What kind of climate change thinker are you?
OK folks, I need your help. For some time I have wanted to develop a speech applying cultural theory to policy dilemmas and organisational change. To help make the speech engaging, I want to start with an audience experiment, but I need to test it out before taking it on the road. This is where you, my clever, generous, loyal blog readers, come in.
The experiment is to describe, in the simplest of terms, the four cultural theory perspectives on an issue (to start off I have chosen climate change) and then to ask the audience to pick the one to which they are most attracted. Second, I want each of the four self selecting groups to choose which of the three remaining positions they favour least.
To work well, I need two things to happen. First, the audience has to be willing to choose. This may be hard because they are bound to think there is some truth in more than one of the propositions. Second, I need to get a reasonably even spread between the options; otherwise the whole idea of the four perspectives is undermined. A bonus would be if some kind of pattern emerges between people’s likes and dislikes.
Here’s what I am asking you to do. Pick which one the following four statements about climate change most attracts you. Don’t think about it too much; go with your initial instinct. Then identify which of the remaining three you least favour. Finally, tell me – briefly please – if you think the whole exercise is interesting or silly.
1. We will only tackle the threat of climate change if we fundamentally change the way we think about our relationship to the environment. Lifestyles in the developed world are unsustainable. We have to learn to live differently, taking responsibility for our duty to the world we inhabit and to future generations.
2. The climate change challenge will only be solved by decisive global leadership. A powerful new Copenhagen Treaty is vital. We need an enforceable framework of rules so that Governments of every nation in the world deliver their contribution to addressing this threat.
3. Climate change is a huge challenge but human beings can rise to that challenge, as we have done to challenges past. With the right framework of incentives, markets and technological innovation will generate solutions allowing us to be prosperous and green.
4. For all we know climate change – if it is real – may already be unstoppable. Despite all the rhetoric and people jumping on the bandwagon, we won’t do anything serious about it until we really have to, and by then it may be too late.
So, please, choose one of these, then, choose the one you find least convincing, then – if you want to – tell me if you think I could pose the question better.
I am looking for a sample of about 100, so do please pass it on.
Thanks
Nudge, nudge, think, think
Having started the day in Kettering talking to the trustees of Youth Music, I have just come back from the advisory board of an ESRC funded project called ‘Researching Civic Behaviour’.
The main part of the meeting was taken up by a discussion of a brilliant paper written by Gerry Stoker, Peter John and Graham Smith entitled ‘Nudge, nudge, think, think: Two strategies for changing civic behaviour’.
In the paper the authors compare deliberation (which for the purposes of a clever title they call ‘think’) and nudging as ways of influencing behaviour and come up with the following dimensions:
View of preferences
Nudge
Fixed
Think
Malleable
View of subjects
Nudge
Cognitive misers, users of shortcuts, prone to flawed sometimes befuddled thinking
Think
Reasonable, knowledge hungry and capable of collective reflection
Costs to the individual
Nudge
Low but repeated
Think
High but only intermittently
Unit of analysis
Nudge
Individual-focused
Think
Group-focused
Change process
Nudge
Cost-benefit led shift in choice environment
Think
Value led outline of new shared policy platform
Civic conception
Nudge
Increasing the attractiveness of positive-sum action
Think
Addressing the general interest
Role of the state
Nudge
Customise messages, expert and teacher
Think
Create new institutional spaces to support citizen-led investigation, respond to citizens
It’s fascinating stuff and regular readers of this blog won’t be surprised that I wondered whether there was a cultural theory perspective here:
• Hierarchy – rules
• Individualism – nudging
• Egalitarianism – deliberation
There’s a lot more to discuss but I’ll see if anyone out there is interested first.
£5 if you read this blog …
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’
Tony McNulty, MPs’ pay – what is the answer?
I was queuing for a chicken balti pie during half time at the Hawthorns at the weekend when a couple of Albion fans approached me;
‘Alright, mate?’ they said;’ ‘we were just saying how much we appreciate your blog, though it;s true what they say at IPPR, you do go on about yourself a bit too much. We are a trifle concerned that you have done so little on cultural theory recently. Is this because you don’t feel it has any intrinsic relevance to the fundamental societal questions arising from the economic crisis?’
At least I think that’s what they said. After watching West Brom for 90 minutes I fell into a deep torpor and required a combination of electric shocks and hypnotism to be brought around, so my recollections are a bit fuzzy.
Unlike West Brom’s current team I try to satsify my fans, so here is a cultural theory analysis of the disastrous saga of MPs’ salaries and pensions, opened up again by the tale of Tony McNulty claiming for his parents’ house.
Thinking of the system of remuneration as a public policy problem. the four cultural theory perspectives might come at it this way:
The egalitarian perspective: MPs should be paid no more than the average wage. Only people who are strongly principled will then choose a career in politics, and the public will respect their representatives as having the right values and motives.
