Mergers/Acquisitions Theory and the Culture Wars

The culture wars between liberals and conservatives can be framed in many ways. Some of my favourites include George Lakoff's Moral Politics framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)), and Johnathan Haidt's Five Moral Bases framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt). But while these frameworks help illuminate the difference between the two worldviews, they don't offer us too many tools for understanding the interplay between them.

After all, we currently live in a bistable political world that oscillates between these two attractors, with liberal and conservative regimes successively replacing each other as electorates react to the excesses of incumbents. That leaves a lot of liberal and conservatives in charge of things who need to interact with each other. How can we work together? (Although even the desire to do so is a liberal trait, I realize, which may be one reason why conservatism is so effective in zero-sum contests, and why people flock to conservative positions when under us/them threat.)

I've recently stumbled upon the work of Harrison Trice and Janice Beyer, who published a book called The Culture of Work Organizations in 1993. Discussing mergers and aquisitions, they point out that these often fail due to cultural incompatibility between organizations. They distinguish between cultural innovation and cultural maintenance, and point out that cultural innovation entails much greater perceived risk, cost, uncertainty and effort. Cultural maintenance is much easier, and is a very powerful bulwark against felt-uncertainty.

Now, change management theories have pretty much always envisioned the change process as a journey from the current state, through a transition process, to a new stable state, so even cultural innovators are working towards an end. This sometimes leads to a phenomenon of stable orthodoxies emerging among ideological liberals, which provide easy targets for conservative critics.

But the truth is that change is disruptive, and risky, and to sway "dual-frame" or "undecided" supporters, liberals need to do things that limit that risk and emphasize continuity as well as change. Cultural innovation needs to be rooted in stablity, and move towards it.

Cultural innovation includes:
- Creating a new culture: recognizing past cultural differences and setting realistic expectations for change
- Changing the culture: weakening and replacing the old cultures
Cultural maintenance includes:
- Integrating the new culture: reconciling the differences between the old cultures and the new one
- Embodying the new culture: Establishing, affirming, and keeping the new culture

A full list of tactics for doing so is listed here: http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_trice_beyer_changing_organizational_cultures.html

One thing this framework does for me is explain something that has long puzzled me. It is the apparent paradox noted by Thomas Frank in his book What's the Matter With Kansas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansas) - namely, how is it that so many low-income people are so immediately ready to vote against their apparent interests, stepping up as stalwart conservatives to support governments whose policies vastly increase the disparity between rich and poor?

I've seen such obviously poor people adorned in emblems of patriotism, stepping forward to boldly declare their fealty to the rich, their faces glowing with virtue, pledging to support candidates who will pull away what fragile safety nets remain beneath them and trade their jobs and communities away via computerized stock exchange selling programs...

I think part of what's going on is that cultural maintenance is an opportunity for heroism. When change causes pain, the stance of saying "no" to people trying to change things offers people a sense of agency, of importance, of solidarity in the face of calamity. Low-income conservatives may feel more secure by embodying the dominant culture, and degrading efforts to reform it. An us/them mentality intensifies this commitment.

The painful irony is that the changes that are radically changing the income equation for working class people in G7 countries have been caused by the opening up of huge trade pacts encompassing hugely different economies, and the people who have profited most from this expansion are a miniscule economic elite class. But this elite class is able to motivate working people against liberals who actually *are* trying to reduce the impact of this huge sea-change on working families, by painting those liberals as elites. And liberalism *is* associated with cultural elites, in part no doubt because you need the luxury of time to expose yourself to culturally innovative ideas, weakening your investment in ideas of the past and allowing yourself the cognitive freedom to imagine change without also imagining insecurity.

Sigh... I so hate fighting against that easy circling of the wagons and the us/them rhetoric of ridicule that is so easy and accessible to people on the right. That rhetoric is so appealing to so many, and so hard to overcome once it's been used against you...