public sector workers were unclear about their interests in resisting enforced wage
moderation? Or to see the Callaghan Government as unclear about its interests in
bringing such industrial militancy to an end?
A second problem relates to the rather uneven ontology that Blyth seems to rely
upon here. In situations in which actors’ interests are not problematized, ideas
matter less and, presumably, non-constructivist techniques will suYce; yet in con-
ditions of crisis, in which interests are rendered problematic, and ideas ‘‘matter
more,’’ only constructivism will do (for similar formulations see Berman 1998 ;
Campbell 2001 ). As I have suggested elsewhere (Hay 2002 , 214 – 15 ), however tempting
it may be to see ideas as somehow more signiWcant in the uncertainty and confusion
of the moment of crisis, this is a temptation we should surely resist. It is not that ideas
mattermorein times of crisis, so much thatnewideas do and that we are particularly
interested in their impact. Once the crisis is resolved and a new paradigm installed,
the ideas actors hold may become internalized and unquestioned once again, but this
does not mean that they cease to aVect their behavior.
Yet this is not the key point at issue here. For it is only once we accept as self-
evident the claim that moments of crisis problematize pre-existing conceptions of
self-interest that the problems really start. If crises are moments of radical inde-
terminacy in which actors an incapable of articulating and hence rendering
‘‘actionable’’ their interests (moments of ‘‘Knightian uncertainty’’ in Blyth’s
terms), then how is it that such situation are ever resolved? Blyth, it would seem,
must rely upon certain actors—notably inXuential opinion formers with access to
signiWcant resources for the promotion and dissemination of crisis narratives—to
be rather clearer about their own interests. For the resolution of the crisis requires,
in Blyth’s terms, that such actors prove themselves capable of providing an idea-
tional focus for the reconstitution of the perceived self-interests of the population
at large. Whose self-interests does such a new paradigm advance? And in a
situation of Knightian uncertainty, how is it that such actors are capable of
rendering actionable their own interests? In short, where do such ideas come
from and who, in a moment of crisis, is capable of perceiving that they have a
clearly identiWed self-interest to the served by the promotion of such ideas? If, as
Blyth consistently seems to suggest, it is organized interests with access to sign-
iWcant material resources (such as business) that come to seize the opportunity
presented by a moment of crisis, then the role of ideas in determining outcomes
would seem to have been signiWcantly attenuated. If access to material resources is a
condition of successful crisis-narration, if only organized business has access
to such resources, and if neoliberalism is held to reXect the (actual or perceived)
self-interest of business, then won’t a materialist explanation of the rise of
neoliberalism in the USA in the 1970 s or Sweden in the 1980 ssuYce? To prevent
this slippage towards a residual materialism, Blyth and other exponents of
constructivist institutionalism need to be able to tell us rather more about the
determinants (material and ideational), internal dynamics, and narration of the
70 colin hay