The Social Sciences in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

 

Inaugural lecture of Professor Peadar Kirby,

Professor of International Politics and Public Policy,

University of Limerick, February 25th, 2008

 

 

Daunting challenges

I presume that what is expected in an inaugural lecture is that one sets out one’s stall, as it were, one announces a programme or project for one’s period as professor. Yet, I want to cast my net wider this evening, both because I find it hard to sum up neatly what might be my programme (after all, I’m only still settling in and learning about my new institutional home) but also for a much larger reason, namely the times we are living through. For it seems ever clearer to me that we are living in very exceptional times and that the challenges ahead for our societies, our universities and us as social scientists are immense. At an immediate level, it is ever more obvious, as former President Gorbachev put it in a recent newspaper article, that ‘very little has been done to respond to the discouraging challenges of the environment, poverty and security’. As he put it about global poverty, ‘in spite of the rhetoric and the commitments to the fight against poverty in developing countries, whatever advance being made is due to their own efforts accompanied by civil society activists. Basically the rest of the world just sits back and watches’.[1] Analysing the links between underdevelopment and climate change, the UNDP in it latest Human Development Report, describes these problems as ‘the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced’ with the future and very survival of our children and their children ‘hanging in the balance’.[2]

 

Taking up a chair of international politics and public policy at a time like the present is therefore a huge and daunting responsibility. For international politics and international public policy is at the very epicentre of the crisis now upon us. Certainly as regards climate change, we know much of what we have to do if humanity is to survive. The real challenge, as we saw at Bali last December, is one not just of political will but of the inadequacy of our political systems, caught between the competitive pressures of national systems and the urgent requirements of fundamental global changes to production and consumption. Our inability to turn around in any significant way the scandalous gap between the rich and the poor at a global level illustrates even more vividly the huge failure of international politics and public policy if only because we have now been trying to do it for half a century and, over that period, global inequality has grown exponentially.

 

You will be reassured therefore to know that there is much to keep a professor of international politics and public policy more than fully occupied. I will return later to some ideas about what we in UL might do, but before that I wish to turn to the title that I have given this lecture ‘The Social Sciences in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’. It may seem to some of you that this title suggests my mindset is limited by the boundaries of the national, something unbecoming in a professor of things international. So let me clarify: to me all our politics and all our social scientific knowledge is ultimately rooted in the local; that is not to say that it is limited by the local but it is to say that, unless our knowledge of a globalised world is ultimately related to the daily life experiences of people as they work, interrelate and make a life for themselves in local communities in whatever part of the world, then it is not useful knowledge and it runs the risk of imprisoning and oppressing human beings rather than liberating and enhancing them. Indeed, the battlelines drawn over the past decade between the so-called ‘anti-globalisation movement’ as the English-speaking media still insist on calling it (the French have a far more accurate term, altermondialisation or alterglobalisation, alternative globalisation) and the proponents of the agenda of global economic liberalisation is today’s best illustration of the point I am trying to make.

 

My basic point here is that international politics and public policy must be rooted in the local and constantly refer back to it. That is one of the dialectic tensions that must nurture it. Hence my title, as the major issue preoccupying us in Ireland right now is the end of our long economic boom. Where we find ourselves is in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, something that even six months ago I might have felt I would have to argue but which few informed observers right now would seriously contest. Reflecting on the role of the social sciences in this situation offers me the possibility of illustrating some of the links between the local, namely our national experience, and the global. However, the intention here is to do more than describe or illustrate – it is also to suggest some ways in which we could more effectively respond to the daunting challenges that now confront humankind. What faces us all therefore is transition, where to no one knows. Everything else fades into insignificance compared to this. But we can only face this challenge from were we are right now and for this reason I turn to consider the more immediate challenges of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

 

The social sciences in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

What is this strange place, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland? Is it just that we are like those awakening from a long drinking session, finding it difficult to come down from the high and nursing a very sore head from all the partying? Or are we waking up to find ourselves in a very different land, one that in many of its key defining features would not have been recognisible to an inhabitant of Ireland twenty or more years ago?

