Assume that evidence can be generalized as follows: Unionized firms as compared to nonunionized firms have lower rates of productivity, employment creation and investment, other things equal. Even putting aside all the contrary evidence, we still ask: So what?

These are generalizations only. Localized scenarios in which the opposite holds are possible and counter-cases available. Considerable evidence suggests that the ‘‘union/nonunion’’ dichotomy masks great variability in collective bargaining laws and wage arrangements across countries and regions.

That variability, in turn, suggests taking a deeper look at the macro-design standpoints with respect to unions or not. What human rights, for instance, are at issue when one talks about unionization? In reviewing the literature, one quickly realizes that the rights concerned relate less to any ‘‘right to unionization’’ and more to traditional rights of collective bargaining and freedom of association.

Focusing on different rights, in turn, means the earlier starting focus on empirical generalizations about unionization and economic growth is too narrow. We should also be looking at the evidence related to economic growth and collective bargaining arrangements, both generally and specifically. We would then better understand why local conditions are so variable with respect to unions.

–Take a peek at the track record of advisers to their leaders:

• Plato and Dionysius II;
• Aristotle and Alexander the Great;
• Seneca and Nero;
• Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf;
• Petrarch and Emperor Charles IV;
• Montaigne and Henri IV;
• Descartes and Sweden’s Queen Christina;
• Leibnitz and the Dukes of Hanover;
• Voltaire and Frederick the Great;
• Diderot and Catherine the Great; and
• in case you want to add to the list, Adam Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch or Goethe and Prince Carl August, and so on through the centuries. . .
• Or if you really want to cringe, consider André Gide recommending against publishing Marcel Proust, Edward Garnett against publishing James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot against publishing George Orwell. . . .

I mean, get real: If these guys didn’t advise effectively, who are we to think we can do better? (And, puhleeese, don’t throw up Kissinger and Nixon as a working template!)

–So what? Two things. It’s hard to imagine two words scarier in English than “designing leadership.” And we should take to heart the extensions of, “It was beyond our mental capabilities to predict Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in 2016.”

We don’t need more justification for raising taxes. The reasons have been evident for some time. You might expect me to follow with, “What’s been missing is the political will to raise these taxes.” No, it’s better to say that we’ve had too much political will insisting this, that and everything else and not enough of the details for doing so.

–Political historian, F.S. Oliver, pointed out the crux decades ago:

One of the discomforts of living in a progressive society is that new fiscal methods are constantly required in order to cover the rising expenditure. . .What weigh most, however, with Treasury officials, when they are seeking to balance a budget, are not so much considerations of abstract justice, as the knowledge that old sources [of tax revenue] will dry up if an attempt is made to draw too much from them. (my bold)

To adapt the point, what is missing are scenarios granular enough to evaluate fiscal instruments for shifting government expenditures across old and new budget categories.

–One clear mechanism for new revenues and reallocation are reductions in tax evasion and use of tax havens. Contrary to public choice theory, tax avoidance is not free-riding on those of us who pay taxes. The defect lies with those whose institutional duty is to prevent tax evasion: government and the regulators.

Principal sources

Oliver, F.S. (1930, 1931, 1935). The Endless Adventure. 3 Vols., Macmillan and Company: London

Strang, C. (1970). “What if Everyone Did That?” in Baruch Brody (ed.), Moral Rules and Particular Consequences, Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ

For me, it’s not good enough to say power is primarily about A making B do something instead. Nor is it good enough to say power is about controlling the decision agenda or determining peoples’ interests without them knowing it. More, when it comes to the policy and management issues with which I am familiar, power isn’t concentrated in or dispersed through interests, full stop.

The power I am talking about lies in surprise and, since surprise is that chief feature of complexity, surprise and its power should be thought of as complex from the get-go. Better then to say the power I am talking about is the power of surprising connections.

