Año: 2009 Página 6 de 9

Women in management: a convenient trend

el 17/02/2009

The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies offers another interesting article on the future of work. In this occasion, it focuses on the arrival of women to management tasks, but not as a fashionable momentum. On the one hand, the failure of an economic system governed by men has offered an opportunity for women. Although they were even more able to play a key role in company boards, the main posts have been in the hands of male managers. Now, as men have failed in avoiding the crisis (If they are not guilty of it) in many businesses owners are thinking of giving a chance to women. On the other hand, in the last ten years we have seen that women perform better in education. They have university degrees and are better prepared than many men. According to this situation, nobody can stop the climbing of women to the managerial tasks.

In fact, as the report Shall women save the world’s economy? points out, women can do best in these difficult times. Their management approach is more appropriate to cope with uncertainty and negative ways:

“Women have a completely different approach to life. They are more cooperative and bring more people in when important decisions must be made. So it can take a little longer to make the decision, but the decision is considered thoroughly before being made. I have absolutely no doubt that the world would have been very different if women had had the assignment.”

The paper says that now we need financial control, cooperation instead fierce competition, warm environment instead hard labour relations and a bigger sense of the importance of success in the long term. All these features are in the managerial style of women. “There is a feminine approach to leadership. It’s about being intuitive and rational. It’s about multitasking, sensitivity to people’s needs and feelings and being a generous listener.” An important point to remember is that the entering of women into management is going to be a structural trend, at least in the more developed countries. The era of supremacy of macho managers is ending.

Knowledge workers in 2020

por Carlos Sotelo Enríquez

el 15/02/2009

en Think Tanks

As Developing Economies growth, they are reducing the distance in standard of living and in the competences of their workers. Western countries have taken advantage of better education in the last 50 years, but the situation is changing. Now there are more people in higher education in some developing countries than in Western States. It means that those countries could be more competitive and will offer a better standard of living in the near future. The question in the next years is whether we are witnessing a fierce competence between Western and Developing countries or the setting up of cooperation as the main relationship between knowledge workers of one side and the other.

This thinking has an interesting argument in a recent report from the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. In Global knowledge work up to 2020, the authors present two possible scenarios in 2020 for knowledge workers. The first of them shows that Western countries will lose their prominent position in favour of Developing countries knowledge workers. The second one, more positive, points out a situation where knowledge workers of different countries will be obligated to cooperate. They explain that the best advances in knowledge economy in the last years have been promoted by groups of workers cooperating from different companies and countries.

During the last five years, London Business School has carried out a number of studies that show that the value in companies, organizations and business is not created by the individual knowledge worker working in isolation. Value is created in teams, project groups, work groups and in communities with a co-operative mindset. Development and more radical innovations also thrive best in co-operative and trustful environments. Based on this perspective, it will make more sense in the future to measure competitiveness in relation to a team or a given community.

Authors of the report hope that the second scenario will win in the 2020 environment. I can agree with that position if we are able to fight against economic nationalism and can stop the isolation policies that are emerging in international relations.

Rethinking the social care system

por Carlos Sotelo Enríquez

el 14/02/2009

en Think Tanks

The social security and care system is probably the best achievement the European Western democracies have got. It is not easy to maintain because of the increasing costs it have, as population is getting older and people expect a better quality of service. In fact, there is a strong liberal wave that asks for the abolition of the public protection systems and proposes a private security framework. Before the crisis, liberal public policysts have supported and highlighted the development of private models in several emerging democracies in South America and Eastern Europe. It seemed that every country was going to move from the public to the private system in the next decade.

However, the crisis has showed that a public protection model works to assure the basic services to all citizens. The costs of the system grow and grow but it is evident its value in hard times. Solidarity organised through the State helps to facing better the negative consequences of the crisis. I cannot argue that it is the best way to maintain a social protection network, but nobody has invented anything better in the las fifty years.

Therefore, while waiting the arrival of other brilliant proposals from the liberal intelligency, it is a good exercise to revise the public social protection model to change its weaknesses and reinforce the strengths. This task has been recently done by the British think tank Demos. This organisation has published A Constitution for Social Care, a report which focuses on disabled people who needs special attention from the system:

«Social care should be a truly empowering public service for all who need it, one that tackles and removes the barriers that some people face in their everyday lives. Everyone should have the opportunity to take part in their communities and be able to live the lives they want to lead».

They propose the setting up of a constitution which explains «a clear set of legislation for adult social care based on the principles of citizenship, equality and fairness, and sets out in detail what everyone should expect from social care services if they need them». In the long term, the purpose is to consolidate the social care system as a essential right of every citizen. It reinforces the public service philosophy against the privatisation of the social security framework.

