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EOpriv: RE: A NEW WAY TO GOVERN



Mary

I would be delighted for your to undertake such a review. I will send a pre-publication copy of the 8,953 word booklet to you off line.
I am sharing a copy of this message with my editor, Andrea Westall and my publisher, Ed Mayo, Executive director of The New Economics Foundation in London http://www.neweconomics.org/

Best regards

Shann

At 09:25 AM 22/12/2001, you wrote:
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
-----Original Message-----
From: Shann Turnbull [mailto:sturnbull@mba1963.hbs.edu]
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 3:31 PM
To: EOpriv@cog.kent.edu
Subject: RE: EOpriv: El Salvador and surge in privatization push

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.
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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.
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[Six chapters between these lines]
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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.
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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
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~sturnbull/index.html
Papers at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=26239
with other papers & book at http://cog.kent.edu/library.html