"More in Common" initiative and the "Hidden Tribes" Report

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"More in Common" initiative and the "Hidden Tribes" Report

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Feb 18, 2019 11:12 am

"More in Common" initiative and the "Hidden Tribes" Report.

On my way out the RI door for a while, I decided to do the courtesy of replying to this post by Heaven Swan.

But it turned into the beginnings of a dossier on an advocacy think-tank called More in Common, which made moderate waves recently with the publication of a report called Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape (2018), by Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Míriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon. So I decided to add a bit of research to the board before taking my leave of absence.

Apologies that this must be a quick treatment, with plenty still to be added, perhaps by some of you if you are intrigued.

More in Common is a new international initiative, set up in 2017 to build communities and societies that are stronger, more united and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarisation and social division.

Our approach is to:
• Develop and deploy positive narratives that tell a new story of ‘us’, celebrating what we all have in common rather than what divides us
• Connect people on a large scale and across lines of difference, through events and campaigns.

We are currently running pilot projects in both these areas and look forward to sharing more in the coming months. While we are just getting started, More in Common has already established national hubs in the UK, US, France and Germany and has published early findings from our first stages of work.


Here I am going to analyze a bit of the "Tribes" report -- my god, what a giveaway in that choice of word -- but I don't want to cast any shade on the other publications in their first round of reports, as I have not read the other reports and presumably they have different authors and approaches and may be more conceptually sound.

However, this is a think tank, not a university department where theoretically the member scholars can do any research they please. There is an organizational agenda and the authors are paid to follow a given assignment. I think it is stated clearly enough on the website and in the "Tribes" report, so let's get on with that.

"Hidden Tribes" is a great example of how foundation-funded social science can be used as a kind of middlebrow agitprop that reinforces already hegemonic messages. In this case, it implicitly critiques the culture war strategy applied to American politics but effectively reinforces it by reproducing its false premises.

The copious polling "data" is deployed so as to suggest all Americans can be essentialized as members of seven political "tribes" that work like quasi-cultural identities.

(Well, actually, these are recycled and reshuffled marketing demographics, but let's get on with it. Seven is such a good number, amirite?)

It is claimed these previously "hidden tribes" can be usefully delineated from each other, as if almost everyone is more a member of one than all of the rest cumulatively. Just to add to the self-branding effect of this "discovery," they even created a Hidden Tribes logo. Also, a separate site. Visitors are offered the chance to take a survey and get a result that tells them what "tribe" they fit. Thus they have not only "discovered" these tribes as though they are fixed entities and not constructs out of their polling results, but also encourage people to decide which one they belong to, thus in a sense starting to create them.

In the data sections, we do find out the individual members have class and ideology and apparently need to make livings in the real world. But what the report touts as most important is the discovery that each tribe is tied to individually innate, divergent "values." There's barely any need to note that the construction of questions and issues and controversies all falls within the usual limited categories of the American political spectrum and liberal/conservative binary.

Are all of these values somehow equally valid in our beautiful multicultural soup? Well, yes, turn to any random passage and you will basically learn a lot about how the polled persons lumped into the various groups "believe" things, but rarely any attempt to figure out either where these beliefs may come from -- does the society have any institutions, or socialization processes? Or whether they actually correspond to any external realities.

So one of the groups believes the wealthy have undue influence and power, and a couple think there is a problem with "economic inequality." But no worries, we're not going to ask whether they might have a point that should be taken more seriously than those who disagree, and whether this should be addressed as a source of the superficial problems of "polarization" and "social division." You won't find no citations of Piketty or Gilens and Page here. Not even Paul Krugman.

The freshly invented "tribe" entities trump and implicitly must always trump individuals' interests as citizens of a given place forced to take on economic roles (or to fail in them), as possessors of occupations, or as political actors, or as individuals who may not fit into any "tribe," or as human beings in awe of the world seeking to love and live. We should not expect that people change their minds too often. That's what makes this report into an act of essentialization.

The methodology repeats the schtick long done by the estimable Pew, who have been ploughing the "what unites us" landscape for decades, but really, this thing could be filed under "Everything Wrong With Empiricist Sociology."

