Although it is unclear from the book at what level of aggregation Hoffman’s computer simulation is operating, wittingly or unwittingly, it addresses a number of concerns of social theory. That is to say Harris sets out a theory of social action, ie financial traders are as much driven by fear as they are rational calculation, as a well as a theory of stability and change:  global social phenomena arise from the complex interweaving of the daily activities of multiple numbers of traders with amalgams of calculation and fear. As with agent-based models of complex social processes, agents are forming and being formed by the population of which they are part, both at the same time.  Fearful micro-decisions can stampede markets, which drive fearful micro-decisions. In this way Harris undercuts some of the principle assumptions of classical economics, that actors in an economy are rational atoms acting to maximise their own utility according to clearly articulated preferences. Nonetheless the novel still sustains the fantasy that the non-rational, even the irrational, can be modelled with efficient causality.

Of course there are currently many researchers working with agent-based non-linear models of complex social phenomena, but I know of none who would claim that their models are particularly helpful at predictions, rather than offering retrospective insights into the ways in which particular global social patterns have arisen. They have much stronger explanatory rather than predictive power. They may show trends and describe probabilities, but there will always be a margin of error.  Small changes in the model can amplify into dramatic and large, population-wide changes in patterns, just as seemingly large interventions may result in not much change at all. Everything will depend on the history of interactions, the context and the way the agents self-organise.

In much organisational theory, however, and with the proliferation of tools and technique, the emphasis is still on developing methods which are assumed to be able to predict and control human behaviour. They aspire to Robert Harris’ dream.For example, in previous posts I have been talking about the preponderance of logic models in strategy development, project development and evaluation methods. In order to sustain the logic, these models must be construed in a highly abstract, deductive and reductive way, covering over uncertainties, messy contingencies and the mixed motivations of the human beings who will be carrying out the work. For managers sitting at a distance  a strategy plan with milestones and targets, a log frame or a theory of change (ToC) are idealised and static representations of the work as it should be done. They aspire to being law-like generalisations which trace causality of an if-then kind and describe what will happen rather than how it will happen. In previous posts I have discussed how these methods allow managers sitting remotely to ‘see like a state.’

Staff in organisations may then apply statistical techniques to determine how closely interventions can be correlated with outcomes, provided that they can control for the many variables that impact upon complex human interactions. In doing so they may draw on quasi-experimental methods and look for counterfactuals or control groups. The results of these techniques are often interpreted in dualistic terms: such and such an intervention has or has not been successful, it proved the logic model, or disproved it. In its extreme form preliminary conclusions from this kind of research can sometimes appear highly unrealistic. For example, an academic I know had been involved in an experimental evaluation of a nationwide government intervention aimed at families and young children claimed that it had apparently demonstrated that the multi-million pound intervention ‘hadn’t achieved anything’. It may not have proved the original hypothesis, but I doubt that it had achieved nothing. The interesting question, perhaps suggesting a review of the original hypothesis and more research using different methods, would be to ask what it had achieved. By focusing on the predictive power of the hypothesis, much else can be lost. This is particularly significant if future funding decisions turn on evaluations of a particular programme and are influenced by reductive conclusions turning on simplifications, such as successful/not successful.

When construed at the highly abstract level theories of social change inevitably discount the uncertain contingency of human life because they are concerned with averages and logical causality, and provide a snapshot of a situation at a point in time. Robert Harris has his central character deal with just one factor of uncertainty in his computational model, which, unlike most statistical methods, runs over an extended period of time. Dr Alex Hoffman is able to programme in a degree of uncertainty which affects the behaviour of actors over time.

How might we otherwise think about the uncertainties that affect our interactions with others, and how ‘computable’ might they be? To what extent would it be possible, to build uncertainty into a predictive model?

To get an idea of the scale of the problem we could turn to the thinking of the Norwegian political philosopher John Elster, who started out as an advocate of rational choice theory, but over time became disaffected with its inability to explain social interaction adequately. Despite how we would like to think of the world in idealised terms, he argued, we face at least five types of uncertainty in social life. The first he described as ‘brute’ factual uncertainty, also identified by the pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, by which he means the way that nature, fog, earthquakes, snow, the inflexibility of things,  may confound our plans and expectations. The second type of uncertainty is related to the first about the cost and manner of resolving the first uncertainty. The third type of uncertainty he refers to as strategic uncertainty: that is to say,  in a competitive environment there are many determining factors. How might my competitors behave? Tit for tat, or sudden death? His fourth type of uncertainty is due to asymmetric information where we may not know what our counterparts or competitors know. We are then obliged to anticipate and adapt just as our competitors will be doing. The fifth uncertainty he ascribes to incomplete causal understanding : ‘will tyrannical measures imposed by the dictator make the subjects more compliant or less?’ Elster argues that the compound effect of each of these uncertainties will, in most complex situations, be overwhelming.

Uncertainty arises not just from the way we are influenced by our own emotions, such as fear, but by the contingency of the world in which we live and the unpredictability of the behaviour and motivations of others. We are constantly anticipating and adapting to the adaptations of others. Modelling this would be a huge task, even for the likes of Dr Alex Hoffman, and even if it were so modelled, the model itself would take on a life of its own just as the programme does in The Fear Index.

The first of these is the exponential growth of INGOs following the first Ethiopian famine in the mid-80s and their increasing dependence on government funding. Where previously a number of larger INGOs set themselves limits as to the amount of money they would accept from governments in order to maintain their independence, over time this self-imposed limit has continued to be raised, some might argue with a commensurate loss of independence. The increase in funds flowing between government and INGOs was initially mutually beneficial: while INGOs were tempted by growth, government was interested in contracting services out and keeping civil servant numbers low.

The contractual nature of the relationship between INGOs and governments brought with it compliance mechanisms and rule-based application procedures which sets a heavy premium on documentation. Sometimes large pots of money are contracted out to leading UK consultancy firms, which contract out further to smaller more specialist development organisations, who contract out further to freelance consultants who may assess tens of applications solely against written criteria. Funding can be awarded with little knowledge of the applying organisations and perhaps even little understanding of the projects they are proposing. In keeping with the need of bureaucracies to have phenomena legible at a distance, much emphasis is then placed on compliance with application criteria, the ‘measurability’ of outcomes and the need for the work to be considered ‘effective and efficient’. Government of whatever colour has come to have an increasing influence over what might be considered good development, including the way that development is contracted and assessed.

