29 Comments on £5 if you read this blog …

Mark Robinson on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 1:22 pm


Or, as my mum used to tell me, ‘It wouldn’t do for us all to be the same…’

You could reverse the terms in that concluding quote, couldn’t you? (Just to prove I read to the end) – communities need to innovate and diversify in order to anticipate and respond to these dynamics and nurture their resilience. This makes innovation a means as much as an end – the end being more resilient, pro-social communities.

I’ve been writing too-long blogs about resilience myself this week – it’s hard doing justice to things in bitesize, isn’t it? See here for latest chunk http://artscounselling.blogspot.com/2009/04/10-quotes-and-thoughts-on-resilience-4.html

Dr Lucy Heady, New Philanthropy Capital on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 2:04 pm


This reminds me of Steven Pinker’s description of how the brain works. Different parts of our brain approach problems in different ways – my left brain wants to argue with this blog on a logical premise, my right brain wants to cry because I can barely understand it, my hypothalamus makes me want to just give up and go and have something to eat. As a result, my reaction will not be a ‘true’ represenation of my opinion, rather it will be the result of competition between the different bits of my brain ‘disagreeing creatively’. Creating a sustainable brain, as with communities, is less of a goal than a lifelong struggle.

£5 to New Philanthropy Capital (if that’s not a conflict of interest, otherwise Mental Health Foundation)

Max Hogg on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 2:22 pm


“So, how can it be true both that there are some social environments which encourage particular attitudes and behaviours (which could be said broadly to fit an egalitarian outlook) while, at the same time, in relation to any specific problem or decision, a set of conflicting responses (of which egalitarianism is only one) will emerge?”

I’m not sure this is as much of a challenge as you suggest. In any social group, the conflicting responses suggested by cultural theory may tend to emerge. But I would suggest that these responses will appear to be more or less dominant depending on the degree to which they can build a convincing narrative about how to respond to the social environment.

To take a couple of examples: in an individualist social environment (the financial sector before the crash), all four world views will exist, but the individualist response will appear dominant because (a) each trader will have a greater or lesser tendency towards individualism, and this tendency will allow them the best ‘fit’ with their social environment and so is likely to be their dominant response (b) within the group as a whole, the traders with base inclinations towards the individualist world view are likely to generate the most successful responses to the social environment, and so become dominant.

In contrast, in the pro-social environment of strong social support you mention, each person’s greater or lesser tendency towards an egalitarian world view will be awakened and brought to the fore, and those with the greatest base tendency towards egalitarianism will be most successful and become dominant.

In short, I am suggesting that there is a strong, but unsurprising, interdependency between the type of social environment and the dominant group response to that environment. So you might describe the financial sector as a pro-individualist environment, and the environment of strong social support as the pro-egalitarian environment.

The crucial point, though, is that the non-dominant world views do not disappear (egalitarianism on the trading floor, individualism in social work) – they are merely sidelined because they don’t fit with the social environment. This leads to two further conjectures:

1) The fatalist world view emerges amongst those whose base inclination towards one of the other three world views does not fit with the social environment e.g. if climate change can only be solved with a strongly hierarchical response, those inclined towards individualism or egalitarianism are more likely to be fatalist about climate change.

2) If (1) is true, then your concluding thesis is true but only half the story. Generating a strong community depends on creating a social environment in which those who would naturally incline towards each world view has the opportunity to act pro-socially.

However, the efficacy of that pro-social behaviour depends on how well it fits with the realities of the social situation. To return to climate change: encouraging, say, individualist responses (not using plastic bags) is empowering and therefore important to generate a strong community. But if the situation requires a hierarchical response (as I believe climate change does) those individualist responses may not be doing much to actually solve the problem, and by encouraging them there is a danger that we are actually encouraging fatalism, which seems to have become the dominant response to climate change.

Sorry for a long-winded reply – hope I’ve made sense of your post. If so, Practical action would love your donation.

Max

matthewtaylor on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 2:35 pm


Hi Max

This is great. How do I donate on line?