Empiricism is an approach I distinguish from the merely empirical. Empirical should mean, to observe and think, and try to systematize it, and if possible to set up testable hypotheses. Empiricism is all system, and plods through masses of observations (in this case, polling data) with little self-criticism of how the method is constituted.

This work avoids a conceptual probing of just what the terms it is attaching to the data mean, or how the ways in which the "tribes" are named by it in a sense create them and influence how we think of them -- and also leave no doubt about the most essential division of all, between these expert analysts and the lumps of human material they expound upon. But that one is not named here.

The effect is to adopt boatloads of unquestioned premises from the surrounding society. Empiricism, like its cousin, "objectivity" (e.g., tell both sides and don't ask if either of them might be more wrong or right), often serves exactly that function. It may not be ideologically "conservative," but it is conservative in the sense of buttressing a status quo.

That status quo is currently feeling besieged, and this is an attempted response in its defense.

But wait, why did I not start with the small print, right at the beginning?

The report was conducted by More in Common, a new international initiative to build societies and communities that are stronger, more united, and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarization and social division. We work in partnership with a wide range of civil society groups, as well as philanthropy, business, faith, education, media and government to connect people across the lines of division.


This confused me a bit, so I put it into the new Google Translate They Live Edition. Here are the results:

Let the banks and the billionaires plunder and indebt you, the corporations suck your soul out at work and sell it back in packets when you shop, the empire bomb peasants and build the next generation of nuclear weapons, the ocean levels rise and the forests burn, the barefoot walk among you in the snow, and the teargas canisters fly to enforce the stability of this glorious order. All that can wait. The real problem in this country are the terrible new threats of "polarization and social division," which no one ever saw before, and social media are creating little bubble communities that reinforce these terrible plagues. Why can't we all get along?


So, who funds this thing? They don't say directly on the More in Common site, but it presumably starts with the foundations and institutes listed under the "Governance" item, and whoever funds them. The report seems to be a joint US-UK project, as it worked with a group there called Purpose (another generic lovely name) and YouGov (a pollster).

Here is the More in Common board and their affiliations. Note the three co-founders are listed in the sentence after the arranged list of voting board members.
https://www.moreincommon.com/governance

Governance

More in Common is governed by a Global Board of Directors. The Board provides oversight on the strategic direction of the organisation as a whole. Members of the Global Board bring a wide range of international experience at the highest levels of government, academia, civil society and philanthropy.

Members of the the Global Board are:
Sally Osberg (Chair), former President, Skoll Foundation
Thorsten Benner, Director, Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin
John Powell, Director, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, UC Berkeley
Will Somerville, Program Director, Unbound Philanthropy
Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, Deputy CEO of Ipsos, former French Minister of Education

The three co-founders of More in Common (Tim Dixon, Mathieu Lefèvre and Gemma Mortensen) also sit on the Global Board as Executive Directors with no voting power.

More in Common is registered as a Company Limited by Guarantee with a non-profit object in the United Kingdom (Registration no 10900540); as an Association de loi 1901 in France; as a 501(c) 3 in the United States and as a gemeinnütziger eingetragener Verein (e.V.) in Germany (Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg (registration no. VR 36992 B).


It would take at least another 60 minutes I don't have right now to yield even the beginning of proper answers about these people, their orgs and other possible sources of funding and what they might represent. And to delve into the prior literature by the four report authors. One of them is Tim Dixon, a co-founder.

Maybe Harvey or conniption or someone would like to give this more of the RI treatment. They smack a bit of Integrity Initiative in terms of their ideological function -- not to mention the timing of their discovery of "polarization" -- but they proceed in a "bipartisan" mode (i.e., they are neither for nor against Trump or Russia, which is not mentioned). And they are way way way more professional. Totally NPR worthy.