The second trend is the way that managers in INGOs have responded to their increasing size which has also brought about greater internal differentiation and the usual difficulties of co-ordination of large numbers of people, many of them working at a distance. INGOs have become progressively professionalised as well as commercialised in keeping with the increasing marketization of all aspects of both public and private life. Greater size and the largely uncritical adoption of management methods arising from north American business schools in symbiosis with the private sector, led to a significant change in power relations within INGOs, and between the larger INGOs and those of lesser size. Where previously, and to caricature, INGOs had a strong narrative of social development based on ideas of justice and human rights and management was considered an administrative adjunct, subsequently the development narrative has been increasingly clothed in the language of management rhetoric. As noted in previous posts, this particular management rhetoric makes grand claims for its efficacy. Staff in development INGOs are said to be able to ‘deliver results’ and to ‘transform people’s lives’, in ways which are ‘accountable’ to donors, both public and private. The discussion of accountability is particularly fraught: it would not be possible to make the case that staff in INGOs were always highly conscious of their accountability to the people and organisations in the geographical South with whom they were working. Some were and some weren’t and the way this was reflected institutionally was uneven. However, the relationship of accountability that seems to cause the most anxiety currently amongst INGO staff in my experience is that of accountability to donors. Making bids to donors to elicit money, accounting for how the money has been spent and making the relevant representations in anticipation of what donors are expecting currently absorbs a lot of time and emotional energy. It also makes the relationship between staff in INGOs and the organisations they work with in the global South more fractious.

Whereas previously, and rightly or wrongly, the cadre of development workers were dominant in INGOs, over time their place has been taken by development management professionals, not all of them from a development background. The development narrative has been hybridized and amalgamated with the discourse of managerialism so that both co-exist at the same time in INGOs, and sometimes within the same person. In the last post I mentioned the way in which management qualifications have gained currency in INGOs along with many other organisations. With this has come what one might term MBA thinking: it is not unusual to hear managers in INGOs talking about the ‘need for growth’ as an end in itself, and to construe the work in relation to imagined ‘competitors’ in the same domain. There have always been rivalries between INGOs, but increasingly these have been systematised and professionalised as each INGO looks to promote its ‘brand’ and its unique selling point and ‘niche’. Competition has come to prevail over co-operation. The handful of very large organisations manoeuvre to maintain their pre-eminence and status, and the category of INGOs at the next level look upon their size and capacities and try to emulate them. The size and distribution of some of the bigger INGOs means that staff are often absorbed in the politics and maintenance of the corporation.

Consistent with what I am terming MBA thinking, is the tendency of staff in INGOs to talk with what Norbert Elias referred to as a heroic ‘we’ identity. In advertisements, promotional material, web sites, and sometimes even in their internal reports on the work they are doing with people in the global South there is a much greater propensity to present what staff in INGOs are doing to the good and to claim to have had a significant effect on improving the lives of others. It is not unusual for INGO staff to claim to have significant and qualitative transformational abilities, and by implication, this is greater than the ability of other INGOs. Claiming a heroic ‘we’ identity automatically implies others who may not be so blessed. In the competitive market place for the donor pound, there is not much room for nuance, modesty and critical thinking, including self-criticism. Indeed, critique or public self-criticism becomes a much more dangerous undertaking, when so many people and organisations have stakes in this highly extended and professional game of international development.

The third trend which directly affects the practice of development is the widespread taking up of management methods based on assumptions of linearity and predictability, which purport to make development practice more systematic and professional, but at the same time have the effect of covering over politics and contestability. They also make it much more difficult for genuine exploration of alternatives, and to value the emergence of inevitably different interpretations of the good as social development progresses. With highly structured project planning methods there is no premium placed on being surprised. The planning, implementation and evaluation of social development turns much more on discussions of the ‘right’ methods to use, usually in the form of a ‘toolbox’ or a proprietary methodology, than it does on issues of justice, ethics and power. Almost all development projects require a logical framework before they will gain access to funding, and most evaluations turn on whether a particular project has fulfilled its pre-reflected targets or not. Target-setting predominates in strategy discussions, project plans and even for individual staff members who have their objectives appraised at least once a year. The log frame, the increasingly popular Prince 2 method (see previous post) are based on parts and whole thinking, where the whole can be disaggregated into logical parts which lead sequentially to the objective in view. These assumptions are derived from natural science methods, particularly those which have proved most useful in engineering.

Whereas previously discussions in INGOs about social development would turn on endless and sometimes repetitive discussions about power, in many contemporary INGOs the discussion of power has become trivialised and reduced. It is not unusual to hear staff in INGOs claim that everything they do ‘empowers’ the beneficiaries they are working with, without any reflection on the relational nature of power, and at the same time covering over their own power relationship with their Southern partners.

It would be wrong to imply that the practice of international development is everywhere the same and the current dominant way of proceeding is entirely monolithic. Even within large, corporate-like INGOs there is deviance and subversion, and the large population of INGOs allows for a variety of practices and approaches. In order to play the game some development professionals learn how to keep the bureaucracy satisfied at the same time as paying close attention to the needs of the people they are there to work with. They are more open to having their views of the world constantly disrupted by what they encounter in the work with others. Equally, some smaller organisations, more modest in their aspirations and their narratives about their achievements, are capable of original and interesting work.

In this and a series of subsequent posts I will be arguing that means and ends are inseparable: they are constitutive of each other. If the means of INGOs appear to be contradicting the ends they espouse publicly, then this is because other ends have come to dominate. Although this discussion is specifically about INGOs it may have relevance by analogy to other discussions about the means and ends of management in, say, the public sector, for example the management of schools and hospitals, or the management of companies which aspire to being innovative or creative. To what degree is the way they are managed consistent with what they want to achieve?

As one would expect in any debate, there are a variety of recommendations for the management of development depending on different commentators’ understanding of the problem. There are people who consider themselves reformists, who argue that there is hodge podge of management methods in use, which in their more extreme managerial forms, should be toned down, but in general are unique to the sector because they are oriented to the good. To sustain this position implies a certain degree of confusing intention with outcome. At the other extreme there are rejectionists from both the left http://tiny.cc/bn6qw and the right, such as William Easterly http://tiny.cc/rgz38 (although he would present himself as a ‘sceptic’), who argue either that managerialism is a new form of colonialism, or, after Hayek, that ‘planners’ using systematic management methods will never produce more creative outcomes than markets in which entrepreneurial poor people following their own interests. The implicit conclusion from the rejectionist perspective is that the management of development in its current form is bound to fail.

In this post I will be arguing that the management practice of most INGOs is clearly managerialist; it is the main game in town. And by managerialist I mean a belief that ascribes to a cadre of professional managers particular and unique abilities to organize activities in any organization irrespective of the context in which they are working, and by using an accepted and ‘stable’ body of management concepts. In future posts I will be discussing the extent to which I consider the body of knowledge to be stable and useful. However, except in cases where a particularly extreme and heroic form of managerialism is being exercised, here I am using the term descriptively, rather than pejoratively, although I would argue that managerialism is widely taken up in a taken-for-granted way and has particular consequences. That is to say, not only is it the main game in town, but it is a very hard game to call into question. In most INGOs, not having a vision or a five year strategy, or not setting targets would be thought highly eccentric, not to say unprofessional. Additionally, in becoming more explicitly managerialist there has been a shift in INGOs in the configuration of power away from ‘development professionals’ and towards management professionals, which is reflected in their status and reward. Senior managers and leaders in INGOs receive rewards which 10-15 years ago would have been unimaginable in the sector.

