The meaning of an inflation crisis: steel, Enron, and macroeconomic policy

How do crises shape policy possibilities? While some scholars cast crises as material shocks, this paper offers a Post Keynesian or constructivist theory of crises as events that agents interpret. It contrasts opposing Galbraithian and classical interpretations of the 1962 steel crisis and the 2000-2001 California energy crisis. Whereas Galbraithian interpretations of the former stressed abuses of market power and legitimated wage-price guideposts, classical interpretations of the latter stressed regulatory excesses and delayed the imposition of price caps. This paper concludes that the absence of wage-price guidelines compelled the post-1970s use of austerity to limit inflation, explaining reduced U.S. growth.constructivism, crisis, imperfect competition, inflation, market power,

The benefits of norm ambiguity: constructing the responsibility to protect across Rwanda, Iraq and Libya

Over the past two decades, International Relations scholars have highlighted the importance of efforts by hegemonic states and norm entrepreneurs to foster norm clarity when promoting the establishment, institutionalisation, and internalisation of norms

Exogenous shocks or Endogenous constructions? The Meaning of War and Crises

This symposium addresses the role of wars and crises as mechanisms of international change. Over the past two decades, the international system has undergone a number of remarkable transformations, from the end of the Cold War to the emergence of an ongoing "War on Terror," and from the collapse of statist development models to the emergence of a contested - if evolving - neoliberal "Washington Consensus." This volatility exceeds any underlying shifts in economic structures or the distribution of capabilities, and raises important questions regarding the roles of agency, uncertainty, and ideas in advancing change. In this introduction we examine the role of wars and economic crises as socially constructed openings for change. We attempt three things: to critique materialist approaches in the security and political economy issue areas, to outline the distinctive contribution that an agent-centered constructivist understanding of such events offers, and to offer a framework for the study of such events, one which highlights an expanded range of elite-mass interactions