumulation of essays that I cannot put a limit on the number of things that are done or claimed, achieved or not achieved, in the name of modernisation. Link the word modernisation to the word governance and ‘N’ may be doubled. Throw in the word management and the opportunities for both ambition and error multiply. None of this would matter perhaps if the word modernisation [or the derivative pre-modern or post modern] actually added predictive meaning, or if governance was an idea that could be bounded, or if management was something more than a rag-bag of tangled imperatives. In practice however these words and concepts have an elasticity that stretches in many directions to the earnest tugs of their proponents. If this were an academic thesis these would have to be exhaustingly explored. I won’t go there, but find that I have in practice simplified and I had better state how.

Governance I have taken to be about some form of social control - or another. There are of course innumerable social conditions such as drugs on the streets, or economic circumstances such as collapse of the banks, or environmental trends, such as global warming that cry out for better governance, some of which have exercised me in these essays. The use of the word governance rather than government is more than a fashion. It allows that there are many potential ways of achieving social control besides setting up a central body, some of which involve many different agents working together; even in opposition to each other, but still with governance outcomes.

Management is about getting things done, in one way or another. I could say again; there is a lot that could be better managed. The ‘how’ of it in either case - how govern, how manage - will have something to do with the nature of the task and the characteristics of the context. Both ‘task’ and ‘context’ are rather complicated, and, as I have stated above, adding the word modern does not bring clarity.

I find that I can go a little further. Theory creeps in. Underlying the observations in the essays are two different sets of ideas or frameworks. One line of thought draws from economics to note the characteristics of ‘goods’; a ‘public good’, such as clean air being, if there at all, available to all regardless and from which it is difficult to exclude non-contributors; a common good, such as village pond or a cooperative society being only achieved if shared but from which non-contributors can be excluded. A private good is, like an apple, both divisible and individually consumable. These different kinds of goods structure choice in different ways. Many minds have been busy over the last half-century in seeing how these notions fit with or tie into ideas about institutions and forms of governance[2]. Elaborate games and simulation exercises - Axelrod leading the way - have been devised to show that competitive individualism is quite compatible with cooperative strategies, given enough ‘plays’ to provide for learning. The innumerable instances of governed commons were found to have rational behavioural foundations. But a problem has since emerged. A lot more rounds of play in the real world, having led to many more emergent institutional forms - think financial derivatives - chaotic patterns of institutional breakdown and distrust have spun out of the same interactive processes. More scope for exhaustive exposition here - which will also be avoided.

I put this kind of economic theorising together in my mind with a bit of anthropology - an odd and much contested bit of anthropology - called Cultural Theory[3]. This theory elaborates in different directions and has its own explanation of irrationality but what I take from it at this stage is this: that the ways in which societies achieve necessary coordination boil down to three; they build hierarchies [sometimes as states], they look for solidarity in groups [communities, civil society organisations] and/or they interact as individuals [through markets or networks or other types of dyadic exchange]. This sounds simple, though the key finding about these modes of coordination is that they build upon quite contradictory sets of values and relationships which do not always fit well together and often leave the conceptual door open to quite irrational, even perverse kinds of social reasoning and behaviour.

At this point, if I were in teaching mode, I would chalk up a three by three matrix on the board and start filling in the boxes. But I am not in teaching mode. In any case, the outcome would be to point to further contradictions. It might seem obvious enough for instance that private ways of interacting with others go neatly into a private goods box, which is fair enough but then some brands of economic theory assert that the greatest good of the greatest number is the public good - best served through private interactions in a market and that there are very few goods - even clean air - that cannot be apportioned somehow and made subject to market access and control. At another corner of my imagined matrix Hierarchy and Public Goods might be boxed together; logical enough, but the biggest thrust of the late 20th Century in many countries besides the UK was in de-constructing state hierarchies to find ways for private and sometimes community institutions to function within the public sphere. Other countries were there already, having never attempted to grant the state total competence.

The conclusion of this section of my imagined lecture - I am allowing myself three points - would have to be that theory alone does not satisfy. It abstracts beyond the point that practitioners - I have been one in several ways; or teachers - I have been one such also and have not entirely abandoned the trade - can readily apply as practice or use to either predict or to explain. To be armed with theory alone would leave one tilting at windmills; and there is plenty of that in the trade. Try another approach?

