A third problem is Formulaic radicalism. This is an attempt to project a veneer of political and intellectual dissidence while ultimately relying on highly established tropes which often lead to unsurprising conclusions. Contemporary research is generally formulaic but [critical management studies, CMS] adds the critical flavour. It often does so by giving phenomena – no matter how benign – a negative framing.

Studying ‘resistance’ gives a progressive, even heroic flavour to a topic. One way CMS researchers do formulaic radicalism is by using conventional formats but include some markers of radicalism. The author may seek to express radical and critical ideas while complying with ‘mainstream’ conventions. Such a move can help to indicate that a study is clearly positioned in an academic subfield, guided by an authoritative framework, and informed by a detailed review of the literature.

Next the research outlines a planned design, a careful data management strategy (sometimes using data sorting programs and codification), and a minor section of ‘safe’ reflexivity. The authors summarize findings, outlines how they add to the literature (and sometimes the author-ity [sic]) and offers a brief conclusion (not saying too much outside the chosen and mainly predictable path). The form should matter less than the content, but this highly domesticated form tends to weaken the impact of the substantive content. The norm of presenting a number of abstracted, short interview statements does not always help to reveal any particularly novel insights.

In the text, there are frequent nods to critical aims such as exploring power, supporting emancipation, recognizing resistance, or generating reflexivity. However, the formulaic presentation of findings often undermines this and leads to modest insights.

André Spicer and Mats Alvesson (2024). “Critical Management Studies: A Critical Review.”
Journal of Management Studies (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joms.13047)

The terms China, Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are used to describe the current government of China under General Secretary Xi Jinping. ‘China’ is not intended to refer to the country itself with the entirety of its peoples and cultures.

Recent first footnote of a peer-reviewed journal article

One of the questions that helped precipitate the research on highly reliable socio-technical systems was: Why aren’t there more normal accidents, given technologies are so tightly coupled and interactive?

A symmetrical question has been posed by the high reliability research since then: Why aren’t there more real-time control rooms or operations centers, given there are so many reliability mandates, critical services and hazardous technologies?

One answer suggests itself: There are in fact more control rooms than people suppose, if the persisting dearth of control room research is any guide.

If a researcher only ever studies one political context, then the horizons of explanation are constrained because of selection bias. If one only studies the United States, without comparison to other countries, then this leads to a sample selection bias where one cannot answer why the United States has comparatively high poverty. To paraphrase [sociologist and political scientist, Seymour Martin Lipset], poverty scholars who only know one country, know no country.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10446494/

For a time, my reading centered on histories of ideas, like those of progress, improvement and the Enlightenment. Once I started reading Isaiah Berlin, there was no going back. That was the pull side of being attracted to abstractions.

Being pushed to abstractions has been a different matter. Discussions about all those varieties of capitalism, realpolitik, and modernities, to name just three entangled constellations, are unsatisfactory for me, when they stop short of recording the actually-existing practices on the ground. So I am pushed further by being compelled to contextualize these abstractions.

To put it differently, what is “insufficiently abstract” for me is the weird undifferentiation that comes with the comparative absence of histories of the highly various and contingent practices at stake when filling in the details.

Note: “comparative” absence of details, not “total” absence. For an example of the kind of history of ideas that goes further by identifying and comparing practices associated with those ideas, I can think of no more formidable book than the recent: Michael Sonenscher (2023). After Kant The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought. Princeton University Press.

When I first became interested in livestock herders in Africa, I was told they lived on marginal lands. Fifty years later the refrain is the herders are marginalized–marginalized in politics, by the economy, and now because of the climate emergency.

May I suggest a more positive and apposite analogy:

The illuminators [of medieval manuscripts] enriched the margins of the page, conventionally an empty space, with figurative, vegetal or abstract elements. Sometimes the marginal images were merely decorative, at other times they functioned rather like visual footnotes or sidebars, as serious or comic commentaries on the text. . .

Jed Perl (2021). Authority and Freedom. Alfred A. Knopf: New York

Pastoralists continue to illuminate what others persist calling “the margins.” Indeed, pastoralists are our counter-public for that point.

