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Millennium: Towards tomorrow's society
Book reviews
implement the concept of sustainable development in terms of practical government policies. Pearce’s approach to sustainable development is that of a (liberal) economist and is somehow reductionist: it suggests that natural phenomena can be measured in economic (monetary) terms. But at least it recommends in-depth adaptations of present economic systems and values. Pearce considers, for instance, that environmental ‘capital’ that is transmitted from one generation to the next is made up of a combination of ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ elements, and that man-made capital elements can be accepted as a replacement for natural ones. Although the report is rather comprehensive in analysing the various methods that have been developed in
Can inner-directed future?
439
order to ‘value’ the environment, the reasons why these methods have not been effectively applied are not analysed. 1 Probably one of the main reasons for this lies in the necessity of establishing a consensus at all levels concerning the changes that have to be made to the economic rules of the game.
Note For further reading, see also the report to the OECD by David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Ed. B. Barbier, ‘The monetary policie;’ evaluation of environmental (Paris. 1988): World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 1987); and Don Hinrichsen, Sustaining Our Common Fufure (London, Earthscan, 1987).
business
shape the
James Robertson Millennium: Towards Francis Kinsman
Tomorrow’s
Society
294 + x pages, f12.95 1990)
(London,
H. Allen,
W.
Over the next twenty years or so we have it in our power to construct a truly convivial future for our species-convivial in the root sense of living harmoniously and interdependently with each other and the planet that bears us.
Francis Kinsman is a freelance business consultant and co-founder of the Business Network. Readers of his earlier books, The New Agenda’ and The Telecommuters,L will not be surprised that Millennium begins and ends with
James Robertson is an independent writer and lecturer. His latest book is Future Wealth: A New Economics for the 2151 Century (London, Cassell, 1989). He can be contacted at the Old Bakehouse, Cholsey, Oxon OX109NU, UK.
FUTURES
May 1990
chapters on the role of business in creating this desirable new future. Kinsman’s theme is that human societies, having developed from agriculture to industry, are now in the process of becoming transindustrial. This historic transition is being quickened by the approach of the year 2000. The dominant values of agricultural, industrial and transindustrial society are respectively sustenance-driven, outerdirected, and inner-directed. Market research has identified these as the three major value groupings in today’s industrialized countries. (They are subdivided, with some overlaps, into seven subcategories: self-explorer, social resister, experimentalist, conspicuous consumer, belonger, survivor, young aimless and old aimless.) The shift to a transindustrial society will involve the progressive replacement of outerdirected by inner-directed as the dominant social values.
440
Book reviews
The UK, on which Millennium concentrates, happens to be the country in which the shift to inner-directed has been most marked up to now. For the future, the forecast is that by 2020 the 1987 figures of 36% inner-directed, 35% outer-directed and 29% sustenancedriven, will have become 55’):-40% 30’&35% inner-directed, outerand 15’%,-25% sustenancedirected, driven. Three scenarios-‘caring autonmaterialism’ ‘assertive and omy’, ‘retrenchment’-correspond to the three value groupings and offer alternative routes to 2020. Progress is not inevitable, however. We must make it happen. To do so, we shall need to learn how to handle potential value conflicts in society, and also in organizations and individual persons. The different value groupings in society are paralleled by the different psychological types of people in an organirand by the different subation, personalities which have to be harmonized within the individual psyche. That brings in psychosynthesis, as developed by Jung’s follower, Roberto Assagioli. Kinsman’s aim is to bring psychosynthesis to bear on society as a whole. He draws on many different aspects of the UK today to illustrate his theme. For instance, a number of public figures, as presented in the media, exemplify the various value groupings. The Prince of what!-the inneris-guess Wales directed self-explorer, ‘the quintessence man’. And Margaret of Millennial Thatcher is the inner-directed social resister. Jeffrey Archer, Richard Branson, Saatchi and Saatchi, Lord Hanson, Robert Maxwell, Lord Armstrong and Ron Todd are among those cast as the other dramatis personae-excepting ‘old aimless’ and ‘young aimless’. The ideas in Millennium need to be widely discussed. Potential readers should not be put off by the enthusiastic back-cover comments of Charles Handy, Sir john Harvey-Jones and Sir George Trevelyan, even if ‘endorsement advertising by some well-known personality lyricising about the product generally gets the thumbs down’ from innerdirected consumers (page 43). But, although the vision of the future and the scenarios in Millennium are
not so very different from my own, I have some serious doubts about Kinsman’s approach. These start with his reliance on concepts developed for market research. The purpose of market and opinion research is to help business people and politicians to attract consumers’ spending and electors’ votes, and to enable managers to control their subMarket ordinates more effectively. researchers cannot empathize with people. They have to categorize people as material to be exploited by their clients. A future defined in their terms risks being based on exploitative values.