* * * * *

Maybe we have to deconstruct the method a bit. Note that all analysis entails comparison, of like with like, like with some thing contrasting, or like with a model or simulation of the same. My second point then is to note that several of my reflections make use of comparison. The little that I understand about governance and public management in Britain has benefited greatly from my work as a consultant or student in other parts of the world. That inevitably has entailed comparison. Funnily enough, while the donors, international agencies, (national governments even) that paid for my services were often committed to the idea that it would be useful for Government officials from Bangladesh, or Laos, or Botswana, or Nigeria, or wherever, to learn by comparing their [‘traditional’, ‘inadequate’, ‘failing’] governance systems with the virtues that were assumed to be found in our British [‘modern’, ‘democratic’, ‘advanced’] public service reforms [ongoing without end]; the comparison that I most often found myself making went the other way around[4] .

There is self-learning in this. To open your eyes to ‘foreign’ enables you to ‘see ourselves as others see us’ - just a wee bit[5]. And that bit has often been uncomfortable [as is reflected in these essays, I hope].

An early reflection, long before I indulged myself with writing these essays, took place on the long flight back from India. A colleague and I had been engaged with a small Planning Cell in Gujarat, an adjunct of a massive, India wide, government directed scheme for getting productive assets to very poor people: state agency at its most energetic and was coming back to Britain where a commitment to ‘rolling back the state’ and liberalising the market was in full swing. The Thatcher project was leading to a flight of capital and the collapse of nearly all productive activity in the West Midlands. The contrast could not have been more stark or more gloomy for a homecoming Brummie. The comparison was not was simply a matter of contrasting political philosophies - the one still clearly Fabian Socialist in ambition, perpetuating Jawaharlal Nehru’s intellectual commitments, the other essaying to invert all that through neo-libertarian radicalism [India has since caught the bug] with resulting public policies in free trade, privatisation and state disinvestment. It was also, in a deeper, multi-layered way, about comparisons that arise from shared bits of history, different ways of using the same language, jokes that unite and divide. Truth or understanding is deep buried in these layers. Does this mean that the only method of comparative analysis that works is historiography or cultural studies perhaps?

I am not sure, but recognise that all comparison requires both abstraction and simplification. To make abstract and to simplify may sharpen one’s capacity to observe but also puts a mass of detail or circumstance out of focus or out of sight altogether One is caught in the business of rationalisation after the event; O.K. for a bit of detective work, a tool for a Sherlock Holmes of government, but not reliable as a research tool. No, there is no ideal method; understanding remains a matter of judgement; of thinking oneself into the situation, seeing the points of view of others [a method that any 60s Sociologist was trained to think of, following Weber, as ‘verstehen’ [and my spell check does not recognise]].

A further complication - if I may slip it in under point two - is that social or economic thinking has to serve both analytic and prescriptive purposes. As prescription, theory has to present authoritative reasons for doing things; or persuasive grounds for accusations by the done-unto of failures by the doers. It has to show, not only what needs to be done but also how it should be done, because the doing will have a dynamic of its own.

So go perhaps a further step away from theory towards deep analysis of practice; observe what people say and do and how they explain themselves to themselves or others. This approach is sometimes called ‘native theory’?[6] The problem here, explored at great length by French Anthropologist, Pierre Bourdieu, is that no native anybodies anywhere seem to feel the need to be consistent in their ideas about what they say or what they do[7]. My essays show that this generalisation goes just as well for politicians in Westminster as for anyone else. Nor is it possible for an observer to avoid bringing ideas or comparisons from elsewhere. The result is that the practitioner does not see the world of government or public management as being governed by theory, either academic or ‘native’. I open Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice (Polity Press 1990) at random and find the following ….. “Only….acquired mastery, functioning with the automatic reliability of an instinct, can make it possible to respond instantaneously to all the uncertain and ambiguous situations of practice” (p104)

* * * * *

My third point goes back to the question of what it is that makes up the subject of these short vignettes. The word ‘governance’ has opened the door to allow many different social institutions or types of relationship to be discussed as social control. It has let us recognise that many aspects of our life chances and the uncertain and ambiguous circumstances that surround us need to be governed or managed.