. . .social figures

. . .witnesses-protagonists

. . .contaminated imaginaries

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1. Social Figures

We consider a timeless model of a common property resource (CPR) in which N herdsmen are able to graze their cattle. The model has been constructed deliberately along orthodox economics lines. . . .We begin with a timeless world. Herdsmen are indexed by i (i = 1, 2, …, N). Cattle are private property. The grazing field is taken to be a village pasture. Its size is S. Cattle intermingle while grazing, so on average the animals consume the same amount of grass. If X is the size of the herd in the pasture, total output – of milk – is H(X, S), where H is taken to be constant returns to scale in X and S.

Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury: 221 (internal footnotes deleted)

After such bruising abstractions, it’s a wonder more readers don’t rush to the anthropological literature for descriptions of really-existing pastoralists and their herding practices.

The methodological problem, though, is that there’s really-existing, and then there’s really-existing. There are pastoralists interviewed and quoted. Then there’s the social figure of the pastoralist, a composite assembled by a researcher to represent the typical features of the pastoralists that have been studied.

All well and good, if you understand that the use of social figures extends significantly beyond the confines of anthropology or the social sciences. Social figures “potentially have all the characteristics which would be considered character description in literary studies,” notes a cultural sociologist, adding, “unlike ideal types, for example, which are written with a clear heuristic goal in a scientific context, social figures can also appear in public debate or be described in literary texts.”

So what? “For theorizing, this means. . .attention must be paid to a good figurative description: Is the figurative description vivid, descriptive and, as a figure, internally consistent? Does it accurately reflect the social context to which it refers? Therefore, the criteria to assess quality in theorizing must be complemented by literary criteria.”

And one of those literary conventions helps explain why the social figure of the pastoralist today is frequently compared and contrasted to the social figure of the pastoralist in the past. “[T]here are often antecedent figures for a social figure. . .The current social figure can then be understood as an update of older social figures.”

A small matter, you might think, and easily chalked up to “this is the way we do historical analysis.” It is not, however, a slight issue methodologically, when comparing your pastoralist interviewees today with the social figures of pastoralists in the past ends up identifying “differences” that are more about criteria for rather than empirics in “really-existing.”

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Source. T. Schlechtriemen (2023). “Social figures as elements of sociological theorizing.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2281233)

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2. Witnesses-Protagonists

I

In my reading, narratives of pastoralism divide into three major types. There are the studies of pastoralism long past. I think of Wilfred Thesiger, though I’ve also read anthropological studies from the 1950s and 60s that share a nostalgia for pasts not threatened by modernizing pressures.

The second group of narratives is everything that Thesiger and colonial-era anthropologists are not. To cut the long stories short, today’s pastoralists are imbricated through and through by overlapping settler-colonial, racial and global capitalisms. There is a deep irony in that these thorough-going critiques of capitalism end up shadow pricing a past thought to be outside the cash-nexus.

The third group is for me more interesting and recent. It seeks to stand in the pastoralists’ marginal(ized) positions and from there observes and comments on the dominant economies and politics at the center. Some of this effort draws pastoralists to the center by demonstrating how their practices and ways of thinking are shared by, if not have positive implications for, center-based economics, banking, and pandemics (I have in mind the recent work of Ian Scoones and his PASTRES colleagues at IDS Sussex).

II

Here though I want to focus on a fourth group of narratives, and frankly one I don’t even know exists. Certainly it is not full-blown or distinct as the preceding three. This group of narratives are those where contemporary pastoralists are “witnesses-protagonists,” much along the lines of the character, “witness-protagonist,” found in certain period-specific novels.

III

In her 2024 Modern Language Quarterly article, “On the Origins of the Witness-Protagonist,” Anastasia Eccles gives examples of novels where such characters are found. For our purposes, these are less important than the features she ascribes to this type of character:

This essay focuses on the “witness-protagonist”: a recessive but still identifiably major character who observes the developments of the main plot from a position on its margins. Such characters are familiar from modernist novels, but this essay turns back to a formative stage in their history to recover their forgotten political significance. . . .

