Peter Hall

Longish Description, concentrating on the theoretical content:

The book has a very broad purview.  It examines paradigm change in several areas, including economic policy and welfare provision, but focusing on education reform. 

Accordingly, it has as one, among several alternative titles, including
SOCIAL LEARNING IN AN ERA OF TRANSNATIONALISM:  
Coalitions and the Effect of Neo-Liberalism on Institutional Models and
SOCIAL LEARNING AND HEGEMONY:  Framing Education Reform in the US

Most relevant, however, are two other alternates:
MARKET EMULATION MODELS IN EDUCATION REFORM, 
4th Order Change and Cultural Development Pathways:
Aristotle's 4 Causes, Social Learning and Theories of Hegemony
 and
4TH ORDER CHANGE AND EDUCATION REFORM:
Market Emulation Models, Aristotle's 4 Causes, 
Peter Hall's Social Learning and Theories of Hegemony

The phrase '4th order change' references Peter Hall’s 1993 article on social learning, compares his 3 orders of change to Gramsci's theory of hegemony, suggesting the struggles of hegemony are the arena of a 4th order of change. 

I add a 4th order of paradigm change – what I call changes in ideo-utopian visions – to arrive at 4 Levels of Analysis of Social Learning, the first three more or less from Hall, the last from Gramsci, although I will argue that some of the other levels are also present in his work: 
1. 'Settings' – how policy makers experiment with policy instruments, such as tax rates or the federal reserve rate.
2.  'Instruments'  – Methods by which policy goals are realized (or sought to be realized), such as choosing between an Income Tax, Tariffs, Value Added Taxes, etc.
3. 'Policy Goals and Political Coalitions'  – The selection of goals and the forming of decisive political coalitions, such as those behind Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's electoral victories, but which could be extended to the creation of historic blocs that supported the implementation of Neo-liberal policies in Chile and other countries.
4. 'Ideo-Utopian Visions'  – The shared understandings Political Coalitions use to justify their policies, whether by ideology (i.e., Keynesian and Social Welfare approaches versus Monetarist and Hayek-infused approaches), through campaign and their slogans (i.e., The New Frontier and Morning in America or manipulation of language (i.e., 'The Death Tax' and the meaning of the word 'trust').

This obviously casts a wide net.  However, it puts these in historical context by looking at the conditions that made possible the advent of neoliberalism through several pathways:  by force of arms in Chile, through the ballot box in the UK and the US, and with the aid of International Financial Institutions, such as the IMF, in much of the developing world. 

The main topic is how public K-12 education in the US has been affected.  Robert Slavin once noted that education in the US has been in “an uninterrupted state of reform . . .  since the publication of A NATION AT RISK “ in 1983 under the first Reagan-Bush Administration. RISK, like other influential documents before it, linked the nation’s temporary failures in international competition to the systematic failures of the school system.  Purposes of education were narrowed, with civics, art and music, physical education being marginalized and Science Technology Engineering and Math programs (STEM) programs expanded.  The emphasis became job and college readiness.  Accountability became a watchword of those called for systematic reform and a single metric of  'achievement' – achievement measured by standardized tests – became ascendant. 

Herbert M. Kliebard's THE STRUGGLE FOR THE AMERICAN CURRICULUM, 1893-1958, there are four types of curricula that have vied for dominance in American schools: 1) Social Efficiency, which  urges that schools be oriented to economic needs and training of the work force.  2) Humanism, or the Liberal Arts tradition,  emphasizes general intellectual skills and familiarity with the cultural traditions of society and understanding of other cultures.  3) Social Meliorism sees the schools as an instrument for social, political and economic change.  4) Developmentalism which starts with the psychological development of the learner and the needs of the individual learner. 

For the last 40 years, the first goal has eclipsed the others.  Moreover, Social Efficiency had been defined in terms of economic goals and the Humanist perspective has been challenged by the ideal of a 'modern individual,' competitive, entrepreneurial and acquisitive, in keeping with the creation of a 'nation of owners'.”  Accordingly, Social Meliorism has a new, highly influential school, with roots  in the works of Joseph Schumpeter and Ayn Rand, in which the entrepreneur is the hero of history.  Finally, Developmentalism, in the Neoliberal view, can be adequately addressed through Skinneresque theories and a type of mechanical causalism in which incentives, primarily monetary incentives, create the motive force of social change.