Consider the governance of financial markets [this has a certain topicality in early 2009]. Is it the good sense of the innumerable buyers and sellers of money [or other financial products] that can or should govern the market? Is it the internal mechanisms within financial institutions which monitor the performance of those involved in external transactions, much as a regulator governs a steam engine? Is it the sector wide collective bodies that represent the banks, the building societies etc., intent upon maintaining the reputation of their sector by being willing to bring ‘rogue’ institutions into line? Is it, on the other hand a government regulator with audit powers that acts as a central, hierarchical control? Is it a central bank which attempts to regulate the banking trade by altering the interest rates at which institutions are obliged to lend to each other; seeking to steer the sector as a sailor steers his ship with a touch upon the tiller? Is it in fact the mutual risk-sharing that financial institutions engage in when they do lend to each other? If the answer is that it is not one of such agent but a combination of agents that is necessary then the question becomes what kind of combination will be successful? The answer, in early 2009, is that we do not know.
There are goodish grounds for thinking however that in such complex interrelationships there are multiple grounds for moral hazard. In other words, individuals won’t think about risk properly when they assume that government will look after their interests. Self-regulation by the banking sector in the interest of good reputation of the sector may not work when a central agent is willing to play policeman and can be made to take the blame when things go wrong. Every internal bank regulator may be willing to bow to an over-ambitious boss in the hope that an external regulator will say ‘no’ on her/his behalf.

Governing financial markets is not a new game. On a world scale it has been in play since the early 20th Century. Governing the use of the World’s resources in the interest of environmental conservation and sustainable development is by comparison only in its first rounds of play; though there does now seem to be some urgency in getting viable rules established. The money game has got more complicated over the years and is hopefully still evolving. It can be thought about - in principle - as being just about money, though the millions around the world who are loosing their livelihoods probably take the view that it should be about money as facilitator of valued human transactions; ‘roof over head’, ‘food in stomach’, that kind of thing, rather than money as money. Governing the environment will inevitably be more difficult because there can be no concept of sector independence; it is about human consumption, production and the generation of side effects through waste. As such it opens up challenges to the way we think, the way we decide, as well as what we do and the way we go about it.

With this broad brief I find that I need to understand;

….cycles of consciousness … narratives, discourses….

….processes of disputation and choice… politics…

….doing governance….looking forward…carrying through…looking back to make corrections….or more likely ….muddling through…

….as well as the always hovering …always present ... inevitabilities of risk and blame

Each of these areas of potential analysis comes replete with sets of thinkers who have spent their careers finding interesting things to say; quite daunting. Each has its tentative frameworks of ideas and practices of one kind of another that have enabled people to think and act or blunder along in society. That adds another challenge. Somehow that opened door calls for a wider view and a lighter touch in trying to understand or explain. Hence I think my inclination to turn to metaphor or simile.

A quick glance through the accumulation of essays and I find that all sorts of comparisons and likenesses have been called into play; models of governance likened to types of landscape [4 -mono-crops and things, 6, rolling roads - borrowed from Chesterton…] to geography more broadly [3, known ways and labyrinths] and so on. Curiously I seem to have missed the body; the most common likening used by governance writers. Body imagery is deeply embedded in language of governance in all cultures; ‘the body politic’; ‘the head of government’, ‘the arms of the state’ and so on that I suppose it is lost its edge analytically. So other likenings have had to do[8].

The reflections

The reflections that follow have accumulated, and will hopefully go on accumulating; this is work in progress. Some have been spurred into existence as reactions to particular events, some in provocative reaction to what have struck me as particularly curious or questionable policies or government postures. Escape from the demands of teaching, researching, advising or project management - my particular engagements with public policy and governance - has liberated my pen [well, you know what I mean, my word machine]. Odd comparisons that spring to mind are allowed, which scholarly principles might disallow. Personal value judgements that might have been hidden can show their face. But, as I contemplate publication I find that there may be some order to the observations which I had better explain [in case it is not obvious!]

[1] George Gershwin, 1937, ‘Walking the Dog’, for the film Shall we dance, in which Fred Astaire chats up Ginger Rogers aboard a luxury liner, fun, but for me the tune has wider resonances.
[2] The game playing, observing, theorising Elinor Ostrom has been my guide.
[3] The late Mary Douglas my second academic mentor.
[4] Just occasionally I managed to make the point in print; ‘"Owning" without owners, managing with few managers: lessons from Third World irrigators'. in Sue Wright and Nici Nelson, eds Anthropology of Organisation Rouledge 1990.

