• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
goods may have an ideological explanation.
&
ResearchPaper
Exploring Public–Private Partnershipsthrough Knowledge Cybernetics
Maurice Yolles
1
*and Paul Iles
2
1
Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 5UZ, UK 
2
Leeds Business School, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK 
Knowledge cybernetics operates as a social geometry and incorporates joint alliancetheory. Using its schema, an exploration is made of how in a globalizing economygovernments may seek to enhance their social infrastructural provision by couplingprivate corporations into public services and producing public–private partnerships.This paper will explore and explain the systemic needs of such partnerships, theirontological and epistemological pathologies, and their ethical and ideological contradic-tions. Despite the unlikelihood of partnerships functioning effectively to the benefit of social provision, the persistence of the use of private provision in the delivery of social
Keywords
complex social environments; knowledge cybernetics; public–private partnerships;ideology; ethicsINTRODUCTIONWe are consistently being told that we are seeinga changing world in which globalization iscentral. More generally, however, this is part of a process of social complexification that occursfor instance as: social, political and economicactivities are stretched and interconnected;phenomena like trade, finance (including invest-ment), migration, and culture are intensified;ideas, goods, information, capital and people aretransported or communicated with an increasingvelocity; and where distant events have anincreasingly significant impact on local societies,so that the boundaries between domestic andglobal affairs become more fluid. Such notionsare not new. They have been indicated by Lenin(1893) who referred to them in terms of a
deepening of capitalism
. Ionescu (1975) refers tosuchprocessesasoccurringina
centrifugalsociety
.Held
et al.
(1999) also refer to them as
turbo-capitalism
. The three concepts are connected asterms that refer to similar phenomenon observedfrom different perspectives. The
deepening of capitalism
effectively refers to the colonizationof new spheres of life in which there is anextension of the proletariat, where labour is seensimply as a disposable utility or commodity. A
centrifugal society
occurs when social collectivesembrace greater intensification and complexitywhile their political processes emerge centripe-tally enabling corporations to accumulate power
SystemsResearchandBehavioralScienceSyst.Res.
23
, 625^646(2006)
*
Correspondence to: Maurice Yolles, Liverpool Business School,Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 5UZ, UK.E-mail: m.yolles@ljmu.ac.uk
 
and make decisions that are unrepresentative of government.
Turbo-capitalism
occurs when globalfinance and corporate capital exercise decisiveinfluence over the location, distribution andorganization of economic power and wealth thatfor Held
et al.
is directly connected with theprocess of globalization.As they experience social complexification,governments tend to perceive that they are notable to run their state infrastructure adequately.This inadequacy is illustrated by Savas (1982)who argues that the infrastructure and distri- bution of social goods is supported by inefficient,inflexible and irresponsible public corporations.ForClaver
etal.
(1999),publiccorporationshaveatendency for pathological ailments that inhibiteffectiveness, and these include:
authoritarian management style with a highdegree of control;
little communication;
univocal top–down management;
limited scope for individual initiative, with anorientation towards obedience and the pro-vision of orders;
centralizeddecision-makingprocessthattendsto be repetitive;
reluctance to start innovative processes;
high degrees of conformity;
high level of resistance to change.Such organizations are implicitly prone tolong-term failure in their attempts to createeffective delivery of their operations. If they areto be able to improve their capacity to developeffective operations there is a need for whatusually turns out to be difficult and expensivecultural change.As part of social complexification, globaliza-tion has resulted in the internationalization of corporate environments. Ionescu (1975) explainsthat this is the result of the industrial/techno-logical revolution that society has been passingthrough. It has brought about such closeinternational relationships that all representativegovernments find their normal policies con-stantly being disrupted through internationaldevelopments. This affects the nation state bothinternally and externally. Internally, govern-ments are encouraged to seek ‘partnerships’,‘compacts’ or ‘contracts’ with corporations tohelpaddress thedisruption. Inthepastthey havesought social relationships with labour unions,and today they seek industrial and financialrelationship with national and multinationalenterprise corporations. They also seekpolitical–administrative partnership with theregions through their civil corporations asprogression towards constitutional devolutiondevelops. Ionescu refers to the process thatunderpins the developmental formation of suchpartnerships as a process of 
centripetal politics
, inwhich political compacts move away from thepolitical centre.An illustration of this has been providedthrough the UK Institute of Public PolicyResearch (IPPR, 2001, p. 5) which wishes toaddress the strong need to improve publicservices. They advocate the formation of jointalliances to occur between corporations in thepublic and private sectors, and they refer to thisas Public–Private Partnerships (PPP) and thepolitical will to implement this as the PublicFinance Initiative (PFI). PPP is more than a UKpolicy,however,andhasbeensupportedinothercountries around the world (Broadbent andLaughlin, 2003).Another manifestation is
privati
za
tion
(inwhich governments delegate their responsibil-ities to corporate bodies), supported for instance by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Fromapaperforameeting ofAfrican financeministerson 18–19 January 2000, Hanlon and Pettifor(2000) note that the IMF stressed that it willdemand of all countries a more rapid privatiza-tion process and a faster pace of trade liberal-ization. Incidentally, these are conditions thathave been criticized by Joseph Stiglitz when hewas chief economist of the World Bank. Indeedprivatization is a concept that arises from socialneo-Darwinism, a notion that is deeply flawed inthewayitisoftenperceivedbystrategists(Yolles,1999).However potentially useful the partneringprocess of centripetal politics might be, thereare fundamental problems with the formationof PPP alliances as governments seek pri-vate corporations to help them service theirinfrastructural needs. These problems arise from
RESEARCHPAPER Syst.Res.