 

Certainly for the social scientist, indeed for academics in general, one major change is that Ireland is now being seen by many around the world as a model to follow. From having been widely seen less than 20 years ago as a laggard, a failure compared to most of our neighbours, indeed a rather strange exception to the western European norm, hidebound by tradition, religion and conservative politics – all the things seen elsewhere as retarding progress – we now find ourselves admired and emulated. From this flows rather serious consequences as we find that our internal debates now have a world audience in that academics and policymakers around the world pay some attention to them. I can testify to this from my own personal experience, for example just a month ago in Costa Rica when everyone from the President and the Minister of Labour, through the main leaders of the political and civil society opposition, to leading social scientists in the University of Costa Rica, wanted to be briefed on the ‘Irish miracle’. This makes working as a social scientist in Ireland today particularly fascinating and even weighty. For what Ireland is being seen as offering is a model for how small and relatively underdeveloped countries can benefit from globalisation; not since our anti-colonial struggles a century ago inspired others in India, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere has Ireland been seen as forging a new path. So, if for most of the 20th century, Ireland took its theories from the experiences of others, it enters the 21st century offering something of its own from which others are learning. This, then, indicates the importance of some of the key debates very actively taking place in the social sciences in Ireland today – such as on the social impact of economic growth, on the nature and role of the state in Ireland’s success or on social partnership.

 

So what then is the specific role and responsibility of the social sciences in this situation? This is a question to which a very simple and straightforward answer can be given: it is the same as it has always been, namely to offer what I liken to an X-ray of society, delving beneath the surface facts and impressions to uncover the deeper and often hidden structures beneath. As political scientists we concentrate on the question of power – how it is exercised, structured, institutionalised, contested and mediated. But, of course, this is not sufficient on its own – we also need sociologists who analyse social structures and their interactions and changes, and economists who analyse structures of production and exchange, the creation of the resources and wealth that keep us going. These are the three classic branches of the social sciences but I don’t want to neglect the many newer disciplinary areas that have emerged in tandem with social changes over the 20th century such as women’s studies, communications and media studies, development studies and many others. All have developed their particular methodological and theoretical approaches, have adapted and refined methodological tools and all have essential insights to offer into the nature of social phenomena and how they are changing. We cut ourselves off from one another at our peril.

 

Yet, of course, the reality is that one branch of the social sciences, namely neo-classical economics, has taken on a hegemonic role in terms of its influence and standing in today’s Ireland. And, due to its theoretical and methodological makeup, it appears to the outsider to be entirely self-referential, showing no interest in the extensive work in other branches of the social sciences except to dismiss it at times. I am reminded of the warning of Karl Polanyi on the dangers of the market mentality. He wrote that ‘nothing obscures our social vision as effectively as the economistic prejudice’ – namely reducing the economy to a market system and making the welfare of society depend on this system – as it presents a ‘formidable obstacle’ to attaining ‘a more realistic view of the general problem posed to our generation’, the problem of human livelihood. If anything, Polanyi’s strictures are even more pertinent today when the ‘economic prejudice’ seems to have taken over not just economics but public policy, our political leaders, media coverage and commentary, and those who are in charge in our universities.[3] If I’ve already said that it is an exciting time to be working as a social scientist in Ireland today, I must add that the hegemony of a neo-classical interpretation of the Celtic Tiger also makes it a very frustrating time. This is because one very partial and overly positive reading of the Celtic Tiger experience has tended to dominate so that much of the ambiguities and the darker sides are elided, erased from the picture, thus avoiding the very complex challenges of interpretation that our recent development raises. And this is frustrating not just for reasons of academic accuracy – it is frustrating to see that some of the weaknesses of policies followed in Ireland and some of their negative consequences are not being recognised or attended to. As a result, conclusions are being drawn from the Irish case about the sorts of policies that offer the prospect of economic and social success amid the conditions of globalisation that are based on far too partial and myopic a reading. To an extent, this flows from the attraction of success, or at least of high economic growth. As long as a boom lasts, others are only too quick to label it a successful model. As soon as it ends, attention quickly switches elsewhere often without the real lessons having been learnt. I fear the same is about to happen in the Irish case.

