Home thoughts from abroad....

I'm going to do a bit of a cheaty thing today and point you in the direction of someone else's blog.

Chris Hatton is an academic working at the University of Lancaster in the UK.

This is his first blog and I think that it's a corker! 

(Read it at http://chrishatton.blogspot.com)

Chris writes about Personalisation and Power in England and his ideas have been formulated through consideration of the work of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and social theorist who writes a lot about power and has a pendulum named after him or something like that...

You will immediately realise that I know Foucall about Foucault...

I've read the blog a few times now and I'm just beginning to get my head around some of the ideas and start to think about what they would look like in our Australian context. 

What immediately struck me about the blog was the conclusion:

'...Despite the attraction of the grand theory and the big answer for academics like me, Foucault’s analysis of power suggests that there is no substitute for the hard grind of working through the issues person by person and service by service, and working through them together.'

Hard work and grind...these big ideas take a lot of figuring out. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but there are some things that are difficult because they are difficult...

Working person by person, service by service...

Working together...

As think about these ideas I really feel the challenge. I'm sure many of you are groaning because you feel that you couldn't possibly work any harder than you do at the moment. 

I just wonder if we've always been working on the right brick...

I think that Chris' blog can give us some clarity around that.

“I was taught to strive not because there were any guarantees of success but because the act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.”

Madeleine Albright