Fundación Ideas, is this really a think tank?

por Carlos Sotelo Enríquez

el 12/02/2009

en Think Tanks

In the last post I argued over the question of what is an authentic think tank and I concluded that the Political Party think tanks do not deserve that name. I know it is a controversial issue, but I prefer to say that this type of organization does not emerge from the civil society and is not an alternative way of participating in the public policy process. Simply they contribute to reinforce the power position of the political parties without contributing to the democratisation of the political decisions.

I understand that these factories of ideas have the right to make their points in politics, but I do not think they are real public policy entrepreneurs. The most dangerous role political party think tanks can play is that they work to reduce the political debate to the game of only three or four players: Government officials, civil servants, political parties and the olligarchy of any society (big corporations, trade unions and small group of social leaders). It is not healthy for an advanced democracy. We can find a good example of the pressure that political party think tanks make in the political scene: the case of Spain. In this country, the think tank movement started at early 80’s and exploded around the beginning of the 21th Century. Now there are around thirty think tanks with a limited presence in the public sphere. You can have more data in the Guía de los think tanks en España, published by the Fundación Ciudadanía y Valores.

In the last ten years, managers of big political parties have worked to concentrate all of their research and analysis resources in one big foundation which could get a high public profile. First, it was an iniciative of the conservative Popular Party, which joint all its organisations under the Fundación Faes. The current President of the foundation is José María Aznar, past Primer Minister of Spain. He uses the ‘think tank’ as a political platform to participate in the political debate although he retired from active politics after 2004. Several actions of the foundation have caused a hard rejection and a lack of public confidence on the real value of the ideas of the Fundación Faes in the public policy process. Another bad consequence of the concentration has been the extinction of other voices in the conservative thinking. Journalists give a lot of space to the Faes activities and help to disseminate the belief that this is the paradigm of a think tank. Therefore, Spanish society has become suspicious on the recent think tank phenomenon.

Looking at the mistakes made by the conservatives with the Fundación Faes, I expected that Spanish socialists were going to offer a different paradigm for a political party think tank. They even have excellent examples in other countries of think tanks linked to a political party but which maintain enough distance to assure their independence. But Socialist Party officials, commanded by the past Labour Minister, Jesús Caldera, have followed the same way that Faes’ promoters. They have set up a big think tank, the Fundación Ideas, capable of fighting in the political arena with the Fundación Faes, but very close to the stablishment. It suggest that also is going to extinct the voices of small think tanks around the Socialist power. Like it happens in the electoral systems, citizens see that their political options are diminishing and that political debate is only for professionals. The situation is not good for democratic progress. If you visit the corporate website of the Fundación Ideas, you will see that at the moment, it do not offer any chance for people participation. And we are living in the Web 2.0 .

Political Party think tanks are not think tanks

por Carlos Sotelo Enríquez

el 11/02/2009

en Think Tanks

A common problem in young disciplines of Social Sciences, like the study of the construction of political discourse is that scholars and researchers do not agree in the basics. Comparing to Experimental Sciences, Philosophy or Humanities, more recent academic areas lack of normative theory. And the main difficulty I have found is that the situation is not changing. After decades of study and research, many times we see Academia do not share the same concepts of fundamental elements.

Obviously, it also happens with the study of think tanks. The systematic research on think tank environment is so young and a first question to discuss is the definition of what is and what is not a think tank. To me, the key is to follow the principles that guide the first founders of think tank projects: ideological independence, scientific method, philanthropy and democratic discourse. Not so many of the institutes named think tank cope with these features. I understand it is a difficult task as think tanks work in the political scene, where power relationships are the main factor. Sometimes, this is not compatible with the democratic discourse, even when political system where think tanks operate is a democracy.

Academics have offered several taxonomies to the global think tank system. One of the categories is that of Political Party Think Tanks. It describes those organizations which are legally dependent on political parties and act as factories of ideas for the election programmes and spaces of promotion of future political managers in Government. The fact is that most of them do not fit in the characteristics I mentioned above, with the exception of democratic discourse (and not all of them). Generally, their research is so biased by the ideological profile of the party, the power relationships of the moment and the need all parties have to become a perfect machine of winning elections. It means that polls play an important role in the research agendas of these ‘think tanks’.

This superficial reflection is an introduction to the recent born of new Spanish political party think tank, the Fundación Ideas, promoted by the Socialist Party to fight in the public discourse arena with the Popular Party organization, the Fundación Faes. I will discuss the matter in the following post.