 

However, the globalisation of a particular interpretation of the Irish boom also reflects the weak position of the social sciences within Ireland since the active debates within them about the developmental nature of the Celtic Tiger and its social impacts have been almost entirely overlooked by the media. Even a relatively well-read Irish dweller over the past decade could be forgiven for not knowing that such debates are even taking place. Indeed, I myself was twice told by a leading Irish publisher to whom I submitted book proposals over the past decade that my books were too radical and would find no audience in Ireland! He said that he had ceased publishing social science texts since they are not commercially viable. This attitude means that the marketplace for ideas about the nature of the Irish boom has been filled by media pundits like David McWilliams who himself shows little knowledge of the work of social scientists, not to mention Marc Coleman’s recent The Best is Yet to Come. I’ve done no scientific study of this but my impression as a quite regular consumer of media from a variety of countries, including French and Spanish-language media, is that the range of social scientific views represented in the Irish media is very narrow compared to other countries. This is a worrying situation and clearly contributes to the poverty of public debate that so characterises contemporary Ireland.

 

It also reflects the quite marginal position that the social sciences occupy in public policy in Ireland where their contribution often seems little valued and much misunderstood. For the priority placed by government today on developing research in certain areas of science and technology is very one-sided as it neglects the fact that all scientific innovation is mediated to society through social, economic and political structures. To take one of my own areas of work, it seems very worrying to me that a state which is so actively involved in developing the economy and society shows no awareness of the need for basic research into how it itself operates, how policy gets made, whose ideas come out on top and why, what paradigms dominate, how the political system relates to the bureaucracy and a host of other issues, with the result that we simply have no adequate knowledge base to assess the capacity and effectiveness of the Irish state. Yet my own experience of the relatively meagre funds that flow to the social sciences through PRTLI and other funding sources is that they are so fragmented and thinly spread, and display a lack of any strategic coherence in the manner of their dispersal, that they often end up distracting us from building up the research capacity so badly needed. The weak and incoherent public effort to sufficiently fund and develop social science research in conjunction with research in science and technology means that we run the risk that much of the benefits of very significant funding from the public purse may well be reaped by economic and social groups with a weak connection and commitment to Irish society, in other words a subsidy by the Irish taxpayer to some of the most successful multinationals in the world. However, we all seem to be so caught up in endless rounds of funding applications that no one is asking these basic questions.

 

If this analysis is in any way accurate, a number of conclusions flow from it about how the social sciences can help us make the transition to a post-boom period. The first is one of which I have become more and more convinced over recent years, namely that we social scientists have failed largely to convince our academic colleagues, politicians and policy makers, the media and the wider public of the essential importance of what we do. In a society which is quite rightly exercised by the poor quality of public services and provision, it should not require a major effort to show how this is in part a result of the failure adequately to resource the work of social scientists and, equally importantly, to ensure their work influences public policy making in a broad and inclusive way.

 

In conjunction with this, we also need to be more pro-active in defining the sorts of research funding we need and the sorts of funding regimes that would best suit our work. The present system seems to me to be hopelessly inadequate, yet we seem constantly to follow along in a reactive mode. What sorts of research capabilities need to be built up in the social sciences in Ireland and how? Are we in agreement with the emphasis on doubling numbers of PhDs? Can we maintain quality in the present funding and staffing environment? Are we in danger of so degrading the quality of a PhD that we will in time find ourselves having to establish a higher grade PhD like they have in some European countries for those who want to advance in academic careers? It is disturbing that there is not a more active debate among us about these questions, being more proactive rather than frantically and somewhat slavishly reactive.

 

We need to be more active in fostering a wider public culture of robust debate. One very questionable legacy of the Celtic Tiger is a stultifying culture of narrow consensus politics. This has had the effect of eliding critical voices and fostering a self-congratulatory culture that serves our society very badly. The media has bought into this culture (often I think without realising it) so narrowing in a most dangerous way the range of views about important issues that are aired among the wider public. In this situation, universities have a particularly important role to play in being the incubators of new and challenging ideas. Yet, it is disturbing in the extreme to find that more and more of those who lead many of our universities (present company excepted) seem to see the role of the university as being at the service of a particular government project rather than being spaces where such projects are debated, contested and refined, and new projects promoted. Indeed, one of our largest universities now states publicly that it is aligning its research priorities with those of government; this is the death knell of the university as we have always known it: universities at their best have always been characterised by their contestation of power through their commitment to the promotion of new ideas. Are we now to have a university system that takes its leading ideas from government and aligns its output to serve these?

