The end of an era

May 12, 2010 by · 8 Comments
Filed under: Politics, The RSA 

It is a new era. As regular readers will know, I have been told to keep political commentary to a minimum on this site but as it feels like a turning point for me too maybe I can be excused one more time.

Despite my own personal political affiliations it is difficult not to be excited by the idea of coalition government. After all this had been Tony Blair’s plan if he had faced a much smaller majority in 1997 – rather negotiate with Liberal Democrats than be in hoc to Labour’s left wing.     

My instinct is that either things will go wrong very quickly for the coalition or they will, as the ruling Parties hope, last a full Parliament. This will depend on events, personalities and, as I argued on Monday, the relationship between leaders who want to stay in power and MPs and activists who may find the compromises of office very uncomfortable.

In terms of our political culture an important question will be how the LibDems and Tories handle their differences. If they are willing to be reasonably frank about them and invite the public to engage in the debate, we really could see a more open and elevating type of politics. If, however, the debates are suppressed only to emerge in hostile press briefings, then the standing of our representative democracy could fall further still. The Osborne Cable pairing will be particularly fascinating in this regard. In many ways, it reminds me of the ill starred welfare reform partnership of Harriet Harman and Frank Field between 1997 and 1998 – let’s hope it does a great deal better. 

As for me this is the time to hang up my boots as a pundit and occasional political advisor (out of working hours I hasten to add). It will be interesting to observe the Labour leadership contest and David Miliband will hope history repeats itself (in leadership elections the person who starts favourite for Labour usually wins while Tory favourites usually lose). The one bit of advice I would give to all the contenders is politely to distance themselves from the New Labour old guard, whether that is big beasts like Campbell and Mandelson or small fry like yours truly.

As for the RSA I believe we are entering a really exciting period. Our non-aligned political position is not only in keeping with our traditions but just right for the times. At our Trustees meeting yesterday we had excellent presentations on our Peterborough and Connected Communities projects. The RSA doesn’t just talk about the Big Society – we are doing the thinking and innovation that aims to make community renewal and deeper civic engagement real.

So it’s kind of poignant to look back across the whole cycle, starting with my first canvassing session – for Douglas Jay (who had himself been MP for Battersea North for over 30 years) in the 1979 election, through the 18 years of opposition and then the 13 years of Labour government and back out again. But one of the lessons of all that time has been that real enduring social change is as likely to start from outside Government as from the plans of politicians. I don’t know how the coalition government will do but I am certain the RSA is going to make a big impact in the years ahead.

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Waving the flag for connected communities

October 5, 2009 by · 8 Comments
Filed under: The RSA, Uncategorized 

Yesterday I was linesman for my son’s under-17 football team. Today, I chaired a seminar on the RSA’s Connected Communities project. What’s the link?

One of the ideas behind Connected Communities is that regeneration strategies in deprived communities should start not by creating new state-sponsored capacity, but by understanding existing capacity and exploring how it could be enhanced. This is why we are spending the first few months of the project looking at the understanding of people in our research areas of existing organisational and interpersonal networks. One question is whether, if the community understood the existing pattern of networks better, would it be more able to make new connections and spot and address gaps? If people are already doing good things in their community, can they be encouraged and supported to extend their mandate?

Being linesman for an under 17s game is no fun. Many of the players and parents are fine but far too many are not. Being called a ‘f…g cheat’ by a sixteen year old boy who doesn’t like an offside decision is bad enough, but when the parents and coaches join in you really do wonder why you bother. Each Sunday now it feels like the whole match could kick off, with insults, fights and even death threats being bandied about (I’ve seen all three and the season is less than a month old). Yet this very volatility underlines what a lifeline organised football is for these kids. Without it where would the energy of fit, aggressive young men (many of whom clearly have huge issues with authority) be channelled?

As I stood yesterday weighing up whether to report the boy to the ref – which might provoke a riot – or put up with it, I wondered why more couldn’t be put into designing the context for the match. Three simple measures could make all the difference:

1. Players could be banned from making comments directly to officials, having instead to channel them through the team captain.

2. Parents could be banned from making any audible negative comment about any official or player (including their own team and their own child).

3. More radically, the two teams could be required to come into a mixed huddle before every match for a five minute conversation in which two or three players from each team are required to talk about what the game means to them and how committed they are to it being played in the right spirit.

It is really tough running a football team, particularly with challenging kids. With the pitch fees, the ref’s fee, the kits, hiring somewhere to practise, transport etc the costs rise all the time. It’s especially hard in the inner city where there is less space for pitches (I won’t be holding my breath for help from Boris Johnson’s invisible sporting participation plan!). And as the kids get older, as they get harder to organise and as their parents tend to opt out of responsibility, most teams seem close to folding, and many do. So, I admire all the adults who give their time to organise youngsters’ football. But just as the saying goes ‘if you want something done ask someone who’s already busy’ so I wish we could squeeze even more out of this commitment, building a culture around the game which meant young people learnt a bit of character alongside the ball skills.