Matthew

matthewtaylor on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 2:37 pm


Hi Lucy

This is fab. Although my understanding is that new research is questioning Pinker’s too rigid ascribing of functions and capacities to certain parts of the brain. The money is on its way to the MHF

Matthew

Duncan Lawie FRSA on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 3:19 pm


I like the suggestion that pro-social communities need to “create a context in which each way of thinking about the world can be expressed, but in a way which values diversity and creates synergy”. However, I’m not confident that it follows from the thesis that people with stronger networks behave better.

It seems to me the strong networks research can be displayed by the stereotypical “small town”, where people behave to community standards for fear of being rejected by the community. That can certainly be a “strong community” but it doesn’t require any basis for valuing diversity. It is, I think, also the “group think” you are concerned about. In cultural theory terms, however, it also sounds like one of those one-dimensional places which can be enriched by involving the other voices.

Having said which, I strongly support the need for “creating the kind of space in which people can disagree creatively” and I think that is something that the RSA is an excellent setting for.

Rob Tabb on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 3:19 pm


Matthew, it could be argued that the 4 perspectives you identify have a rank order, and that liberal paternalists will always go for the egalitarian view. To quote a marriage guidance book “different isn’t always wrong”. There will be times when the different perspectives are required, and there will be some people who are better at responding in different situations at different times. The fundamental issue is about creating a space where it is okay to have different opinions, personalities and perspectives and where genuine diversity is celebrated and indeed respected. but as they say, the heart of the human problem …

Rick on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 3:29 pm


The four box typology you quote is only one model used in the study of culture. Having been a management consultant for twelve years, I’m now naturally suspicious of all four box models, especially when applied to something as complex as cultures – national or organisational.

Your point about the difficulty (futility?) of trying to create a single culture is well made. It’s difficult enough to do in organisations, where people tend to come from a narrower social background. Trying to do so for whole communities would be nigh-on impossible and, as you say, probably not desirable.

But ‘creating the kind of space in which people can disagree creatively’ is going to be difficult too. In my experience, that’s hard enough to do with small management and workplace teams. It requires a great deal of trust which takes a long time to build up.

Sorry to sound pessimistic, or even ‘fatalistic’, but creating strong communities, the the way you define them, sounds like a tall order to me.

Henry Kippin on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 3:32 pm


One conclusion you present – that ‘the strength of strong communities lies less in everyone sharing the same view of the world, but in creating the kind of space in which people can disagree creatively’ – made me think of time spent in the development industry in east Africa.

So much development policy is based on the idea of community empowerment, stemming from the notion that communities can articulate collective interest, and therefore sustain some kind of coherent collective identity.

But real empowerment (particularly economic) allows people to act outside of the boundaries set for them, so they can help sustain (and develop) this collective, but can also behave antisocially or selfishly. The point is, they cease to be defined with the collective bounds set for them, so the idea of development gets contested and renegotiated.

Within this context, shared values are heavily contingent upon resources. Small personal inputs (ie a corrugated iron roof or a bicycle) can have huge socioeconomic impacts. Pro-sociality is interesting because it implies less of a trade-off between these individual benefits and a more collective idea of development.

Jonathan on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 3:35 pm


Partly the problem stems from a discomfort in trying to reconcile two attractive theoretical paradigms that seem to be incompatible. And that in turn may come from a tension between the diagnostic and predictive capacities of those theories

Of course as a recovering post-structuralist I’m not so worried about that

But a more serious take on what theories of culture can do and their limitations is be provided by my all time hero Clifford Geertz (forgive v long quote).

“Thus we are lead to the second condition of cultural theory: it is not, at least in the strict meaning of the term, predictive. The diagnostician doesn’t predict measles; he decides that someone has them, or at the very most clincially decides that someone is rather likely shortly to get them.

But this limitation, which is real enough, has commonly been both misunderstood and exaggerated, because it has been taken to mean that cultural interpretation is merely post facto: that, like the peasant in the old story, we first shoot the holes in the fence and then paint the bull’s-eyes around them. It is hardly to be denied that there is a good deal of that sort of thing around, some of it in prominent places. It is to be denied, however, that it is the inevitable outcome of a clinical approach to the use of theory.