 

The urgency of this situation is a particular challenge for the social sciences. For what passes for a government project today is an idea (if one can call it that) taken from a particular branch of the social sciences, namely ‘the knowledge economy’. This has become the key objective of public policy though the term ‘knowledge society’ is also used, usually interchangeably with the former. Yet, examining government documents, it is very difficult to know what exactly is meant by this broad term ‘knowledge economy’. Its origin is the economic concept that knowledge has become a key factor of production in some branches of the economy, though there is less consensus on what exact kind of knowledge. Ultimately, what the term seems to boil down to in the mindset of Irish policy makers is a very belated effort to build in Ireland significant research capacity in certain key areas of science and technology. This, of course, is a positive development but there is far less clarity about how to translate this into the sorts of leading national industrial sectors that characterised the East Asian success, for example, much less how to translate economic success, were we to lay its foundations in any sustainable way, into social success. Indeed, on international tables of the ‘knowledge economy’, Ireland does not rank very highly and is placed as a follower rather than an innovator.

 

What is remarkable about all this is just how little it is being debated, and I am delighted that we in UL now have an Institute for the Study of Knowledge in Society which should make the study of this vague and confused term a key objective. The terms ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge society’ are being widely used, including in key university policy documents, yet can anyone tell us with any exactitude what sort of project for a post-Celtic Tiger Ireland this actually involves? It seems paradoxical in the extreme that a public culture of consensus, actively policed by government, is promoting a knowledge economy and society. What kind of knowledge is to be promoted? Clearly not an active interchange of contestatory ideas. And how might a ‘knowledge economy’ achieve two goals that we in Ireland urgently need to bring to the forefront of public policy, namely an equal society and a sustainable society? We have moved further from achieving these goals over the course of the Celtic Tiger and there is little about public policy in Ireland to give one much confidence that they are the serious objectives of policy makers (though the presence of Green Ministers in government and EU pressures are belatedly forcing some seriousness about the ecological issue). I fear that the ‘knowledge economy’, as promoted by today’s Irish state, recognises only forms of commodified knowledge (knowledge that can be turned into commercialisable goods and services) and has little appreciation of or value for ‘the structure of ideas, the beauty of ideas and most importantly the power of ideas’ that our president, Professor Don Barry, so eloquently and inspiringly proposed as the aim of our undergraduate education in his inaugural lecture last September 19th.    

 

So I conclude that the transition to a post-Celtic Tiger Ireland urgently requires that we social scientists challenge the narrow consensus that has replaced serious debate about public policy in today’s Ireland. We need to return again to seeing our primary activity as being the creation and communication of ideas, ideas whose power comes from their ability richly to interpret their social experience for those who hear them. We urgently need to foster a public culture of contesting ideas, for the sake of deepening and clarifying our knowledge of society and the options now facing us. This is our task and let us not get distracted from it. It is the opposite of generating thin and brittle ideas, ideas which are second-hand makeovers and which break once put under any pressure. The generation of robust ideas will not achieve an equal and sustainable society in Ireland or elsewhere but it is an essential contribution to their achievement and it is our contribution as social scientists. It is up to activists of various kinds, those involved in political parties and in social movements, to take these ideas and translate them into the stuff of political struggle, to clarify competing projects and the interests they serve, to promote what the Latin Americans call wonderfully a ‘proyecto de pais’, a country project.[4] But without the contribution of those who generate the ideas, none of this can happen. Its urgency for the uncertain times we are now entering cannot be overstated.

 

Towards the post-industrial age

So let us now raise our heads from our own patch to look out beyond us and place our little transition in the context of the wider transition that now confronts the human race. The veteran scientist, James Lovelock, described in his latest book the crisis now facing all of us as follows:

 

We suspect the existence of a threshold, set by the temperature or the level of carbon dioxide in the air; once this is passed nothing the nations of the world do will alter the outcome and the Earth will move irreversibly to a new hot state. We are now approaching one of those tipping points, and our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.[5]

 

According to Lovelock, nothing like this has happened for 55 million years but, much more to the point, it is the first time it is caused by one of the species inhabiting the Earth, namely humans. So here again the social sciences are fundamentally challenged since it is the ways we have organised our economic production, our forms of consumption, our societies that are fundamentally implicated. We are facing the crisis of a social paradigm, industrial society, that was created in the West and then exported to the rest of the world. As well as bringing us wealth and sophisticated living beyond our wildest imaginings, it has as Polanyi reminded us also brought us grim poverty and inequality for much of the human race – ‘poverty amid plenty’ as he put it. Both are the two sides of the one coin.

