Cultural theory – and the row over the Heathrow third runway

January 15, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Politics, Social brain 

Cultural theory offers four paradigms of change (there is a fifth, but it is of a different kind). What are they and how are they exhibited in relation to a specific issue, for example, whether to build a third runway at Heathrow?

The four paradigms can be understood as theories of change in themselves and as critiques of the other ways of doing things. Indeed, cultural theory argues that each paradigm gains its strength primarily from its critique of the others. All four views have weaknesses which are always threatening to undermine their credibility.  

The egalitarian paradigm 
This sees benign change as being driven bottom up through collective action by those who are united by shared values and status. The idealism of egalitarians (emphasising the possibility of equality and the power of shared values) tends to leads them to feel that nature (including human nature) is vulnerable and has been corrupted. Egalitarians see individualists as selfish and irresponsible and hierarchists as out of touch and overbearing.

The paradox of egalitarianism is that while it espouses shared values, it gains its strength by being exclusive (only those with the values or status are seen as valid or can join).    

The hierarchist paradigm
This sees benign change relying on leadership, authority, expertise and rules. As long as these things are in place then the potentially dangerous cycles and vagaries of nature can be managed.

Hierarchists see the other paradigms as naïve and unbalanced, but may accept each has its place as long as the hierarchy allots and regulates those places. 

The paradox of hierarchy is that while hierarchies present a face of order and authority to the outside world, they contain their own conflict. A senior Whitehall civil servant told me he had found it easy to assign the four models of change variously to each member of the UK cabinet. People may be members of hierarchies, and in that role adopt a hierarchical world view, but when it comes to conflicts within the hierarchy they may adopt an egalitarian, individualist or fatalistic stance. Hierarchists fear this guilty secret being exposed and the consequent loss of the authority.

The individualist paradigm      
This sees benign change as the result of individual initiative and competition. The aggregate sum of individual actions is collective good.  It’s OK to take risks because nature is resilient to change.

While individualists recognise the need for some hierarchy (more in theory than practice), they see the other paradigms as self-serving; hierarchists and egalitarians are hiding their own interests behind their paternalism and collectivism, while fatalists are simply excusing their laziness or lack of talent.

The paradox of individualism is that it espouses meritocracy while fostering unmerited inequality and exclusion.

The fatalist paradigm        
This sees successful change as unlikely and, in as much as it is possible, random in its causes and consequences. The world is unpredictable and unmanageable.

Fatalists view the other paradigms with indifference or scepticism, although they will tolerate them for the sake of a quiet life, or to help justify their own inaction.  

The paradox of fatalism is that fatalists know (even though they might not like to admit it) they rely on non fatalists to keep the world turning.

It isn’t hard to see these paradigms at play in the Heathrow argument. Today’s announcement by Gordon Brown represents an alliance between the individualist perspective (‘Freedom to Fly’) and the hierarchical (the Government’s duty to manage the UK economy) against the egalitarian view of environmentalists and local residents.

There are two things to notice about the polarised debate over the runway. The first is that individualists and egalitarians seem to enjoy attacking each other more than making their own case. Second, each side portrays the other in cultural theory terms. So, the supporters of the third runway present its opponents as ideologically blinkered tree huggers, people who exaggerate environmental issues because they don’t trust people’s choices and don’t like progress. Conversely, the egalitarians present the pro-runway faction as selfish and irresponsible and imply that they are working conspiratorially with the Government.

Cultural theorists argue for what they call ‘clumsy solutions’ which recognise and engage each perspective in problem solving. This hasn’t happened over the third runway. It might not have been possible. But one consequence is that the environmental pledges made by the Government are rightly considered worthless. If the egalitarians had been part of the solution they would have built in believable safeguards but instead we have a sop by the hierarchists and individualists.

I said I would offer some evidence today for the paradigms being ‘fundamental and ubiquitous’. I’ll do that tomorrow but Michael Thompson’s response to yesterday’s post gives a hint of how cultural theorists claim their perspective can apply to almost any problem.

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11 Comments on Cultural theory – and the row over the Heathrow third runway

  1. Matthew Kalman on Thu, 15th Jan 2009 12:52 pm

    2. DO THE 4 PARADIGMS OF CHANGE CORRELATE WITH 4 PERSONAL/CULTURAL VALUE SYSTEMS?

    Hi Matthew,

    I’ve only just started reading your blog and am certainly looking forward to perusing your forthcoming evidence that the ‘four paradigms of change’ are ‘fundamental and ubiquitous’.

    I’m struck by the similarities between your recommendation to ‘recognise and engage each perspective in problem solving’ and the recommendation that comes from the ‘Spiral Dynamics’ model of the stages found in the growth of individual/cultural values.