It is thinking through the reverberations that, in my mind, connect Adorno starting an opera on Tom Sawyer, Picasso painting Buffalo Bill Cody, Sartre preparing a screenplay on Freud, Benjamin Britten facing the prospect of becoming a bandmaster (or Samuel Beckett a commercial airplane pilot), Coleridge and fellow poet Robert Southey planning an egalitarian community on shores of the Susquehanna, Goethe’s plan to clean up the streets of Venice, Kafka drafting rules for a socialist workers’ cooperative, and Abraham Lincoln and Hedy Lamarr securing their respective patents. More than “w” (as in “war”) links Walt Whitman the medical orderly, Max Weber the hospital orderly, and Ludwig Wittgenstein the dispensary porter.

The objective correlative of contingency is this power to connect differently. Where so, the great threat to addressing power is to think there is an outside to contingency: as if asking, “What is more important, power or contingency?”, and being told, “But that’s like asking which chopstick is the fork…”

I

Start with a question asked of a workshop’s invitees:

What are the challenges, practices and strategies of governing infrastructure reliability and safety in organizational networks?

In my mind, the questioning and answering take place in this way and order: What are the system boundaries of the operating infrastructure? What are the standards of reliability and safety being managed to for system-level operations? What are system risks and uncertainties that follow from managing to that standard for that system?

In the process of answering the three, I would specifically probe for the changing interconnectivity between and among latent and manifest boundaries, standards, and risks/uncertainties.

II

So what? Yes, definition and clarification of terms are needed, but not with respect to the initial ones of safety and reliability. In my recasting, it is case-specific system, boundaries, standards, risks/uncertainties and interconnections that are gasping for the same air now sucked away by struggles in better defining “reliability, safety and networks.”

Or to shift the analogy. For centuries, ancient Greek architecture has been praised for its pure forms and perfect proportions. Then came along those who did more site research, suggesting that the bare stone we see today could have been covered by all manner of rough stucco and garish paint. What too then of those forms we—myself included—have abstracted as reliability, safety and networks?

Out of the blue, got a call from Ray R. Haven’t heard from him since he took my class—when? He’s Director of Planning, County Welfare Agency, and wants me to help write the Agency’s five-year action plan. Haven’t dealt with such issues since I fled the social-work track here and five-year district development plans there.

***

Ray briefed me today. Got a briefcase of material. Now for the cast of characters in this melodrama:

• David M., Agency Director, on probation by Board of Trustees of politicos and micro-managers.
• Agency has four departments:
  • Welfare to Work (Doris P, head),
  • Child Youth & Family Services (Rachel F),
  • Adult & Aging Services (Betty W), and
  • Workforce & Resource Development (Pedro X)
• Amanda T. is Deputy Director, to whom Ray–remember, the Director of Planning–reports. You’ll meet Tomas Y, Family Services’ chief consultant, in a moment.

David forced by Board of Trustees to have a long-term action plan. Who can be against action planning? That means, no one is for it, except Ray and Amanda. Agency is one of largest in the Bay Area: Half a billion dollar annual budget, over 2000 employees.

***

Agency waiting room looks like a bus depot in a bad part of town. Private security guard opens doors around 8:30 am. Mostly Blacks, Hispanics and Asians hang around in front. Building is next to probation and courts, all Stalinist construction.

Walls look like they’ve been eaten off where not pissed on. We queue, eventually get up to functionaries behind bullet-proof windows. Mine decides to buzz the outer door open. I sign in. I’ve interrupted the security guy chatting up one of the females. He buzzes the inside door open, and I’m free.

***

Ray introduces me at today’s Executive Committee meeting. Rachel and Betty are burned out. David says not a word. Amanda waits until the others have had their say, and then wades in. Ray’s the only one who smiles. I don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s mostly acronyms, but this part of a learning curve I like. Ray and I arrange interviews with each department head, plus David and Amanda.

***

Went to my first meeting with the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup charged to work with Ray on the Action Plan. (Thinking in CAPS now.) We’re grim. Ray tells me later of another meeting, when they were trying to figure out what to call welfare recipients. Clients? Customers? Consumers? Hell, they’re all suspects, said the head of Welfare Fraud.

