Organisation and Creativity: Mere Administration and Mere Theology

This essay uses personal experience at the University of Sussex and as Principal of Ruskin College since 1989, to argue that Creativity in associational form has been systematically marginalised as ‘Mere Administration’ or even as ‘Theology’. New forms and relations of production (of ideas and culture as much as of material goods) depend upon organisational innovation. Max Weber's work, together with some of the best 19th and 20th century Social History (particularly of voluntary organisations) in Britain, together with the author's own experience all point to the importance of what Marx called ‘Centres of Organisation for the working class’ which can do what the medieval municipalities and communes did for the middle class’. Don't forget. I set out our principles before we came into power so that people knew exactly what we stood for. Let me try briefly to sum up. It is the sanctity of the individual. Margaret Thatcher, in Newsweek, April 1992, reprinted in The Guardian, 22/4/92 Our case, after all, is the sociality of general freedom. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters, 1979