If we accept that the management practice in most INGOs is managerialist, rather than taking this as and end point which closes down discussion, it could instead provoke further exploration, which in turn may call out a different discussion, and perhaps subversion and resistance. It may produce alternatives, but from within a detailed understanding of what it is we encounter in every day practice. In adopting neither a reformist nor a rejectionist position I am arguing that it is important to understand the characteristics of managerialism, how it is taken up as a form of coercive persuasion, what it allows and disallows, what it enables and constrains and some of its contradictions. In this post I am also concerned to discuss how it is that managerialism has come to dominate in INGOs, which is no surprise if we consider that INGOs are not separated from the societies of which produced them.

One might think of INGOs as the institutionalization of conscience, a particular organizational form of an explicit social and moral commitment to mobilizing groups of people in support of other, more marginalized groups. The practical form that this exercise of conscience takes, what we consider to be ‘good development’ and the way that this is supported and guided, is bound to change over time and to be affected by broader societal changes. As institutions embodying this practical moral commitment, INGOs take a particular form which is evolving dynamically, not just in reaction to the context in which ‘development’ takes place, but more directly in response to social changes that are happening in the societies from which the organisations emerge. In this sense I am arguing that the changes in the management of INGOs have come about as a result of social processes which no-one, and no group of people has planned. However, this is not the same as saying that these changes are inevitable, or that it is impossible to act differently within the constraints of broader social processes. Rather, that we are all caught up in a game which is not just of our own making, and nor is it in the gift of whole domains of activity, such as international development, which involves thousands of organisations and billions of dollars of spend, to decide how things ‘should’ be organised. What interests me here is what is, as much as what should be. I am also interested in pointing to and discussing some of the mutually amplifying processes which sometimes make a trends in societies irresistible, ones which make a rejectionist position untenable.

One significant change in the whole of society in the West to a greater or lesser extent since the early eighties is that all organisations, be they private, public or third sector, have been formed by, and have continued to form, a particular and ascendant manifestation of liberal economic capitalism which privileges market exchange and economic rationality. For example, there has been a high degree of continuity between both Thatcher and Blair governments in the UK in their acceptance of the dominance of the market in social affairs (although there were clear differences in emphasis between the two colours of government) and the importance of ‘sound management’. The last 30 years have seen waves of organizational and managerial ‘reforms’ which have affected all sectors of the economy, which have made all organisations more permeable to market exchange, and one might argue, more like each other. In opening themselves up to market ‘reform’, with its promise of greater flexibility, they have also come to resemble each other. These have been processes of both standardization and diversity at the same time: the claim of bringing about hybrid and different forms of organization has developed from a convergence of thinking.

An accompanying aspect of this change has been the way that business schools have both responded to, and helped create an environment where having a qualification in management has become a prerequisite for access to the burgeoning ranks of managers and consultants who attend to what is considered necessary to make all organisations more ‘business like’. There is a high convergence in what many business schools teach in the way of management thinking, which is partly brought about by similar standardising pressures that are brought to bear on universities, and partly from an aspiration amongst academic ands practitioners for a stable body of knowledge which constitutes ‘management science’. For example, any business school wishing to accredit its MBA programme with the Association of Masters of Business Administration (AMBA), will be obliged to standardize its curriculum: to a degree students on an MBA course can expect to learn similar things in similar ways.

In contemporary INGOs one is highly likely to encounter managers in the upper echelons who have a development background and who have subsequently trained in management on one of the courses which I have discussed above, or who have migrated from the private sector to take up a job in an INGO as an alternative career. There are a number of chief executives of leading INGOs who have no background at all in international development, but this is in no way thought to disqualify them from the prominent position which they occupy. As INGOs have grown and diversified, and have taken up their place in an increasingly competitive market place for aid, so they have taken on different functions, such as marketing and public relations, which are new to them, but ones which we might argue are necessary for success in the emerging environment. In developing these new functions they have called on the experience of professional marketeers and communicators who may or may not have a background in development. These employees are of course changed by the experience of working in INGOs, and they in turn, change the organisations of which they have become part. It is not unusual in development organisations to take part in discussions about ‘branding’, about the organisation’s ‘market offer’, about a particular initiative’s ‘unique selling point’ or ‘added value’, terms which would have been unthinkable before the 2000s.

The process of becoming ‘more business-like’, more market oriented, covers over as much as it reveals, as I will be exploring in subsequent posts: firstly it introduces new vocabulary, and hence new ways of thinking into the international development domain. For example, if we were to take as standard the idea that development interventions should principally be ‘effective and efficient’, which are undoubtedly two important criteria in any organization which makes things for profit, then this potentially silences a discussion of whether the intervention is just, or ethical, and whom it benefits. Technical discussions may interrupt, or at least alter, discussions about the good and the right. It is clearly very difficult to argue in short order against effectiveness and efficiency, as though one would be in favour of being inefficient and ineffective, although there is a strong case to be made, which I will do latterly, in arguing that a certain level of redundancy is a perquisite for creativity and innovation.

In the next post I will address questions of ends and means. In the international development sector in the UK there are a handful of INGOs which are very large indeed followed by a second tier of medium-sized INGOs which are large by many companies’ standards. The large INGOs have a big influence on all the others who aspire to be like them, and whose employees watch and emulate initiatives that they undertake. All organisations are faced with the problem of co-ordinating the activities of sometimes large numbers of people in a way which broadly fulfills the organisation’s mission. To what extent, then, do the ways that dominant forms of organizing, which I have claimed in this post are informed by managerialism, compromise the explicit moral mission that INGOs claim? What are the contradictions that development workers and managers are dealing with, where on the one hand they are obliged to fulfill their organizational objectives and on the other are supposed to be working to support others to live the lives they have reason to value, which may not always be one and the same thing? In what ways are the particularities of INGOs in the development domain helpful for understanding the needs of other sectors, which are both similar and different at the same time?

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Prince2, Projects IN Controlled Environments 2, is the third manifestation of a highly structured method for managing complex IT projects (first PROMPT, then PRINCE, then PRINCE2). It has been developed, adopted and promoted by the British government and is now a requirement for anyone tendering for British government IT projects. Prince2 comprises eight components, three techniques, eight processes which have 44 sub-processes, and claims to be a generic method which is applicable for any complex project, not just IT, and in any context. While it has nothing to say about the management of people, Prince2 is very plan-heavy and has rigorous and bureaucratic procedures for reporting against, and correcting towards, pre-reflected goals. One of its key claims is the early identification and mitigation of risk, that is to say, any event in the project that might be a threat to pre-conceived plans.