[5] Robert Burn’s poem fits the aid trade and many other forms of government that are prone to arrogant pretensions of superiority. The last verse of Tae a Loose’ goes;
O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! / It wad frae monie a blunder free us, / An' foolish notion: / What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, / An' ev'n devotion!

[6] Or emic and etic viewpoints; emic accounts being attempts to see cultures within their participants terms, while an etic perspective seeks to explain within a universalistic observer framework.
[7] Furthermore, as I found when being an anthropologist in Manyana village, Botswana, trying to make sense of people’s behaviour in the micro-political arena of the village assembly, evidence that one value was being followed could be denied by the need to accentuate another contradictory value. The men would sit in a semicircle. I observed that the seating order reflected their seniority within the elaborate kinship structure of the village. An elder brother coming late would ask his junior to move round. When I recounted this observation in the presence of the Paramount Chief, he completely denied that this could be the practice. All men are equal in court was his theme, and have equal voice. This was also an observable fact, but one that sat so awkwardly with the assertive status differentiation that rank ordering had to be denied.
[8] though I was tempted to use the Heads, Bodies and Legs game when searching for a way of describing some contemporary government created hybrid organisations

Constitutionalism and Rolling Roads;

2009-06-17T01:35:00.000-07:00

There is, amongst the English, an aversion to straightforwardness. G.K. Chesterton, in his hymn in praise of “a reeling road, a rolling road that rambles round the shire”,[1] captured this aversion. By implication it can be applied to a present issue in UK public management, namely ‘should we have a written constitution?’ If this discussion rambles a little it is because the answer, or at least an attempt at an answer, requires a short tour through some rather abstract ideas in institutional analysis.

Just to know where we are going; I intend to illustrate the following. Constitutionalism is about defining powers, entitlements, obligations and their limitations. But to define a power, an entitlement or an obligation is (a) to immediately delimit it in ways that may turn out, in the course of events, to be inadequate and (b) to set innumerable minds about the task of opposing it. So, my argument will run, it is much better to keep alive a struggle for definition; a constant contested discourse, as it might now be said in social science speak. Such contest has been plentiful through the ages in England and there is still a dire need for it today. Is English non-straightforwardness a consequence of this discourse, a contributor to it, or simply a convenient coincidence?

How to describe this English aversion to straight thinking: a starting point may be found in our use of language. Non-English speakers, particularly Germans apparently, find many English social niceties completely unintelligible. Why, when you want salt, should you say ‘would you mind passing me the salt’ – what possible objection could there be to the more economical and functional ‘salt please’? Or, to take an example that might be closer to the constitutional issue, why not, in academic discourse, say ‘You are wrong about that’ instead of saying something like ‘That is a point of view, but on the other hand it could be argued, equally, if not more persuasively, that …..’ In neither putative case must we suppose that the English person does not have a position; is not convinced of his/her correctness, may even be holding back a feeling of superiority. Many Non-English people certainly suspect that an assumption of superiority lurks about the English. In academic conferences, despite circumlocution, claims of superiority of argument are but thinly disguised. No, it must be something deeper that drives this Chestertonian aversion.

Aversion to straight thinking has deeper consequences for the English political domain than mere circumlocution; it includes aversion to statements or manifestations of political principle. The UK Labour Party, for instance, found that a clause had somehow slipped into its constitution committing the Party to the nationalisation of the means of production. Clause 4 did not fit well with other clauses but they struggled mightily to get rid of it. Nationalisation could only be done under dire emergency as in the Second World War, when miraculously, it had worked rather well. The Conservative Party could also come up with surprises. The nation moved into a condition of deep shock when UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) not only came out with a free market doctrine but also apparently believed in it. Her principle mentor and cabinet colleague, Sir Keith Joseph, was so committed that he was known as the ‘mad monk’. By contrast it was quite un-troubling to public opinion that an Archbishop could voice doubts about the existence of God.

Without being able to explain the general aversion to straightforwardness and principle, in relation to governance ideas there is a clearer history. It may go back to sketchy awareness of the collapse of the English Republic. Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) could have been remembered for introducing ‘warts and all realism’ into public affairs – which would fit quite well with pragmatist leanings - but school book history probably encourages us to focus instead upon the babble of contradictory idealisms – The Godly, The Levellers, The Independents, The Diggers - that made Parliament quite unable to give direction to the revolution. What we are encouraged to remember is the way the Republic petered out, allowing the exiled monarch - no, he had lost his head; it was his son, Charles 2nd - to wander back and take charge.

