the politics of expertise. how ngos shaped modern britain

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Bristol] On: 03 November 2014, At: 04:26 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Contemporary British History Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fcbh20 The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain Brian Harrison Published online: 12 Nov 2013. To cite this article: Brian Harrison (2013) The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain, Contemporary British History, 27:4, 535-538, DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2013.845395 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2013.845395 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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Page 1: The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain

This article was downloaded by: [University of Bristol]On: 03 November 2014, At: 04:26Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Contemporary British HistoryPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fcbh20

The Politics of Expertise. How NGOsShaped Modern BritainBrian HarrisonPublished online: 12 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Brian Harrison (2013) The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped ModernBritain, Contemporary British History, 27:4, 535-538, DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2013.845395

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2013.845395

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain

Reviews 535

Jefferys’ sub-title might suggest a gradual shift from an era when sport was essentially the concern of voluntary organisations to a present in which it has a secure place in the business of government. In fact, as he points out, the process has been far less smooth. It is true that sporting matters bulk larger in the minds of politicians as well as in the structure of government than they did 60 years ago, but this is not to suggest that there have not been fallow periods (the 1980s was a notable one) when sport was marginalised in the political arena, nor that such times will not recur in a future of retrenchment in public spending and austerity. Although the goal of bringing sport into a comprehensive programme of social welfare—linking school, community and elite sport—has frequently been expressed by politicians (especially Labour figures), the prospect of achieving it is still a distant one. Jefferys has produced an invaluable, novel and much-needed study. At the same

time, it is a top-down, Whitehall-centred, English examination of the subject. Certain conventional wisdoms among historians have been challenged and modified, if not overturned, and some grandiose political claims—such a Ben Bradshaw’s idea of a ‘silent sporting revolution’ under New Labour—subjected to more temperate analysis. But in a text that necessarily has to spend time setting out new detail Jeffery focuses chiefly upon what his chosen sources tell. There are, therefore, further areas to be explored such as the rest of Britain or the place of local government in sport, which has always been important. Jefferys’ excellent chapter on this level of activity provides a platform. Above all, perhaps, the voluntary sector, still the most dynamic provider of recreational sport, awaits investigation in detail to understand its responses to the greater influence now being exercised by the state. These are areas for a fruitful collaboration between political and sport historians, so let us hope that Jefferys’ book will set some hares running.

Jeffrey Hill

De Montfort University q 2013, Jeffrey Hill

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2013.845393

The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain Matthew Hilton, James McKay, Nicholas Crowson & Jean-Francois Mouhot Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013 xvi þ 317 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-969187-6 (hbk) (£35.00)

In tackling the rapid late twentieth-century growth and increasing professionalism of voluntary bodies in Britain, these four authors confront a large and difficult

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Page 3: The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain

536 Reviews

subject. In 2008 the National Council of Voluntary Organisations found that there were 171,000 voluntary organizations in the UK with a paid workforce of 668,000 and an army of volunteers twice as large. Here the middle classes are on show, whether in the processions of the Countryside Alliance, behind OXFAM shop counters, or campaigning to Make Poverty History. Indeed, in its main line of argument this book demonstrates how central these movements are to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century making of the British middle class, wielding professionalization as its prize weapon. These movements soon shed the charismatic chrysalis whose importance is so often exaggerated by historians of voluntarism, and reveal themselves for what they are for most of their history: energetic butterflies adorned with the expertise and status of the true professional. The engineers, scientists, lawyers and academics who join at the outset eventually take control as ‘social entrepreneurs’, then rationalize structures and secure tighter financial supervision through centralization. So in the twentieth century’s later decades, a voluntarist but paid career can be pursued by advancing from one pressure group to another. The optimistic mood among these four authors reflects the optimism of the

nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that they study. With the growth of women’s paid work, the number of women volunteers in bodies such as the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), Women’s Institutes (WI) and Mothers’ Union might decline, but the one-time volunteers could now be paid for what they had earlier done for nothing. With diversified recreational opportunity within an affluent society, political apathy might spread, but televised programmes on the country house or the environment ensured democracy’s survival through a more direct and participatory route: through the booming membership of institutions such as the National Trust and environmental and outdoor organizations. Turnout at general elections might be waning, but ‘the political became personal’ (p. 1) in a ‘transformation in political engagement’ (p. 2). If, by any chance, an NGO declines, another springs up to replace or even surpass it: ‘associational life is dynamic rather than static’ (p. 40). Even religion, organizationally in decline, remains ever hopeful here: in reforming movements it finds new late twentieth-century roles and recruits however uncongenial they find the irreligious company they are forced to keep and however secularizing such collaboration may be in the longer term. Our four authors show that however much NGOs may owe to nonconformist (and

especially Quaker) attitudes, they no longer inherit in its full force the distrust of government that pervaded nineteenth-century dissent. Through an adult education that is eminently compatible with democratic values, professionalized NGOs are portrayed as ‘ultimately about mobilizing expertise and taking it to the sites of political power’ (p. 107). Instead of merely opposing governments, they aim ‘to bring expertise to expertise’ (p. 79). So professionalization, a major theme in British twentieth-century history, mobilizes not just to build up the state but also to build up its critics. NGOs’ priorities are inevitably short term: fund-raising, negotiating, self-advertising and dealing with the latest emergency. With all too little time for reflection, they

