In his obituary of Paul Spencer, Richard Waller talks of Paul’s nine years with the Tavistock Institute in the 1960s as a period in which he carried out “sociological research unrelated to his work in Kenya”.
I had the opportunity to work closely with Paul during four of those years – on an interdisciplinary Nuffield Foundation project that was intended to shed light on, and if possible suggest changes to, the processes of policymaking in city government.
Our host was Coventry city council, which offered us open access to its full range of planning and policy forums, including, most unusually, the private pre-council meetings of both of Coventry’s opposing party groups.
Paul’s anthropological perspective proved to be an eye-opener for me, as a young mathematically-schooled management scientist. Not only did we together attend and report on many meetings of officers and members, but Paul went out of his way to access wider community events, ranging from the ritual of the formal counting of votes after municipal elections to ad hoc meetings of council representatives with campaigning neighbourhood groups.
At times Paul would point to intriguing parallels between aspects of societal organisation in rural Kenya and urban England. My subsequent career in devising approaches to help shape public policies in various countries owed much to the insights Paul shared with me back then.