Contemporary reactions to the French Revolution are a much more certain influence upon English ideas of politics and governance. The French Revolution, following the American, enunciated some clear constitutional principles, claiming for individual citizens, ‘liberty, equality and brotherhood’. When the Americans had claimed the same sort of thing, the English ruling class no doubt smarted a bit, but more from the loss of property and tax revenues than from the realisation that these principles were counter to the way they viewed their status in life. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), an early political commentator rather than philosopher, actually supported the right of the Americans to set up their own government, urged reconciliation and the reestablishment of trade and other relations between the new America and the English Crown. When the French followed the Americans some English free thinkers initially saw this as the opening of a new era. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / To be young was very heaven” announced a young William Wordsworth (1770-1850). But he and others became quickly disillusioned. As the heads began to roll and simple principles found no simple expression, a new pessimism overtook the country. Burke, a member of a House of Commons assembled in thoroughly unprincipled ways, used that bloody backdrop to enunciate a pragmatic conservative philosophy that several commentators see as the origin of various trends in present day conservatism. Both pragmatism and pessimism seem to have attached themselves to the management of UK public affairs ever since.

Every now and then politicians and political commentators in England argue that Britain is urgently in need of a written constitution. Usually however their efforts peter out in the face of a task that would apparently be enormous and, worse still, would have to appeal to principle to sort out obvious anomalies; the position of the head of state, the role of the church, the composition of the upper house, how to define Britishness; other than an ability to understand cricket of course.

The first and second periods of government by New Labour under Tony Blair (1997-2007) were perhaps unchallenging from a constitutionalist perspective. ‘Third Way’ ideas were sufficiently vague to be not really appeals to principle at all – just slightly dressed up ‘muddling through’. However a large parliamentary majority coupled with a very informal, sofa based, style of political leadership soon led to a number of tensions within the political elite and a call for a constitutional fix. The prevalence, youthfulness and assertive role of political advisers upset the civil service. ‘Kitchen cabinet’ got in the way of the formal cabinet of ministers. Parliament objected to the tendency of ministers or civil servants to leak policy to the press before informing the House. The problem appeared to be that ‘proper procedure’ in these matters was not rule based but a matter of precedent and how ‘good chaps’ had heretofore been expected to behave.

The call for constitutional reform was not however based upon a radical agenda. The proponents would probably argue that relationships between the main constitutional actors had been in better balance at some earlier date, but things have changed; instant communication for instance, news coverage ‘24/7’ as the phrase goes and something needed to be done to right the balance. Although the language is about constitutions, pragmatic tinkering is what they really wanted to achieve. That the constitutional movement has run into the ground is probably because the word itself suggests fundamentals - A Bill of Rights, principles of citizenship; all sorts of French sounding things. But how would we write logically about a Queen who has no powers but must sign everything as if she did; a state religion that owes its institutional origins to the misdemeanours of a monarch, and a system of law that finds greater security and stability in the sense or nonsense of precedent than in any appeal to fundamentals?

French legal principles and constitutions, once they had been stabilised and written into codes by Napoleon 1st or his advisors, have had a far greater impact world-wide than has English pragmatics, but still find voices of disapproval on this side of the Channel. Most European countries have constitutions that conceptually at least owe their origins to the Napoleonic code. The Communist countries, for all their radicalism – or perhaps because of it - all adopted organisational structures that fitted within a basically Napoleonic constitutional framework. Now the European Union has a constitution in all but name and would have a real one were it not for an obstinate objection from the British. Britain still wants to muddle through. Without wanting to go quite as far as Chesterton [2] in antipathy to French orderliness, an argument can be found for exercising suspicion in relation to enunciated governance principles. It boils down to the inescapable laws of institutional perversity – however well constituted a set of rules, people will contrive to corrupt them. These laws are well known but seldom documented in discussions of governance. I had better go cautiously but since they are essential to my reservations about constitutionalism I had also better try to explain.

