The Lectern
August 28, 2008
The Lectern: The music of the Democratic convention
I'm in Denver to comment on the Democratic convention (in Swedish) for Sweden's TV4, the nation's largest TV channel (and I will be in St. Paul for the Republican convention next week).
I keep this blog away from partisan politics, but I do have an observation on the music played at the convention yesterday. Readers of this blog with a good memory (or Facebook friends who've checked out the music interests section of my Facebook profile) might know that I retain a fondness for the 1960s music of my youth -- and that for a number of years Congressman Tom Davis and I have challenged teams of my Master's in Public Policy students to a sixties rock 'n roll trivia contest.
Well, admirers of the music of my generation had a lot to admire in the Democrats' choice of music on Wednesday. When Obama was nominated, the music played to accompany the roars of the crowd was "Love Train" by the O'Jays (okay, that is from 1973, but still part of the '60s era in message). Melissa Ethridge sang Bob Dylan ("The Times They Are A-Changin'") and John Lennon ("Give Peace a Chance"). The crowd rocked to a tape of Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools." When Bill Clinton spoke, he was of course accompanied by his signature melody, "Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow" (also mid-70s) by Fleetwood Mac.
Personally, I loved this. But it was a strange set of choices, I thought. Obama has reminded people he wasn't even 10 years old during the sixties, and stated that he can go beyond the divided politics of that generation that affect both Clinton (Bill and Hillary) and Bush, and the rancor of partisanship among both Clinton and Bush haters. Maybe displaying my generation's music isn't the best way to signal that message.
Steve Kelman
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August 26, 2008
The Lectern: Taiwan miscellany
1) In the annual Brown University e-government survey, out this week, Taiwan came in second place in the world, just behind South Korea and ahead of the third-place U.S., for the quality of its online government. The story got big play in the local English-language press. (However, in the Taipei Times, this was actually smaller than an entire article on a research paper by a Taiwanese scientist published in Science magazine — such is Taiwan's hunger for international recognition as a small country that China has isolated internationally.)
2 ) Taipei, Taiwan's capital, now has a 311 citizen phone number. People can call the Taipei Citizen Hotline to report potholes, non-working street lights, noise complaints and so forth. The ad for the phone number appearing in an English-language city map states its motto: "The Citizen Comes First." Customer service in government is a worldwide phenomenon.
3) Another worldwide phenomenon present in Taiwan is environmentalism. August is Ghost Month, a holiday during which (Chinese-culture readers, please correct me if I'm wrong!) ghosts emerge from their cave abodes and threaten humans. To placate them, people traditionally make offerings to ghosts, including burning money (these days, phony paper money) as a sort of offering. To discourage pollution from burning paper on the streets, the Taipei city government now encourages people to hand such offerings into the city, to be burned in pollution-friendly incinerators. The new president of Taiwan — who campaigned partly by bicycling through Taiwan — is a big proponent of bicycling as a way to reduce pollution and encourage good health (trying to counteract the association of bicycling with the island's poverty-stricken past). One of my former Taiwan executive education students is currently in charge of developing new bike paths for the Taipei city government. And the Taiwanese bike industry has developed some of the most technologically advanced bikes in the world. The Taiwan Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will make air quality information by geographic address available online, allowing people to enter specific addresses and receive air quality information.
4) A Taiwanese female taekwondo Olympic competitor, Su Li-wen, suffered during her match from an old knee injury, like the Chinese track star Liu Xiang, but continued playing despite great pain. After the match, during which she had fallen 11 times, she was carried off by her coach and taken to the hospital. President Ma called her personally to say her perseverance was more important than winning a medal. The pro-independence opposition called for her story to be included in Taiwanese elementary and junior high school textbooks as an example of Taiwan's spirit as a small nation that will not give up. One newspaper article noted that some Chinese bloggers had favorably compared her with their own track star Liu, who passed up his hurdle race because of his injury.
5) I've been listening to Chinese-language tapes on an iPod while going to the gym in the United States and Taiwan in the past few weeks. I made some real progress while here, especially in being able to distinguish the four tones that you need to get right for Chinese people to have any idea of what you're saying — thanks to a recently graduated Taiwanese Kennedy School student, Charlene Wang, who helped me with this over the weekend! I'm going to keep working on this.