Anyone familiar with the LFA (the logical framework analysis) will recognise similar conceptual underpinnings to Prince2. Like Prince2, the LFA claims a universality of application, and is supposedly useful in any context and for any project; it disaggregates logically from a whole into parts, moving from the general to the particular. It assumes that causality is of an if-then kind: it we undertake this activity, then we will get that kind of result, and it focuses management effort on correcting to the pre-reflected ideal.  In doing so it privileges thought before action, assuming that pre-reflected intentionality is more important than the consequences of following our intentions. Both methods are highly abstract, rely heavily on documentation, planning and accountability to contract holders and exception reporting: that is to say, reporting against those milestones in the plan which were supposed to be achieved but have not been. They are both methods which advantage administrators managing at a distance who want to ‘see like a state’ . Neither has much to say about power and politics, justice, context, history and judgement, since they cover over people and what they are doing with schemata. And interestingly, any social development professional could be competent in Prince2 after a five day training course, and with the LFA in two days, irrespective of experience in the field.

This post will continue to explore what I consider to be some of the more radical insights from the complexity sciences because I think that it turns many of the assumptions which underpin both the logical framework and Prince2, and one might argue, many of the other assumptions of predictability and control that accompany much contemporary management discourse, on their head.

So for example, a radical interpretation of complex adaptive systems theory would argue that causality is never of an if-then kind since interactions between agents are non-linear; that the local and global are arising paradoxically and simultaneously together, which would encourage a focus on how the particular Is informing the general and vice versa. We would not automatically privilege our abstract plans of wholesale change for the good over the particular conditions which we encounter. If the local and global mutually inform each other, then our understanding of our particular context and its historical development are central to constructive project work, rather than peripheral to it. To extend the analogy, abstract generalisations, such as project plans and LFAs, can only ever be taken up in particular places between particular people at particular times and interpreted together.

The future of complex adaptive systems is radically uncertain, and I am taking uncertainty to mean unknown unknowns, rather than the known unknowns, which is how I understand risk. Since we cannot know what we don’t know about how our plans will unfold, there is a limit to how much risk mitigation will be useful. If we were to take such an interpretation of complex adaptive systems theory seriously, we would be less concerned about exception-reporting against our pre-reflected plans, because we would expect our actions to bring about the expected, the unexpected and the unwanted. All three consequences would be important data to help us think through how our abstract intentions, which are a best guess at a certain point in time, play out in reality with others, who are often the objects of our good intentions. We would need to accept the limits to which it is possible to control circumstances in which we are not the only players.

The most important aspects of project work in social development are not to be found in the plan, or the planning methods. Rather they involve paying careful attention to what people are doing to achieve whatever it is they set out to do. This  involves taking seriously questions of power, recognition and practical judgement in the particular encounter with others, and a radical empiricism that remains open to the exploration of contestation and difference. Good development managers are not necessarily the ones who have mastered Prince2, but the ones who are radically open to the plurality of experience and who have developed a high degree of reflective and reflexive ability in the groups engaged in the social development undertaking. This is not something which can be mastered in a five day training programme.

It also leaves those with a greater reluctance to give in to this kind of expressivism exposed to the accusation that if they can’t compete about how passionate they are then perhaps they are not committed to, or interested in, what they are doing. Being passionate and excited are surely  not sufficient qualification on their own for doing anything well. I am reminded of the lines in WB Yeats’ poem The Second Coming: ‘The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity.’ Sometimes it is being passionate that closes down opportunities for listening and noticing, and paying attention to the particular importance of context and difference. It is a claim for authenticity that deceives.

I was forced to reconsider the idea of being passionate  when I listened to Aung San Suu Kyi’s first Reith lecture ‘Securing Freedom’, where she talks of her own passion for freedom, drawing on Max Weber and Vaclav Havel. In linking passion, power and political action she has helped me retrieve the word from its contemporary shallowness. Aung San Suu Kyi  is using the term very differently from the way it has come to be taken up in contemporary organisational life, and she describes the consequences of being passionate in both practical and paradoxical ways.

The first thing to notice is the link that Daw Suu makes between passion and suffering, re-establishing the connection with the original Greek word παχω meaning to suffer; hence the Passion of Christ.

‘Passion translates as suffering and I would contend that in the political context, as in the religious one, it implies suffering by choice: a deliberate decision to grasp the cup that we would rather let pass. It is not a decision made lightly – we do not enjoy suffering; we are not masochists. it is because of the high value we put on the subject of our passion that we are able, sometimes in spite of ourselves, to choose suffering.’

In her case being passionate about freedom has impelled her into political activity and made her a dissident. It has thrown her into radical opposition, with all the hardship that this implies in a military dictatorship, which she takes up as a practical activity.  It is not just about believing in things, or making statements, she says, but developing ‘a sense of freedom as something concrete that has to be gained through practical work, not just as a concept to be captured through philosophical argument.’ And with the practical work comes suffering and self-doubt, questioning whether she is capable of enduring what she has to endure, at the same time as realising that she has no other choice. Daw Suu  expresses this as a paradox of conviction and doubting at the same time.

Daw Suu also brings in Weber’s essay on Politics as a Profession to try to explain two other facets  of passion when taken up in political action: a sense of proportion and a feeling of responsibility. Weber argues that the sense of proportion and responsiblity for a cause, and one’s part in it, rescues the term passion  from what he calls ‘sterile excitation’ , where people ‘intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations’. Passion is not just about you, but about the broader cause for which you are prepared to suffer, and those you implicate in your actions if you become a leader. And because of the dangers of blind passion, exposure of the self, and exposure of others, it needs a broader understanding of the social implications of what one is attempting:

‘that firm taming of the soul, which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the ‘sterilely excited’ and mere     political dilettante, is possible only through habituation to detachment in every sense of the word. The ‘strength’ of a political ‘personality’ means, in the first place, the possession of these qualities of passion, responsibility, and proportion.’

Weber argues that no politician would have changed things had s/he not been prepared to attempt the impossible. However, attempting the impossible is undertaken with a passionate detachment and a sense of responsiblity, to become a hero in ‘the sober sense of the word’. Weber, too, is pointing to a paradox that one needs to be detached in order to engage more intensively.

When I listened to Aung San Suu Kyi’s lecture I realised that she was using the term passion in a highly nuanced way, one that implies detachment from her drive for freedom at the same time , a practical engagement with the politics of the everyday, a sense of responsibility towards those who share the same passion, and a good deal of courage which ‘has to be renewed consciously from day to day and moment to moment.’