***

I just interviewed a guard at a death camp. You can’t imagine how cruel this system is to children, says Rachel about her Child Youth & Family Services department. 20,000 calls to the child abuse hotline a year, only 1200-1500 leading to children being removed from the home. We’re missing lots of kids. We don’t know what bottom is, she says.

Her department’s to reunite children with their families. Reality is that the family’s the problem. She tells me the single best predictor of a foster kid ending up in the juvenile justice system is being reunited with the family.

Some kids have been moved 40 or more times before they graduate from the system at 16 years old. Most families trained as foster care parents drop out early. Every foster kid in the county should get life-long psychiatric therapy, she tells me. Oh, and don’t forget they have more medical and dental problems than do average kids. Most violence done to kids is kid-on-kid violence. An 8-year old kid sexually abuses a younger one. What do you think happened to the 9-year old who committed an armed robbery? He was sent home. You can’t imagine how cruel this system is, she repeats.

Foster care graduates should be guaranteed county jobs, she presses, since they’re the creation of the county and have no other employment possibilities. Number of kids exiting foster care who are prepared to take care of themselves is negligible. She’s really worried about what’s going to happen once parents are time-limited off of welfare assistance. The Action Plan goal is: “Promote healthy development of children and families and healthy aging of elders that emphasize home and community-based services.” I’ll be long retired before the end of that Plan period! For one second, she’s young.

***

Had trouble getting past security. Another meeting with the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup. One thing clear so far: Agency staff know what needs to be done, but they don’t know their clients. Contradictory?

If you have 20,000 calls to a hotline, but respond to 1 out 20, you know what needs to be done—more calls have to be taken seriously—even if you know nothing about who is being abused or doing the abuse. Plus who needs to know the clients, when all trends are getting worse. Next year there’ll be even more calls. The gap between implementation and results is so big, you can’t worry about results (i.e., the impact on the client), until you do something to address implementation (i.e., answer those hotlines).

***

Interviewed Tomas Y today. He’s Rachel’s hired gun to inject new energy into Child Youth & Family Services. He said alot about walking the talk. Interview neatly summarizes the Agency’s problems and proposed solutions:

In brief, the Agency is too

´           fragmented and departmental

´           centralized and headquarters-oriented

´           specialized and narrowly focused

´           focused on needs and immediate crisis response

´           client-centered

´           rooted to desks and offices far from the real problems

´           constrained by categorical funding; and

´           hamstrung by the employee’s union.

Therefore, the Agency should

´           provide integrated services

´           be decentralized and located in the neighborhoods

´           be more generalist and multidisciplinary

´           focused on people’s strengths and longer term prevention and recovery strategies

´           be centered around the whole family

´           have mobile units that go to where the problems are

´           have much more flexible funding; and

´           be working with community-based organizations under performance-based contracts.

Tomas has no—repeat: no—examples of where integrated, decentralized, multidisciplinary, preventative, strengths-oriented, whole-family, mobile, flexibly funded place-based organizations have worked.

In short: All the problems, but none of the solutions, are found in the Agency, while the solutions, all outside the Agency, haven’t been identified by those responsible for finding them. Such is walking the talk.

In the last decade, the Agency has injected into the county economy nearly $2.5 billion in cash assistance alone (excluding staff salaries).

***

The Executive Committee loved my first draft of the roadmap. Convinced them that the Action Plan should have two parts—a roadmap for the future and then the Plan itself. That way, even if the Board of Trustees or the Agency’s critics don’t like specifics of the Plan—what’s this on page 57, line 3?—they still can sign off on the Plan as a whole because they bought into to the short roadmap earlier.

BTW, remember the security guard? He’s been fired. Caught being sucked off. Ray and I speculate about this.

***

We met with Doris, head of the Agency’s largest department, Welfare to Work. Is upset with Rachel re: What happens to kids of parent who are time-limited off welfare?

What are we doing worrying about a problem that hasn’t come up yet and may not even be a problem? We haven’t seen any evidence of this. The whole point of Welfare Reform is that those on the rolls can’t depend indefinitely on the Agency. They have to fall back on their “families” and “communities” at some point. The government safety net is gone. The last resort is the safe haven (no scare quotes!) of community organizations. We no longer provide cash, but match people to jobs. How are the job groups working? I ask. Some 35% of those on the rolls don’t even show up for them. Maybe they’re already employed, she hazards.