About to head back to the U.S.
Steve Kelman
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August 21, 2008
The Lectern: The Olympics seen from Taiwan
Because of the delicate state of relations between Taiwan and China, the Olympics are an issue that divides Taiwanese along political lines. The previous government, roundly defeated in presidential elections in March, was pro-Taiwan independence and anti-China. The current government is trying to improve relations with mainland China -- for example, direct tourist flights from China have begun. Parts of Taiwan society, particularly big business (which has many investments on the mainland) and some descendants of mainlanders who came to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek when the Communists came to power in 1949, are actually quite pro-China.
Taiwan itself participates in the Olympics as a separate team, though under circumstances that are humiliating, especially for Taiwanese proud of Taiwan's national identity. Their team is called "Chinese Taipei," it marched alphabetically at the opening ceremony just after the China team and the Hong Kong team ("China Hong Kong"), not as either "Republic of China" or "Taiwan," and there is no Republic of China flag at the Olympic stadium.
I have asked a number of Taiwanese whether they root for China in matches where the Taiwan team is not represented. The question is generally met with nervous giggles and the occasional observation that this question is very sensitive. The more a person supports the former government, the less likely they are to root for China; the more the person supports the current government, the more likely to root for China. Indeed, I've noticed big differences in Olympics coverage in English-language papers supporting the two different political parties. The pro-government newspaper gives more coverage to the Olympics, and, in its coverage, features with greater prominence the performance of Chinese athletes. The anti-government newspaper writes less about the Olympics overall, and the coverage they have gives more attention to victories by the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Jamaica. When a Taiwan athlete won a bronze two days ago (in taekwondo!), this was the front page lead story in the pro-independence Taipei Times, and got much more modest treatment in the pro-government China Post.
On another topic, I had an interesting class discussion with my Taiwanese students (all 40-something civil servants) about the transition in Taiwanese society towards a changed view of the civil service. In traditional Chinese society, government officials lorded over people; one student described their relationship with the population as master and slave. As Taiwan has democratized over the past 20 years, there has been a conscious attempt to introduce a new relationship between government officials and the people. Here, the phrase civil servant has a genuine meaning -- designed to signal that government officials exist to serve people, not lord over them -- as does the word customer to describe the status of citizens vis-a-vis government.
I did a vote in the class about how far in their opinion the transition had gone between the old idea of government official and the new idea of civil servant. Almost all students said they believed the transition at this point was between half and three-quarters complete. It would be interesting to do a similar poll in mainland China.
Steve Kelman
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August 19, 2008
The Lectern: China rising redux
I have just arrived in Taiwan for a week — as some readers may remember, I am faculty chairman for a fantastic executive education program for about 40 up-and-coming Taiwanese civil servants, and I come to Taipei to teach them for a week in August. Then they come to Cambridge in September to be taught by an all-star cast of Kennedy School faculty. However, in this post I am writing, based on some experiences on my airplane trip over here, about mainland China, not Taiwan. (To be sure, a Chinese Facebook friend, having seen my "status update" about leaving for Taiwan, did write me back that it was good that I was going to be "in China.")
I traveled to Taiwan via Toronto, which gave me the opportunity to read the weekend Canadian newspapers. There was a fascinating article in Sunday's Globe and Mail called "Chinese-Canadian Diaspora Fostering New Bond with Homeland." The basic theme of the story was that Chinese Canadians have become much more pro-China thanks to the emotion around the Olympics in Beijing in particular and China's economic and political rise in general. The story talks about an anti-Chinese government activist who for years has spoken out against government policies while living in Canada. For a decade, whenever he spoke out, he had been "showered with praise" by other Chinese Canadians.
However, when he spoke in a similar way against the actions of the Chinese government in Tibet this spring, the praise turned to fervent criticisms that "his attacks on the Chinese system had become tantamount to slighting the Chinese people themselves." Indeed, in the spring, thousands of Chinese Canadians protested in front of parliament (with similar demonstrations in Toronto and Montreal) to support China's activities in Tibet. "When China becomes a super nation," one observer is quoted in the article as saying, "[Chinese Canadians] feel proud. They feel that their status in society is tied directly to how China is being thought of on the world stage."
