Robin Murray

Robin Murray (14 September 1940 – 29 May 2017), birth name Robert, was an industrial and environmental economist. As a social entrepreneur, he advocated and implemented new forms of production and organization, based on principles of ecological sustainability, social justice, and democracy.

Murray was awarded posthumously the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in October 2017, for "pioneering work in social innovation".

Early life and education Robin Murray was born on 14 September 1940 in Westmorland (now Cumbria), the son of Stephen Hubert Murray (1908–1994), a barrister, and his wife Margaret Murray Gillett (1907–1979) from a Quaker banking family and an architect. He was the third of four sons. The Murray family moved from Hampstead to Hallbankgate in Cumberland in 1951, Stephen Murray giving up his legal career to farm. Greenside Farm, Hallbankgate, a hill-farm in and around Coalfell, was in a mining area, and a family property of Lady Mary Murray (1865–1956), Stephen's mother and daughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle; she passed it on to Stephen and his sister Rosalind Toynbee, wife of Arnold J. Toynbee.

On the move to Cumberland, Murray to went to White House School grammar school in Brampton. In 1952 his parents sent him to Bedales School. It was at Bedales that Robin met his future wife Frances (née Herdman, 1941-) and together they became head boy and girl of the school (1957-8). In 1959 Murray spent several months in between leaving school and going up to university working for Danilo Dolci in Partinico, Sicily.

Murray studied Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, (1959–1962), then at the College of Europe in Bruges where he received a Diploma in European Studies (1962–1963), finally at the London School of Economics where he earned his MSc in economics (1963–1966). While studying at the LSE, Murray was an Adult Education Lecturer for the Oxford University Extra Mural Department, the Inner London Education Authority and the Workers' Educational Association.

Career

1960s On finishing his studies, Murray became a lecturer in economics at the London Business School between 1966 and 1970. He was part of the group that helped bring the May Day Manifesto into being, and then contributed with Michael Barrett Brown to the economics section of the 1968 Penguin edition which was edited by Raymond Williams. The original 1967 edition was edited by Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams.

1980s Between 1982 and 1986, Robin Murray worked as the director of industry and employment at the Greater London Council and was tasked with developing the London Labour Plan and the London Industrial Strategy. The latter set out an action plan to regenerate London's economy in a socially sustainable way, creating a blueprint for the Labour Party's future national economic policies.

In the months leading up to the abolition of the GLC, Murray and his colleagues created the Third World Information Network (Twin) which initially imported goods from the Global South in solidarity with the co-operative movement. Following on from this, Robin Murray and colleagues went on to set up Twin Trading, an innovative and groundbreaking organization which combined trade with social and economic development in partnership with coffee co-operatives in Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua and East Africa. In so doing, Twin and Twin Trading were at the forefront of the Fair Trade movement, one of the great social innovations developed in response to the post-imperial contradictions of political self-determination shackled by economic dependency.

Reflecting on his experience at the GLC, Robin Murray wrote a number of highly influential articles in Marxism Today on the emergent subject of ‘post-Fordism’. These articles played a critical role in introducing the concept of ‘post-Fordism’ to the wider left in the UK. His view was that contemporary forms of production could further the classical democratic socialist objectives of co-operation, democratic self-management, and self-realization. Drawing on his experience at the GLC, Murray learned the inadequacy of traditional industrial policy to those sectors which were rooted in particular cultural and/or geographical communities (reproduction furniture, clothing, branches of food production, and a range of cultural industries). What they often lacked – economically – was the collective institutions developed most notably in the so-called Third Italy (such as consortia, specialist colleges, centers of ‘real’ services’) which allowed small firms to have access to those services normally only available to large firms; quality control and branding, information on design, markets, and technology, skilled labor and political representation in the capital.

Much of Murray's work in the 1980s and 1990s was about strengthening these types of economy, particularly linked to the economic development of particular places and communities. This was done partly through advice to governments (local, provincial, and national) and through the work of Twin Trading, the alternative trading intermediary set up to strengthen small farmers from marginal regions in Latin America and Africa in first world markets.

1990s During this time, Robin Murray became Programme Adviser to the SEEDS Association of Local Authorities (1986–1993). He subsequently became visiting professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and a special adviser to the minister of economic development and trade in the Government of Ontario (1993–1995). In Ontario, where he was responsible for Community Economic Development policy for the Provincial Government, his focus was on three sectors: food, culture and green industries. The cultural industries work was directed towards (a) providing support to ethnic communities and areas with high unemployment in establishing and expanding their own cultural industries (through new distribution facilities, training programmes, cultural industry finance, and cultural spaces – including in one case a crematorium) and (b) allowing existing cultural institutions to re-conceptualize themselves within a wider cultural economy – museums, libraries, art galleries, cinemas and theatres.

Upon his return to the UK in the mid-1990s, Murray became the chair of Twin and Twin Trading, the Fair Trade organizations responsible for developing the fair trade brands Cafedirect, Divine Chocolate, Agrofair UK and Liberation Foods. He held this position until 2007. Between 2005 and 2009 Murray was the chair of Liberation Foods (formerly The Ethical Nut Company).