 
public corporate and private corporate ethicaland ideological incommensurability, and weshall discuss these during the course of thispaper.The exploration and understanding of com-plexsocialphenomenathatunderscoreprocessesof centripetal politics is always potentiallyimproved when a schema (a pattern imposedon complex reality or experience to assist inexplaining it, mediate perception or guideresponses) can be used. In this paper we shalloutline a schema that we refer to as knowledgecybernetics, and in due course apply some of themodelling aspects of this to joint alliances likePPP.Like PPPs, the notion of privatization enablesprivate corporate bodies to participate in theprovision of infrastructural services, enabling afundamental contradiction of egocentric asopposed to socio-centric ethics to play itself out,with society as the injured party. Why democraticgovernments persist in this despite the likelihoodthat it is beyond the perceived capacity of publiccorporationstoeffectivelyrunsocialprovisionmayhave an indicative reason that arises from theplutocratic nature of their societies.THE KNOWLEDGE CYBERNETICSSCHEMAKnowledge cybernetics has its history in thetheory ofautonomous viable systems asexplored by Beer (1959, 1985); Schwarz (1997). Just as thesystem is normally seen as a metaphor, knowl-edge cybernetics is metaphorical in that it: (a)explores knowledge formation and its relation-shiptoinformation; (b)providesacriticalview of individual and social knowledge, and theirprocesses of communication and associatedmeanings, (c) seeks to create an understandingof the relationship between people and theirsocial communities for the improvement of socialcollective viability, and an appreciation of therole of knowledge in this. In a coherent autonom-ous human activity system knowledge occurs instructured patterns. This provides the structurethat enables the system to recognize its existence,maintain itself, change, and develop manifes-tations that can be seen as being indicative of systemic content. The notion of system, normallyattributed to Bertalanffy (1951) through hisnotion of the ‘general system’, is often perceivedas a metaphor that can enables conceptual ideasabout thematic situations of attention to beelaborated on and explored, thereby promotingextended and logical explanations. The systemmetaphor is normally used to explain beha-vioural phenomena. Its extension into cyber-netics derives from the work of Rosenblueth
et al.
(1943), who were interested in its teleogicalproperties that relate to its identity, degree of autonomy and coherence.Autonomous system theory was a particularinterest of Beer (1979). He recognized thepractical utility of the idea of the meta-systemexplored by Whitehead and Russell (1910)in their logical study of formal systems, andused it as way of exploring the viability of complexsocialsystemsthrough processesofself-regulation, self-organization and control. A con-sequence has been the emergence of a newparadigm with its own new frame of referencethat transforms the way in which organizationscan be examined. It takes us away from thesimple input–output model of a system, in whichthe system components behave in such a waythatthey transformtheinputsinto the outputs, toa model that explains how such behaviour iscontrolled.Beer’s paradigm effectively has two philoso-phical dimensions: ontology and epistemology,though his explicit interest only ever lay in thelatter. While epistemological approaches enablethe nature of knowledge to be explored, onto-logical approaches define types of being in a waythat enables complex cybernetic relationships to be expressed simply. This simplicity occurs because ontology (Poli, 2001, 2005) can berepresented as geometry. To explain this,consider that a function of ontology is to definea frame of reference that topologically dis-tinguishes between arbitrarily defined distinctmodes of being through the creation of areferencing system. Within a social context, thissystem then provides for the creation of a socialgeometry through which component propertiesandrelationshipscanbeexpressedandanalytically
Syst.Res. RESEARCHPAPER
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...