But
what about non-fiction books? Since
we were small children, we have all needed stories to help us give meaning to
the strange world we inhabit. In
this post-modern world, “narratives” indeed have become a fashionable adult
activity for the same reason. Just google “story telling in management” if you
don’t believe me – this
booklet is just one fascinating example which the search produced
At
University in the 60s I had been interested in how social systems held together
and why people (generally) obeyed - Max Weber’s classification of
political systems into – “traditional”, “charismatic” and “rational-legal” was an
eye-opener. But it was the sociologist Ametai Etzioni who first impressed me in
the 1970s with his suggestion that we behaved the way we did for basically three different types of
motives – “remunerative”, “coercive” and “normative” – namely that it was
made worth our while; that we were forced to; or that we thought it right. He
then went on to suggest (in his 1975 “Social Problems”) that our explanations
for social problems could be grouped into equivalent political stances -
“individualistic”, “hierarchical” or “consensual”.
During
the 1980s, when I was doing my (part-time) Masters in Policy Analysis, I registered
the potential of “Frame Analysis” (originating from Erving Goffman in 1974) which showed how different “stories” were used to make sense of complex social
events – but had no occasion to use it myself. Little did I realize that it was
becoming a central part of post-modernism’s
encouragement of diverse realities…
For
me, the typologies surfaced again in political scientists Chris Hood’s The
Art of the State (2000) which used Mary
Douglas’ grid-group theory to offer a brilliant analysis of 4 basic “world
views” and their strengths and weaknesses in particular contexts. Substantial
chunks of a similar sort of book "Responses
to Governance - governing corporations and societies in the world" ed by
John Dixon (2003) can be read on google books.
Michael
Thompson is an anthropologist who has used Mary Douglas’ cultural theory to
make The
case for clumsiness (2004) which, again, sets out the various stories which
sustain the different positions people take on various key policy issues – such
as the ecological disaster staring us in the face. There is a good interview with the
author here
Three
short reports give an excellent summary of all this literature; and how it
finds practical expression in government policies – Keith Grint’s Wicked
Problems and Clumsy Solutions (2008); Common Cause
(2010); and Finding
Frames (2010)
Three
years ago I enthused about a book called Why
We Disagree About Climate Change which uses seven different lenses (or
perspectives) to make sense of climate change: science, economics, religion,
psychology, media, development, and governance. His argument is basically that
–
We understand science and
scientific knowledge in different ways
We value things
differently
We believe different
things about ourselves, the universe and our place in the universe
We fear different things
We receive multiple and
conflicting messages about climate change – and interpret them differently
We understand
“development” differently
We seek to govern in
different ways (eg top-down “green governmentality”; market environmentalism;
or “civic environmentalism”)
But
few authors have had the courage to apply this approach to the global economic
crisis. Most writers are stuck in their own particular “quadrant” (to use the
language of grid-group writing) and fail to do justice to the range of other
ways of seeing the crisis.
Misrule of
Experts? The Financial Crisis as Elite Debacle M Moran et al (2011) is a
rare essay which tries to plot the different types of explanation of the crisis
- eg as “accident”, “conspiracy” or “calculative failure” and then frames the
crisis differently as an “elite political debacle”
As I like
such lists, I should try to draw one
for the crisis and try to fit the existing literature into the various
categories! My starter would look like this –
-
Stuff happens
-
Things go up
-
Things go down
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