intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle
rages not on a corporate but on a ‘universal’ plane, and thus creating the hegemony
of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups” (Gramsci 1971:
181–182).
This means that the governance of societies is anchored at very deep and
informal levels (as highlighted in the s-curve presented here) and the groups whose
particular interests are best served by the currently accepted social myth will benefit
from an effect that Gramsci called “leadership with least resistance.” Even in highly
unequal societies control is maintained not so much by violence and political or
economic coercion as through an ideology that expresses the idea that there is no
valid or realistic alternative (Gramsci 1971: 242).
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is therefore very close to that of the uncontested
paradigm of Meadows, who says: “The shared idea in the minds of society, the
great big unstated assumptions—unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone
already knows them—constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs
about how the world works” (Meadows 1999: 17). While Meadows leans more to
the camp of overcoming paradigms and path dependencies by learning, Gramsci
highlights political interest and domination when thinking about the persistence of
paradigms. He therefore argues against restricting the idea of coercive rule to
official laws but to understand how the private context equally defines codes of
conduct and shapes the way in which individuals fit in. He explained that the
concept of the law
will have to be extended to include those activities which are at present classified as
“legally neutral,” and which belong to the domain of civil society; the latter operates
without ‘sanctions’ or compulsory ‘obligations,’ but nevertheless exerts a collective pressure and obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking
and acting, morality, etc. (Gramsci 1971: 242).
Contemporary political economists like Stephen Gill from York University in
Canada have used Gramsci’s work to track manifestations of the mainstream
economic paradigm in contemporary societies. Gill’s concepts dovetail nicely with
the original three levels of the MLP, and help us sharpen our understanding of the
degree to which the mainstream economic mind-set has been encoded into our
societal systems. They also show why I think that changing this paradigm would be
one of the most powerful leverage points for transformational changes in development. In his analysis, the mind-sets component is inherent in all three levels, but
given their important role in understanding system perpetuation and change, I
decided to single them out into the meta- and mini-levels as well as cutting across
them (Fig. 2.6).
On the landscape level, Gill’s “market civilization” resembles Polanyi’s stark
utopia of a market system. It describes the ongoing structuration in which social
relationships, and relationships with nature, are commodity-shaped, fitting everything into the pathway of price-governed exchange value growth. According to
Gill, this institutional setup and with it the personality-shaping effects nurture an
152
5 How to Work a Great Mindshift for Sustainability Transformations
rages not on a corporate but on a ‘universal’ plane, and thus creating the hegemony
of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups” (Gramsci 1971:
181–182).
This means that the governance of societies is anchored at very deep and
informal levels (as highlighted in the s-curve presented here) and the groups whose
particular interests are best served by the currently accepted social myth will benefit
from an effect that Gramsci called “leadership with least resistance.” Even in highly
unequal societies control is maintained not so much by violence and political or
economic coercion as through an ideology that expresses the idea that there is no
valid or realistic alternative (Gramsci 1971: 242).
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is therefore very close to that of the uncontested
paradigm of Meadows, who says: “The shared idea in the minds of society, the
great big unstated assumptions—unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone
already knows them—constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs
about how the world works” (Meadows 1999: 17). While Meadows leans more to
the camp of overcoming paradigms and path dependencies by learning, Gramsci
highlights political interest and domination when thinking about the persistence of
paradigms. He therefore argues against restricting the idea of coercive rule to
official laws but to understand how the private context equally defines codes of
conduct and shapes the way in which individuals fit in. He explained that the
concept of the law
will have to be extended to include those activities which are at present classified as
“legally neutral,” and which belong to the domain of civil society; the latter operates
without ‘sanctions’ or compulsory ‘obligations,’ but nevertheless exerts a collective pressure and obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking
and acting, morality, etc. (Gramsci 1971: 242).
Contemporary political economists like Stephen Gill from York University in
Canada have used Gramsci’s work to track manifestations of the mainstream
economic paradigm in contemporary societies. Gill’s concepts dovetail nicely with
the original three levels of the MLP, and help us sharpen our understanding of the
degree to which the mainstream economic mind-set has been encoded into our
societal systems. They also show why I think that changing this paradigm would be
one of the most powerful leverage points for transformational changes in development. In his analysis, the mind-sets component is inherent in all three levels, but
given their important role in understanding system perpetuation and change, I
decided to single them out into the meta- and mini-levels as well as cutting across
them (Fig. 2.6).
On the landscape level, Gill’s “market civilization” resembles Polanyi’s stark
utopia of a market system. It describes the ongoing structuration in which social
relationships, and relationships with nature, are commodity-shaped, fitting everything into the pathway of price-governed exchange value growth. According to
Gill, this institutional setup and with it the personality-shaping effects nurture an
152
5 How to Work a Great Mindshift for Sustainability Transformations