It is true that in the clinical style of theoretical formulation, conceptualization is directed toward the task of generating interpretations of matters already in hand, not toward projecting outcomes of experimental manipulations or deducing future states of a determined system. But that does not mean that theory has only to fit (or, more carefully, to generate cogent interpretations of) realities past; it has also to survive–intellectually survive–realities to come.”

So I don’t think your problem is as acute as you fear

But another way of thinking about it might be as follows

What if the socially benign behaviour of well connected people came not from a rational cost benefit analysis – they support me so I should support them – but from the simple fact of connectedness itself? Is there any evidence on how far the quality and nature of relationships matter or is it just the relationships themselves?

This would fit with your model of strong communities in which people creatively disagree. But the very fact of that disagreement and the existence of different paradigms strengthened rather than weakened social bonds.

Finally should we assume that only egalitarian response can be benign? Couldn’t individualist, hierarchical or even fatalist responses be benign in some circumstances?

Similarly social support needn’t be egalitarian either?

If we break the link between social connectedness and egalitarianism your problem goes away doesn’t it? Though your solution remains powerful.

Don’t know if that’s in time (or worth) a fiver – but if so Children of the Andes please.

matthewtaylor on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 4:04 pm


Hello old friend

Yes you get a fiver – you might want to send Barbara the link so I can donate on-line. I like the quote and the point. And I think we agree. I am saying that strong communities, while being by definition predisposed to E should accommodate and hear H, I and F (if they don’t these impulses will just go underground or deviant). There is a bigger point here about whether each of the paradigms is better at dealing with a different risk resulting from trying to develop a clumsy solution. So if the danger with a clumsy solution is that it might be too risky it is best for it to be overseen by hierarchists, if the danger is soggy compomise or inertia individualists etc. But my brain hurts and it’s Friday

Have a good weekend

matthewtaylor on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 4:06 pm


Absolutely – said by a true cultural theorist. Most of their ideas came from development studies and there is a fab example of egalitarian scare mongering in the first chapter of Michael Thompson’s book organising and disorganing.

matthewtaylor on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 4:08 pm


Hi Rick

Thanks. I agree with the difficulty. The method we are exploring here is finding our what networks already exist, mapping them and playing them back to communities so that people see these networks, their role in them and how they can better exploit what already exists. This is so much more credible than trying to create new top down capacity

Have a good weekend

carl allen on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 7:50 pm


Where do individuals get their inherent balance between self-interest and active citizenship?

Where do communities get their strength to behave as communities, whether as Nazis or Quakers?

Pro-sociality depends on environment but an inherent balance as above has its own personal belief that acts despite an unfavourable environment. The inherent balance does its bit irregardless of the environment.

And as pro-sociality depends on environment, then the argument about benign behaviour falls down when the environment is adverse or the resources in the environment can support only the few and not the many.

In community development, the balance creates the strong space, however small, and not the general community. One type of pro-sociality will be attracted to the space and the opposite pro-sociality will oppose it.

Successful communities with a high birth rate tend to fail, rapidly, when the leaders group move on and a gap exists. The leaders group tend to move on as a bunch … they get married and move out of the area. Thus sustainable community development depends on the continuity of replacement leaders having an inherent balance and not an environment that encourages pro-sociality. The pro-sociality environment degrades rapidly when the inherent balance is not present.

So where do individuals get their inherent balance between self-interest and active citizenship?

Philip Virgo on Sat, 18th Apr 2009 12:21 pm


Thought provoking, but also simplistic and over-complex at the same time.

One missing dimensions is encapulated in the title of Solly Zuckerman’s autobiography “From Apes to Warlords” : although he leave to reader to work out how his studies of the social behaviour of the great apes enabled him to make sense of the behaviour patterns of Churchill’s War Cabinet.

Another, more complex, is the experiences and thought processes that lay behind Maurice Cowling’s challenge to his students (of which I was one) to argue against the view that British Politics was a game between semi-hereditary elites who use ‘ologies as clubs to beat each other with.