The central enquiry is theoretical – a connection between the theory of Gramscian hegemony and accounts of Social Learning in the social sciences literature.  Gramsci's work is concerned. in large part, with how we conceive of things.  Hall is concerned with the paradigms by which we understand phenomena and implement policy. My argument is that thery are complimentary – that what we normally refer to as cultural or ideological hegemony constitutes, is an extension of Hall's terminology, a 4th order of change. 

Hall famously (if you an academic with a taste for macro-economic policy analysis) built on accounts of social learning and policy learning, such as those put forth by Hugh Heclo.  Of his three orders of policy change and social learning, two were based on the study of state-centric models in which the decision makers were relatively insulated from public pressure.

Third order change was something different, however – a paradigm change usually caused by (or at least occasioned by) the failure of policy and involving sociological and discursive factors.  Thus something like the concept of hegemony seems to be implicit in Hall's original 1993 article. 

I point to the most general epistemological paradox: Facts without concepts are blind, concepts without facts are empty. This is directly descended from Kant's statement, “Thoughts without content [observations, facts] are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” 

In Kant's framework, all mental activity results either from affection (receptivity) or from the mind’s self-prompted activity (spontaneity). Kant conceives of the mind as constituted by two fundamental capacities, which he labels “receptivity” [Receptivität] and “spontaneity” [Spontaneität]. The former is the mind’s capacity to be affected and produce “representations” [Vorstellungen]; the latter, however, comes from the mind itself without any external stimulus.

This leads to his distinction between “sensibility” [Sinnlichkeit], “understanding” [Verstand], and “reason” [Vernunft].  Sensibility is very much in the moment, Understanding has a largely analytic function (trying to break down the objects of sensibility), while Reason has a largely synthetic function (trying to unify the objects of sensibility into a coherent system).  This tension between Reason and Understanding manifests itself in the antinomies, which are the core paradoxes of the Kantian system.  Moreover, the tension presents a general danger; as argued by Gramsci, analytical distinctions which are treated as organic realities are worse than blind facts – they not only blind us, but can point us in the wrong direction and keep us from seeing properly. 

Eventually, I argue this is not a paradox because there are always feedbacks and interactions between the two.  In fact, I think of them not as two things, but as two faces of the same thing which we distinguish analytically and sometimes forget how they are organically united. And paradoxes, apparent or real, are important:  The force of paradoxes is that they are not contradictory; they rather allow us to be present at the genesis of the contradiction.

My reconstruction of Hall adds a 4th order or change, applying Aristotle's 4 causes and the introduction of theories of hegemony to explain 3rd and, especially, 4th order changes.  It also makes reference to Kant's antinomies, of which, like Aristotle's causes and the revamped orders of change,  there are 4.

I seek to make a connection between Aristotle's 4 causes and Kant's 4 Antinomies, but it is the latter which is most relevant.  For Kant, each antinomy describes a tension between the analytic and synthetic faculties of consciousness. I argue that this corresponds to the tension between the Incremental and the Constructionist.  It is a long argument, but I believe it is worthwhile and provides insight into paradigm change, whether in education, welfare provision or economic policy.

COVID-19 has exposed, reproduced, and created new inequalities in Latin America and the world. In this introductory paper, we discuss the impact of extant inequities on vulnerability to COVID-19 but we also identify new, and some unexpected, vulnerabilities. We emphasize vulnerabilities to the disease as well as vulnerabilities to policies and other responses in the fight against COVID-19. Building on insights from Peter Hall and Michele Lamont’s work on social resilience, we draw on the papers of this special issue to identify the important role of the state in addressing vulnerabilities and discuss the types of social resilience that vulnerable groups have turned to in their response to COVID-19.

An examination of how business-oriented models of education attempt to promulgate a Neoliberal ideology emphasizing entrepreneurship, 'leadership' and anti-unionism.  Notions of Social Learning and Hegemony are usee to highlight ideo-utopian visions and the directed narratives needed to effect paradigm change.  Principal examples come from the discourse emanating from TFA and foundations in favor of corporate education reform.  Additional examples focus on how teachers and principals are depicted on TV and in films.  Special attention is given to Jim Belushi's gut-wrenching portrayal of a new principal in The Principal.  Belushi plays Rick Latimer, a high-school teacher with a drinking problem who is made the new principal of crime-ridden and gang-dominated Brandel High.  The climax cannot be believed, but neither can the discourse of corporate reform groups.