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£5 if you read this blog …

April 17, 2009 by · 29 Comments
Filed under: Social brain 

I am speaking next week about communities and it is an area of growing significance to RSA research. Here are my musings. But given this post is five times as long as a blog should be and given that, despite my best endeavours, the prose is both complicated and constipated, I am personally promising £5 to the nominated charity of the first ten people  to leave intelligible (not necessarily positive) comments on my site. (PS For my more superficial readers, I am also going to return very briefly to the McBride affair later on today)

Earlier this week I referred to important new American research on the relationship between social support and pro-social behaviour. The unsurprising but significant conclusion was that people with greater access to support, whether from family, neighbourhood, church or close friends, are more likely to behave in socially benign ways.

The behavioural explanation is that altruism as a strategy succeeds in socially supportive environments, whereas selfishness may be the best (short term) policy in more atomistic or hostile settings. Good things go together; if we want good citizens we need to ensure people have strong networks of support around them. Safe, secure and happy people will tend to be more generous, thoughtful and willing to defer gratification.    

One implication is that strategies to encourage ‘pro-sociality’ should focus less on exhortation, specific incentives and sanctions and more on creating an environment where such behavioural patterns pay off.

But how does this fit with my belief in cultural theory (or as it less confusingly, but more cumbersomely, called ‘the theory of plural rationality’)?  This suggests that, when groups work together to solve a problem, distinct and competitive models for understanding and acting upon the world will emerge; namely, ‘the hierarchical’, ‘the individualistic’, ‘the egalitarian’ and ‘the fatalistic’.

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? 

The simple explanation is that one effect outweighs the other. Egalitarian impulses are stronger in tighter communities but, in relation to any specific group dilemma, cultural theory’s four rationalities will quickly assert themselves. Conversely, it may be that the cultural theory dynamic is much less powerful in contexts where one way of viewing the world is dominant; in a strong, close-knit, community the egalitarian perspective may always dominate.

After all, the four rationalities are not personality types; they are situational interpretations and strategies. But this doesn’t mean people and groups don’t have general predispositions towards certain ways of viewing the world. The default rationality for army officers will be hierarchical, for city brokers individualist, and for social workers egalitarian (or maybe, after the press they’ve been having, fatalist).  

Take a concrete example; say, staff morale. In all these professions a debate about how to tackle low morale will generate hierarchical solutions (e.g. stronger leadership and rules), individualist solutions (e.g. more staff autonomy, better individual incentives), egalitarian solutions (e.g. empowering the front line, engaging all staff in developing a new mission) and fatalist (e.g. accepting that some people will always be miserable at work).

The contrast between the different approaches and the tendency towards polarisation between them will exist in any context. However the centre of gravity of the debate will differ; a hierarchical solution in social work will be much less hierarchical than one in the army, an egalitarian solution in the City is likely to be couched in individualist terms.

This is a credible account, if a bit complex, but perhaps we can be a more concrete, and in so doing reconnect social and cultural theory to thinking about the brain.

Reflecting, in the paper ‘Health and the Ecology of Altruism’, on how we respond to stress, David Sloan Wilson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi say:

‘ Because there is no single best strategy for all situations, a mix of strategies will be maintained in the population through a number of proximate mechanisms, including short-term individual flexibility (e.g. becoming cautious in dangerous situations), developmental processes (e.g. becoming temperamentally cautious as a result of childhood experiences), and long-term evolutionary processes (e.g. being innately cautious) ‘

From this perspective it might be argued:

a) human beings have an innate predisposition towards a core sets of rationalities (we are hard wired to a finite number of strategies for group problem solving)
b) contexts (such as a community or a profession) can instil a temperamental leaning towards one rationality, as can individual personality
c) but every exercise in group problem solving has a tendency to generate a dynamic in which different rationalities emerge and compete

In relation to pro-social communities this generates a new hypothesis. Instead of the goal being to create an egalitarian culture (e.g. one of strong group membership, shared values etc) in the hope that this cultural orientation might predominate over individualist, fatalistic and hierarchical world views, the aim is 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.

In other words, the strength of strong communities lies less in everyone sharing the same view of the world (something which would carry with it risks of group think) but in creating the kind of space in which people can disagree creatively. 

This thesis appears – at least superficially – to chime with the conclusion of research on sustainable community development reported by Ann Dale and Lenore Newman.

‘ In a changing and unpredictable world, sustainable community development is less a goal than a dynamic process of working with the resources and information at hand. In order to sustain this dynamic interactive process, communities need to anticipate and respond to these dynamics and nurture their resilience in order to innovate and diversify’

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