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The winter of discontent continues to exert a powerful hold over the British political imaginary. It acts as a discursive key to a collective mythology seemingly appealed to, and conjured, in each wave of industrial unrest, in each hint of political turmoil and, until recently, whenever the election of a Labour Government looked credible. In this paper I consider the rhetorical strategies and linguistic devices deployed by the tabloid media in the narration of the events of the winter of 1978-79. I argue for an interpretation of the winter of discontent as a moment of state crisis. By crisis however I do not refer to the mere accumulation of contradictions but rather to a moment of transition, a moment of decisive intervention. Within such a framework, the winter of discontent emerges as a strategic moment in the transformation of the British state, and perhaps the key moment in the pre-history of Thatcherism. For, as I hope to demonstrate, the initial appeal of the New Right was premised upon its ability to offer a convincing construction of the winter of discontent as symptomatic of a more fundamental crisis of the state. In such a moment of crisis, a particular type of decisive intervention was called for. In this discursive construction of crisis the New Right proved itself capable of changing, if not the hearts and minds of the electorate, then certainly the predominant perceptions of the political context. It recruited subjects to its vision of the necessary response to the crisis of a monolithic state besieged by the trade unions. This was perhaps the only truly hegemonic moment of Thatcherism. It occurred well before Mrs Thatcher entered Number 10. It is thus not surprising that one of the most enduring and distinctive legacies of Thatcherism has been the new political lexicon of crisis, siege and subterfuge born of the winter of discontent.

As be®ts two if its principal exponents, Hall and Taylor's recent article`Political science and the three new institutionalisms' provides a meticulous and provocative review of the many faces of the`new institutionalism' and a distinctive contribution to the growing literature in this area in its own right.* It provides an important opportunity to consider again the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary institutionalism and to raise the question of how its many insights might be more fully incorporated within the British political science mainstream. 1 While careful to distance themselves from the idea that a`crude synthesis' of rational choice, sociological and historical institutionalism is`immediately practical or even necessarily desirable' ( p. 957), they suggest that a dialogue between them is both necessary and crucial. We argue that the prospects for such a dialogue are more limited than Hall and Taylor suggest. For, rational choice and sociological institutionalisms are based on mutually incompatible premises or`social ontologies'. Moreover, in identifying two social ontologies ± the calculus and cultural approaches ± within the historical institutionalist canon (and hence in reconstructing historical institutionalism in rational choice and sociological terms), we argue that Hall and Taylor do a considerable disservice to this distinctive approach to institutional analysis. While this view of historical institutionalism makes it appear`pivotal' to future dialogue between institutionalisms, such a reading neglects the potentially distinctive social ontology of this approach. This may leave historical institutionalism prone to precisely the tendential structuralism characteristic of much institutionalist analysis, while giving a super®cial impression that the approach has already overcome this problem. We argue that if institutionalism is to develop to its full potential, it must consider the relationship between structure and agency, on which Hall and Taylor merely touch, as a central analytic concern.

Crisis' is one of the most underdeveloped concepts in state theory and, indeed, in social and political theory more generally. In this article I suggest one way in which this persistent oversight might be rectified, making a distinctive case for rethinking the process of social and political change in terms of the transformation of the state, and for rethinking state crisis in this 'restating of social and political change' (see also Hay 1996a). I return to the etymology of the term and (re-)conceptualise 'crisis' as a moment of decisive intervention and not merely a moment of fragmentation, dislocation or destruction. This reformulation suggests the need to give far greater emphasis to the essential narrativity of crisis, and the relationship between discourses of crisis and the contradictions that they narrate. The result is an analysis of crisis as a moment of transformation-a moment in which it is recognised that a decisive intervention can, and indeed must, be made. It is argued that during such moments of crisis a new trajectory is imposed upon the state. The intense and condensed temporality of crisis thus emerges as a strategic moment in the structural transformation of the state. Within this theoretical account crises are thus revealed as 'epoch-making' moments marking the transition between phases of historical-political time. They are thus suggestive of a periodisation of the development of the state.These are the times that try men's souls (Thomas Paine, 1776).The concept of 'crisis' is ubiquitous within eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century social and political thought. Despite, or perhaps because, of this pervasiveness, it remains one of the most illusive, imprecise

This article provides a summary of the distinctiveness of constructivist institutionalism and tries to identify the nature of the challenge that it poses. It considers the origins of constructivist institutionalism and the ontological and analytical distinctiveness of constructivist institutionalism's turn to ideas. This includes a discussion of the associated nature of the challenge that it poses on existing neoinstitutionalist perspectives. The article concludes with a section on the contribution to the analysis of complex institutional change made by constructivist institutionalism.

In this paper we identify and seek to resolve a certain paradox in the existing literature on networks and networking. Whilst earlier policy network perspectives have tended to emphasize the structural character of networks as durable, dense and relatively static organization forms, the more recent strategic network literature emphasizes the flexible, adaptive and dynamic quality of networking as a social and political practice. However, neither perspective has yet developed a theory of network formation, evolution, transformation and termination. In this paper, we seek to rectify this omission, advancing a 'strategic relational' theory of network dynamics based on a rethinking of the concept of network itself. We illustrate this perspective with respect to the policy process centred in and around Westminster and Whitehall, drawing on a series of semi-structured interviews with ministers and officials from four departments.

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