Power and powerlessness The market research approach pays insufficient regard to the realities of power and to the circumstances and outlook of people who experience powerlessness. To them it makes little sense to say that, because the conventional labourconfrontation between capitalist sustenance-driven and outer-directed values is now fading, ‘it is no longer appropriate to define social phenomena terms-north/south; in bi-polar rich/poor; have/have not; or even able/disabled. We are not in the realm of left or right any more, but up’ (page 41). And failure to empathize can all too easily shade into blaming the victim-as when Kinsman discusses the tendency of sustenance-driven people, who are often synonymous with the poor, to hold passive, fatalistic, dependent attitudes towards life in general as well as towards health in particular. Placing responsibility on other people or on institutions, they ignore the behaviour which is recommended to promote good health-and they also have the highest lncldence of illness (page 52). At the heart of
whether
of the matter
is the question
competitive,
profit-making
force for ‘a change of approach from the separative to the holistic, from the competitive towards the co-operative’ (page 229). Kinsman himself quotes HarveyJones: ‘the role of management is to identify the direction of change and then to bring about conditions in which it can occur positively’ (page 230). Exactly. The challenge for business today, as busibusiness
can, in fact, be the driving
FUTURES
May 1990
Book reviews/News
ness people see it, is to identify what will happen and adapt successfully to it. The challenge for whole people is different. It is to decide what kind of future we should be trying to create, and how to set about it. This involves moral choices. Business people, whose criterion is the bottom line and whose aim is to survive and succeed in the supposedly amoral arena of economic life, are taught to regard moral choices as someone else’s business. There is a crucial issue here. Decent people in the business community and
441
decent people in, say, the environmental and Third World development movements, disagree deeply about it. It needs to be widely discussed. Millennium should help to stimulate the discussion, and I very much hope it will. References I.
The New Agenda: an Exploration of the New Human Issues Facing British Management (London, Spencer Stuart Manage-
ment Consultants, 1983). (Chichester, 2. The Telecommuters
Wiley,
1987).
NEWS UK wealth
divide
forecast to grow
The gap between rich and poor in the UK will widen in the next decade, according to a recent report by the Henley Centre for Forecasting in London. Economic and social analysts say at least 11 million people in the UK already live in a ‘second nation’, where income is below 60% of the national average. The 1990s hold little prospect of improvement. ‘The living standards of the “second nation” will rise by only 1% between 1989 and 1995,‘says the Centre. This rise will be set against an overall increase which will give the average person a 10% increase in living standards. ‘Given these prospects for the Nine-
ties, the idea that the “second nation” could come to account for one third of the population does not seem inconceivable,’ concludes the report, the 1989-90 volume of the Centre’s ‘Planning for Social Change’ programme. The Centre offers some advice about the kinds of products which will be most successful in an ever more segmented market-‘those which alleviate the boredom and drudgery of a “second nation” existence (here forms of escapism such as video and literature spring to mind)‘. Source: February
The Sunday 1990.