‘We engage in dissent for the sake of liberty and we are prepared to try again and again with passion, with a sense of responsibility and a sense of proportion to achieve what may seem impossible to some. We are struggling with open eyes to turn our dream of freedom into a reality.’

However, a number of evaluation practitioners have begun to question the linearity of development interventions, and therefore the evaluation methods which are commonly used to make judgements about their quality. Since most social development interventions are construed using propositional logic of an if-then kind, there can be no surprise that most evaluation methods follow a similar path. As a recent call for papers for an international conference articulated this, evaluation is understood as being about developing scientifically valid methods to demonstrate that a particular intervention has led causally to a particular outcome. In calling into question the reductive linear logic of the framing of both social development and evaluation, a number of scholars have found themselves turning to the complexity sciences as a resource domain of a different kind of thinking but have done so with a varied radicalism in calling the evaluation game into question.

A number of general themes seem to repeat themselves in the struggle to make sense of the complexity sciences and to think about how they might be useful to evaluators. Although there are a wide variety of approaches demonstrated in articles about evaluation (simple rules, wicked problems, complicated vs. complex, systems dynamics, complex adaptive systems) complexity is often adduced without scholars ever taking a view on which of its manifestations is more helpful, or exploring the theoretical assumptions behind each of them. This renders the borrowing of insights from the complexity sciences more or less useful in the problematising of evaluation as a discipline.

One very popular way of taking up insights from the complexity sciences is by reference to the idea of ‘simple rules’, drawing on Reynolds’ Boids simulation (1987). Reynolds developed a graphical computer simulation of birds flocking, where the programmed agents, called Boids, followed three rules: maintain a minimum distance from other objects in the environment, including other Boids; match velocities with other Boids in the neighbourhood; move towards the perceived centre of mass of Boids in the neighbourhood. Programmed thus, the interacting agents demonstrate flocking behaviour. A number of scholars have seized on this insight to suggest that all that is required for a manager to ‘encourage’ emergence, which they conflate with flocking behaviour in organisations, is to set a few simple rules. There are a number of difficulties with the direct application of the Boids simulation to organisational life, which have been comprehensively rehearsed by Ralph Stacey. One of the principal objections to the idea that managers can apply simple rules is that the Boids simulation is a deterministic model where all the interacting agents are the same and are behaving exactly the same: the model is incapable of evolving over time but simply fluctuates around one attractor. In this sense there is a limited form of emergence since the model never evolves beyond flocking. So this is a good example of the way in which the idea of simple rules can be introduced along with a variety of other insights from the complexity sciences without any critical assessment of the limitations different ways of taking different manifestations of complexity.

Most scholars never stray from the idea that organisations are systems. Sometimes they might argue that organisations or development projects are complex systems and sometimes they are just like them. In thinking of development initiatives as complex systems, some scholars find it hard to relinquish the idea that they are somehow outside the systems they are describing and modelling: this makes it possible for them to suggest that these models might be mapped, directed or ‘tipped’ in one ‘direction’ or another. As with the idea of simple rules, this understanding of complexity and emergence still allows the potential for managers of social development projects, or perhaps evaluators, to control complex social processes by standing apart from them and ‘moving’ them from one state to another, similar to the detached and objective observer of the realist perspective on social development. Managers, or indeed evaluators, are still the principal instigators or investigators of semi-predictable change. This may be why the Boids simulation so appeals: the manager or evaluator is like the simulation programmer who can set the parameters for what is happening in the development intervention. To this extent the role of evaluator is relatively unproblematised. It is for the evaluator to decide whether what they are dealing with is simple, complicated or complex phenomena, to find different ways of collecting data, whatever we might mean by that term, and to ‘analyse’ it together with the project staff they are working with.

Many evaluation scholars are working with what they call logic models, by which they mean a summarized theory of how the social intervention works, usually in diagrammatic form, which gives an overview of how change occurs and thus what data an evaluator might collect. Scholars may call on the complexity sciences as a means of making their logic models more complex: they are largely intent on subsuming complexity within a pre-existing systemic framework where there is an assumed detachment of the evaluator from the reality they purport to be modelling, having first decided whether what they are modelling is simple, complicated or complex. Some scholars equate complexity with the number of actors involved in social development programme, or with the scale of the programme: increased scale means increased complexity. Usually they are still looking for a grand, aggregating theory of change. ‘Emergence’ may be taken to mean being flexible, or perhaps not having too much planning, or perhaps doing things ‘bottom up’.

In setting out my own understanding of what I consider some of the more radical implications of insights from the complexity sciences I will draw principally on evolutionary complex adaptive systems models.  In complex adaptive systems simulations where diverse agents are demonstrating non-average behaviour in their interactions with each other, novel global patterns emerge which have not been pre-programmed or planned in any way. In other words, agents  acting locally and responding to the amplification of small differences between them and other diverse agents produce novel patterning that has not been programmed or planned in any way. The emerging global patterns constrain what it is possible for agents to do in their local interactions – they cannot just do anything- but at the same time the local interactions are forming the global patterning. There is a paradoxical forming and being formed both at the same time. Computer simulations of complex adaptive systems are temporally bound, as patterning leads to further patterning over time – the simulations are modelling non-linear equations which have no solution, but simply iterate and reiterate. Taking a temporal view of the patterning of interaction would help us understand retrospectively that one phenomenon lead to another and we would be able to say something about the patterning which has emerged, but we would never be able to know all the causes. In the words of the sociologist Peter Hedström: ‘There is no necessary proportionality between the size of a cause and the size of its effect… Aggregate patterns say very little about the micro-level processes that brought them about’.   Self-organising emergence, then, is not a free-for-all, but nor has it been pre-planned. Individual agents are both constraining and enabling each other to bring about the dynamically changing pattern of order and disorder. The patterning emerges as a result of what every agent is doing and not doing, and none of this is predictable in advance or reducible to history of interaction. Complex adaptive systems models are able to take on a life of their own in the way that Boids simulations are only able to do in a much more limited way.

If we were to think of these insights in organisational terms then it would be impossible to propose that emergence means ‘just letting things emerge’, i.e. anything goes and we don’t need to make plans. We cannot take emergence to mean being flexible or being the opposite of being in control, or having a plan, or allowing people to be creative. There is nothing to allow, permit, unleash, guide, tip, steer or encourage. We might take emergence to mean the complex interplay of human intentions as we constrain and enable each other, whether we have controlling plans or not. Whatever happens in all social development interventions can never be entirely accurately captured or described, and will never be reducible to even a highly detailed account purporting to show what led to what.

