The Cloud of Unknowing: Time for Value-ing Gerunds

• Author: John Benington,Jean Hartley
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/00953997211053508
• Date: 01 November 2021
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211053508

Administration & Society

2021, Vol. 53(10) 1610 –1623

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997211053508

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Perspectives

The Cloud of Unknowing:

Time for Value-ing

Gerunds

Jean Hartley1 and John Benington2

We respond to Mark Prebble’s welcome and thought-provoking article not by

repeating in full our previous, published arguments about public value as

contested democratic practice (Benington, 2015; Benington & Hartley,

2019), but by highlighting some key points about profound changes in the

context to take the conversation forward from where Mark leaves it. These

have implications for knowing, contesting, value-ing, and creating publics.

A Liminal Period of Crisis, Uncertainty and

Transition, Requiring Major Paradigm Shifts

The Covid pandemic, the climate emergency, the historic geo-political shifts

which are re-drawing the power-relationships between the USA, Europe,

Russia, Africa, and above all China and other parts of Asia, together with the

exponential growth of trans-national financial corporations, global social media

giants, and artificial intelligence (the latter largely beyond accountability to

democratic national governments), combine to create a period of epochal

change in the ecological, political, economic, social, technological, and cultural

context of societies and nations. The outcomes of these tectonic changes are

still very uncertain—“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is

dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid

symptoms appear” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 276)—but clearly require major para-

digm shifts in mindsets and practices.

1The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

2The University of Warwrick, Coventry, UK

Corresponding Author:

Jean Hartley, Centre for Policing Research and Learning, The Open University, B2 Wing,

Michael Young Building, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK.

Email: jean.hartley@open.ac.uk

1053508AAS0010.1177/00953997211053508Administration & SocietyHartley and Benington

research-article2021