Social order, it seems, is based upon the interplay of three contradictory means of coordination in human affairs; hierarchy, mutuality and individualism. The constitutional project in any country will always be about defining the relationship between these coordination principles. It will be about establishing the legitimate hierarchy of the state – and its limitations, including some role for collective representation. It will be about social inclusion and boundaries – and how they are policed by the state. It will define rights and entitlements of the individual citizen, to property and liberty of person, and how these may be socially constrained. In other words there will be attention to balance and an acknowledgement that each element may go wrong

Historically, in the cases so far mentioned, the constitutional project has started as a reaction to the perversities of hierarchy; the absolutist claims and actions of kings. Hierarchical perversity; absolute power corrupting absolutely has had its 20th Century moments and we should not expect it to go away entirely in the 21st, but the more common complaint in present day discussion of governance is that hierarchical systems don’t do justice to the diverse needs or interests of the citizenry. They tend toward machine like characteristics. Machine style bureaucracy may have done well in the last Century – delivering war time ration cards or the post war dole – but fits badly with the more plural and organic concepts of civil society that today prevail. How do the French manage this trend? By maintaining a sharp dividing line between the state, represented in the Prefecture and local society represented by Mayor and Commune. The former delivers roads – indeed comparatively straight - pensions, uniform schooling and other citizen entitlements; the latter petanque pitches, café licences, street markets, the obligatory roundabouts for village roads and a local arena for political contestation about these and diverse other comfort-giving things. The dividing line may change, but only as a result of major reform efforts and constitutional changes.

French claims to ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ can all be seen as appeals to individualism and mutuality of interests as against hierarchical entitlements. Edmund Burke was horrified by these claims and their immediate outcomes. He was particularly exercised about the French mob’s use of the idea of liberty and the support that certain English libertarian preachers gave to them. Freedom to choose your own ruler was going altogether too far; without boundaries liberty is freedom to destroy.

Writing to a young Frenchman - who had assumed that Burke, having supported American Independence, would be enthusiastic about transformations in France - Burke approached his subject cautiously. Using a brewing metaphor he wrote;
“When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one.” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790)

This is very much in the oratorical tradition of “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” (W.S., Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 2). We guess that congratulation will not, at the end of so many pages, be forthcoming;

“Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver, and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long” (ibid).

We do not write in such style and our lists of the requirements of good governance may have changed slightly over the intervening two hundred years but we are still on about the same things[3]. Burke also anticipated today’s Political Scientists in recognising the significance of power [and of conspiracy];

“The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men, but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers” (ibid).

In his long discourse – disguised monologue in actuality – Burke seemed to recognise as a reality what we would now discuss as the agency of the individual. There is nothing in his text that denies that individuals should exercise choice, simply that their freedom should be exercised within bounds; bounds set by experience, tradition and ‘consideration’ – according to the paragraph above – which all sounds like a reasonable, conservative [with a small c] stance.

But even the pragmatist in Burke could hanker after authoritative principle. His argumentation becomes doubtful, even inconsistent, when much of the tract is devoted to a rather tortuous defence of monarchy, with unbroken succession, as a necessary pinnacle to social order. His problem is that English monarchic succession isn’t unbroken. To cover his tracks he introduces a couple of syllogisms that, apart from their eloquence might have been drawn from a present day management textbook;
“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”
He goes even bolder;
“An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease”.
Extracted from the text these statements might be assumed to be justifying the contemporary convulsions in France, but no, what he is actually attempting to explain away is the succession of William of Orange to the English Crown, who’s Protestantism and willingness to sign a deal with Parliament in 1688 was the sole justification for his usurpation of the Stewart line.

For Burke, William’s deal with Parliament justified an English claim to the idea of liberty – if we have it already why should we fight for it - but it was, for him, irrevocably bound up with legitimate monarchy;
“This Declaration of Right (the act of the 1st of William and Mary, sess. 2, ch. 2) is the cornerstone of our constitution as reinforced, explained, improved, and in its fundamental principles for ever settled. It is called, "An Act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown". You will observe that these rights and this succession are declared in one body and bound indissolubly together” (ibid).
Burke is here using all sorts of metaphor - of building, binding, indissolubility, timelessness – to reinforce the idea of ‘constitution’. So perhaps he is a subscriber to principle after all? But the fact is that he has to recognise compromise: William’s opportunist succession illustrated …“how totally adverse the wisdom of the nation was from turning a case of necessity into a rule of law” (ibid). [How many appeals to necessity have we experienced since….]