Ironically this report, endorsed by HS, reinforces the very same bad things she associates with the "identity politics" or "SJWs" that she decries. The culture war may be implicitly eschewed in the report, insofar as golly-gosh it causes conflict and division, and there could not be good reasons for us ever too be too divided, and so we need to have "more in common," but before this division is to be overcome, first it is naturalized. ("The old left/right spectrum, based on the role of government and markets, is being
supplanted by a new polarization between ‘open’ cosmopolitan values and ‘closed’
nationalist values," p. 21). The report accepts the culture war's essentialist (and in the US very right wing) framing of what the issues are: urban vs. rural, tolerant vs. patriotic, etc. This helps into splitting us conceptually into geographically inchoate "tribes" (gak!) at war with each other, rather than, say, classes, or sexes, or people forced into castes based on skin color whether they like it or not, or ethnicities and language and religion communities, or, most importantly, holders of particular ideas that may have more or less valid or rational basis. There's a strange positivism regarding the polling results -- as if they measure reality -- coupled with a simultaneous denial that there is a reality one could observe correctly, while others might get it wrong. There is no idea treated that these "tribes," which are opinion groups, came to be through given histories and circumstances that change constantly, so that next year or in ten years the same procedure might map out a different number of entirely transformed "tribes." Or, finally, that the dynamics of how such transformations happen do not work and have never worked according to the pluralist model implicit here. Changes involve conflicts, often unavoidable and legitimate, and institutions, and top-down power moves by the ideologically hegemonic institutions, and cynical hidden plots to manipulate and deceive, and giant anonymous trends visible only in retrospect if that, and fluctuating tensions between current power and wealth, rising power and wealth, and, sometimes, feet walking out of workplaces and on to the streets. In a time of unrelenting class war from above, reaching new peaks and striving for worse, this report wants to suggest that "division" is a function of what everyone cumulatively thinks.

The next step, as with the mission statement above, is to condescendingly imagine how insight into these tribal (gak!!!) identities will allow the "tribes" to communicate effectively and negotiate peaceful compromises -- within a wearying loop that never addresses the issues that actually affect most lives and cause most of our sufferings.

Where is a consideration of who holds powers to make decisions?

Where are the wealth and resources?

Where is the history, the real-existing economics?

What divides us even before we are old enough to form opinions about this division?

Who are bosses and who are servants?

Who is punching and who is receiving the punches?


These are the kinds of questions that are rendered inconceivable, or hidden, by this report, although at the same time More in Common does express an admirable desire to care for oppressed and displaced peoples outside the borders of the countries it studies. Within, however, it's all about what the name says. (The "More in" part is a kind of a confession of futility, by the way.)

The word capitalism does not occur in this report. ("Capital" appears once, in reference to capital punishment.)

Corporation, corporate, bank, finance: zero references. ("Financial" occurs only once, in quoting an informant who spoke of personal financial problems.)

Dollar, USD: one reference.


Money money money, sure is funny, it's a rich man's world.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: "More in Common" initiative and the "Hidden Tribes" Repo

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Jun 14, 2019 10:11 pm

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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Re: "More in Common" initiative and the "Hidden Tribes" Repo

Postby Harvey » Fri Jun 14, 2019 10:33 pm

Good stuff. Missed it first time round.

Someone put this on Twitter during the Trump visit, instructing people to assemble as indicated for the anti-trump demo in London, I assumed it was a joke.

Find your zone....jpg
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This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: "More in Common" initiative and the "Hidden Tribes" Repo

Postby Elvis » Fri Jun 14, 2019 11:23 pm

More in Common is a new international initiative, set up in 2017 to build communities and societies that are stronger, more united and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarisation and social division.

Our approach is to:
Develop and deploy positive narratives that tell a new story of ‘us’, celebrating what we all have in common rather than what divides us
• Connect people on a large scale and across lines of difference, through events and campaigns.

We are currently running pilot projects in both these areas and look forward to sharing more in the coming months. While we are just getting started, More in Common has already established national hubs in the UK, US, France and Germany and has published early findings from our first stages of work.


I'm immediately reminded of the PR used to garner support for a big local developer's project to gut the downtdown of anchor businesses and open a huge shopping mall outside town on a once-lovely rural acreage. The sales job was very clever and some people even wept at an outrageously maudlin video the organizers showed of a community building a barn. Yes, the old barn-burning, I mean barn-building theme.

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Re: "More in Common" initiative and the "Hidden Tribes" Repo

Postby liminalOyster » Sat Jun 15, 2019 3:12 pm

Harvey » Fri Jun 14, 2019 10:33 pm wrote:Good stuff. Missed it first time round.

Someone put this on Twitter during the Trump visit, instructing people to assemble as indicated for the anti-trump demo in London, I assumed it was a joke.

Find your zone....jpg


Equally obnoxious, the right wing retort:

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