Conversations

One of the things I love about this blog, my most personal blog, is the sense of conversation.

There are now over 55 million blogs worldwide, still growing at 75,000 per week. This does not matter, nor am I especially worried about clawing my way up the Technorati rankings. I am only concerned about a tiny slice, that group that wants to talk to me or that I have so far found and want to talk to. So I thought that I should pause and talk about some of those conversations.

In my post of 25 September 25, 2006 Keeping a Sense of Perspective - Larrikins and Volunteers I repeated an earlier point about Australia having a unique culture. Then in response to the immediately following post (26 September) Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y - What does it all mean?, David Anderson commented:

If I did not know you were talking about Australia I would think you are here in the US. I find it intriguing that established countries seem to be moving step by step together in business and culture changes.

David is right, of course. When I was looking at the Gen X stuff on Wikipedia I too was struck by similarities. In similar vein, our conversation about sense of alienation, the disconnect felt by many people, also brought out the similarities between countries.

How, then, do we reconcile all this with my claim re Australia's cultural uniqueness? What are the forces bringing such convergence about? How are ideas transmitted and adopted? Has Australia in fact lost its uniqueness?

All this is interesting stuff that requires thought. At this stage I would only make a distinction between an idea or concept and the way that it is transmuted in practice in the circumstances of particular cultures.

One example that I hope to discuss a little later in the context of the change process in Australia is the way the global revolution in public administration including the winding back of the welfare state found a very particular and clear form in the New Zealand model that was then imported into Australia in a bastardised way as it met the barriers created by Australia's institutional rigidities.

In another conversation, Neil put up a very interesting article on his blog on Menzies and the Suez crisis. I had not focused on the Suez crisis in my thinking about change in Australia. I found the article intensely interesting because it made me think of the broader context in which the crisis, I think a key historical turning point, occurred as well as the associated implications for Australia.

The thinking I have been doing about cross-cultural comparisons on this blog feeds into other thinking. Using the concept of professional mental mudmaps as a peg, one of the issues that I have been pursuing on the Managing the Professional Services Firm blog is the cultural differences between and within professions. Often unrecognised, these have quite profound effects on behaviour.

As an aside, it may not surprise you to know that several Belshaws have been anthropologists, that I have been interested in social and cultural analysis from an early age, while my honours thesis in history - an analysis of the economic structure of Aboriginal life in New England at the time of the European intrusion - was a study in ethnohistory.

In the midst of these conversations I should mention that there is one conversation that I should have been having and have not. Tony Karrer has been putting up some quite remarkable material on his blog dealing with learning and especially e-learning.

I say remarkable both because of its standard and its simplicity. Someone who is interested in and wants to find out about e-learning can find much of what they want there. It is a world class blog.

I said that I should have been having a conversation. Because I have been focused on other things I have not participated in discussion with Tony in the way I should have, including not responding to his response to one of my suggestions.

Tony, please accept this as a public apology.