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Page 4: The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain

Reviews 537

cannot initiate ideas and must rest content with diffusing them. Alert to new media opportunities, they must quickly adapt to new situations, and are always on the brink of moving from outsiders to insiders, deploying their expertise as their weapon. In this and in other ways, the volunteers increasingly resemble the politician and

even the diplomat, and the NGO finds itself increasingly and sometimes painfully exposed to the dilutions, amalgamations and compromises which are the lifeblood of democratic politics. So MPs and civil servants repeatedly cross and re-cross the line that divides the formal from the informal political process. And here lies the dilemma that pervades the entire book. On the one hand the ongoing vitality of Victorian Liberal, internationalist and libertarian values is fully apparent. NGOs have linked and energized their disparate causes by ‘speaking the language of rights’, thereby acquiring ‘a veneer of radicalism’ (p. 220) that is rendered respectable by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). ‘The privatization of politics has occurred not just through the engagement of individuals, but also through the ideas for action subsequently proposed’, and through this libertarian alignment NGOs ‘have demonstrated a commitment to individualism as an underlying ideology’. On the other hand the warning note is ever-present: the Victorian and still more the nonconformist individualist would have seen a state machine as threatening when it so cleverly harnesses voluntarism to its own purposes. This book emerges from a project ‘that deliberately sought to bring together the

different sub-fields, specifically those associated with the skills of the social and cultural historian and those of the political and diplomatic historian’, yet it has done so without any of the sectarian lingo of ‘cultural studies’, and with none of sociology’s jargon or political science’s meticulous quantification of the unimportant. Ample statistics, often laboriously acquired, are provided when necessary, though they are sometimes under-interpreted; documentation is thorough, with footnotes sometimes creeping a quarter of the way up the page; the 35-page bibliography quarries rich and diverse mines, though fails to list the many manuscript collections consulted; the index is adequate, though sometimes insufficiently differentiated (who, for instance, will plough through the 25 undifferentiated references to ‘international aid and development’?); and the prose is clear, unpretentious, businesslike and seamlessly integrates its quadripartite authorship. The book is also fair-minded, well aware that ‘the social and political causes spearheaded by NGOs can be as reactionary as they are radical’ (p. 23) and that ‘the pluralism of modern politics is by no means the preserve of the liberal progressive’ (p. 14): it knows that the Charity Organization Society must be included alongside the Child Poverty Action Group. And although NGOs are their major preoccupation, the authors are always sceptical of their claims to influence; rightly so, because all pressure groups approach history, not objectively, but instrumentally as an aid to self-advertisement. Above all, the book is splendidly learned in unfamiliar areas, and is especially strong

on the three pressure-group causes of international aid, homelessness and the environment. All this constitutes a major achievement which will be welcomed by historians and social scientists of every variety. Two small doubts arise. The book owes

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Page 5: The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain

538 Reviews

much to the rise of ‘global’ history, but the recent transfer of the acronym ‘NGO’ from the international to the domestic arena risks cutting off modern NGOs from their past: from the pressure groups, opinion groups, cause groups and reforming movements which would have found the acronym alien and even abhorrent. The authors know well enough that volunteers have collaborated with the state at least since the seventeenth century (p. 4), but they assign little more than a polite nod (a mere seven of their 271 pages of prose) to anything that happened before 1945, from which they date the gradual build-up to ‘the transformation of the political’. This is a pity, given that histories since Henry Jephson’s The Platform (1892) have illuminated this whole area with their studies of the free press, Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League, the women’s suffrage and the humanitarian movements, CND, and their conservative opponents. And this is to name only the national movements without their firm base on abundant spontaneous local initiatives. Without the initiatives and information that these volunteers provided, the Victorian small state could never have functioned, and for a prime example of the international NGO one can hardly better the pre-Victorian anti-slavery movement. As for the voluntarist resort to state aid, much discussed in this book in its late twentieth-century context, this was nothing new. Anti-slavery activists, birth controllers and enthusiasts for family allowances all hoped for and eventually received state reinforcement and even state takeover of their voluntary efforts. During the First World War the government even helped to create trade associations and the Women’s Institute movement as devices for drawing groups with shared interests together and thereby rendering them more accessible. A second important but neglected area in the book is the relationship between NGOs

and the much-misunderstood British two-party system, which interacts with NGOs quite differently from the multi-party coalitionist structures that are now so fashionable. Eager to do down the other side, each party in the two-party system hoovers up anything from NGOs’ policy, personnel and methods that can be sold to the electors, thereby stabilizing government by nourishing governmental priorities in fringe groups which might otherwise become conspiratorial. By contrast, the party fragmentation fostered by multi-partism introduces all the drawbacks associated with blurring the distinction between party and pressure group. It is no surprise that governments in wartime or peacetime multi-party coalitions or suspensions of party conflict are so vulnerable to Anti-Waste Leagues, Middle Class Unions and the like. These two areas of neglect, however, do not disqualify the book for the title of ‘new political history’—a title more fully deserved by its four authors than by others who so eagerly claim it. Our four authors do not push their claims, so others must do it for them.

Brian Harrison

University of Oxford q 2013, Brian Harrison

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2013.845395

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