What about Equality and Brotherhood; how did Burke manage these other assertions of principle? The answer is ‘rather badly’. Equality he was simply against[4]; and many of his followers have been equally simple in its rejection. ‘Unnatural’ and ‘unachievable’ have been Right and Left wing assertions when there has been a need for justification. About Brotherhood he was more ambiguous, recognising a kinship with his fellow Irish, rich and poor, a sympathy for American ambitions, but some followers have found in him grounds to justify an inward looking mutuality; a lowest common understanding of the mutual interest, appealing to the priority of family and kin; a crude nationalism, opening the door to a hatred of ‘outsiders’[5] . Regrettably, a strain of xenophobia persists in UK politics to this day.

Where does this leave the discussion of the written constitution? If high social principal is not enshrined in a constitution, how can citizens have any expectation that values they hold to be important are expressed or able to be expressed in society? Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are not enshrined in a UK national constitution, though we have a variety of laws on the stature books under which some such values can be championed: championed being the important word in that statement. Nothing good can be achieved unless someone is prepared to strive for it.

It is of course an illusion for constitutionalists to think that, simply by having a good thing built in to a super-law that it will thereby be automatically protected. Freedom of speech in America is a constitutional entitlement, set out in the First Amendment. But no sooner enacted than great effort has to be expended in defining its limitations. It is not a surprise that certain forms of pornography are exempted[6]. It is only to be expected that someone should be restricted from shouting ‘fire!’ without cause in a crowded theatre. Defamation of character is likewise constrained. In all cases the restraint recognises that what is a freedom for one may be a harmful constraint upon the liberties of another. Defining such limitations becomes a matter of law; in the Anglo Saxon tradition a matter of precedent. But note that in America with a constitution as in Britain without; nothing happens unless someone has been prepared to take action to achieve it.

The American constitution is also designed by its authors to put limits upon the power of the state. The American government may therefore expect to face challenges from its citizens if it attempts to transgress these constraints. The UK has no one document with the same intention. So is the British citizen then powerless against tendencies towards the arbitrary exercise of power by our government?

In both countries government strategies in relation to Iraq and the so-called ‘war on terror’ have led to protests from some elements within the public. It is not the question as to whether one or other position is right or wrong that should concern us here but the narrower question as to how free or otherwise these citizens have found themselves in their desire to exercise ‘voice’. In both cases protest has posed a major challenge to relationships between citizen and state. In America the Bush Administration has used a real or supposed fear of terrorist attack to set additional limits on the citizen’s right to free speech, protecting the President from exposure to protesters by removing them to ‘free speech zones’, well away from the President’s path. The Administration had a clear target in the First Amendment.

On Dec. 6, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft informed the Senate Judiciary Committee, “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty … your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and … give ammunition to America’s enemies.” Some commentators feared that Ashcroft’s statement, which was vetted beforehand by top lawyers at the Justice Department, signaled that this White House would take a far more hostile view towards opponents than did recent presidents. And indeed, some Bush administration policies indicate that Ashcroft’s comment was not a mere throwaway line’[7].
In Britain protests have been numerous and, although the police have adopted some tactics from their American counterparts, such as penning protesters into a limited space and preventing their movement for hours, the government has been sensitive to criticism that it is in any way curtailing civil liberties.

The longest running British protest was established in Parliament Square by lone activist Brian Haw who began camping out there in 2001 and gradually built up a display of anti-war plaques and images that ran the length of the Square. He was undisturbed before Parliament enacted constraining legislation in 2006. Police moved in to remove most of the display in May 2006[8]. But that was not the end of the story. Artist Mark Wallinger then reproduced Mr Haw’s display as an exhibit in the Tate Britain galleries, where it stands in stark contrast to the painterly elegance of most of the other art items on display. It is not that art always avoids critical engagement. Indeed, London’s galleries hang several critical social statements of William Hogarth (1697-1764), such as The Rakes Progress series (Sloane Museum). Along with writers such as John Gray (1685-1732), Henry Fielding (1707-1754), and Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Hogarth evidenced the willingness of what we would now see as free-thinking intellectuals to use social satire to express views that were critical of the establishment – if not directly of the government of the day or the crown. Edmund Burke would have been very much aware of this tradition, assuming it to be evidence of the pragmatic English approach to liberty that he contrasted so emphatically with French idealism.