I should add that I have never had the temerity to believe that Maurice taught me anything other than to better dissect the positions of others while defending my own prejudices (and recognising that that was all they were).

P.S. Is this good enough to earn £5 for the Salvation Army: chosen because of its success in using an eclectic mix of concepts to restore balance to those who have lost it.

Faizal Farook on Sat, 18th Apr 2009 2:22 pm


This is a really interesting post and set my brain going in a million different directions at once, but I have tried to order these thoughts into something intelligible (hopefully). I haven’t followed the background to this post, so if my comments have been covered earlier or are way off base, apologies.

1) The four categories seem to pose difficulties. For example one can be either individualistic, hierarchical, fatalistic and still egalitarian. All these categories imply is perhaps how that egalitarianism is manifested. In my experience, some of the people who are the most individualistic are the ones most likely to check if the old lady next door needs anything, whilst the ‘social egalitarians’ were more likely to be in favour of higher taxes so that the government should do something to help the old lady living on their own. Both are pro-social behaviours, which seems to mean the question is not whether egalitarianism trumps the other characteristics but how one defines egalitarianism. How widely do you see your responsibility to society, how widely do you define what your society is, and what contributions do you decide are worth making?

2) Related to this is the need to separate out attitudes and behaviours. A cultural theory analysis would have to be applied to both attitudes first and then behaviours. (For example, pro-social reasoning may want to make you take action, but fatalism may stop you acting on this.)

3) I think an important element in these considerations are the physical characteristics of the network in question, such as how geographically dispersed are the ‘nodes’, how much contact do they have and perhaps most importantly, what size is the network itself. For example, hierarchy becomes of increasing concern as a network grows and the lines of communication between ‘nodes’ reduce.

Equally important is the scale of the problem the network is trying to solve. Is it the drug dealers round the corner, the dog waste in the playground, the ethnic division in the borough, the low aspirations within the city or global climate change?

4) The problem with these types of theory is that they can’t account for the emotional factors and interpersonal interactions that influence decision making. They assume decision making to be a) rational, b) linear, and c) about the decision in question.

5) Also, to follow on from Max Hogg’s excellent comments, it’s important to not view these interactions in isolation. So in Max’s example, assuming climate change needs a hierarchical response, an individualistic pro-social action may produce fatalism in relation to climate change but may create a more general egalitarian outlook in other areas. An increased sense of personal responsibility and efficacy may therefore express itself in areas where an individual feels he can have an impact.

Based on my superficial understanding I have to admit I’m a bit sceptical but hope some of the above is useful to you.

Bishop Brennan on Sat, 18th Apr 2009 10:54 pm


This all sounds a bit over-complex, and yet not complex enough to me.

Why do I have to belong to any group, community, etc.? What if I don’t want to? That’s the problem with the left – they insist on grouping the rest of us, whereas the reality is that there is no single group that shares / represents all of my views.

We are individuals – and we should celebrate that. Sure, we can come together when it’s in our interests, or when we perceive that it is or our values mean that we believe it is right. But unless we’re actively hurting someone else, then no-one has the right to make us do something that we don’t want…

Max Hogg on Sun, 19th Apr 2009 10:59 am


Matthew,

The link is https://www.secure.practicalaction.org/donate.asp?id=207

Good luck with the speech!
Max

matthewtaylor on Sun, 19th Apr 2009 2:43 pm


Hi ‘Bishop’
I agree that no one should be forced to be part of a community or judged if they choose a solitary life but (a) man is an innately social animal, (b) human activity and human progress are highly dependent on our capacity to collaborate and (c) both collaboration and altruism make more sense among strong networks. This, it seems to me, provides sufficient grounds for wanting to find out more about what makes networks thrive. And, by the way, there is a strong communitarian tradition on the right too.