Correspondent,
4
Hope for future grain harvests Researchers are closely watching the production of the newly created grain, triticale. Widespread cultivation of trititale would be evidence that fertile hybrids can be successfully tailored to
FUTURES
May 1990
meet specific human and environmental needs. The US National Academy of Sciences is looking at triticale as a supplement to the world’s cereals and the grain is
implement the concept of sustainable development in terms of practical government policies. Pearce’s approach to sustainable development is that of a (liberal) economist and is somehow reductionist: it suggests that natural phenomena can be measured in economic (monetary) terms. But at least it recommends in-depth adaptations of present economic systems and values. Pearce considers, for instance, that environmental ‘capital’ that is transmitted from one generation to the next is made up of a combination of ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ elements, and that man-made capital elements can be accepted as a replacement for natural ones. Although the report is rather comprehensive in analysing the various methods that have been developed in
Can inner-directed future?
439
order to ‘value’ the environment, the reasons why these methods have not been effectively applied are not analysed. 1 Probably one of the main reasons for this lies in the necessity of establishing a consensus at all levels concerning the changes that have to be made to the economic rules of the game.
Note For further reading, see also the report to the OECD by David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Ed. B. Barbier, ‘The monetary policie;’ evaluation of environmental (Paris. 1988): World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 1987); and Don Hinrichsen, Sustaining Our Common Fufure (London, Earthscan, 1987).
business
shape the
James Robertson Millennium: Towards Francis Kinsman
Tomorrow’s
Society
294 + x pages, f12.95 1990)
(London,
H. Allen,
W.
Over the next twenty years or so we have it in our power to construct a truly convivial future for our species-convivial in the root sense of living harmoniously and interdependently with each other and the planet that bears us.
Francis Kinsman is a freelance business consultant and co-founder of the Business Network. Readers of his earlier books, The New Agenda’ and The Telecommuters,L will not be surprised that Millennium begins and ends with
James Robertson is an independent writer and lecturer. His latest book is Future Wealth: A New Economics for the 2151 Century (London, Cassell, 1989). He can be contacted at the Old Bakehouse, Cholsey, Oxon OX109NU, UK.
FUTURES
May 1990
chapters on the role of business in creating this desirable new future. Kinsman’s theme is that human societies, having developed from agriculture to industry, are now in the process of becoming transindustrial. This historic transition is being quickened by the approach of the year 2000. The dominant values of agricultural, industrial and transindustrial society are respectively sustenance-driven, outerdirected, and inner-directed. Market research has identified these as the three major value groupings in today’s industrialized countries. (They are subdivided, with some overlaps, into seven subcategories: self-explorer, social resister, experimentalist, conspicuous consumer, belonger, survivor, young aimless and old aimless.) The shift to a transindustrial society will involve the progressive replacement of outerdirected by inner-directed as the dominant social values.
440
Book reviews
The UK, on which Millennium concentrates, happens to be the country in which the shift to inner-directed has been most marked up to now. For the future, the forecast is that by 2020 the 1987 figures of 36% inner-directed, 35% outer-directed and 29% sustenancedriven, will have become 55’):-40% 30’&35% inner-directed, outerand 15’%,-25% sustenancedirected, driven. Three scenarios-‘caring autonmaterialism’ ‘assertive and omy’, ‘retrenchment’-correspond to the three value groupings and offer alternative routes to 2020. Progress is not inevitable, however. We must make it happen. To do so, we shall need to learn how to handle potential value conflicts in society, and also in organizations and individual persons. The different value groupings in society are paralleled by the different psychological types of people in an organirand by the different subation, personalities which have to be harmonized within the individual psyche. That brings in psychosynthesis, as developed by Jung’s follower, Roberto Assagioli. Kinsman’s aim is to bring psychosynthesis to bear on society as a whole. He draws on many different aspects of the UK today to illustrate his theme. For instance, a number of public figures, as presented in the media, exemplify the various value groupings. The Prince of what!-the inneris-guess Wales directed self-explorer, ‘the quintessence man’. And Margaret of Millennial Thatcher is the inner-directed social resister. Jeffrey Archer, Richard Branson, Saatchi and Saatchi, Lord Hanson, Robert Maxwell, Lord Armstrong and Ron Todd are among those cast as the other dramatis personae-excepting ‘old aimless’ and ‘young aimless’. The ideas in Millennium need to be widely discussed. Potential readers should not be put off by the enthusiastic back-cover comments of Charles Handy, Sir john Harvey-Jones and Sir George Trevelyan, even if ‘endorsement advertising by some well-known personality lyricising about the product generally gets the thumbs down’ from innerdirected consumers (page 43). But, although the vision of the future and the scenarios in Millennium are
not so very different from my own, I have some serious doubts about Kinsman’s approach. These start with his reliance on concepts developed for market research. The purpose of market and opinion research is to help business people and politicians to attract consumers’ spending and electors’ votes, and to enable managers to control their subMarket ordinates more effectively. researchers cannot empathize with people. They have to categorize people as material to be exploited by their clients. A future defined in their terms risks being based on exploitative values.
