OKAY, I’LL DO IT

Have you visited a school lately?  Have you walked into a classroom?  It’s a different place from the one you might have attended if you are approaching my age.  Technology has hit the schoolhouse; it’s wired nowadays.  So schools are no stranger to change, yet change can still be a daunting process.  This blog is dedicated to convince you, the reader, that change is needed.  My target is not a “thing” technology, but an idea.  It is how we view the content of our civics curriculum.  The challenge which I write about will prove to be more difficult to accomplish.  Such a curricular change hits at basic assumptions, biases, aesthetics, senses of loyalty, and even notions of self-worth.  For example, the change I am advocating questions how we view liberty, such a cherished, self-defining attribute that we, as a nation, hold.  Yet, as I pointed out in my last posting, there might be certain historical trends, currently making themselves felt, that would help, if not necessitate, a move toward what is being “pitched” in this blog.

Of course, the proposed change is to move our view of civics from one which holds the natural rights construct as the dominant view in determining the content of our civics lessons, to what I have termed the liberated federalism construct.  As a proposed change, any effort to accomplish it would benefit from understanding what is involved with planned change, change that is conscious and deliberate.  There is a literature, in the social sciences, that reflects the research that has been done in this field.  I want to visit a portion of that literature so that we can consider the overall challenge of what I am proposing.

Robert Chin and Kenneth D. Benne offer an overview of strategies that have evolved.  These strategies represent three different approaches to the efforts of change.  But before I review these three approaches (a topic of my next posting), I want to tie these strategy types to a basic political concept, power.  I have written earlier in the blog about power.  I have used Robert Dahl’s relatively simple definition of power:  a person has power over someone else if he/she can get another person to do what he/she would not do otherwise.[1]  Further, I have cited two scholars’ work that identifies different forms of power.  John R. P. French and Bertram H. Raven identified five motivational types based on why someone would be convinced to yield to the dictates of another; i. e., the mental states that would lead one to do something he or she would not do otherwise. They are perceptions of coercion, reward, legitimacy, expertise, or referential desire (known as coercive power, reward power, legitimacy power, expert power, and referent power,).[2]

Coercive power occurs when a person acts in accordance with the wishes of another in order to avoid punishment, either initial punishment or the continuation of punishment.  Punishment can take many forms from physical harm to financial losses.  It can also be psychological in the form of guilt, shame, love lost, embarrassment, fear, and the like.  If experienced, punishment, especially if it is viewed as unjustified, can and is likely to elicit a desire for revenge.  If the conditions are right, the exercise of coercive power can lead to a cycle of coercive activity as in violence begetting violence.  This should be a consideration one would be wise to calculate before using coercive power.  On the other hand, coercive power might be viewed as the only option to attain what is perceived as an essential state of being.

Reward power is doing the bidding of others in the anticipation of receiving what one wants to attain.  Usually, this is in the form of money, but it can be in the form of psychological benefits – affection, love, kinship, fame, respect, and the like – or some physical entity – a car, a diamond ring, a trophy, a favored parking space, etc.  Reward power does not spur negative consequences other than the costs of issuing them.  These costs, though, can be substantial.

Legitimacy power occurs when someone does something he/she will not do otherwise due to a sense of doing the right thing.  Usually involved is a sense of duty or obligation.  One can see that if the act is not done, guilt can be the result so there is, in such a case, an overlap with coercive power; the difference being that there is no inkling that the requested behavior is unjustified.  Therefore, if one can convince a person or population that certain behaviors or aversion to behaviors is legitimate, then compliance will not elicit any resentment.  If the necessary beliefs are not present, then the party wanting to exert legitimate power needs to instill such beliefs.  This can prove to be expensive and difficult.

Expert power occurs when someone does something he/she would not do otherwise because he/she is being told to do so by someone who knows what is the best (or better) course of action.  An example from everyday life that comes to mind is the power a doctor has over a patient when the doctor convinces the patient of a change in lifestyle choices – such as giving up smoking.  The key here is twofold:  convincing the subject that the power holder is expert enough and that the subject is disciplined enough to follow suit.