In thinking about the consequences of the emergence of novelty in non-linear systems simulations and moving by analogy to make comparisons with organisational and social life we might conclude that our plans for change have a limited predictability, since whatever we plan will continue to emerge in novel ways in local interactions irrespective of what we intended. It also has implications for thinking about the models we might build about complex reality, should we be tempted to do so. This would problematise the idea of a fixed logic model since we could never say with complete certainty that X input let to Y outcome. Any model we would be tempted to build would be permanently evolving, with the danger that it would take on a life of its own and would cease to reflect the reality it purported to model.

I will set out some of what I understand to be  implications of the above for evaluative methods by comparing and contrasting with some of general themes of other scholars’ attempts to draw on complexity in their writing on evaluation. I am suggesting abandoning the idea that evaluators are objective observers of reality which they have come to evaluate in a detached way, but can be stakeholders in any development programme.  Their role could be to help co-create interpretations of what it is everybody thinks is going on. This might involve using different techniques to collect data, but would also involve problematising and discussing this data to work out and interpret what the data might mean.  I am suggesting that an evaluator should not be naïve about the power of the role they have and the way it affects the interpretations that they make with others, and the way that evaluators, in turn are affected by their participation in the social development programmes they come to evaluate with others. I share with the more radical scholars that an evaluator’s role is to question and then question further, and understand this to be having an iterative effect: the evaluator learns from programme participants and in turn ‘teaches back’ what they think we have learned in order for this to be relearned and retaught. In this way meaning emerges iteratively: paradoxically evaluators shape meaning and are shaped by it at the same time. I would argue against scholars where they put forward managerialist ideas that social projects arise from unity, shared values and vision, and would argue instead on the basis of my own understanding of some insights from complex adaptive systems theory, that what contributes to social change is the exploration of similarities and differences which amplify into larger population-wide changes, and it is from these that genuine novelty emerges.

What is most interesting for me about social development programmes is the way in which actors, including evaluators, negotiate order in local contexts at a particular time and place. And I am putting forward the idea that reflexivity, particularly the way that the evaluator’s own reflexivity is helpful in giving an account of how change is occurring. In contradistinction to some scholars, I do not think I am producing research about programme stakeholders, but rather, with them. This distinction ‘about’ and ‘with’ is the  difference between an epistemological position which assumes separation from the objects of research, which is metaphorically conveyed by the image of taking up complexity as a ‘lens’ for example, and a position that assumes no separation between researcher and the researched. A radical interpretation of complex adaptive systems theory might problematise the idea of logic models being any more than highly abstract, fixed and thin simplifications of reality which can never produce the infinite level of detail required to approximate causality. If interaction is non-linear, then small interventions can have a large effect, and the opposite is also true. This makes the search for causality which forms the basis for most evaluations a highly uncertain exercise.

My own recent experience of a number of facilitated workshops has made me question whether they really are such positive and productive events, and whether they tend rather to suppress opportunities for learning rather than encourage them, the very opposite of what they intend. I am also sceptical about the degree to which one can agree and plan to have fun. I am concerned about how the focus on ‘fun’ can tend towards collusiveness and an avoidance of the exploration of difference and power relationships, and in particular the power of the facilitators and the guiding principles of the workshops themselves. To call the design of the workshop into question can appear as though one is against participation and transparency.

In one workshop I attended we spent a long time exhaustively playing games for the first couple of hours. These games, usually known as ice-breakers, are based on the idea that we all had to know each other’s names and backgrounds before we could begin to talk, and had to repeat them back to each other to demonstrate that we had in fact mastered the details. No one was to be left unrecognised, no one was allowed to stay quiet. In this particular workshop participation played itself out as obligation, one of the characteristics of a cult value. As we played the games one of the facilitators praised us for being an ‘obedient’ group, and of course, as the workshop wore on, it became increasingly difficult to be ‘disobedient’. ‘Disobedience’ could be construed as asking questions when it was not the time to do so, not playing games along with everyone else, or perhaps simply disagreeing with someone else. It might also manifest itself as appearing not to be having fun. One of the things that was happening in the playing of games, then, was the establishment of a particular order, a discipline of meeting in this particular social object.

In situations where conformity is valued, it is not surprising that there is often a big emphasis placed on rules of engagement, which we have to agree before we can start. Often this will involve agreeing to be ‘constructive’, ‘open’ and ‘honest’ with each other, as though we could know in advance of acting what would turn out to have been constructive. I wonder to what extent it is possible to be fully open and honest, particularly in such an intense social gathering, and whether the injunction to be ‘constructive’ imposes a kind of self-silencing on the participants.

Moreover, it is interesting the way in which the role of the facilitator encourages dependency from the group and infantilises them. We are unable to proceed until the facilitator tells us it is appropriate to do so, or even to take a break unless the facilitator gives permission, despite the fact that the timetable clearly delineates break times. On one occasion one of the participants who was presenting finished on time but was uncertain whether just to announce a break. She ‘handed over’ to the facilitator, who in turn ‘handed over’ to the allotted time keeper, who agreed that it was indeed time to take a break. We needed two facilitators to tell us it was time for tea. Taking responsibility can feel like an irresponsible act.

However, tight constraints can provoke disobedience in some. As an example, one participant in the workshop tried to ask a question during a particularly long and uninformative PowerPoint presentation, but was prevented from doing so by the facilitator, since it wasn’t the right time to ask questions. The questioner persisted, asked their question, and immediately following this the facilitator intervened rapidly to get everyone up on their feet to play another game – we needed another facilitative moment to re-establish order. Despite the appeal to the idea that we were having fun, and were participating ‘democratically’ together, there was little doubt that some forms of participation were more valued than others. Discomfort was to be avoided at all costs.

Additionally, in highly organised workshops there is often a pronounced anxiety about time, about achieving ‘outputs’ and about ‘capturing the learning’. The deliberate techniques to achieve all three can drive out all spontaneity and substitute mechanism for meaningful exchange.

Concerning time, for example, orchestrated activities are often very prolonged. The longer the activities take the greater the anxiety about time becomes, and what usually suffers as a result is the opportunity to discuss what has just been said. Many of the slots which are dedicated to discussion then have to be cut because we have got so behind with the timetable. What becomes most important is sticking to the timetable, rushing on to the end, rather than sometimes diverting to discuss what has arisen, which could be very important.

Small group discussions are often very disruptive of serious engagement, particularly if facilitators encourage techniques such as World Café, where group members are expected to change every ten minutes. No sooner has a discussion begun than it is time to move and disrupt. When small groups have finished their discussion after often short duration then each of the groups will be expected to ‘feed back’ to everyone else what they have been talking about. ‘Feedback’, on grounds of inclusivity, is deliberate and exhaustive, and notes are written about notes in order not to ‘lose’ any insight.

