Research Interests

I am a political economist and contemporary political and economic historian with a particular interest in the means by which radical policy change occurs, in why such change sometimes turns out to be temporary despite intentions to the contrary, and in why change (even though sometimes apparently superficial) may turn out have enduring consequences.

Current work in progress

My current research has two dimensions:

1. I am engaged in a major study of policy learning and policy change in post-war British pensions. Essentially, the research seeks to explore the roots of the present 'pensions crisis'. I am particularly interested in the way that long-term pensions contracts (implicit or explicit) both created pressure for reform and consistently limited policy makers' ability to achieve it via change to the existing system Instead these contracts seem to have encouraged the development of new systems running in parallel with existing pensions - thus creating a systemic tendency for the system as a  whole to become inexorably more complex. Recent work that has emerged from this project includes my edited volume with Pat Thane and Noel Whiteside (Britain's Pensions Crisis: History and Policy) and a study utilising pension policy to explore the Labour Party's changing conception of social democracy ('"What matters is what works": from "national superannuation" to "personal accounts"', British Politics, forthcoming Jan 2010).
    
2. I am pursuing work on the history of the 1970s, an oddly under-researched decade in British history, with a particular emphasis on continuity and change in British economic policy. This has given rise to several events at the British Academy and I am also co-organising a 2010 CCBH conference (with Lawrence Black) 'Reassessing Britain in the 1970s' (see the conference call for papers). See also our jointly edited transcript of a witness seminar on The ‘winter of discontent’ in British politics' (Political Quarterly 80:4) and my forthcoming article for Renewal comparing the economic crises of the 1930s and 1970s with the financial crisis that began in 2008.

PhD thesis

My PhD thesis was an interdisciplinary analysis of British economic policy during the 1960s. It drew upon political science theories of policy learning and policy networks to explain how the framework of ideas underlying policy, the goals of policy, and the instruments used to achieve those goals changed in the early 1960s, and why this change did not endure. 

A monograph based on this thesis (Governance and policy learning in the Keynesian-plus era) was published in 2004 by Palgrave Macmillan. In this, I argued that the failure to institutionalise a new economic policy framework in the 1960s was a consequence of economic institutions that were at once highly inter-dependent and profoundly fragmented. Central government, lacking the power to impose solutions, was forced to seek the support of others but Britain lacked the ability to create an 'active consensus' around the new ideas about how policy might be changed to raise economic growth. Consequently, resistance 'from below' - from vested interests in industry, trade unions, the City, and in government - stymied the attempt permanently to shift policy towards a more growth-oriented and Continental 'consensus' model of economic policy making.

From this flowed two important conclusions. Firstly, in his work on social learning Peter Hall overestimates the ease which which 'third order learning' (i.e. the learning of the lesson that policy goals need revision) can be translated into effective and lasting policy change. Secondly, recent governance theory has simply revealed a long-standing and endemic problem in British policy-making - the fragmentation and interdependence of its economic policy institutions.