The same issue of The Globe and Mail had another story titled "China Knocking the World Off Its Feet" about China's Olympic successes. It quoted a Chinese blogger as saying, "Look how strong our homeland is now. Look at how much progress has been made in 20 years by the country that was once called the sick man of Asia. I deeply feel the pride of being a Chinese." The article pointed out that China had in a sense made this the first Olympic team in the age of globalization by bringing in many coaches from outside China to train its athletes. (There was another news story recently showing that the Chinese people were far more optimistic about their future than the people of any other country surveyed.)
On my long flight from Toronto to Asia and a week earlier on my flight from Abu Dhabi to Washington, I watched recent entertainment movies from mainland China that were available among the many choices on the business-class TV screens. It is an interesting in itself that Chinese films were being shown. One was a romantic comedy called "Contract Lover," about a guy who hires a woman to make believe she is his girlfriend to bring home to his parents, hoping that her disrespectful, overly Westernized behavior will get his parents so angry that they will accept his real girlfriend, a quite Westernized investment banker. The other was a light drama, "Slam," about a team of three smaller high school kids (including one who is a Chinese American living in China, or what the Chinese call an ABC for American-born Chinese), who dub themselves the Hummingbirds and take on a bigger and more well-established team in a basketball contest.
Both movies struck me as bearing an amazing resemblance to mainstream Hollywood entertainment. You would never in a million years believe they came from the one-time kingdom of Chairman Mao. "Slam" included scenes of Chinese-language rappers!
This is a new world that Americans need to understand.
(By the way, there was also an interesting article on the front page of the Canadian daily The National Post called "Do We Care Enough To Win?," wondering whether Canada's dearth of Olympic medals reflected a culture that prides itself, compared with the United States, on de-emphasizing the importance of competition and "winner takes all."
Steve Kelman
Steve Kelman
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August 12, 2008
The Lectern: Academy of Management conference
I'm at the Academy of Management conference in Anaheim, Calif., about three blocks from Disneyland. (Musings about ironies are welcomed.) As obsessive readers of this blog or my FCW column — or those with elephantine memories — may remember, the Academy of Management is the major professional organization of scholars studying organizations, the vast majority at business schools, but some populating the Academy's Public and Nonprofit division. This is their annual meeting, with thousands of participants, a growing number from outside the U.S. (mostly Europe and Asia).
There are always interesting papers at this conference. A few that especially interested me:
- Carrie Leana and Frits Pil of the University of Pittsburgh have produced another great piece of research in their series of papers on school performance improvement. They find that in schools where teachers talk a lot among themselves about how to teach math, student performance (controlling for everything) is higher than in schools where teachers don't talk with one another. This result has broader significance for the impact of high levels of informal collaboration among colleagues on organizational performance — a finding of relevance to any government organization. (The findings are especially dramatic because many assume that teachers pretty much produce whatever they produce in the classroom in private, with little collaboration with other colleagues. These results might be presumed to be even more dramatic in many other government organizations.) A vote here for Web 2.0 technologies that promote collaboration, particularly informal collaboration.
- A paper by Daniel Whitman and David Van Rooy of Florida International University found, among other things, that managers in nonprofit organizations have on average a higher level of job involvement than government managers. For government managers, their performance level is highly related to their intrinsic motivation toward the work they do (a relationship that is much less strong for nonprofit managers). This suggests a homework assignment for government — to encourage development of intrinsic motivation among employees.
- A paper by one of my favorite public administration scholars, Hal Rainey of the University of Georgia, and a former graduate student of his, Sung Min Park at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, suggests one way to produce improved intrinsic motivation. They find that the development of intrinsic motivation among public-sector employees previously motivated only by money is encouraged by job designs that provide more opportunities for autonomy and self-determination. Another vote against excessive bureaucracy in government (and against the current political and fear industry environment) that promotes rules and regimentation over autonomy and self-determination.
Steve Kelman
Steve Kelman
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