2000s In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Murray's work focused on industrial restructuring in response to environmental pressures (notably waste and energy). It is during this period that Murray wrote Creating Wealth from Waste and Zero Waste. During this period, he was director of the London Pride Waste Action Programme (1996–1997), executive director of the London Recycling Consortium (1997–2004) and chair of the Tower Hamlets Community Recycling Consortium (2003–2007). Between 1998 and 2002 Murray also helped to devise local waste policies in Essex, Newcastle upon Tyne, Lancashire and Greater Manchester. Between 2003 and 2008, he played a key role as Environmental Adviser to London's deputy mayor, Nicky Gavron in developing London's recycling policy and setting up the London Climate Change Agency. Between 2001 and 2002 he was a member of the Planning Advisory Group to the Greater London Authority, advising on spatial planning in London. The following year Murray was a member of the Waste Advisory Group for the Cabinet Office of the UK Government, advising on waste policy. In 2003, he was a special adviser to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Waste. Between 2005 and 2007, Robin led the development of the Green Homes Concierge Service for London.

Between 2004 and 2005 Murray was the acting director of RED, the research and innovation arm of the Design Council. He oversaw projects in Kent and Bolton on co-creating health services. These and other projects developed and refined Murray's thoughts on the critical role of design in public service reform and social innovation. Murray was able to continue his work in this area as a visiting fellow at Nesta (2008–2010) and The Young Foundation (2008 – onwards) where he led a major research project examining the ways to design, develop and grow social innovation. As part of this project, Murray co-authored The Open Book of Social Innovation and Social Venturing and wrote Danger and Opportunity.

2010s After this, Murray undertook a strategic review of the future of co-operation in the UK for Co-operatives UK (2010–2011). He continued his work on the social economy as a visiting research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance and then a senior visiting fellow at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit at the LSE (2011–2017). He also taught at Schumacher College.

Interests Murray's interests as economist included: Marxian theory; transfer pricing, globalisation and transnational corporations; industrial policy and cooperatives; fair trade, local economic development, international development, the environment, waste and recycling, social innovation and the social economy and the circular economy. His theses in this article were criticized at the time by Bill Warren, who found in particular Murray's discussion of "territorial non-coincidence" unconvincing. With Murray advocating the view that ultra-imperialism was displacing national capitalisms, and Warren instead claiming that imperialism was being replaced by those capitalisms, Robert Rowthorn took an intermediate view, predicting a future of nationalist rivalries.

In two papers from 1977 on Value and Theory of Rent, Murray worked with the assumption that Karl Marx's theory of differential and absolute ground rent applies generally to landed property, of whatever kind. His phrase "founder's rent" has been called "muddled".

Transfer pricing In his editor's introduction to Multinationals Beyond the Market (1981), Murray wrote of the international trade theory of neoclassical economics as faced with challenges on two sides: from the theories around unequal exchange, and also, the focus of the book, from institutional critique. His paper in the volume stated that the arm's length principle for transfer pricing had become problematic for international trade, referring to customs literature for issues on how to carry out the accounting. He mentioned two other public policy approaches: anti-monopoly legislation, and bilateral bargaining to correct the asymmetry present in trading relationships, with state intervention. He had already argued in a 1970 conference paper for a descriptive framework of the bargaining process between international companies and nation states, given that these negotiations often were asymmetric. Murray's widely used teaching case study on bargaining over access to North Sea oil deposits showed how the choice of the discount rate affected the distribution of rents between the state and the private sector. Building on this case-study and drawing on the work of Constantine Vaitsos on the pharmaceutical industry, Murray convened an influential conference on transfer pricing at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex in 1975. This made an important contribution to foregrounding the control of transfer pricing in development policy, particularly in the operational work of the United National Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Fair trade Co-founder in 1985 with Michael Barratt Brown of Twin Trading, a fair trade company, Murray played a part in the creation of the brands Cafédirect and Divine Chocolate. The British government Department for International Development commissioned a report Understanding and Expanding Fair Trade from Barratt Brown, Murray and Pauline Tiffen.

Twin Trading moved after the International Coffee Agreement broke down in 1989, to market a popular coffee. To that end it went into partnership with Equal Exchange, Oxfam and Traidcraft to set up the Cafédirect brand.

Fordism and Post-Fordism Murray has been credited with the introduction to British debate of "Post-Fordism". While the concept is credited to the regulation school of French economists, he drew primarily on the ideas of Michael J. Piore and Charles Sabel, who saw a "Second Industrial Divide" as flexible specialization began to replace mass production; as well as on the work of Michael Best on Japan and the industrial districts in Northern Italy. Writing in the 1980s, Murray viewed both the Thatcherite imposition of rational choice models onto the British public sector and the Soviet system as outdated expressions of Fordism. Building upon his practical experience at the GLC, he observed that dynamic and innovative businesses had moved on: car factories in Japan, industrial districts of Italy and Silicon Valley were all adopting more nimble and flexible strategies, focusing on skills, innovation and participation.

The social economy

The term that Murray preferred was the social economy; not a separate third sector, but the provision of services driven by the imperative of social values rather than financial accumulation. His social economy of active users, or "prosumers". He developed this vision through existing case studies, drawing on his work with cooperatives and environmental advocacy groups, healthcare coalitions and social entrepreneurs.