Or maybe she hopes I start a rumor to that effect.

***

Executive Committee had meeting to discuss Chapters 1 – 3 (includes “Goals, Strategies and Policies”). I’m again struck by how meetings rehearse one more time who the departments are, what are their problems, and why they can’t do what needs to be done. It’s Agency auto-suggestion enabling it to reconstitute itself daily. Result: There’s always twice as much ground for the meeting to cover.

***

I’m directed to reduce the Plan to a sentence that the Broad of Trustees can understand. One sentence. Okey-dokey:

The Action Plan’s eight goals promote, increase or improve the stability, health and well-being, security and learning, capacity building and access, independence and self-sufficiency, and, equally important, the participation and accountability of County families, neighborhoods, and individuals (including children, elders and persons with disabilities) in the planning, delivery and evaluation of services offered by the Agency and its providers.

***

Interviewed Betty, head of Adult & Aging. Department seems to have its act together, i.e., relies on community-based organizations (CBOs), contractors, encourages local capacity building, has new ideas about public/private partnerships. Feels its approach could be extended Agency-wide to the other departments. Two trends strike her: fastest growing segment of the population is the old-old, the over 85’s. Second, dramatic increase in services required for veterans, with younger veterans than in recent past.

***

Met again with the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup. Went through the draft Plan, goal by goal, focusing on the new policies and strategies for implementing the eight goals. They blew me out of the water with comments. From top to bottom and with apologies to Gregory Corso’s “Bomb”:

***

Ray presented the revised proposals to the Executive Committee. Decided not to submit the full text of each, but to introduce ideas for buy-in. The next meeting we’d submit the full text, with their changes incorporated.

The proposals weren’t savaged as much as I thought by the department heads. This worries me.

Key proposal is the cross-departmental Family Intervention Team (FIT). Rachel felt that the FIT members would have to be new hires. We just don’t have enough staff. Doris dittoed the same for welfare-for-work. I’ll have to change the reference to “Job Group Leader.” I tell her I got the info from her people in the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup. Sometimes I wonder if my staff know anything, she said.

Oh, oh. She’s seen the proposal’s implications, i.e., more scrutiny of her staff and its outputs. DOES NOT LIKE IT. We need random assignment of referrals to the Team, she says abruptly. Tomas says Team should be working on referrals made in light of assessments, as proposed. I’d rather have the support of Doris than Tomas. Doris clams up. This is not good.

Too late, we see that our overheads backfired in one big way. Only after meeting did that become clear.  Doris thinks the FIT will be her department’s responsibility, notwithstanding the Agency-wide scope. Clearly not so in the text, but not clear from the overheads. Bulleted by bullets.

***

By the way, the Executive Committee went word-by-word—WORD-BY-WORD—through Chapter 3’s goals, strategies and policies. Doris had a field day. “Authoritative”? Please, let’s stick with simple English! Improved communications? 20 years ago we said we would improve communications, and haven’t done it yet. Rachel beams, she’s retiring.

***

Ray has given up on the benchmarks and indicators of Plan performance. First, he had them in Chapter 3, where the new policies and strategies are discussed. The Executive Committee didn’t like them there, and frankly they broke the flow of the text. Then Ray put them away in an appendix. Then he tried inserting them in the Chapter 4’s Management Plan and that didn’t fit either. So a section on specific indicators has been dropped altogether.

***

Had final meeting with David today. He’s back and jet-lagged. We go through the draft chapters, hitting the new recommendations concerning policies, strategies and the innovation units. He again pushes his idea about the Agency facilitating creation and operation of different networks of providers that vary in terms of subject area, e.g., one network for providers working on substance abuse, another for mental health, and so on.