Power and powerlessness The market research approach pays insufficient regard to the realities of power and to the circumstances and outlook of people who experience powerlessness. To them it makes little sense to say that, because the conventional labourconfrontation between capitalist sustenance-driven and outer-directed values is now fading, ‘it is no longer appropriate to define social phenomena terms-north/south; in bi-polar rich/poor; have/have not; or even able/disabled. We are not in the realm of left or right any more, but up’ (page 41). And failure to empathize can all too easily shade into blaming the victim-as when Kinsman discusses the tendency of sustenance-driven people, who are often synonymous with the poor, to hold passive, fatalistic, dependent attitudes towards life in general as well as towards health in particular. Placing responsibility on other people or on institutions, they ignore the behaviour which is recommended to promote good health-and they also have the highest lncldence of illness (page 52). At the heart of
whether
of the matter
is the question
competitive,
profit-making
force for ‘a change of approach from the separative to the holistic, from the competitive towards the co-operative’ (page 229). Kinsman himself quotes HarveyJones: ‘the role of management is to identify the direction of change and then to bring about conditions in which it can occur positively’ (page 230). Exactly. The challenge for business today, as busibusiness
can, in fact, be the driving
FUTURES
May 1990
Book reviews/News
ness people see it, is to identify what will happen and adapt successfully to it. The challenge for whole people is different. It is to decide what kind of future we should be trying to create, and how to set about it. This involves moral choices. Business people, whose criterion is the bottom line and whose aim is to survive and succeed in the supposedly amoral arena of economic life, are taught to regard moral choices as someone else’s business. There is a crucial issue here. Decent people in the business community and
441
decent people in, say, the environmental and Third World development movements, disagree deeply about it. It needs to be widely discussed. Millennium should help to stimulate the discussion, and I very much hope it will. References I.
The New Agenda: an Exploration of the New Human Issues Facing British Management (London, Spencer Stuart Manage-
ment Consultants, 1983). (Chichester, 2. The Telecommuters
Wiley,
1987).
NEWS UK wealth
divide
forecast to grow
The gap between rich and poor in the UK will widen in the next decade, according to a recent report by the Henley Centre for Forecasting in London. Economic and social analysts say at least 11 million people in the UK already live in a ‘second nation’, where income is below 60% of the national average. The 1990s hold little prospect of improvement. ‘The living standards of the “second nation” will rise by only 1% between 1989 and 1995,‘says the Centre. This rise will be set against an overall increase which will give the average person a 10% increase in living standards. ‘Given these prospects for the Nine-
ties, the idea that the “second nation” could come to account for one third of the population does not seem inconceivable,’ concludes the report, the 1989-90 volume of the Centre’s ‘Planning for Social Change’ programme. The Centre offers some advice about the kinds of products which will be most successful in an ever more segmented market-‘those which alleviate the boredom and drudgery of a “second nation” existence (here forms of escapism such as video and literature spring to mind)‘. Source: February
The Sunday 1990.
Correspondent,
4
Hope for future grain harvests Researchers are closely watching the production of the newly created grain, triticale. Widespread cultivation of trititale would be evidence that fertile hybrids can be successfully tailored to
FUTURES
May 1990
meet specific human and environmental needs. The US National Academy of Sciences is looking at triticale as a supplement to the world’s cereals and the grain is