    Though the majority of people remain stubbornly attached to their one favoured set of values, there is a less common value system which is characterised by the urge to balance, connect, and include all the previous value systems.

    The whole “I’m right, you’re wrong” bun-fight of politics begins to fade where this value system is active. (Perhaps the recent book – ‘The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking’ – about how great leaders can simultaneously hold opposing ideas also relates to this – I need to read it. The book ‘Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change’ makes the same point, I think).

    I remember a related analogy you once used when you and I were chatting after a lecture I organised about ‘the Politics of Meaning’ (which you sponsored and spoke at!).

    You talked about the kind of person at party who will thumb through all the vinyl records, ignoring them all in order to always pick out the very same one to play (or something like that).

    (Scroll down on this page: http://www.integralstrategies.org/london.html for a photo of the lecture – you’re sitting behind the main speaker, Michael Lerner.)

    For Spiral Dynamics, this set of values is dubbed integral or systemic (actually, it also labels each stage of values with a colour – this one would be Yellow!).

    Your 4 paradigms map pretty directly onto the 4 most prevalent value system that Spiral Dynamics research has uncovered.

    I briefly describe Spiral Dynamics here:
    http://www.integralstrategies.org/tests.html#spiraldynamics

    Spiral Dynamics’ research suggests that adults tend to mature through a series of values stages – being mostly identified with the newest one to emerge in their thinking, though older ones are also active. It’s a sort of spiral.

    Spiral Dynamics finds that an indiividual with Yellow/integral/systemic values will advocate ‘the health of the whole spiral’ (ie of all the sets of values at once).

    By contrast, the egalitarian/communitarian/sensitive values that Spiral Dynamics labels as ‘Green’ are incapable of truly crafting such ‘health of the whole spiral’ solutions, even if they claim to offer global solutions etc. These limited and partial values are at the heart of ‘progressive’ thinking – so clearly Yellow/integral/systemic thinking needs to be added in to the progressive synthesis asap!

    This is all surely analagous to advocating a ‘healthy engagement with all the 4 change paradigms’, in the vein you talk about?

    Enough from me, I just thought I’d point out these parallels – in case it helps. And generally suggest that the extensive research field of ‘adult development’ might help broaden and hone your thinking…

    Cheers,

    Matthew Kalman

    PS A useful excerpt from the book about leadership agility stages is here:
    http://leadershipagility.com/pdf/Appendix_B_Stages.pdf

  2. Matthew Kalman on Thu, 15th Jan 2009 1:54 pm

    3. ‘DO THE 4 PARADIGMS OF CHANGE CORRELATE WITH 4 PERSONAL/CULTURAL VALUE SYSTEMS?

    Hi Matthew,

    I’ve only just started reading your blog and am certainly looking forward to perusing your forthcoming evidence that the ‘four paradigms of change’ are ‘fundamental and ubiquitous’.

    I’m struck by the similarities between your recommendation to ‘recognise and engage each perspective in problem solving’ and the recommendation that comes from the ‘Spiral Dynamics’ model of the stages found in the growth of individual/cultural values.

    Though the majority of people remain stubbornly attached to their one favoured set of values, there is a less common value system which is characterised by the urge to balance, connect, and include all the previous value systems.

    The whole “I’m right, you’re wrong” bun-fight of politics begins to fade where this value system is active. (Perhaps the recent book – ‘The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking’ – about how great leaders can simultaneously hold opposing ideas also relates to this – I need to read it. The book ‘Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change’ makes the same point, I think).

    I remember a related analogy you once used when you and I were chatting after a lecture I organised about ‘the Politics of Meaning’ (which you sponsored and spoke at!).

    You talked about the kind of person at party who will thumb through all the vinyl records, ignoring them all in order to always pick out the very same one to play (or something like that).

    (Scroll down on this page: http://www.integralstrategies.org/london.html for a photo of the lecture – you’re sitting behind the main speaker, Michael Lerner.)

    For Spiral Dynamics, this set of values is dubbed integral or systemic (actually, it also labels each stage of values with a colour – this one would be Yellow!).

    Your 4 paradigms map pretty directly onto the 4 most prevalent value system that Spiral Dynamics research has uncovered.

    I briefly describe Spiral Dynamics here:
    http://www.integralstrategies.org/tests.html#spiraldynamics

    Spiral Dynamics’ research suggests that adults tend to mature through a series of values stages – being mostly identified with the newest one to emerge in their thinking, though older ones are also active. It’s a sort of spiral.