Referent power occurs when someone does something he/she would not do otherwise because he/she wants to be associated with some person, group, movement, or something such as an idea (ideology) or symbol.  It is a form of reward power, but association usually involves an ongoing connection into the future.  A sense of belonging is the “reward” and, as such, deserves to be distinguished from what is usually considered a reward.

Those are the types of power that French and Raven insightfully wrote about back in the 1950s.  This formulation, I believe, is still a powerful conceptualization.  It is particularly helpful for those who want to begin to learn what is needed in order to initiate change.  If we look at civics education, for example, the current view has been institutionalized for a fair amount of time.  So if one wants to work toward changing an important element of our national curriculum, one is taking on a difficult task.  There should be no doubt about that.  Elementary use of the above list of power types quickly points to the fact that most coercive resources, in the form of job security, and most reward resources, such as job advancement, are in the hands of those who hold the current curricular biases that support the natural rights construct.  This should be kept in mind as I review the types of strategies Chin and Benne offer.  As I stated above, I will review those strategy types in my next posting.

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[1] Dahl, R. A.  (1957).  The concept of power.  See https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/Dahl_Power_1957.pdf .

[2]French, J. R. P. and Raven, B. H. (1967). The bases of power. In. E. P. Hollander and R. G. Hunt (Eds.) Current perspectives in social psychology (504-512). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 

CONTENTIOUS SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC THINKING

I wish I had a nickel for every time I have written in this blog, “sixty or so years ago.”  The phrase refers to the notion that about sixty or so years ago, the natural rights construct became the prominent mental construct among Americans as to how they thought and felt about government and politics.  That promotion was at the expense of the traditional federalist construct.  I have in this blog shared some of the history that traces the transfer.  I wrote about how since the times of the early republic, our political beliefs and feelings have slowly drifted from the puritanical origins of congregational unions.  That origin led the way to our governmental foundational bias of forming polities through the use of covenantal arrangements.  I will spare you a whole retelling of the story; let it suffice to say that this religiously inspired origin went through secularization and then a shift from a collectivist orientation to a stronger and stronger individualism. 

In the past century, we had the effects of the Great Depression and World War II.  These two tide-changing experiences proved to be the end of the dominance of the federalist – the construct reflecting our covenantal perspective – mindset and the beginning of the dominance of the natural rights mindset.  In my telling of this story, to date, I have left out the effect of the influence our reliance on science has had.  I alluded to it when early on I related how the growth of positivist scientism influenced our views of the social sciences and the reliance on systems theory.  Since this blog is about civics, I emphasized how this influence affected political science.  What I left out was that the adoption of a science bias was not without contentious claims and a bit of a conflict among those who favored a more scientific approach to studying social realities.  That conflict has had consequences and they are of such a nature that they need to be accounted for if we are serious about implementing a newer form of federalism.  Let me explain.

We, as a culture, have adopted science so thoroughly that it is easy to believe that the influence of science has been around for centuries.  Not so.  The effects of science on our culture can be dated back only to the end of the nineteenth century.  The famous early social scientists had their “heydays” back in the late 1800s.  At that time, such pioneers as Vilfred Pareto, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber began using more scientific methodologies to study social realities.  There began to evolve a general belief that science could study any realm of reality and render such explanations and understandings so that someday one could predict how people would behave under given situations.  After all, the purpose of science is to be able to predict.  One strong spokesperson of this view was Lester F. Ward.  He wrote:

Man’s destiny is in his own hands.  Any law that he can comprehend he can control. … His power over nature is unlimited. … Human institutions are not exempt from this all-pervading spirit of improvement.  They, too, are artificial, conceived in the ingenious brain and wrought with mental skill born of inventive genius.  The passion for their improvement is of a piece with the impulse to improve the plow or the steam engine.[1]

That viewpoint only became stronger as the new century took hold.

