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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

Apartheid’

Social Change

Updated: 25 August 2020   Social change means some aspect of society, culture or sub-culture changes. The changes may be overt and dramatic and obvious to everyone or they may be more discreet and less obvious…until people come to a realisation society around them has already changed. An example of this is the attitude of the general public in the UK towards welfare and benefits. As Elizabeth Clery shows in the results of the 2012 British Social Attitudes survey (BSA)– see graphic left – there has been an increased perception that people on welfare are over-reliant on their benefits and that cutting benefits won’t harm too many people too badly. The following 2 years’ surveys  showed only the most marginal reversal (3%) of this trend (Sarah Alcock, 2015) and the election in 2015  of a Tory government determined to cut even more could be seen as voter approval of these strategies. This was actually a major attitudinal shift in a country that, for many years, had largely prided itself on a generous attitude to welfare. Yet these more subtle changes in public perception often only become news when surveys like the British Social Attitudes annual survey pick them up. How complex… Read More

Don Beck & South Africa

Written with input from Don Beck Updated: 26 June 2021 Each participant in designing the South African transition from Apartheid to multi-cultural democracy during the early-mid-1990s will have his/her own version of what happened – and it doesn’t always suit the politicians to give too much credit to the ‘backroom boys’! What is beyond doubt is that Don Beck was involved and used the Spiral Dynamics model (Don Beck & Chris Cowan, 1996) developed from Clare W Graves’ research (1970) to replace the skin pigmentation and ethnic origin categories with an understanding of the value systems (vMEMES) and ways of thinking universally accessible to the human race. Beck (Don Beck et al, 2018) recalls: “…when I was working peacefully to dismantle Apartheid in South Africa…I used the neutrality of colours to escape racial profiling. I wanted the leaders working for peaceful solutions to Apartheid to be aware of the different codes existing in people, even of the same race. Only then could we get a realistic picture of what was happening. “Zulus tended to be stereotyped as a tribal ethnic group. Yet millions of Zulus lived in urban South African settings with Westernised urban values. The Afrikaner of European ancestry was… Read More

Global

These pages use the models and theories of the Integrated SocioPsychology approach for analysing and understanding the factors underlying international conflict and global issues and developing appropriate intervention strategies. More immediate ‘hotspot’-type observations can be found in the Blog. Those who support the Integrated approach and are interested in such matters are invited to submit pieces for publication here as ‘guest features’ or ‘guest reports’. Please get in touch with your ideas via the Contact page. Different Values: Different Democracy Guest feature by Alan Tonkin exploring the concept of Stratified Democracy The Often Misunderstood Dynamics of Global Change Guest feature by Alan Tonkin on the importance of addressing values in international negotiations Innovation & Values in the 21st Century Guest feature by Alan Tonkin on  the concept of innovation being influenced by value systems Values & Development Guest feature by Alan Tonkin exploring how Democracy develops in different ways over time and in different contexts Developing Countries, Democracy & Values Guest feature by Alan Tonkin on the need for countries to develop Order-oriented values to avoid becoming ‘failed states’ Killing the Terrorists The argument for being tough on terrorists and the causes of terrorism The EU: an Organisation divided by Values Guest… Read More

Martin McGuinness for President?

Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, always good for a soundbite, is certainly making some interesting news stories these days.His effective admission yesterday (3 October) that the Provisional IRA did commit murder when innocent people died as a result of their activities is another – major? – step forward in Northern Ireland’s unsteady and decidedly volatile route to a lasting peace. McGuinness told The Independent: “The IRA were involved in quite a number of incidents which resulted in the accidental killing of innocent people and the term used by the relatives of those people who were killed was that they were murdered. I wouldn’t disagree with that. I’m not going to disagree with their analysis of what happened to their loved ones…. I accept that, in the circumstances where innocent people lost their lives, then it’s quite legitimate for the term murder to be used.” Of course, McGuinness maintains that the army and police personnel and Unionist paramilitaries blown up or gunned down by the IRA were legitimate targets in a ‘bitter war’ – to say anything other would be to disrespect both his own past and the hundreds of IRA members who died or served jail sentences for their cause.… Read More

The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain?

As Gordon Brown sits in 10 Downing Street and contemplates the terrible drubbing the small turn-out of disillusioned voters inflicted on Labour in Thursday’s local elections – 273 Labour seats lost – while hoping desperately that yesterday’s emergency reshuffle of his Cabinet will at least temporarily stall the intra-Labour campaign to oust him and that Sunday’s European election results will not be as bad as predicted, there is one crumb of comfort for him in all this…. The Thatcherite project, which, with his roots in traditional Socialism, he must have hated, is at an end. Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy of the pursuit of individual wealth in an unregulated market, with few or no social responsibilities, was an ethos driven by the ORANGE vMEME. And, for quite a time, that philosophy seemed vindicated. After being the ‘sick man of Europe’ in the 1970s, Britain once again become an economic powerhouse and a country of standing on the world stage, with Thatcher seen clearly to exert influence on those ‘leaders of the free world’, Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. Thatcherism reached its Capitalist zenith in 1989 with the collapse of European Communism and even China starting to crawl towards a sort of… Read More