    Spiral Dynamics finds that an indiividual with Yellow/integral/systemic values will advocate ‘the health of the whole spiral’ (ie of all the sets of values at once).

    By contrast, the egalitarian/communitarian/sensitive values that Spiral Dynamics labels as ‘Green’ are incapable of truly crafting such ‘health of the whole spiral’ solutions, even if they claim to offer global solutions etc. These limited and partial values are at the heart of ‘progressive’ thinking – so clearly Yellow/integral/systemic thinking needs to be added in to the progressive synthesis asap!

    This is all surely analagous to advocating a ‘healthy engagement with all the 4 change paradigms’, in the vein you talk about?

    Enough from me, I just thought I’d point out these parallels – in case it helps. And generally suggest that the extensive research field of ‘adult development’ might help broaden and hone your thinking…

    Cheers,

    Matthew Kalman

  3. Indy on Thu, 15th Jan 2009 3:07 pm

    4. What strikes me as missing from this post (but probably not from the concepts of CT) is a discussion of the role of the power struggle.

    You say:

    “There are two things to notice about the polarised debate over the runway. The first is that individualists and egalitarians seem to enjoy attacking each other more than making their own case. Second, each side portrays the other in cultural theory terms. So, the supporters of the third runway present its opponents as ideologically blinkered tree huggers, people who exaggerate environmental issues because they don’t trust people’s choices and don’t like progress. Conversely, the egalitarians present the pro-runway faction as selfish and irresponsible and imply that they are working conspiratorially with the Government.”

    It seems to me that part of the reason for this is that the two paradigms are engaged in a struggle for legitimacy. I’d probably suggest (being a bit on the egalitarian side of neutral) that the last 30 years has seen the individualist paradigm take a dominant role in public discourse.

    The struggle going on is as much about the paradigms, or the terms of analysis as about the case for building a third runway. A lot of the argument you describe is about developing support for the paradigm, not the specific case – perhaps relying on people to fall into line on the specifics when they’ve identified a tribe they associate with?

    I’ll even complicate matters by pointing out that you can support the expansion of airport capacity on individualist grounds without supporting a third runway at Heathrow.

    Which of course leads to the issue that once a paradigm has gained certain legitimacy it can make use of the hierarchist paradigm to gather support for/enforce change, even if that change doesn’t have an explicit hierarchical basis to it.

  4. Indy on Thu, 15th Jan 2009 3:09 pm

    5. Just to be clear, I don’t know enough about CT, so I’m not proposing that the things I’ve mentioned in my last post are missing from CT, just that perhaps they are as important as the basics when considering the example of the runway.

  5. Blimpish on Thu, 15th Jan 2009 3:30 pm

    6. I know you’ve bracketed it out for simplicity, but I think I might be a hermit on this one. (I’ve read Organising and Disorganising.)

    I’m not an egalitarian, because I’m not as wholly bought into the emissions concern as some (i.e. I think the Stern Review’s discount rate assumptions were flawed), and I also don’t live in the area, so I’m not party of that community.

    I’m not an individualist, because I don’t believe in freedom-to-fly as such (well, except for birds, possibly), and as most of the arguments seem to refer to the gains of more transfer traffic, I’m fairly sanguine about that too. And I’m not that much of a traveller (they’ll still be flying to New York, after all.)

    I’m not a hierarchist, because I think the arguments that authority needs to be used for economic reasons are overstated (the interests of BAA are not coterminous with those of the UK) and, as you say, the Government is at odds with its own declared objectives anyway – which I take as it damaging its own claims to authority.

    I’m not a fatalist because I don’t think that change is coming and it’ll affect me badly, for better or worse… In terms of my life as far as I can see it, it won’t touch me – if it did, I might take a more active position. I think it’ll probably be built anyway, but I’m fairly ok with that.

    (If Michael Thompson’s passing, he can tell me if I’ve got the hermit role wrong – it does seem the most difficult thing to grasp.)