Doris has been maneuvering behind the scenes. David tells us she saw him in the morning and said, Yes, she supports FIT, but she can’t possibly agree to fund it until her own staffing problems are solved. David sees this as reasonable. Ray doesn’t say much. I say it’s blackmail. I tell David she’s holding ransom a fifteen-person unit by demanding that her 60+ vacancies be filled first. The punishment she’s exacting isn’t proportional to our “crime.” David equivocates, but says he supports the key proposals and “will make them happen.”

I leave, feeling irrationally hopeful that David’s meeting tomorrow with the Executive Committee on the four chapters will end the right way. As for my involvement, it stops here.

***

Called Ray after I got back from my conference. How did the Executive Committee meeting go?

Terrible, he says. Worse meeting he’s ever had. In fact, told Amanda he was back on the job market. What happened?! Seems Doris had made a side deal with the other department heads that would effectively nudge Ray out of monitoring implementation of the Action Plan, leaving it to the separate departments.

“Causal power means the power to bring about some sort of change at the level of empirical events. The Critical Realist (CR) philosophy of science argues that “there are enduring structures and generative mechanisms underlying and producing observable phenomena and events” (Bhaskar 2011: 2). According to CR, causal mechanisms are the “relatively enduring structures of nature and their characteristic ways of acting” that scientific activity tries to identify and characterize. These mechanisms may or may not be empirically observable. Mechanisms possess causal powers, “which, when triggered or released, act as generative mechanisms, with natural necessity and universality (within their range) so as to codetermine the manifest phenomena of the world, which occur for the most part in open systems: that is, where constant conjunctions do not pertain” (Bhaskar 2009a: 17).

“This ‘codetermination’ may take the form of generating or preventing, enabling or constraining, events, or effects (Hartwig 2007). A law in CR is not a constant conjunction of events but the characteristic pattern of activity, or tendency, of a mechanism (Steinmetz 1998). CR also argues that that mechanisms and their powers shape the course of empirical events within open systems. . .Single causal mechanisms do not act in isolation or in universal conjunctions in producing empirical effects. Causal laws should not be “regarded as empirical regularities” but instead as the expressions of the “tendencies of things” (Bhaskar 2009b: 199; 1997: 10).

“In open systems, mechanisms combine to produce actual events conjuncturally, that is to say, in concert with other mechanisms (Steinmetz 1998). The events, processes, cultural phenomena, etc., that are studied by sociologists are always “multiply determined” and always within causal “conjunctures” (Bhaskar 2009b: 196). While there are, of course, other definitions of causal mechanisms, and while some readers find the metaphor of “mechanism” rebarbative, its use in CR is distinctly non-mechanical (Gorski 2009).”

I take this to mean that the enduring contribution of the social sciences to really-existing policy analysis and public management is the two-notion of the sample and the intervening variables.

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Source. George Steinmetz (2025). “Explaining Geopolitical Inventiveness: Late colonialism, decolonization, and the Cold War (1945-1970).” Social Science History (accessed online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/explaining-geopolitical-inventiveness-late-colonialism-decolonization-and-the-cold-war-19451970/3F9A71473EDB5E5562CC1AA8BCAA46B1)

The article demonstrates how climate and capitalism crises need to be analyzed together, if the interconnected emotions of anxiety and burnout are to be addressed effectively..

I agree. My problem is I worry how readers often conflate advocacy and analysis.

First, I feel the author is right in saying: “these insights could be deepened by placing them in the context of the care crisis of neoliberal capitalism”; “such reforms could help create the preconditions for deeper post-capitalist transformation”; and “a ‘polycrisis’ lens might usefully decenter the climate crisis while informing a broader analytic framework and political program”.

But then the author asserts that “this must be a form of polycrisis analysis deeply influenced by Feminist and ecological Marxism”. Also, some of those could-reforms “must prioritize public transit over private cars, circular economies, and extended producer responsibility to reduce extraction as far as possible”. Indeed and also specifically [my bolding below]:

To a large extent this requires the decommodification of care, involving ‘universal guarantees in place that all people will be entitled to care,’ along with expanding publicly funded childcare, physical and mental healthcare, elderly care, and care for those with disabilities (ibid: 195–196). It also requires revitalizing community infrastructures – like libraries, community centers, parks, and public spaces – that have decayed under decades of neoliberal privatization and austerity (particularly in poor communities) (Rose 2020). More broadly, ending the care crisis requires social programs that dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the emotionally distressing dynamics of debt and unemployment by improving economic security for all.

