One of the aims of this book is to persuade the reader to embrace the unbounded approach in how to understand community development and economic theory. I am almost certain that the author really means that the aim is rather to convince rather than persuade – an important distinction in any pedagogic work. As a reader, I am challenged by this aim and approach the theme of the book with an open mind in trying to digest the concept and practice of unbounded organization as opposed to conventional economic thinking bounded by parameters put in question by Richards.
What could be more important than community development in a world where mainstream economics have failed for so long in contributing towards equity and instead being a root cause of the constant reproduction of poverty and inequality. The book points to the failure of economic science: Since the 60s neoliberal academics have harvested Nobel Prizes in economic growth theories arguing for less government interference and regulation and strong ‘free’ markets as the right medicine for creating more jobs, reducing poverty and inequality. Today we see the result of neoliberalism as producing the opposite of these predictions.
Richards criticises the very concept of economic growth and argues for a community development that he sees as a governable growth that intends to produce equities rather than inequities. This alternative path starts on brand new premises compared with any previous economic theory and has been developed in light of people’s basic needs. Methodologically, it is a well-known rule that the theory needs guidance from reality – not only the present but also potential reality. Human needs are explained as decisive in understanding the reality of the present and also visions of potential reality.
Chinua Achebe’s first book was entitled ‘Things fall apart’ (1957) and depicted a pre-colonial society before things fell apart upon the arrival of Europeans in the late nineteenth century. Richards aims at integrating things that have fallen apart, like economics and community. His diagnosis of separateness and fragmentation is a temporary one in that his aim is to integrate what has been separated, viz. community and economics. This putting together again what has fallen apart necessitates even an integration of academic disciplines that have built walls around themselves – located in different buildings with little or no communication amongst them. This strong classification is another fragmentation that inhibits understanding of social issues and development alternatives. Richards calls for vocabularies in different theoretical frameworks to encounter each other in order to develop multidisciplinary and even transdisciplinary vocabularies.
Richards breaks Popperian rules in acceptable social science methodology when he grounds his methodological preferences in Bhaskar’s critical realism and John Searlès theory of how cultural and material facts in interaction over time results in constitutive rules which tend to cause the further construction of reality in harmony with those rules. Material facts therefore have cultural roots. This realisation makes transformation of the material world more possible in that culture may be less hard to change than the material world which then may be transformed via cultural changes. As I read it, however, the simultaneous change in culture with material experiments results in learning new skills, attitudes and behaviour. Richards puts it this way when he adopts John Searle’s view of the human being as change agent assuming that ethics is included as part of the equation:
People are norm-abiding because they are biologically coded to be culturally coded; they can be socialized to respect the norms of the community, and they can go on to individualize themselves as coherent personalities with moral integrity. From a psychological and physiological perspective, humans can create and operate functional institutions because in most cases their moral development is normal, not pathological. Today’s underdose of community and overdose of economy is an underdose of something very real and very promising: ethics. (p. 173)
It is pointed out that change in culture as a step towards change in the material world was an important part of early social democracy in Sweden. It is to be expected that participation in and towards any new economic activity - whether social democratic or neoliberal – leads to learnings that accumulate as culture in harmony with that activity. And that this cultural creation may be modified in new constitutive rules in the material world of the future in line with altered contextual conditions. An example is the unbounded organization approach as developed by Gavin Anderson in South Africa. It will undoubtedly carry with it learning about how to cooperate in cross-sector and versatile community projects and thereby also strengthen citizenship education in the community.
Whether such projects and learnings will attract investment from the present neoliberalist system is another question. It is also a question whether an unbounded approach is a strategy for piecemeal – and over time overall – change of the present economic system. The last two chapters of the book are devoted to the fiscal crisis of the state and possible solutions to it. As Richards points out even President Mandela changed his socialist views in order to attract investments. He found it difficult to resist the new neoliberalist forces dominating the global economy (Reagan and Thatcher) at that time. The New Labor in European social democracies (e.g. the Blair government in the UK and social democratic governments in Norway) embraced the same.
It has to be recognised that the dilemma of balancing between ‘what is’ and ‘what should be’ requires an acceptance of present conditions as a stepping ground for transformation towards a future vision. In that change process, Richards says that we are constrained to work with mainstream thinking and the basic social structure as they are even though we might disagree with it. The unbounded organisation path, however, may be a viable alternative in trying to balance what is practically feasible in the present system with a view to changing it.
Richards writes in a style which is inviting also the non-economist. This is of great pedagogical value in that expert economic concepts are well explained. This is also important in that those without dominant economic expertise can develop insights into economic issues that might tend to be impenetrable for the non-economist when trying to understand economic issues. Richard’s style is one of demystifying economic jargon, which is of great importance for any transformative action.