Organising and Disorganising: A Dynamic and non-linear theory of institutional emergence and its implications ebook | Michael Thompson | 9781908009203

We may believe that our perspective is the right one and that any interaction with opposing views is a messy and unwelcome distraction. Yet the current financial crisis perfectly illustrates the danger of allowing one voice (individualist/markets) to drown out all the others.

Using a range of examples and analogies, the author shows that what is needed is constructive and argumentative engagement: the democratisation, in other words, of processes. And in order to actually do that democratising, we have to avoid silencing any of the voices. In this way each approach gets more of what it wants and less of what it doesn't want.

Cultural Theory argues that there are five ways of organizing (voices): the hierarchical (e.g. the Government), the egalitarian (e.g. Greenpeace), the individualistic (e.g. the markets), the fatalistic (nothing will make any difference) and the autonomous (deliberate avoidance of the coercive involvement in the other four). Each approach is a way of disorganising the other four, and without the other four it would have nothing to organize itself against.

The importance of Cultural Theory is brought into focus through case studies involving UNEP, DfID, Shell, the World Bank, Nepal, Arsenal Football Club, to name a few, illustrating the dynamics of how to enable responsible and enlightened action on challenging issues.

The lively style of the presentation - punctuated with the author's delightful wit and humour - and its rigorous attention to detail makes this book suitable for anyone who understands the importance of variety and diversity, and how it can be used to achieve 'best outcomes'.

Originally a professional soldier, Michael Thompson studied anthropology (University College London and Oxford) while also following a career as a Himalayan mountaineer (Annapurna South Face 1970, Everest Southwest Face 1975). His early research on how something second-hand becomes an antique, or a rat-infested slum part of Our Glorious Heritage ("Rubbish Theory", Oxford University Press 1979), diverted him into teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art, London and at Portsmouth University's School of Architecture, and from there to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an East-West think-tank in Austria. There he worked on energy futures, on risk perception and on environment and development in the Himalayan Region, the key-unifying concept in all that being "plural rationality": people doing very different things and yet still behaving rationally, given their different sets of convictions as to how the world is and people are.

With his mis-spent youth continuing into (and way beyond) middle-age, Michael Thompson is still teasing out the various ideas of fairness that underpin the different rationalities and that are so seldom given adequate recognition in global-level decision-making, devising ways of clumsifying and democratising international development aid, and enquiring into how urban infrastructures (those, for instance, that handle human waste by putting it into the water cycle) can be re-engineered so as to make cities into "forces for environmental good".