Latest thinking

Pole to pole: making art in the Antarctic and the Arctic

Blog

15 Jan 2009

The artist Neville Gabie is currently in the Anarctic with the British Antarctic Survey as artist-in-residence at the Halley Reseach station on the Brunt ice shelf. He'll be there for four months and each week he's recording a video blog of his life there, One Minute Week.

The numbers that really matter...?

Blog

15 Jan 2009

This week, the education headlines will no doubt be dominated by the political row over the headline figure of 470 'failing schools'. Is it good progress, poor progress,  or not what we should be measuring in the first place...  

Andy Burnham, Steven Gerrard and the spiral galaxies

Blog

15 Jan 2009

Matthew Taylor

Earlier this week I did a Fabian Society event with Culture Secretary Andy Burnham (before I get my usual ‘Blairite stooge’ comments, I am also due soon to speak to the Bow Group). Discussing how to generate mass participation in the arts, I made a point I find myself making often when talking to Government folk.

Social brains, social networks, big ideas and social change

Blog

15 Jan 2009

The Social Brain project tries to wed together three elements:

Cultural theory - and the row over the Heathrow third runway

Blog

15 Jan 2009

Matthew Taylor

Cultural theory offers four paradigms of change (there is a fifth, but it is of a different kind). What are they and how are they exhibited in relation to a specific issue, for example, whether to build a third runway at Heathrow?

Cultural theory - and the link between George Washington and Gordon Brown

Blog

14 Jan 2009

Matthew Taylor

Cultural theory has changed the way I think about policy dilemmas and organisational problems. It can provide insights to everyone from political commentators to community activists to managers of large organisations. Over the next few days in some – hopefully – short, accessible posts I intend to lay out the key tenets of CT as I understand them by reference to concrete examples and contemporary issues.

Public pessimism private optimism and individualism about agency

Blog

14 Jan 2009

I read in the Times yesterday that the gap between public pessimism and private optimism has reached new limits with regard to the economic outlook for the UK in the coming year or so. Most people when asked about their own prospects are bullish, but regard the prospects for the economy as a whole as dire. This appears to be a form of irrationality or cognitive bias – if a vast majority of individuals are going to do okay, then how will the economy as a whole nose-dive?

Social mobility, the brain and good news for the RSA

Blog

13 Jan 2009

Matthew Taylor

As I write I’m listening to the Today programme item about the social mobility white paper. The RSA will soon be hearing from someone whose work may be one of the most important contributions to this debate.

Self-help, individualism and the social brain

Blog

12 Jan 2009

The self-help movement was a real late twentieth century phenomenon. It was (is) quite different from the self-improvement societies of (say) Victorian Britain, or the (often somewhat cultish) self-improvement societies of the twenties and thirties (the nadir of these societies being Hitler’s National Socialism, which had its roots in cult-of-the-body groups from the twenties). All these movements were fundamentally social. But self-help since the liberal individualism of the sixties has been thoroughly individualistic (think of the Tom Cruise character in Paul Thomas-Anderson’s flawed masterpiece Magnolia as the nadir of this kind of movement).