Four Ways to Make Social Change Work Better: The Transition Movement and the Four Cultures

‘Transition actually looked like a good tool for the job. They were picking it up by whatever handle they grasped. They were swinging it as earnestly as they could.’ – Jon Mooallem, NY Times

The Transition Movement, a grassroots coalition pioneered in the UK by Rob Hopkins, is a great case study for understanding and improving the process of social change. In this article I aim to clarify the microdynamics of social change by using Grid-Group Cultural Theory (the four cultures) as an analytic tool. The theory, first developed by anthropologist Mary Douglas, suggests there are four competing ways of organising and disorganising society, at every level, and that a balance between these makes for a better outcome than an exclusive over-emphasis on one or another of them. Most social activists recognise a basic conflict in social-political visions between, broadly, left and right, conservative and liberal. The four cultures shows that there are actually four basic positions, not two, and that social interaction is much more intelligible when we take all four into account.

It’s my conviction that the Four Cultures approach can help social change agents ‘to bring in the people that conventional activists have failed to reach’, by showing how to be more inclusive while also becoming more focussed on what kinds of inclusion really matter. Continue reading Four Ways to Make Social Change Work Better: The Transition Movement and the Four Cultures

A Month of Resilience

This month Four Cultures is going to be considering Resilience and its connection with Grid-group Cultural Theory.

By Resilience I mean the cross-disciplinary scientific approach inspired by the work of Canadian ecologist Buzz Holling, and promoted in a number of places, especially through the Resilience Alliance and through the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

There’s a video of him from his award of the Volvo Environment Prize in November 2008.

Fatalist access to scientific knowledge: a case study

The  way academic and scientific knowledge becomes accessible online has been a hot subject for some time. I want to suggest that this process is structured according to the four cultures identified by Grid-group cultural theory. Here I am focussing on the  idea that there may be a Fatalist paradigm of knowledge sharing at work, which provides access in a capricious manner – and I make a tentative suggestion as to how this particular deficiency in the availability of access may be overcome . Continue reading Fatalist access to scientific knowledge: a case study

Towards an institutional understanding of the ‘cultural agoraphobia’ bias

As seen on the Public Library of Science blog, Prof James Boyle has been arguing in his book The Public Domain (read for free) and a recent talk for Arcadia that society is biased against openness.

Grid-group cultural theory contributes a number of factors to this discussion, as follows… Continue reading Towards an institutional understanding of the ‘cultural agoraphobia’ bias

Chaos theory and fourcultures

More on Chaos theory, evolution and fourcultures.

Meika recently posted a piece about brain research, bias and chaos theory.

And DK asked:

How does chaos complicate or enrich evolutionary theory in biology? How does the nonlinearity that chaos features interact with mutation/drift/natural selection? Is there a canonical text (or at least something authoritative & comprehensive) on this?

I think one of the key texts on this subject is going to be Continue reading Chaos theory and fourcultures

Bias, learning to walk at the edge of Chaos

This is a guest post by Meika, for which, many thanks.

Cambridge-based researchers recently published a study providing experimental data which supports the idea that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos”.
Its press release ends:

According to [co-author] Kitzbichler, this new evidence is only a starting point. “A natural next question we plan to address in future research will be: How do measures of critical dynamics relate to cognitive performance or neuropsychiatric disorders and their treatments?”

Well, taking that ‘cognitive performance’ a bit more specifically to include learning, and learning to walk in particular, the following story leads in an interesting direction for us fourculture fans.
Five years ago… Continue reading Bias, learning to walk at the edge of Chaos

Good Intentions: is rational choice the only choice?

A new book called Good Intentions proposes that Christians should stop judging economic matters on the basis of pre-conceived moral positions and start judging them on the basis of what actually works. A prime example is the debate about the minimum wage… Continue reading Good Intentions: is rational choice the only choice?