From the Introduction:

The subway ads for the New York City Teaching Fellows were designed to appeal to people’s altruism and sense of idealism: “Picture their eyes lighting up when you explain electricity.” “How many lives did your last spread sheet change?” Along with the second person structure, there is also an appeal to egos, as well as tinges of elitism: “Convene the city’s future leaders. Every day.” “They’re not rocket scientists. Yet.” In trying to recruit people from other fields into education, the subtext was that a candidate’s skills in finance or law, as well as the native superiority that i is assumed to imply, make them a better pool from which to take teachers.
Underlying this is a set of assumptions that diminish the complexity of teaching. An explanation is sufficient to make a child’s eyes light up.  A call for teacher dedication pervaded the ads and engaged in some significant omissions. The Image of the Unproblematic Child played a crucial role; the ads seemed to suggest that that child was waiting for the one inspirational teacher to step in and give a direction to the child's latent aspirations that had, perhaps, been stifled because of their uncaring and robotic teachers. The ads played on people's desire to change the world and ignored what I had learned with great difficulty – that every class has disruptive children, some more than others, that the best laid plans are often laid waste, that reaching kids was a slow, incremental process with, at best, mixed success.
The argument that the solution to our educational woes is to be bring in new, supposedly better and more dedicated teachers, has been one of the most compelling of the last few decades. Its most forceful proponents, Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and, now, Arne Duncan, have offered a vision of the future in which good teachers will be venerated, but not so good ones will leave or be pushed out of the profession and no teacher will have the protections of tenure, seniority and dependable pay scales. Security will be a thing of the past and in its place will be some sort of ‘merit system,’ the details and dependability of which are much in doubt, but which would come to some sort of merit rating based on a mix of results on standardized exams and subjective evaluations by administrators who have their own agendas.
Thus the narrative of dedication – a narrative of how new dedicated teachers will close the achievement gaps due to socio-economic status, race and class is certainly worthy of comment. It is something we might call the Highly Effective Teacher narrative or the TFA narrative (after Teach For America). It glosses over social problems and. by pointing to new teachers as the answer, points to old teachers as the problem. As Steve Klees puts it, it is one of the “underlying refrains of the neoliberal era: schools are failures, and it is the fault of teachers.”  It moves the responsibility from a set of social institutions meant to deal with the consequences of poverty –institutions which are it wants to be dismantled-- and gives the project of educating young Americans to a set of individuals who will be subject to supervisors with much greater discretionary power and will then be gauged on their effectiveness in a matter yet to be determined, but in which cost effectiveness will be a major component.
I focus first  on Teach for America and the discourse that developed around it as a master narrative. The goal of this narrative was to advance approaches to education that emphasized the exceptional individual as the key to a new form of national education that would rescue the public education system. At the same time, the public education system was descried as a relic of bureaucratism with socialist tendencies that served the interest of adults rather than children.

In addition, we look at the struggle for the TFA message, the images of teachers on television and on film.

The original brief for the Sydney Opera House was for two major spaces that would accommodate a range of activities: ballet and dance; chamber music; choral; concerts and recitals; dramatic presentations; opera; lecturers; pageants and mass meetings; and symphonic concerts. This encompassing list of requirements indicates that from the outset, it was intended that the city would receive an edifice to reinforce its desire to be Australia's leading city. What rose out of Bennelong Point has become perhaps one of the most famous buildings in the world. As an icon for the city, and possibly the nation, the Sydney Opera House maintains a special relationship with the city and its people. Despite numerous controversies, and a turbulent history, it is a place of and for people. Bennelong Point has been a place of gathering and belonging for millennia; this paper focuses on examining the notion of belonging through the various ways in which the people of the city engage with the Sydney Opera House as an example of the built environment and as an active performing arts centre. Utzon's masterpiece of architecture is more than a simple venue, it is a site based on engagement: for patrons, performers, and workers. This engagement is not limited to attending an event, giving a performance or doing a job; it extends beyond the physical borders of the site and embraces communities far and wide to foster a sense of belonging and how this famous site allows everyone to engage in a performance of belonging.

The Sydney Opera House is an internationally recognised icon of Sydney. As a piece of modernist architecture, performing arts centre and tourist destination, the structure on Bennelong Point is regularly examined and rarely left in the dark. This paper briefly examines two architects, from opposite sides of the globe, and an unusual pair of lighting designers from competing companies who all worked in partnership to realise a lighting design for this famous building. Together, these four men gave shape to a structure, redefined the night skyline, and provided an experience of the theatre that was uniquely Sydney. Through brief biographies of the well- known architects Jørn Utzon (1918–2008) and Peter Hall (1925–1995) as well as the lesser-known lighting designers Fred Drijver (n.d.–) and John Waldram (1903–1990), this research demonstrates how these professionals, from radically different backgrounds and cultural settings, delivered a cohesive and elegant design to illuminate the Sydney Opera House.