  6. Marco Verweij on Thu, 15th Jan 2009 8:24 pm

    7. I believe Mike is travelling today, so I will just give my reaction to the other responses. Among cultural theorists, a ‘hard core’ and a ‘soft core’ exist when it comes to the question of whether the four ways of organizing and perceiving social relations are ubiquitous. The softies limit themselves to simply claiming that this is a practical scheme that helps them understand how people tend to disagree with each other in many concrete situations. (This is often the wiser career move in academia). The hard-liners insist that these are the only four ways of organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations that can exist.
    To me, it seems that social ‘science’ (in any real sense) would not be possible if there were no strict limits on the amount of ways in which people could potentially organize, justify and perceive their social relations. (This does of course not mean that only a small number of different societies or even organisations can exist – it is easy to create infinite variety by endlessly recombining a small set of elementary forms).
    However that may be, I have also been struck by the frequency with which other social scientists and observers have reinvented this typology, or parts thereof. The book mentioned by Matthew Kalman (thank you for that) looks to be another addition. (For years now, I have been walking around with the idea to write a paper about this striking overlap – for no other reason then that I am quite self-satisfied with the title I’ve come up with: ‘Grid and Group Galore’). This overlap sometimes makes me think that even if turned out that cultural theory (that name is a bit of a marketing disaster – I prefer ‘theory of plural rationality’) did not offer that much insight into social life after all, it would at least offer lots of insight into how social scientists seem to conceptualise the world!

    All the best, Marco
    PS: to Blimpish: a hermit (in the theory, at least) is someone who fully believes in all four rationalities at the same time. As a result, s/he cannot decide or (inter)act. So I am not sure you are a hermit on this one. But you may be clumsy…

  7. matthewtaylor on Fri, 16th Jan 2009 8:31 am

    8. Thanks for this. I agree with your critique of each of the positions on Heathrow 3. In fact, if the solution offerd by the hierarchical actor (Govt) was adhered to it would be pretty good, but becuase it has been developed without the prior and continuing engagement of the egalitaran actors I fear that like previous sets of reassurances it will prove worthless.

    Incidentally, in the RSA my diagnosis was that all three active paradigms were underdevoloped and that this left the ground clear for fatalism to be dominant. So among other steps I have established three cross cutting groups which seek to bring together those identified by their managers as being adherents of different views of change; a sociability and human development group for the egalitarians, a systems and processes group for the hierarchists, and an innovation group for the individualists. Of course, as the hierarchical actor I am bound to try to control the groups for ‘the good of the whole organisation’ but I am hoping I might create somehting that builds its own ‘clumsy’ momentum.

    Have a good weekend

    Matthew

  8. matthewtaylor on Fri, 16th Jan 2009 8:41 am

    9. Hi Matthew

    Thanks for this and I will look out the book you mention. I got into the spyral dynamcs literature some time ago – I guess around when I did the lecture. And I have an executve coach who is also a strong advocate. I am very interested in the deas and – as a progessive – lke the notion that human beings can attan higher levels of functioning (this indeed is a core beleif and value of the RSA). My concerns with the literature were two fold. First, I found it slightly overelaborate. Second, there was a kind of determinsm that implied that we are bound to move though the stages from lower to higher. My instinct is that the evolution described in work like Ken Wilbur’s is possible but so is regression and disaster and that even when we function at higher levles the kind of comflict and competition described in cultrual theory will still be present, becuase, in part, this s how we experiment and learn

    Thanks for the comments, and I hope you enjoy the coming blogs in the series

    Matthew

  9. William Shaw on Fri, 16th Jan 2009 9:39 am

    10. Whether you chose to use the CT model to explain things or not, David Cameron has taken a very clever step today by chosing the day after the third runway decision to announce he’s backing the idea of a “smart grid”, as championed by people like Thomas L. Friedman. Not only does this further drive a wedge between Brown and the left-green “egalitarians”, but it starts to suggest the previously unthinkable – that the Tories are their true home. Yesterday even George Monbiot wrote a column about considering voting Tory.

    And the “smart grid” idea can be conceived of as a perfect Tory idea, combining a kind of free individualism in which everyone becomes a potential electricity generator and consumer and in which the price is regulated only by demand at any particular second.

  10. Fourcultures on Sat, 17th Jan 2009 3:17 am

    11. I think it’s important to be clear that grid/group cultural theory is not analogous to psychological ‘types’ or to astrological star signs. We don’t live the whole of our individual lives inside one or another of the cultural solidarities described but shift between them in various contexts. It is a theory of society, not of individuals, so it it inappropriate to say, for instance, ‘I am / am not an egalitarian’. Just as ‘Runway Protester’ or ‘frequent flyer’ doesn’t describe the entirety of a person’s life, neither does ‘individualist’, ‘fatalist’ or ‘heirarchist’. Similarly to the way individuals are ‘carriers’ for a language, transmitting it across generations, the Cultural Theory typology exists between people; it is fundamentally relational, as Michael Thompson points out in his recent book.
    If you are interested in this, there’s more at the Fourcultures website.

  11. matthewtaylor on Sun, 18th Jan 2009 3:00 pm

    12. The Tories certainly look more open to clumsy (although not necessarilly practical) solutions to reducing emmissions. Does this perhaps reflect their scepticism towards hierarchical solutions?

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