 

So, where do we go, what do we do? The first responsibility that I feel as an Irish social scientist is to show as clearly as I can that the so-called Irish model now being exported and emulated, far from being a way forward exacerbates these twin realities of unsustainability and poverty. If, as some economists argue, Ireland was simply belatedly catching up on our more developed neighbours, then clearly if most of the other countries in the world try the same we will need the resources of multiple planets to achieve what we define as development: the UNDP estimates we would need nine planets if all the human race were to live at our level. This is not the way forward. The human race is entering a time of immense transition, out of an industrial model of production and consumption that we now realise is based on resources that are limited and some of which, notably oil, we are fast running out of, and that has brought us to the edge of a climatic tipping point that will have catastrophic consequences for us all if we go over it. As the UNDP put it:

 

The battle against dangerous climate change is part of the fight for humanity. Winning that battle will require far-reaching changes at many levels – in consumption, in how we produce and price energy, and in international cooperation. Above all, though, it will require far-reaching changes in how we think about our ecological interdependence, about social justice for the world’s poor, and about the human rights and entitlements of future generations. … We can avoid 21st century reversals in human development and catastrophic risks for future generations, but only by choosing to act with a sense of urgency. That sense of urgency is currently missing.[6]

 

In this situation, it is our responsibility as universities and as social scientists to force a recognition that the development paradigm based on economic growth cannot continue. I mention this issue as it strikes at the heart of what we presume to be progress, the concept of economic growth or growth of gross national product. As economists like Herman Daly and others have been saying for three decades now, we have to reach a steady state equilibrium where the agenda becomes far more one of redistribution of what we have than one of endless and ever more intensified growth.[7] An issue that has languished on the very far margins of social debate must urgently become part of the mainstream. When it does, it will turn everything else on its head since it will force us to return to local resources producing them in more sustainable ways and distributing them among neighbouring communities rather then sending them to the far ends of the earth. Our forms of consumption, of social interaction, of mobility are going to have to change radically. So the agenda for us social scientists, as it is for all scientists, is daunting in the extreme. Though we know all this, we continue living as if some scientific and technological breakthroughs will finally save us, something like carbon capture technologies, and allow us continue our forms of production and consumption essentially unchanged. Undoubtedly science and technology have immense contributions to make but we must also remember that it is science and technology that have brought us to the brink. They must be at the service of a project of sustainable and equitable social organisation and that requires that the social sciences play a central and essential role, not the marginal and dispensable role now accorded them in this society.

 

And if there is any grain of truth in all this, is it not the height of irresponsibility to continue educating the younger generation as if things are going to continue unchanged? I often find myself uneasy when touching on these issues in class because what I essentially am telling students is that they will have to sort out this mess and we are leaving them on their own to do it since we are offering no guidance. So part of the challenge for us as social scientists is to begin envisioning a post-industrial society and economy and the political institutions that can help to organise it. And make no mistake about it – confronting the huge social changes that will be required for survival on this planet will demand a level of state intrusion in our lives unknown in modern times outside wartime. For all this we urgently need a paradigm change within the social sciences, bringing the ecological challenge from some chapter towards the end of our textbooks, if it is there at all, into the centre of our thinking and research and writing. And, if we do that, of course it comes into the centre of our teaching. That would be to live up to the vision of undergraduate education, indeed the rich vision of what essentially all education is about, presented by our president a few months ago.

 

In the light of his priorities, I want to make a concrete proposal tonight, one concrete challenge to my new institution. This idea is taken from the work of the veteran environmental writer and Catholic priest, Thomas Berry. In his book The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, Berry writes that:

 

The religions are too pious, the corporations too plundering, the government too subservient to provide any adequate remedy. The universities, however, should have the insight and the freedom to provide the guidance needed by the human community. The universities should also have the critical capacity, the influence over the other professions and the other activities of society. In a special manner the universities have the contact with the younger generation needed to reorient the human community toward a greater awareness that the human exists, survives, and becomes whole only within the single great community of the planet Earth.[8]

 

