Ricardo Blaug’s research while affiliated with University of Westminster and other places

To be legitimate, research needs to be ethical, methodologically sound, of sufficient value to justify public expenditure and be transparent. Animal research has always been contested on ethical grounds, but there is now mounting evidence of poor scientific method, and growing doubts about its clinical value. So what of transparency? Here we examine the increasing focus on openness within animal research in the UK, analysing recent developments within the Home Office and within the main group representing the interests of the sector, Understanding Animal Research. We argue that, while important steps are being taken toward greater transparency, the legitimacy of animal research continues to be undermined by selective openness. We propose that openness could be increased through public involvement, and that this would bring about much needed improvements in animal research, as it has done in clinical research.

Democratic Management is a theoretically informed and empirically evidenced practical lever for change. It seeks to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of public organisations and to provide the much needed legitimacy for such enhancements. Democratic Management aims to fill the gap between what have become the largely empty ideals of public engagement and the menus of participatory methods that are so often impossible to implement. By focusing on a situated agent of organisational change - the democratic manager - and addressing the real problem s/he faces, Democratic Management shows how management and democracy can be brought together to create value, increase social productivity and reconnect management with the public. This, then, is an attempt to radically strengthen the hand of public managers by reconnecting them to their publics.

It happened to Caligula, Tiberius, Robespierre, Hitler and Stalin, and perhaps also to Mugabe, Thatcher, Bush and Blair. But there was no question about Richard Keys. In his case, it took a curiously protracted form. Promoted first to middle management and then to managing director, Keys moved slowly from popular and enthusiastic office worker to gruff and impatient boss. Confined to his parochial empire on the edge of an industrial estate near Swindon, Keys evinced all the classic indicators of corruption by power; so much so that at last, his erstwhile friends used a telling everyday phrase to describe him to new recruits: power, they said, had ‘gone to his head’*.

Psychology, as the study of the human mind, tends to begin with the individual and to come to matters social and political as something of an afterthought. The mind is structured in this or that way, people are social, in the social world there are collectives and in those collectives, power comes into play. As a result of this ordinal primacy of the individual, psychology has always struggled to provide insights into the intersubjective world. At best, the discipline has sought to plumb the complex interaction of individual and social processes, and we see this in the development of sociology and social psychology. At worst, it unwittingly adopts a methodological individualism that misses the strange and synergetlc effects of groups and simply forgets about power altogether.

We have seen that power corrupts by somehow stimulating a series of behavioural changes in individual perception; that these changes involve a complex interaction between individual psychological processes and social structures, and that such changes occur beneath the awareness of the affected individual. If we are to extend this insight, and move towards the identification of the actual mechanisms by which power corrupts, we need to understand more about how the mind constructs meaning. In this, we are much aided by recent developments in the fields of cognitive psychology and neurobiology.

Power comes in many forms: physical, economic, political, cultural and personal. So does it have differing effects. Power can thus be hierarchic, it can take the form of capacity and it can make things happen. Ownership of a resource convenes power, for it enables the owner – via the assertion of property rights – to ‘trump’ the wishes of other stakeholders. Ownership is thus a form of economic power that enables the owner (whether legally and/or culturally constituted) to decide organisational goals and dictate the means by which they will be achieved. This report examines how such ownership impacts upon good work outcomes.

If politics concerns the question of ‘what should we do?’ then democracy holds that we should consult the citizenry, empower selected agents to govern effectively and guard against the concentration of power. Since liberalism’s attack on religious dogma and the absolutist state, we have learned to refrain from dictating the good for others and resolved to ask individuals for their own conception of the good. As Jürgen Habermas so cogently asserts, ‘all things considered, the best judge of individual interests is the individual themselves’.1 Democracy is not, therefore, a universal truth to be imposed on others, but is, instead, a practice evolved to prevent the imposition of a universal truth.- We thus do democracy nol because we know, but because we do not.

Our earlier examination of various psychologies of power shows the difficulties encountered when analysis attempts to keep individual and collective knowledge processing apart- The nature of groups, the complex ontology of the social world and the evident interplay of individual and collective knowledge processing all suggest that we cannot separate individuals from their social contexts. Having subsequently explored some of the structural tendencies of our individual cognitive apparatus, we now require a better understanding of how those tendencies interact with processes of collective knowledge processing. After all, individuals do not undertake cognitive activity as solipsists, but learn schemas and gain experience through interaction with others- When it comes to corruption by power, we have, from the outset, known that we are dealing with what amounts to an ‘illness of position’.1 Consequently, we now begin our turn towards the role played by organisational ‘’position’, to collective knowledge processing and to the possibility that organisations themselves are cognitive systems.

Most agree with Lord Acton that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It seems to apply to history's cruel dictators, perhaps also to the behaviour of current political and economic elites and even across the hierarchic organisations of our everyday lives. Yet there has been little study of how power corrupts, and in particular, how it does so beneath the awareness of those afflicted. This book brings together cognitive psychology and democratic theory to examine the subtle ways in which power corrupts and distorts our thinking. Drawing on the history of political ideas and current research on the nature of power, it shows that corruption affects both elites and subordinates, and that its symptoms are best treated by radical democracy. The book presents a rigorous and critical analysis of the hierarchic organisational form. It is thus a provocative exploration of the usually hidden, and little understood, political psychology of organisations.

A Research Report for The Work Foundation’s Knowledge Economy Programme