matthewtaylor on Sun, 19th Apr 2009 3:06 pm


Hi Philip. Yes the Sally Army gets £5 (you weren’t one of the first ten but most of the others declined the offer). Your Cowling comment remnds me of Marx’s description of Parliamentary democracy; something like ‘an opportunity every five years for the working class to choose which committee of the bourgeoisie will misrule them’

matthewtaylor on Sun, 19th Apr 2009 3:21 pm


Hi Carl. I’m not sure I get all of this. But one thing have long thought is that we have to find clever ways of incentivising those who have the wherewithal to move up and out of deprived communities so they stay around a bit longer; not just to help develop others with the potential for mobility but also to contribute to a more fundamental shift of self and external image for that community. We know from research in schools, that you need a certain number of people with commitment and talent to legitimise and exemplify the norms of self improvement. The criticism of some schemes to help the most deprived communities is that they help the most talented move on leaving the community itself even less well off.

matthewtaylor on Sun, 19th Apr 2009 3:40 pm


Hi Faizal

Thanks for the comment. I agree that things are complex. Cultural theory is not a tool that tells us what to do except in as much as it provides a way of understanding why some (neat) solutions don’t work and other (clumsy) solutions seem to. It is also important to emphasise that the categories in cultural theory relate to strategies in an organisation (broadly defined) in relation to solving a problem. They are not personality types. Most of us will, for example, support hierarchical solutions in one area of our life and egalitarian in others. And we may change our mind in relation to a specific problem. Also, the four positions emerge in opposition to each other; those advocating an egalitarian solution will tend to be clearer about why they oppose the argument of individualists than why they support their own. And, yes, we can adopt solutions which involve two or three of the four views (after all the definition of a clumsy solution is one that mobilises the insights and energies deriving from all the positions). Our capacity to do this is enhanced if we understand the core dynamic that tends to lead to polarisation, and understand that once people have adopted a positon they tend to see the world in a way that reinforced that position and delegitimizes the others.

carl allen on Sun, 19th Apr 2009 4:17 pm


Since you are talking about community, why are you not talking to community development workers before talking about community? And not the present day 9-5 variety but the ones who really engage with the people and the streets of the community.

It is a thought, right or wrong, that this specific blog might consist of similarly minded and trained people consulting with themselves … consultation is not a substitute for analysis of an issue and mad people also consult with themselves. Granted that some mad people are close to genius and I have met a few of those.

By way of note, the film “City of God” is an excellent film on community. And since significantly more of the young people in England are motivated to die in similar circumstances (unlike past eras), life is starting to imitate art.

Cathy Lee on Thu, 23rd Apr 2009 9:41 am


Well, Matthew, this time my reply is not coming as late as before!

So, I’m not sure if you already read their work or not, but if you haven’t, you should read Simon Szreter and Michael Woolcock’s work in social capital. In “Health by Association? Social Capital, Social Theory, and the Political Economy of Public Health,” they do a fantastic job of summarizing a wealth of social capital literature and argue that who benefits from pro-social behavior depends upon what form of social capital. They differentiate between three different forms of social capital—bonding (e.g. trust and cooperation within a group sharing social identity/ egalitarianism), bridging (respect and mutuality between people in a network not in the same socio-demographic and fairly equal in status and power/individualism), linking (trust and benevolence across power differentials or people in different ranks/hierarchy), and the absence of social capital (fatalism). That horizontal, egalitarian social capital does not, as Putnam points out, necessarily translate into pro-social behavior for the whole community—look, for instance, at the mafia. Szreter and Woolcock’s theories though, could benefit from a little bit of CT—especially from CT’s predictions about the different types of preferences and biases (this is actually a whole list that includes different perceptions of risk, needs-and-resource management strategies, and etc) and their way of measuring varying degrees of democracy/pluralism (Steven Ney has great work on this, and a short summary is also included in Mike’s report for the Lisbon symposium).

Your comment that certain social environments encourage particular attitudes and behaviors is interesting, and I think, inevitably relates to the topic of how organizations change over time and adapt to the shifting external environment. There are, I think, many variables to what determines a particular “leaning” of an institution, but I do believe there are cycles of transformation that occur over time, some cycles more favored than others.

