| |
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
RE: EOpriv: El Salvador and surge in privatization push
Shann,
Congratulations on your upcoming publication, A New Way
to Govern. If you think that Choice and Booklist, review
publications of the American LIbrary Assoction used by academic and public
libraries. are sufficiently high profile, I would be happy tor recieve a
pre-ublicaton copy and submit reviews to them for
publication.
Mary
If COG wants to
take up Vic Thorpe's suggestion below that the problems of privatization be a
topic for our conference next October then I would like to offer a
contribution. As I stated at our last conference, distributed control
can be more important than distributed ownership. My contribution would
be to show how distributed control can be implemented to legitimize
distributed ownership as well as showing how to introduce distributed
ownership.
The UK Prime Minster, Margaret Thatcher, made the UK a role
model for privatization around the world. However, the failure of their
railways has proved that there are serious flaws in this approach. The
World Bank and IMF would appear to be blind to the empirical evidence that has
become so blatantly obvious to UK citizens, academics, treasury officials and
the government. As a result I was commissioned by a leading UK "think
tank", The New Economics foundation, to write a booklet to suggest an
alternative approach for governing social and public interest
activities. I have just completed A NEW WAY TO GOVERN that will be made
public in February that could provide a basis for a paper and/or discussion at
the Washington D.C. conference. I can send a pre-publication version to
anyone that is interested in writing a review for a suitable high profile
publication.
I have pasted in below the opening four paragraphs and the
closing two
paragraphs.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This
pocket book describes a new way for the State to govern society. It is
based on a new method of governing bureaucracies, social and regulated
enterprises or complex private firms by replacing command and control
hierarchies with network governance. Network governance by stakeholders
introduces economic, social and political advantages by providing a basis for
institutions to become self-governing.
Self-governance requires
management hierarchies to be transformed into network organisations governed
by the competing interests of strategic stakeholders. Strategic
stakeholders are the employees, clients and suppliers on whom all
organisations depend for their existence and survival. Financiers of
enterprises are not included as strategic stakeholders. This is because
all viable businesses, must by definition, become self-financing and so become
financially independent in sustaining their existence. This makes it
practical to phase out investors over time.
Network organisations can
be designed to allow economic forces and market competition to be replaced
with social forces and political competition to improve their economy,
efficiency and effectiveness. It is by this means that the private
self-interest of executives can be harnessed to further the public good.
The introduction of social forces and political competition into government
departments, social or private enterprise to improve their self-regulation and
self-governance would enrich democracy. Inclusive stakeholder
constituencies would replace alienating command and control hierarchies with
their ruling elites. Stakeholder governance also provides an alternative
to either State-run enterprise or the State regulating privatised or other
public interest companies.
The arguments here complement and develop
some of the concepts of Associative Democracy articulated by Paul Hirst
and of The Mutual State by Ed Mayo and Henrietta Moore (1) a
companion pocket book in this series.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Six
chapters between these
lines]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
A
new way to govern society is also required to enrich democracy to counter the
alienating and colonising forces of globalisation. The forces of
globalisation could then be used to promote self-reliance, self-regulation and
self-governance. The size and cost of government would be reduced and
multinational corporations turned into nested networks of stakeholder governed
organisations accountable to local citizens as proposed in my book,
Democratising the Wealth of Nations (2).
The science of
governance (3) provides a basis for displacing the 1991 Nobel Prize wining
theory that justified privatisation (4). It is the laws of governance
that should determine the underlying institutional structure and functioning
of society rather than costs and prices that drive markets. The problem
is that the role of markets increases when organisations fail to develop on an
ecological basis to allocate resources on an efficient and sustainable
basis. A new way to govern society is not just required because the old
ways are failing but to allow the institutions of society to become richly
connected to their host environment to nurture and sustain life on the planet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1.
<www.themutualstate.org/pdfs/the_mutual_state.pdf>
2.
<http://cog.kent.edu/lib/turnbull1/turnbull1.html>.
3. Turnbull, S. 2002 (Forthcoming) 'The Science of Governance',
Corporate Governance: An international review, 10: 4, October.
4.
<http://almaz.com/nobel/economics/1991a.htlm>
Regards
Shann
At
09:01 PM 20/12/2001, you wrote:
So, it's Dirty Business as usual
World Bank and IMF style in El Salvador
also.
It is interesting to
see in this classic report on the impacts of 'market
freedom' policies on
a developing economy, the mention of education and
health services.
Now that the first 'privatisation wave' has effectively
smashed public
ownership of industrial resources and energy infrastructures,
property
transfers to private hands have now got round to the core elements
of
human survival (water and health) and civilization (education). With
the
recent accords coming through the WTO on 'trade in services' such
transfers
will increase - even in bastions of public intervention in such
areas as
Europe. The result will be further polarization and
marginalization in
these essential aspects of human development, as it
has been in every other
area so far touched by this process. A
world of elites and drones is being
created amid the rhetoric of
'freedom'.
There is no way back to centralised state control over
production and
services for more just human ends. But the
distributed ownership response
does need promotion as a model that can
provide distributed democratic
control. The COG needs to develop
this argument and sell it to the movement
for 'globalization from below'
- I strongly reject the term
'anti-globalization movement'. It is
something that I hope we can do in the
coming year's
conference.
Vic Thorpe
Shann Turnbull Ph.D.
P.O. Box 266 Woollahra, Sydney, Australia, 1350
Ph: +612 9328 7466 office; +612 9327 8487 home; Fax: +612 9327 1497;
Life long E-mail: sturnbull@mba1963.hbs.edu
Alternate:sturnbull@optusnet.com.au
with
other papers & book at http://cog.kent.edu/library.html
|