The individualist perspective: MPs should be paid well to ensure public office attracts talented people. If individual MPs choose to donate their salaries to Party or community activity, that’s up to them. If voters think an MP is being greedy they can show their displeasure at the next election.
The hierarchical perspective: We need to balance the need for talented people to come into politics and government with the need for the political establishment to have legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
This explains the mess we are in. The present system – a modest basic salary but lots of scope for MPs creatively to add to it with various allowances – is a classic clumsy solution.
The problem comes with paradigm four: fatalism. As I have suggested before, in cultural theory each way of viewing the world has a benign/engaged and a malign/disengaged form. So, for example, individualism can be creative and brave but also selfish and irresponsible. The dichotomy for fatalism is between a benign indifference (‘I don’t really care what happens so I’m happy to let other people decide’) and cynicism (‘those in power will always screw the little man’). Which is where the mass media come in. Engaged as they are in a battle to prove that politicians are even less principled than newspaper owners and editors, they seek to exploit the problem of MPs’ pay.
No doubt the present system could be better designed and enforced (and Tony McNulty does look like he stretched the rules to breaking point) but would any radically different, neater, system work? We could have MPs on £110,000k a year with no allowances and constantly subject to the critique that they are an out-of-touch, privileged elite. Or we could have MPs on average wages which would stop many talented people from entering politics and, probably, encourage other forms of abuse.
Fundamentally, it’s not the system of MPs’ pay and allowances that creates the problem, nor even the way MPs work the system; it is the nature of the problem itself. How do we pay politicians in the public interest? This would be a hard problem to solve in the best of circumstances but it is nigh on impossible in the face of media determined to prove that all politicians are second rate money grubbers.
Why migration policy is never right
My old friends at ippr have a report out today on immigration. In typical ippr style the work is balanced, evidence based and progressively inclined. It comes to the conclusion that there is no net impact on the existing workforce as a result of immigration. However, all the evidence upon which the project was based comes from before the recession, so I fear it won’t cut much mustard with the kind of people who have been protesting against the hiring of foreign workers.
Coincidentally, a former ippr colleague of mine, who now works for the US based Migration Policy Institute has asked me, ahead of a seminar they are hosting in London next month, to lay out a cultural theory approach to migration policy.
I’m not sure I am entirely equipped for the job (either in terms of expertise in migration or cultural theory) but here goes:
Migration policy is tough because it has to deal with powerful forces and perspectives along each of the three active paradigms of cultural theory: individualism, egalitarianism and hierarchy.
Hierarchists (by which in this case we generally mean Government agencies) want a migration policy which is orderly and leads to predictable and manageable outcomes. Moreover, they feel a great deal of pressure to show that they can engineer and deliver such a policy. This helps to explain why Governments not only tend to talk tough on migration but also consistently exaggerate their control over migration and its outcomes. The state’s frailty in the face of the uncontrollability and complexity of migration threatens to undermine its credibility not just in this area but more broadly.
This is because migration is an issue which stirs huge egalitarian feeling. People often associate egalitarian instincts (an emphasis on ideas of fairness, shared values plus a suspicion of change driven by the state and markets) with the left, but in this case egalitarianism is most often expressed in hostility to migration. Progressives and champions of the rights of migrants and refugees do attempt to counter this with their own appeal to common values and grass roots mobilisation (see, for example, the brave and creative campaign, Simple Acts, advanced by the Refugee Week Partnership, which includes he Refugee Council and a number of other agencies) but these appeals lack the intensity of nationalism or tribalism.
The individualist approach to migration combines the desire of migrants themselves to improve their lot (or in the case of refugees – to save their lives) with the need of business to have as broad a labour market as possible from which to select employees. Thus, individualism, which is normally associated with a right of centre perspective is, in the case of migration, the foundation for what looks like the progressive stance on this issue – the one argued by the RSA itself in a report published during the time of my predecessor.
Migration policy is complex for many reasons but a cultural theory analysis highlights why this is such a ‘wicked’ issue. Egalitarians, individualists and hierarchists share powerful and apparently irreconcilable views which invert traditional alignments between ideology and models of change.
A successful migration policy has to find the aspects of each perspective which can be reconciled with the others. How can hierarchists accept a policy that recognises and works within the limitations of state regulation? How can egalitarians be engaged in shaping a realistic and humane migration policy that can be reconciled with cohesion and local fairness? And how can individualist aspirations be met in ways which recognise that for many people migration has few obvious benefits.
As usual, cultural theory offers no answers but it does force us to address the really tough questions. As the recession deepens, the tendency of hierarchists to over-claim, and egalitarian to express fear and suspicion, will grow. But people’s desire for a better life will not go away, nor will the globalising effects of modern business and technology. At a time like this a workable and progressive migration policy requires exceptional insight and courage from those who frame discourse, develop policy, and live with its consequences.
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