I have no problem with these requirements! My problem is the paradox: Conditions are sufficiently uncertain that we cannot say the proposed reforms would actually work, but we are certain enough to say that these proposed reforms entail must-requirements with varying degrees of specificity.

Now there is nothing inherently “illogical” about taking that latter position. In fact, it’s what we expect from policy advocacy. This is what policy advocates do; theirs is not to analyze the uncertainties and certainties case-by-case, which I would do as a practicing policy analyst.

Policy analysts of course make recommendations and that is an advocacy of sorts. But they do so in the face of that case-specific determination of what is “sufficiently certain” and “certain enough.” For advocates, the determination is a settled matter with respect to their cases.

—

Source: Michael J. Albert (2025). “It’s not just climate: rethinking ‘climate emotions’ in the age of burnout capitalism. Environmental Politics (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2025.2526228).

I

Another growing concern about the US Supreme Court is its expanding “shadow docket.” “Emergency applications,” writes the New York Times‘s Adam Kushner,

require a snap decision about whether a policy can go ahead or must wait while lower judges argue over its legality. Critics call this the “shadow docket,” and the court usually rules on the urgent cases within weeks. Trump has won almost all 18 of these petitions. And unlike normal rulings, justices often don’t explain their rationale.

What is of interest here isn’t so much the shadow docket itself as it is how some Justices see what they are doing in deciding this way. Kushner elaborates:

None of these emergency decisions are final. In each, lawyers can fight the policy in lower courts. Perhaps the Supreme Court will eventually decide that the government can’t deport migrants from around the world to Sudan or unmake a federal agency without the say-so of Congress. But by then, critics of the shadow docket say, the work will already be done.

The justices themselves have battled over the propriety of emergency rulings. In a 2021 dissent, Elana Kagan rued a midnight ruling that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade in Texas. A month later, Samuel Alito returned fire in a speech:

The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways. … You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way.

Some law professors have built a new database tracking the rise of the emergency docket. The first half of 2025 represented a record high, with 15 emergency applications accepted as of June 18. The next highest peak was 11, from the final year of the previous Trump administration.

(accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/briefing/a-supreme-court-mystery.html

Let’s extend that analogy, “You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way”.

II

Imagine if you will the shadow docket consists of the real-time decisions of the justices (if only aspirationally) as reliability professionals. They see themselves managing the federal justice infrastructure not only during its routine operations but also during turbulent periods of just-in-time or just-for-now.

One research finding takes on considerable prominence in this thought experiment, namely: Control rooms managing just-for-now–“just keep that generator on line for now!”–do so outside standard operating procedures and routines.

Here, the emergency is such that real-time reliability of the electric grid requires keeping that generator on line, even though it was scheduled for mandatory maintenance and repair at that time. Duch exceptions, while allowed, in no way are meant to undermine the official practice and procedure of routine repair and maintenance.

So too for an aspirational Supreme Court-as-control room. Our early Federalists also worried about systemwide emergencies, and the accommodation they made was that, yes, presidential emergency powers may be needed in extraordinary times (think of Lincoln during the Civil War). But these would not serve as precedent for governance thereafter (Fatovic 2009). Or in the case of the quoted shadow docket, the legal determination comes later after lower court deliberations.

III

The real problem, of course, lies in Alito’s analogy. Yes, there are doctors in the emergency room, but there’s little else that is empirical. The justices are not emergency management teams in emergencies, and thereafter a team of physicians the rest of the time. By and large, career physicians and career emergency staff are different professions requiring different skills and orientations, at least if you take the management literatures seriously. To think the longer-care physician translates easily into the emergency ward is like thinking you can make fish from fish soup.

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Source: C. Fatovic, (2009). Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.