Small groups are often sent away with highly idealised questions, such as ‘what would your ideal organisation look like?’, or ‘how should we organise ourselves in the future so that we can maximise our efficiency and outputs’? Unsurprisingly this generates lists of ‘shoulds’ which are also of a highly idealised kind, which, when aggregated, begin to look as there is a high degree of consensus in the group about what we all ‘should’ be doing. This in turn leads to action planning about how this ‘shoulds’ might be realised, which can often involve changing our ‘culture’ and ourselves. This can be abstract and idealised, as well as compelling and uplifting, both at the same time. Perhaps it is uplifting because it is so abstract and idealised – we are imagining a whole which can never be achieved.

Workshops, in my recent experience, have tended towards conformity and obedience, have organised away opportunities for spontaneity, and have provoked the very acts of rebellion that they were designed to render unnecessary. The experience has been more totalitarian than democratic and an endless array of lists and abstractions.

If we were to take the more radical insights from the complexity sciences seriously, then there is no way of knowing in advance what is optimal in terms of different people with different experiences meeting together. Indeed, it would be the exploration of these differences which would be most likely to lead to surprising and perhaps innovative thinking, although there would be certainly no guarantee that this would be a comfortable process. Discovering what is ‘optimal’ for a particular group would probably involve quite a lot of negotiation, rather than blindly sticking to the agenda as pre-planned, and would emerge moment by moment. There could well be a role for the facilitator, but the fulfilling of it would partly be about encouraging others to take responsibility for the way that the workshop was running, the things we might choose to talk about and how we might talk about them. One of the things to talk about would be our power relationships and what this constrained and enabled. We might like to hear about what other small groups have been discussing, but we might also chose to let things go and not try to be part of every conversation in reduced form. There would be no necessary injunction to have fun, but this would not necessarily mean that every one would be sitting around po-faced. Any group meeting together would certainly operate according to ‘rules’ but these would be likely to be discovered in the meeting together, rather than setting them out in advance. Whether the workshop was participatory could only be discovered in the experience of meeting together, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

So should we set the target in line with what the statistical predictor (a figure derived from past performance) indicates is realistic, or should we set something more ambitious than that? Additionally, there might be other areas of teaching where we might set targets for ourselves even though we are not obliged to do so. This would look good during the next inspection, that we as a group of governors are prepared invent more ways of holding ourselves to account and scrutiny.

Just as annual setting of targets is something of a ritual, so too is the debate that follows.

From the proponents of targets there are a variety of reasons put forward to setting them high. Firstly there is the motivational argument: to choose an ambitious target over the lower statistical predictor ‘would send out a clear message’ to staff and students alike that the governing body is ambitious for them. The target, then, is considered to have symbolic value, and is a sign and representation of governor intent.  This in turn could motivate students to have high aspirations for themselves. Secondly, and closely related to the first, is the moral imperative for setting high targets: students will only survive in the modern world by getting high grades and we would be doing them a disservice not to aim for the very highest for and with them. And thirdly there is the natural law argument for setting targets. Targets might be flawed but actually there is no other way of having a properly focused discussion about the quality of education. Without the setting of targets hospitals would never have tackled waiting lists, higher education establishments would never have considered the widening participation agenda, and schools would never have tackled performance at GCSE. Unless we can produce a numerical target then conversations about teaching and learning tend towards the vacuous.

In previous posts we have noted the way in which targets are often taken up in groups as a cult value in G.H. Mead’s terms: there is a strong tendency to idealise what we might bring about by setting ‘ambitious’ targets, and to challenge the concept of targets is to risk exclusion by being portrayed as being against students achieving. When targets are taken up as cult, those who are not prepared to set a high target, or who argue against them are in danger of appearing as though they don’t care about the students in their school.  In previous posts we have also noted the strong contemporary influences of the North American positive psychology movement with its emphasis on individual self-belief and aspiring to the positive. These ideas are taken up in some contemporary management methods such as appreciative inquiry, where the suggestion is that enquiring into the good brings about the good. Student achievement, then can appear to hinge on positive self-belief. Doing well will depend on really, really wanting to do well, and not doing well can be understood as not having wanted success enough, irrespective of whether the targets which were set were realistic or the other social factors which determine doing well in school. Additionally, governors could be criticised for not creating a ‘culture’ of aspiration. Somehow, despite all our efforts, we may all be personally to blame.

Another way of thinking about targets is to notice their disciplinary power, both on us as a group of governors and more broadly in the education sector. In his book Discipline and Punish Foucault considered the way in which disciplinary techniques became pervasive in the army, the school, the hospital and the prison in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. They became ubiquitous alongside the surge in population, the growth of capitalism and the emergence of the state, and were contemporaneous with the establishment of the Enlightenment. Disciplinary techniques were required to govern and co-ordinate multiplicities. Foucault notes the irony that the Enlightenment which discovered and promoted human liberties, also coined disciplinary techniques.

The development of the disciplines marked a reversal of the political axis of individualisation from the Middle Ages, where individuality for example in a feudal society, became more apparent the more one had power and status. Conversely, in the 17^th and 18^th centuries new methods arose, what Foucault terms ‘a micro-economy of perpetual penality’, which calculated, examined, individualised and pathologised through constant supervision, scrutiny and documentation. They were a way of making even the lowly individual, the schoolchild, the hospital patient, the prisoner, transparent and visible. In James C Scott’s terms, they enable the ability to ‘see like a state’.

Through the proliferation of disciplinary techniques, we have entered into an age, he says, of infinite examination and compulsory objectification:

…as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualised; it is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather than commemorative accounts, by comparative measures that have ‘norms’ as their reference rather than genealogies giving ancestors as points of reference; by ‘gaps’ rather than by deeds.

One of the starkest measures of the disciplinary society for Foucault was what he termed ‘panopticism’. This derives from Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon, a tower to be built in the centre of prisons where prison guards can observe without themselves being observed to the degree that prisoners assume they are being scrutinised all the time and start to modify their own behaviour. Disciplinary techniques are taken up as self-discipline. Foucault develops the idea of the Panopticon to start to sketch the growth of the pervasively disciplinary society where we are both the subjects and objects of power relations. The effects of power become constant, profound and permanent and produce ‘docile bodies’ oriented towards maximising our own utility; he suggests that we have come to live in a society permeated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms. These small, micro-techniques of power he describes as cellular, a machinery which is both immense and minute. We are subject to daily panopticisms which constantly count, judge and compare. The effect, he argues, is a kind of normalisation and isomorphism – institutions strive to become more like each other as we practise disciplinary power on ourselves and on each other.

Although the disciplines take a particular form and have a specific effect, Foucault argues that we should stop regarding power as a negative:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘’abstracts’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.