‘The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism’; this is the heading of an American blog. Some citizens, here, in America and elsewhere do seem in one way or another to be willing to exercise their critical faculties in relation to the behaviour of other citizens or of their governments. In some countries, such as today’s Zimbabwe or yesteryear’s South Africa they can only do so at grave personal risk to their wellbeing – but still do so. The sad thing is that, once freedom of voice is achieved politically, the alertness of citizens to ‘things going wrong’ in the public sphere seems to decline. An undertone of disappointment is evident in South African political commentary today. The effort required to be politically active; to articulate a view, to gain support for a cause, to be willing to champion that cause in the face of indifference or derision seems to be too much for too many persons and in consequence, governments seem all too often to be able to get away with quite mediocre policies. I would like to go further and hazard a guess that the more apparently certain are the constitutional entitlements of the citizen, the more the citizen is prepared to assume that ignorance of the public weal is bliss.

Nevertheless criticism is not dead anywhere. Sometimes, as in the old Warsaw Pact countries, it consisted in political jokes. Sometimes stand up comics have colonised the space. Now the net has opened up a near infinite number of opportunities for informed or ignorant exchange of views. If plural views can find expression somehow this in itself is a constraint upon the attempts of governments – inevitably imperfect governments – to define the world in ways that enhance their power. This may sound a little anarchic. Mr Chesterton was clearly anarchically inclined[9] but did not claim much for the outcome of anti-conformist views. Today, much of our Web-based commentary is rubbish. Bremner, Bird and Fortune may not change the fate of the nation when they give us a good laugh at the expense of our leaders and of ourselves. But it all keeps us on our political toes.
Henry Porter, complaining about some New Labour attempts to speed up the legislative process which, he claimed, allowed ministers to usurp the authority of parliament, used the press to object and to criticise;
“If Mr Blair were more interested in history he would realise that the present, while certainly unique, is certainly not uniquely awful. But more important, he [Tony Blair] would see the great damage his laws are doing to the institutions we have inherited - to the constitution, to the tradition of parliamentary sovereignty, to the independence of the judiciary, to individual rights and to the delicate relationship between the individual and the state. All of them are products of British history. They are not perfect, but they make up a fairly large part of the body politic. This is who we are”. (The Observer, Sunday March 6th, 2006).
His appeal was none the less powerful for the acknowledged intangibility of UK’s unwritten constitution.
So I think that, at the end of all this, I come out in favour of constant struggle and mildly against setting up an edifice of constitutional principles against which the ranters in society may rant. This places considerable responsibility upon the citizen to find ways down the crooked paths of political discourse.

It also entails living with an inconsistency that is not always comfortable. When the drums roll and the National Anthem rings out, I do not object to invoking the blessings of God upon the Queen, a decent enough lady, no doubt in as much need of blessing as anyone else. ‘Long to reign over us’ takes a bit more explaining away to myself. I imagine myself putting it to a foreign visitor; “She doesn’t really ‘reign over us’. That is just a figure of speech. If I am caught driving without a licence my offence is deemed to be against the crown and I will be prosecuted and sent to jail by policemen and magistrates acting in name of the Queen”. How will my imagined foreign visitor see this? Just as another instance of English non-straightforwardness I guess.

By the way: Chesterton ultimately takes a very High Church way out. Like Edmund Burke he has to find ultimate authority somewhere. Oh dear, it is the usual poetic assertion that - as an economist put it - ‘In the long run we are all dead’[10]

[1] Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode / The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. / A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire, / And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;/ A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread / The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

[2] I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire, / And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire; / But I did bash their baggonets* because they came arrayed / To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made, / Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands, / The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
* old English usage for French origined word bayonet

[3] And are often much more blunt in our assertions; as when telling developing countries what they must do to receive our aid.
[4] BELIEVE ME, SIR, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The association of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris, for instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which by the worst of usurpations — an usurpation on the prerogatives of nature — you attempt to force them. (ibid)

[5] See Andrew Webster’s commentary at; http://www.bigeye.com/burke1.htm

[6]Henry Cohen, ‘Freedom of Speech and Press; exceptions to the First Amendment’ http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/95-815.pdf.
[7] James Bovard, ‘The Administration Quarantines Dissent’, The American Conservative http://www.amconmag.com/12_15_03/feature.html
[8] Guardian Unlimited http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1781182,00.html

[9] His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run / Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?/ The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which, / But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch. / God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear / The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

[10] My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage, / Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age, / But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth, / And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death; / For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, / Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green. |