I also think you might be onto something about different approaches and tendency toward polarization within each institution. Milgrom and Roberts’ case study of the Salomon Brothers, an intensely individualistic corporate finance and sales and trading company, fits exactly what you describe. In the 1980’s, volatile interest rates created opportunities for speculation. To take advantage of this environment, a corporation had to organize itself to be highly competitive, short-term oriented and risk-seeking. That is, they needed less of the cautious approach exercised by more hierarchically organized firms. Hence, the Salomon Brothers had implemented a compensation system based on performance pay, which encompassed both individual and departmental performance. Competition within each department, and especially between departments, was fierce.

Moreover, because there was no mechanism for binding departments to one another, each department preyed opportunistically on profits of other departments and was too short-sighted to realize the long-term consequences of their actions. There was no fraternity between the horizontal divisions of the Salomon Brothers. One could even argue that if the Salomon Brothers had left the situation as is, the whole company would eventually have collapsed due to the lack of both plurality in types of trust and collegiality. These individualistic traders were caught in a vicious cycle because each trusted too much in the Smithian myth of the invisible hand.

As a solution, the Salomon Brothers withheld a fixed percentage of each employee’s bonus and used it to purchase company stock, which would be held in trust for five years. The solution was still in line with the individualistic nature of the firm but also altered the perception of individual employees by forcing them to think long term and associate more closely than before with the company. Ambitious individuals were rewarded for their own hard work but also bound by an incentive to work for the department, which allowed them but another opportunity to reap benefits. The transfer of part of their bonuses into company stock effectively served to expand the boundaries encircling each department to encompass the whole firm, redirecting accountability and strengthening the central structure of the firm.

By the way, if you are interested in links between cultural theory, evolution, and the brain, you should read Mike’s Man and Nature as a Single But Complex System (I’m a fan; can you tell?). He discusses Holling’s ecological theory and links it to CT. I think it ties in nicely with the quote you selected from Wilson and Csikszentmihalyi.

Fourcultures on Thu, 30th Apr 2009 6:42 am


Matthew, in reply to your question:
“how can it be true both that there are some social environments which encourage particular attitudes and behaviours (which could be said broadly to fit an egalitarian outlook) while, at the same time, in relation to any specific problem or decision, a set of conflicting responses (of which egalitarianism is only one) will emerge?”

1) Scale is crucial. Just as there isn’t a single rationality but four, neither is there a single scale. At one scale of operation, one of the four cultures may be dominant, and may seem to be a good fit with the landscape, but at other scales other cultural biases may be a better fit. See the work of ecologist Buzz Holling on this.

2) Similarly, time is also crucial. The social-ecological model of Holling and others in the Resilience Alliance suggests that ecological succession has a social counterpart. What appears optimal at one moment will become less optimal as time changes the environment, so that alternative problems arise, leading to alternative solutions.

3) The ability to defect is also crucial. I have been quite taken with a cellular automata problem called the density classification problem. In short this seems to suggest that even in simple mechanistic systems, total knowledge is impossible. This means there is always room for the dominant answers to be wrong and for defectors from the main view to get it more nearly correct. Given that a) social-ecological systems are far more complex than cellular automata and b) evolution has fine-tuned human responses to problem solving, it seems possible that human society is an environment which rewards a dominant viewpoint without punishing too severely a minority of dissidents.

On the relationship between behaviour and context in Cultural Theory « Fourcultures on Thu, 30th Apr 2009 1:40 pm


[...] in Cultural Theory By fourcultures In reply to Matthew Taylor’s  question over at his RSA blog: “how can it be true both that there are some social environments which encourage particular [...]

matthewtaylor on Fri, 1st May 2009 9:55 am


Thanks Matthew. Fascinating and convincing as usual. I wish I got the chance to do half the reading you do but your references are always really helpful.

Connections within, connections without : Connected Communities on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 4:19 pm


[...] of this process is an important question, and I would add, as I did yesterday, that increased community resilience (in the face of existing problems as well as unexpected ‘black swan’ events) may be one [...]

Positively wrong : Matthew Taylor’s blog on Mon, 28th Dec 2009 11:04 pm


[...] back once again to cultural theory; one of its insights is that each of the four ways of thinking about change in the world derive [...]

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!