Storytelling and life's three conversations

A colleague recently encouraged me to publish this post. Hopefully it is because they felt it would have wide relevance. I do not feel I’m exploring new territories, so much as looking at old ones in new ways... anyhow, this is me planting my flag in the field. This is the lens through which I am thinking about our world at the moment.

Accountability is the subject of many debates these days, and while typically the word often suggests sound financial management, to many it signifies a commitment to upholding Human Rights in organisational activity. This often means accommodating to inequality in the present, while committing significant thought to ethical considerations in strategic planning. Where accountability is viewed as an ability to account to communities, or being answerable to people within them, then from an equality perspective there is a more specific significance for the outcomes of marginalised groups within them.  Understood as being account-able to named groups, or able to acknowledge the interest of specified constituencies, activity is required to restore fullest participation in human endeavour. 

Account-ability requires more than a one-way statement, it necessitates an ongoing conversation. This idea of storytelling, one that helps envision and thereby creates better futures, requires an invitational movement to those most shutout by present inequality. Viewed thus as a type of dialogue, of specific intent, its character become important for it to secure better well-being and positive outcomes for all. Over time, an increasing ability to account for the interests of named constituencies within organisations, would help the co-construction of new knowledge, helping to empower both workers and those most disadvantaged within the localities they serve. Accountability understood as a conversation, is a dialogue used to secure human rights interests more equitably. In other words a storytelling that acknowledges the need for greatest engagement and long-term well-being of all local people. 

Inequality and disadvantage

Set against a backdrop of austerity, the monologues many are delivering about reducing funding to those in need are imposing negative ideas on those least privileged by institutional authority within our society’s uneven landscape. This palpable vilification is imposing additional strain, caused by the stress of hardship, to the difficult financial situation faced by many (Hughes, 2015).

Here, I am exploring the characteristics of those conversations that impact on the ideas affecting groups, organisations and society. Not so much on the individuals within the groups, but the impact a shared voice has on the telling of their story in society more widely.  Previously, I’ve written about the importance of being mindful about how we talk about certain groups in personal and public places. The importance of respecting individuality and experience of people privately; while in a public context highlighting the lack of privilege they may enjoy (Chapman, 2013). Over the last few months I've come to think that the public sphere itself can be subdivided into three areas: community, state and market.

For the purposes of this piece I will be looking at the characteristics of three types of dialogue that are held in public: because the way we tell a shared story has an impact on the society we live in. Furthermore, these ideas relate to the sustainability of many organisations whose purpose straddle these areas: the state (democratic), community (associational) and market (business).  For many of their workers the impact of a market conversation, within an increasingly procedural tone equating cut backs to ‘austerity/efficiency’ agendas, brings tensions that are increasingly difficult to live with. I would add that in many ways we are facing a crisis, but I hope it will be one that will drive positive social change from a Human Rights perspective.

Three lives

I feel that because conversations hold varying amounts of attention/time in our lives, they influence how we think and what we believe – our story. For the purpose of my study I chose to look at the differences between community, market and state conversations because they have been identified as relevant to equality in the literature.  From the social and environmental standpoint, being account-able more specifically requires a fluency to articulate a balance of all three areas: what has cost (quantitative), worth (qualitative) and of value (interpretative). In sustainability terms, economic, environmental and equality are also defined areas of interest relating to development, or equity of growth, within systems (the 3 Es as identified by (Bebbington, Unerman, & O'Dwyer, 2007). The community conversation relates to the happiness (now) and the well-being (to come) of populations, and whether growth can be more equitable in progress, so that we can all flourish rather than become increasingly unhealthy (Wilkinson 2005). My overarching question is whether we can achieve a balance between professional, associational and democratic activity in order to secure human rights.  As this, in my view, is also a key to upholding the interests of the disabled people living in our communities.

The amount of airtime conversations hold, can also be understood as power, the voices that dominate. Viewed thus, the stories we tell, and the voices within them, amplify or diminish the belief we have in ideas voice. For those groups marginalised by the negative impact of unsustainable growth, the louder conversations will have an oppressive  impact. And carry messages that are damaging to individuals, even when they are not identified as prejudice.  The power of the bias within the story told will build cumulatively from the position of the individual, to the group and across society more widely (Thompson, 2007).  

Where cost considerations dominate, in a consumerist society, individualism will reinforce a belief that participation equates to contribution through work.  Unfortunately, this helps place blame for personal choice on people disadvantaged by circumstance, rather than highlighting systemic and institutional discrimination. And where we over-emphasise cost in the wrong context, it effaces the value and worth has equals importance.

The belief in market quantities

While at work we may rightly talk about the financial impact of new machinery on sales. In professional life, for example, networks of people use specialist language, in places where people’s knowledge is specific to sector or industry – their professionalism. People may use shortcuts that imply a bundle of ideas, they may be difficult to explain fully, but they are understood because they are linked by familiarity and shared understanding. (Sadly, this can also exclude the outsider: example ‘supported living’ in people and homes). As an other example, the word risk means different things to play workers or social workers; the former sees risk as life-enhancing unlike the latter life-threatening. The words used in community gatherings, an associational perspective, where the shared activity of bread making or allotment tending is free, people may use a more relaxed register but still with a technical dictionary – words that refer to cooking measures or plant types.

Monetary consideration will not highlight the community worth of a wildlife citizen-led  project that helps birds feed after a pond has been cleaned. Moreover, how can we interpret the long—term democratic value of increasing young people's access to the curriculum following a parent led pressure group who talk about raising aspirations for their children? I've witnessed both community and state conversations being conducted in market language; school governors talking about their learner’s potential earning power, or charities business-washing worthwhile qualitative outcomes in monetary terms for annual reports. This is proof in my view, if not evidence I admit, that our consumerist society is having an impact on how we talk about lived experience.  How can we interrupt market conversations, with their implied rectitude, from perpetuating the importance of cost in associational and democratic situations where worth and value could be articulated more fully to honour the scale of the interests inherent in the Human Rights agenda.

In the next few months I would like to explore how these ideas could help people think more clearly about service provision. 

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Hughes, B. (2015, Sept 11). Disabled people as counterfeit citizens: the politics of resentment past and present'. Disability and Society , 14.

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