Just as disciplinary power produces individuals so it also produces ways of knowing the individual, what Foucault calls the human sciences of medicine, psychology and psychiatry. Power and knowledge are tightly coupled.

One way of understanding the discussion at the governors meeting, then, is as a manifestation of the effects of disciplinary power. We have come to the point where we do not need the government, or inspectors to impose targets on us: we now volunteer to impose our own targets on ourselves. It seems as though there is no other way of proceeding. They have become natural to us, the foundation of the way we can know ourselves, a concrete form of everyday morality. Hence the fear of what might happen if we tried to find another way of talking about what we are doing in school. Who knows what might unravel?

• Alzheimer’s sufferer Mrs J, 82, whose husband was denied the chance to be with her when she died at Ealing hospital in west London because he had been “forgotten” in a waiting room.

• Mrs R, a dementia patient, who was not given a bath or shower during 13 weeks at Southampton University Hospitals NHS trust. She was not helped to eat, despite being unable to feed herself, and suffered nine falls, only one of which was recorded in her notes.

• “Feisty and independent” Mrs H, who had lived alone until she was 88, was taken from Heartlands hospital in Birmingham to a care home in Tyneside but, when she arrived, was bruised, soaked in urine, dishevelled, and wearing someone else’s clothes, which were held up with large paper clips.

Abraham’s report prompted much hand-wringing on the part of the Royal College of Nursing,  government ministers and the press. The care services minister Paul Burstow saw the report as further proof that ‘modernisation’ of the NHS was needed, which presumably means the major ‘reforms’ that his own government is proposing. He added that ‘leadership’ was needed in the NHS to ‘drive out poor practice’, and mentioned a forthcoming initiative of the Health Quality Commission NHS regulator to carry out spot checks to identify malnutrition and dignity in older patients. Inspecting older patients for dignity is an interesting proposition.

The sociologist Norbert Elias lived till he was 93 and in one of his last works reflected upon the process of ageing and dying in his book The Loneliness of the Dying. Taking a broader view drawing on Elias could be helpful in thinking about what we might otherwise consider inexplicable instances of neglect and  leap to the usual conclusions that these are either one-offs, or simply require more regimes of inspection and target-setting.

The ageing process, Elias said, marks a pronounced shift in power relations between the young and the old, and is another example of the way in which our advanced control over nature has run ahead of our understanding of social relations at this particular juncture of history. Elias’ major work, The Civilising Process, turns on the idea of interdependency between people. We become more civilised, he argues, as more and more people become more dependent on each other more of the time. This is not a linear process, since sometimes it goes into reverse,  and nor are we in control of it. The blindly operating social processes often produce unexpected and uncomfortable consequences which we cannot explain. At the same time as becoming highly interdependent, we have a parallel and heightened sense of our own individuality, as though we were sealed off from the very people upon whom we have become interdependent.

Old age, he remarks accelerates the dependency of the old on those younger,  tipping power away from them and also increasing their sense of isolation. People will respond to this process in a variety of ways according to their personalities: ‘but it is useful to remember that some of the things old people do, in particular some of the strange things, have to do with their fear of losing power and independence and especially of losing control of themselves.‘  He remarks that although the young’s revulsion from and cruelty towards the old was probably much more marked in previous ages, it has by no means disappeared in contemporary society and is one of the manifestations of this changing power relationship.

The ageing process brings about a fundamental change  in a person’s position in society, and therefore in their relationships with other people, which we may be blind to because our understanding of the social lags behind our vast store of knowledge about the biological ageing process.  Our advanced ability to manipulate and control nature can lead us to ignore affective  social relationships. While physical and medical care may be excellent for older people, and  the ombudsman’s report gives glaring examples of where it is not, we have yet to find adequate ways of dealing with the shrinking of affective ties between older people and the broader networks in which they used to play a more active part.

Elias notes that despite enormous advances in biological sciences which have increased longevity and the quality of life in the later stages,  we are not able ultimately to control ageing and death, despite our recurring fantasy about immortality. We also have a tendency to defer to the natural,  somehow believing that Nature is benign and immutable and separate from the social. He thinks that  it may be that doctors note the way that the human body is taken over by the  powers of nature and simply assume that there is nothing they can do: they shrug and go on their way once the medical intervention has bumped up against its limits. What is missing in this engagement for Elias is familiarity with the special branch of knowledge which has to do with the bonds between people and the constraints and dependencies we create with each other, which have particular qualities and different stages of our lives. Elias is optimistic that this form of knowledge will one day be considered part of medical practice, and to a certain extent it already is, that we can become more knowledgeable about how,  in the ageing and dying process, relations with others take on a special importance:

‘Of course, it is not easy for people to witness this process of decay with equanimity. But perhaps people in this situation have a special need of other people. Signs that the bonds have not yet been severed, that those leaving the human circle are still valued within it, are especially important since they are now weak and perhaps only a shadow of what they were.‘

Our attitudes to dying are neither unalterable nor accidental, since they reflect the particular stage of social development which we have reached. Our increased life expectancy has made death seem like a much more remote prospect for many of us, where in previous times it would have been much more immediate and more publicly acknowledged.

Elias notes how the rationalised ways in which we currently treat the elderly and dying may work against our paying attention to  these affective bonds between us, our own fear of death, and our acknowledgement that we are engaged in relationships of power with others. In the advanced, scientifically based  medical treatment that we practice, contact with the people whose presence may be of utmost comfort to a person taking leave of life,  may be thought of as secondary or as an impediment to rational treatment, or perhaps an inconvenience to the routines of professionals. (At the same time as saying this  he is not starry-eyed that familial relationships are all positive ones: he realises that they may also  involve jealousy and contempt).  However, to have people present who are of emotional value to the dying person, and vice versa, means that the person takes leave of this life publicly and amongst people who continue to recognise each other. The dying may depart ‘unhygienically’  and inconveniently (as far as medical staff are concerned) if surrounded by people they care about, but they do not die alone.

If we take Elias seriously, then, treating patients with dignity involves much more than dealing with the individual attitudes of medical staff, or creating more inspection regimes. Nor will it be improved necessarily by more leadership, whatever the government minister understands by that. Treating older patients with dignity is not a discrete ‘problem’ to which there is a particular ‘solution’. Respect, dignity and humane treatment of each other involves our paying attention the contradictory, complex and sometimes paradoxical nature of our interdependencies, the need for mutual affirmation, and the way in which our relationships with each other give us a sense of meaning of living in the world.  It will concern understanding better our  changing relationships of power, particularly towards the end of our lives, and our need to belong. Being a highly trained  medical professional is not enough on its own to guarantee a high quality of care, if we take quality to mean more than just treatment. Sophisticated routines and procedures may be the very things that can contribute to  the loneliness of the dying.