The witness-protagonist took shape during a period of mass revolution abroad and democratic mobilization in Britain in which constituencies lacking formal recognition claimed the power to remake the structures of collective life. These historical developments turned the phenomenon of “unwarranted” participation into a pressing matter of public debate—and a basic condition of modern political subjectivity. The characters considered here tend to strike readers as illegitimate subjects who do not quite fit into or live up to their assigned roles. Instead of anchoring the whole, as we might expect protagonists to do, they call the form of the whole—its boundaries and its internal arrangement—into question. In their curiously unstable narrative position, they illuminate the formal conditions of democratic agency. . . .

Such a figure thus embodies the apparent paradox of a peripheral center or a major minor character. . .

The witness-protagonist, then, is a character whose status in the novel as a whole is somehow in question. We might say that these characters pose problems of or for form, insofar as form is taken to mean some principle of underlying fit or coherence among the novel’s parts. The signs of this problem are evident in the commentary surrounding these characters, which so often takes the form of a struggle to fix or locate or categorize a figure who does not quite behave like a normal protagonist. . . .

If the novel form projects an imagined community or potential body politic, these novels draw attention to that community’s grounds and limits. By focusing on characters whose station in the novel is anything but secure, they underscore the contingency of any particular arrangement of the collective. . .

Accessed online through https://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article-abstract/doi/10.1215/00267929-11060495/385703/On-the-Origins-of-the-Witness-Protagonist?redirectedFrom=fulltext

I don’t know about you, but I suspect I’m not the only one who sees pastoralists s/he has studied or read about in terms of: being at the margins, but still difficult to locate with respect to the dominant narrative; not like the usual protagonists at the center, but still clearly a center of gravity interacting with that bigger narrative; but so insecurely so as to call into question the dominant narrative(s).

IV

An example is a 2023 Annual Review of Anthropology article, “Financialization and the Household,” by Caitlin Zaloom and Deborah James. Although not explicitly in the preceding terms, the quote below captures this sense of speaking substantively and interactively about the center from the perspective of householders, including rural and poor households at the margins:

Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-100947

Imagine if the very first article you ever read about global financialization began with the preceding quote. Imagine that those articles you actually have read on global financialization must now be re-read as slightly-off-center by comparison. What you thought was the plot all along isn’t the plot with which you could have started.

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Source. Ian Scoones (forthcoming, 2024). Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World. Polity Press.

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3. Contaminated Imaginaries

I have in mind those who regret the passing of pastoralism as if it were a singular institution with its own telos, agency and life-world. It wasn’t and it isn’t. When was the last time these people asked herders their political party affiliation? When was the last time they treated the pastoralist as neoliberal citizen?

I also have in mind those long-trough narratives of depastoralizing, deskilling, and disorganizing the imagined pastoralist life-world, leaving behind all but corpse-pastoralism, flogged by conflicts, mummified by inequality, buried at the sea of liquid modernity, dissolved by the quicklime of disaster capitalism and speculative finance, always harboring worse to come. In these narratives, any pastoralists who survive are like feisty little tardigrades, those near-microscopic (another “marginal”!) organisms that survive in the most hostile environments on the planet.

I also have in mind the hangover notion that policy and procedure are at every turn subordinate to state power, that politicians and officials are nothing but the state’s secretariat to capitalists, that capitalisms have entirely colonized every nook and cranny of the life-worlds, and that we have surrendered our minds entirely to politics, such as they are.

Last, I have in mind the remittance-sending household member who is no more at the geographical periphery of a network whose center is an African rangeland than was Prince von Metternich in the center of Europe, when he said, “Asia begins at the Landstraße” (the outskirts of Vienna closest to the Balkans). You can stipulate Asia begins here and Africa ends there, but good luck in making that stick within and across national policies.

Methodological upshot: It cannot be said often enough that you mustn’t expect reproduction of the same, even when it’s reversion to the mean (Anderson 2020).

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Source: Perry Anderson (2020). “Ukania Perpetua.” New Left Review (accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii125/articles/perry-anderson-ukania-perpetua)

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Related blog entry:

https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/07/most-policy-relevant-entries-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralisms-reposted/

Opera’s advantage is differentiating what we call power in a way that puts the differences side by side, e.g., greed next to revenge next to goodness next to jealousy next to love next to. . ., resonating like tuning forks together momentarily.