Universities have gone through many transitions, he says, but ‘they have never experienced anything like the transition that is being asked of them just now.’[9] At different times in history, they have been dominated by theology, by humanistic concerns, by science and engineering, by business. In our times, he quite rightly says, universities much choose as to whether they are educating people for temporary survival in our declining industrial age or for an emerging and more sustainable future society. With our beautiful campus, which itself creates a living relationship between our scholarly activities and the natural world around us, UL is in a very special way suited to give a lead, a lead already being given by the important work being done by the university’s environmental committee. But far more is required and Berry’s concrete proposal is that all students take a compulsory foundation course in the history of the Earth as they begin their studies, not just a geological history but a history of its emerging consciousness. The best idea I have heard mentioned since I came on board in UL is the idea for a BA in Global Studies. Instead of copying what the competition is doing, here is an idea that holds the prospect of pushing the boat out in a new direction, if it were properly done to include at its centre the challenge we face of finding a new paradigm of sustainable living on and with the planet. Not only might it challenge our students to engage with the immense task that lies ahead for all of us, educating them for the real challenges as we largely avoid at the moment, but, more importantly, it would hold the prospect of challenging us as scientists and us as an educational institution to make this the centre of our concerns and activities.

 

My challenge to UL, then, is to cease always looking over our shoulder at what the others are doing and trying to claw our way up some dubious international ranking of so-called world-class universities. Let’s take the lead and make a radical gesture of the kind Berry called for. I propose that no student of UL should leave without:

 

1)      knowing their own and our society’s carbon footprint;

2)      having been intensely educated in the features (social, economic, political, ecological, cultural) of the severe crisis of sustainability now upon us;

3)      having had the dominant consumerist and individualistic values that characterise our society and culture today frontally challenged; and

4)      having experimented with practical ways of constituting a sustainable lifestyle.

To achieve these goals would challenge us in a fundamental way to begin to restructure all we do so that we become a seedbed of ideas, through our teaching and our research, for the new post-industrial age that lies ahead. It would be the best way that I can think of to be faithful to UL’s challenging motto: Eagna chun gnímh, a wisdom for action. How urgently our society and our age needs a wisdom for action![10]

 

Conclusions

In this lecture, I have tried to step back from the daily details and place what we do in a far larger canvas. In doing this, I have emphasised the fundamental transition that, as I see it, lies ahead for all of us, the transition towards a post-industrial society. Some may think I’ve exaggerated the extent of change and adaptation that lies ahead. But it would be foolhardy to deny the urgency of raising awareness and placing on our agenda an issue that is now the most live issue of international politics and public policy. Facing the ecological challenge of climate change and the social challenge of greater equality may seem light years from post-Celtic Tiger Ireland but of course it is not. If our period of economic boom was characterised by a remarkable neglect of these issues so that Ireland has been warming at about double the global average over the past two decades and the gap between rich and poor remains among the worst in the developed world, let us take the opportunity now to place these issues at the heart of our planning for the future. I have ended by throwing out a challenge to UL to take a lead on this. I hope there are others in this academic community who share my sense of urgency. We owe nothing less to those we are educating and to our society as a whole than to be at the forefront in laying the foundations for a more equitable and sustainable Ireland as we put the years of boom finally behind us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


[1] Gorbachov, Mikail: ‘Seguimos anclados en el siglo XX’, in El Periódico, January 6th, 2008, pp 5 and 6.

[2] UNDP (2007): Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 6.

[3] Polanyi, Karl (2001 [1944]): The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Books, p. 166 and Karl Polanyi (1977): The Livelihood of Man, New York: Academic Press, p. 5.

[4] See, for example, Gustavo F. J. Cirigliano (2002): Metodología del Proyecto de País, Buenos Aires: Editorial Nueva Generación.

[5] Lovelock, James (2006): The Revenge of Gaia, London: Penguin Books, p. 7.

[6] UNDP (2007): Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 6 and p. 15.

[7] See, for example, Herman Daly (1996): Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Boston: Beacon Press and Herman Daly (1991): Steady-State Economics, Washington DC: Island Press.

[8] Berry, Thomas (1990): The Great Work, New York: Bell Tower, pp. 79-80.

[9] Ibid., p. 84.

[10] Indeed, in a keynote address to a conference in Aarhus University, Denmark, last November, Professor Bob Jessop of Lancaster University, a leading authority in my field, did an exegesis of the term ‘knowledge economy’, concluding that it was so vacuous that people invested it with whatever meaning they wished. He ended by proposing the concept of ‘wisdom-based society’ as a more worthy objective for social scientists.