Between 1900 and 1950, spurred on by the progressive forces of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and then the challenges of World War II, there was a very strong bias that undermined the remnants of the federalist view.  That newer bias held that desired social change could be engineered with enough social scientific knowledge.  That change could not only be substantively formulated by the use of such knowledge, but its implementation could also be achieved by the appropriate experts and sufficient resources – usually meaning enough money.  Such efforts entailed large bureaucracies, high levels of central planning, and national efforts.  Of course, this flew in the face of federalist thinking that relied heavily on local community responses to social ills.  Part of the problem was that social problems themselves had become national in scope, mostly pushed by a more national and then international economic system.  Local realities were to ever greater degrees being affected by events farther and farther away.  The Great Depression and a world war brought these realities into sharp focus and could no longer be denied by objective observation.  But not everyone bought into this “engineering” approach.

One of the outspoken critics of this planned change approach was William Graham Summer.  While these critics did not turn their collective backs on the use of science, they did find the ambitious projects these social engineers were conducting as troublesome.  Not only did such critics view Ward’s view a folly – a naïve and presumptive form of arrogance – but sacrilegious:  we study social realities scientifically to gain insight, but “never in the world by reconstruction of society on the plan of some enthusiastic social architect.”[2]  Instead, Sumner saw such knowledge as merely an assistance as one goes about his/her business.  Society, under this view, will balance itself out if the natural human and physical forces are allowed to “do their thing.”  He argued for a laissez faire approach and saw Wardian engineering as meddlesome and even dangerous.  He called for such efforts as affronts and urged all these do-gooders to mind their own business.

Since those days, we have had a heavy dose of both approaches.  The engineers took an early advantage as the nation, as stated above, slogged through the Great Depression and then had to conduct the monumental effort of defeating the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.  But even though overall they met with successes, they were not unqualified successes.  It took an entire ten years to get out of the depression – not until preparation spending for the war did we get to full employment – and the war effort left us with a new enemy, the Soviet Union.  But what finally cost the engineers their favored position was the social upheavals associated with the Vietnam War – the engineers got us into that mistake – and finally the Great Inflation of the 1970s.  Taking its place was the old Sumner view of laissez faire under the guise of Reaganomics.  Of course, not all of the measures instituted by the engineers disappeared.  Remnants of the Progressive Era and the New Deal survived:  Social Security, FDIC, and the FED are examples.  And the older line of thinking also had later successes such as Medicare and Medicaid.  Economically, we, under the regime of the engineers, had an economic policy described as Keynesian from the 1930s to 1980 which relied heavily on expert economic planning.  This was replaced by the supply side economic regime introduced by Reagan’s administration.  With the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, a lot of that economic construct has come under attack.  That’s where we are today.  Things are in flux; perhaps it’s time for a change.

There is more talk of what is known as clinical, as opposed to engineered, approaches to change.  This approach is more reliant on personal narratives, interactions with subjects, partnership building, collaboration, and shared decision-making.  It doesn’t disregard positivist/quantitative based knowledge, but sees such study as verification for what is learned from qualitative study.  It sees politics less as a zero-sum game and more of a win-win game.  Whether a new approach is developed where this more inclusive view becomes dominant, we will see.  There is one arena where this newer approach is being used and the critics are vociferous; that’s in the field of foreign relations.

President Obama has been trying to institute a foreign relations approach that relies more heavily on diplomacy.  His recently negotiated deal with the Iranians is an example.  I will not analyze the whole range of issues involved, but the President’s stance is one of seeking an arrangement with Iran in which both sides win.  The President’s critics accuse him of weakness that will be exploited by our adversaries.  I believe this illustrates the challenges that a more federalist approach will have to overcome.  We’ll see what the outcome will be.

In any event, the stage is set.  Will a newer form of federalism be able to take hold?  If so, will it mean that such a change will cause a ripple effect in other realms of our social life?  Can it affect, for example, what we teach in schools, in our civics classrooms?

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[1] Quoted in Benne, K. D., Bennis, W. G., Chin, R.  (1985).  Planned change in America.  In W. G. Bennis, K. D. Benne, and R. Chin (Eds.) Planning of Change (pp. 11-21).  New York, NY:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston.  Quotation on p. 15.

[2] Ibid., p. 15.