The last link below is to a very accomplished production of the opera, Il Giustino, by Antonio Vivaldi. There’s lots of stuff about this power of this opera, e.g. from online sources:

Il Giustino relates the appearance of the goddess Fortune to the peasant Giustino, his rise to leadership of the Byzantine army and the defeat of a Scythian army under Vitaliano, and the jealousy of the emperor Anastasio, who suspects Giustino of having designs on his wife Arianna and on the throne itself. misunderstandings straightened out for a peasant to be proclaimed emperor? https://operavision.eu/performance/il-giustino

Love, eroticism, jealousy and intrigue, war and violence, lust for power, tests of courage and great visions: Antonio Vivaldi’s »Il Giustino« offers an action-packed and emotionally charged stage spectacle about the young farmer Giustino’s rise to the apex of Roman politics. https://www.staatsoper-berlin.de/en/veranstaltungen/il-giustino.11043/

As the opera is long, those who can afford 20 minutes to get a sense of what’s on store try from 1:08.20 minutes – 1:28.16 minutes at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cur90vb_5ko&list=RDcur90vb_5ko&start_radio=1 (for those who seek intelligible English subtitles, go to Settings, then Auto-Generate, and click on “English”)

Control is at the heart of professional risk management.

Risk management refers to “coordinated activities to direct and control an organization with regard to risk, ” according to the standard-setting international guidelines, ISO 31000:2018 (https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:31000:ed-2:v1:en ). These do concede, however, that “Controls may not always exert the intended or assumed modifying effect,” without feeling obligated to underscore that such aftereffects increase risks too often.

The danger in stopping short by organizing around presumptively independent probabilities and consequences of failure (the defining topoi of “risk”) is that, stranded at your cognitive limits, you don’t realize what you have before you are little more than contingencies interdependently associated with aftermaths. At these limits, your official risk management framework misleads you in thinking otherwise.

This means starting with and taking seriously our cognitive limits and biases.

For example, the Fundamental Attribution Error has been defined as: The failure to recognize and explain human behavior by reference to situation in which the person finds himself or herself. Do appeals then to the absolute priority of universal human rights over the irreducible particularities of being commit this error? Or is there also a human right to commit that error?

Either way, control doesn’t come out looking good.

I

At the beginning of my career, I wanted to write a book on poverty, defense and environment. A centering focus on poverty today? More likely, it’d be Inequality. Today, “defense”? More likely, International Security. “Environment”? Better to think in terms of the Climate Emergency, Species Extinction and Biodiversity Loss. The change, in this recasting, has been twofold: the today’s topics not only differ, they are now capitalized as extreme.

In the spirit of asking ourselves, “What’s missing in this recent way of thinking?,” I want to suggest that topic of the public debt remains hugely important but perennially uncapitalized in ways that help us rethink current policy urgencies and priorities.

II

If I am reading historians Istvan Hont and Michael Sonenscher correctly, 18th century thinkers wrestled again and again with the constitutional means for reining in the bad-side of public debt (e.g., rulers use the monies to war), while promoting the good-side (e.g., rulers build the infrastructure Adam Smith himself saw necessary for human betterment).

What interests me here, however, is when did forecasting public finances become so much a part of the government remit that the public debt has become so predictably unwieldly? Does the noise that comes with contemporary forecasting drown out the other messages sent by the public debt, namely, what is it to need something so much that it cannot be regulated in the ways desired?

How might this work out?

III

Constitutional proposals to ensure balanced budgets have come and gone; actual constitutional amendments, e.g. Germany’s restricting budget deficits to no greater than a certain percent of GDP, are suspended or circumvented. Green golden rules are proposed today that “would exclude any increase in net green public investment from the fiscal indicators used to measure compliance with fiscal rules,” recognizing however that “by allowing green spending to be financed by borrowing. . .could undermine public debt sustainability”.

How then do we get out of the much-touted messes of public debt? Short answer: We don’t. We recast by first differentiating and bringing granularity into the analysis of public debts, plural.

You can start anywhere. (Isn’t that the methodological advantage of constructing everything to be connected to everything else?) For my part, I start with aquaculture.

The negatives of commercial, government, and donor-funded aquaculture are well-documented. Yet even where true as far as it goes, those insights have to be pushed into the distribution of really-existing cases. Are shrimp aquaculture projects off the shores of Louisiana and Bangladesh negative in the same ways? No, because context must matter, or it wouldn’t be aquaculture as actually practiced over a run of different cases. To take an empirical generalization—more roads lead to more traffic congestion—and elevate it to Downs Law—peak-hour congestion rises to meet its capacity maximum—is to willfully ignore those cases where the latter instances just do not hold in real time.

IV

I want to underscore the methodological point of the public debt being granularized into public debts experienced in the varied here’s and now’s.

Doing so insists on use of the present tense throughout the analysis. “Present tense compresses event and narration into one temporal register, an immediate here-now.” It is to insist on the context-specific relevance in policy and management of contingency and immediacy, direct and near-instantaneous, over any kind of pretense of foreclosure by human conclusions, judgments and pronouncements.

This real-time pivot renders some very interesting “if-then” clauses. For example, if cities are killing the planet, then they also continue to the sites of real-time demographic transition where poorer women experience lower their birth rates and increase their education and incomes as well as serving as the locus of many democratic movements and the source of much of our art, culture, commerce and technology. If the public debt is our ruination, then we have to push that point further to how public debts are experienced, here and now.

VI

So what? Well, carry on with the other if-then possibilities until you find something that sticks by way of policy relevance:

Then public debts are like keystone ecosystems, the way groundwater systems are central to other dependent terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Or, then these debts are experienced like those wonderful recordings of performers whose grunts and equipment sounds we routinely overlook or ignore, like when portions of a painter’s palette are more pleasing than the painting. Or, then public debts are the infrastructures experienced as the social property of the propertyless, who know best when and how to depreciate their assets.

. . .

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Ideas and wording drawn from:

Darvas, Z. (2022) “Legal options for a green golden rule in the European Union’s fiscal
framework.” Policy Contribution 13/2022, Bruegel (accessed online at https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/2022-07/PC%2013%202022.pdf)

Dyk, Silke van and M. Kip (2023). “Rethinking social rights as social property: alternatives to private property, and the democratisation of public politics.” Critical Sociology (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08969205231195378)

Hont, I. (2005). Jealousy of Trade. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

Johnson, N. (2023). “Times of interest: longue-durée rates and capitalist stabilization.” (accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii143/articles/nic-johnson-times-of-interest)

Kornbluh, A. (2024). “Immediacy [excerpt]; ‘The prose poetry upsurge’, Protean (accessed online at https://proteanmag.com/2024/02/08/immediacy-excerpt/)

Mammola, S. et al (2023). “Groundwater is a hidden global keystone ecosystem.” Global Change Biology (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.17066)

Paprocki, K. (2022). “Anticipatory ruination.” The Journal of Peasant Studies (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2022.2113068)

Sonenscher, M. (2007). Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.

Vallée, S. (2023). “Germany has narrowly swerved budget disaster – but its debt taboo still threatens Europe.” (accessed online at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/13/germany-budget-debt-europe-constitution-crisis).

–“First off,” the project designer tells us, “I’m always working in unstudied conditions. Every major project, I’ve got to make assumptions.” I counter: The challenge of project designers is to find out what are the better practices for starting off complex project designs. I mean the really-existing practices that have emerged and been modified over a run of different cases and shown to be more effective for design implementation.

“But how can a field or discipline grow if it doesn’t do something the first time?” This follow-on response is often stated as established fact. Here too better practices are to be first searched for. Or better put: Where they aren’t found, then, yes, systemwide innovation should not be undertaken if it reduces options, increases task volatility, and diminishes maneuverability in real-time complex system operations.

“But, there always has to be someone who does something for the very first first-time, right?” But I counter, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate this is indeed the very first time. This is a planet of 7.5+ billion, after all.

“But still,” now the economists, press: “What about the irreplacable role of innovation in the economy?” Well, yes, that’s true as far as it goes, but the economists need to go further. So too are the foundational infrastructures upon which the innovation economy depend. To treat innovation as more important than the infrastructures (without whose reliability there wouldn’t be most innovations) risks Mercator’s projection: It over-enlarges the already large.

–Innovation evangelicals would have us believe that everything existing is already an anachronism. The form to be freed from the stone is out-of-date because there’s surely something better than stone. But why is it better to innovate as the next step ahead rather than improve the step now taken?