The task of creating a public will for a unified public school system is daunting.  This article looks at reform movements that seek to derail those efforts and substitute in its place a patchwork of charters, vouchers for private schools, on-line education, home schooling, virtual schools and public schools based on market emulation models.  It does so by using Amy Gutmann's work as a heuristic device to interpret business influenced movements to reform public education.
Since the 1980s education policy in the US has been increasingly influenced by business interests and ideologies.  Examples include the importation of business practices, the push for higher standards, high stakes testing based on standardized tests, accountability regimes, public asset privatization (such as Charter Schools), performance pay (sometimes referred to as merit pay), changes in labor relations, changing evaluation systems, an advocacy of administrative autonomy and a more away from civics education, physical education, arts education and music education.1  These are intertwined and for the most part have a common political lineage in that they are based on market emulation models and also provide opportunities for private entities to make profits in the public education sector.
What  is striking is that, since the 1980s, the form that influence takes, the positions that business takes and the  authority that business wields, can plausibly be interpreted as a direct response to Amy Gutmann's Democracy and Education (1987) – an attempt to refute its premises and principles. Thus, the article explores this lineage by tracing what might be regardes as the negative influence of Gutmann's work. Significant aspects of the pro-market education reform movement seem to closely and negatively  correlate to the arguments she makes in favor of Deliberative Democracy and Egalitarian social goals.  Accordingly, the article starts from a conceit – that business influence manifests itself in education reform as a point by point rejection of Gutmann's central goals.  This is not to say that there was a conspiracy, but rather to suggest that the motivations of business and the interests of investor classes cohere is such a manner as to advance policies that allow for the greatest freedom of action for owners, model the labor market  so as to align with business needs and are, as result, antithetical to liberal Democratic concerns.

According to the  political philosopher Amy Gutmann, there are, broadly speaking, three types of political theories of education:  those that give authority over education to the state, those that give it to the family and those that give it to education professionals.  Gutmann then outlines three models based solely on only one of these three types of authority; the family state, in which children are educated for the good of the state and the sake of social harmony; the state of families, in which parents are entrusted to make choices for and pursue the best interests of their children; and the state of individuals, which relies on educational professionals and expert knowledge to create institutions which maximize the future choice of children, “without prejudicing children towards any controversial conception of the good life.”  [Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education, Princeton University Press, 1987, discussion pp 22-44, quote p. 34.]
With all this, it is interesting to note that business and markets, so much the woof and warp of contemporary debates on education reform, are words that do not appear among her chapter titles or the titles of the sub-sections, nor is business included in her three-fold division of authority.  This is particularly striking because the most forceful calls for education reform of the current day look not to the state, not to the family, not to 'future' individuals (nor, by any means, to educational professionals acting on their behalf) to be the main actor.  Rather they seek to authorize a fourth group to shape the future of public education in the US:  business.  If one were to rank the influence of different coalitions on education policy in the US, near the top would be the coalition centered on the globally connected business community and those who feel they have a calling to use business methods to improve and reform the school system.
The manuscript starts from a conceit – that business influence manifests itself in education reform as a point by point rejection of the central goals of Amy Gutmann's Democratic Education.  The article is drawn from a book Democratic Education and Markets takes its title from Gutmann's work but instead concentrates on business, markets and the underlying goals thereof.  It is not merely that business has influence in education debates – that is something that has been true since at least the early 1900s. What we find is that we are not dealing with disinterested policy making, but an agenda laden process in which the agendas are not usually on the surface layers, but are deeply rooted and are informed by the eye of the profit hunter.

Recensions

Gretchen Helmke et Steven Levitsky (2004). « Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda ». Perspectives on Politics, vol. 2, n° 4, pp. 725-740.

Peter A. Hall et Rosemary C. R. Taylor (1997), « La science politique et les trois néo-institutionnalismes », Revue française de science politique, vol. 47, n° 3, pp. 469-496.

This work attempts an as far as possible analytical perambulation in the Global City (S. Sassen) and the World City (P. Hall, J. Friedmann) paradigm under the prism of globalisation, development and generally of geography (space/place). This literature review highlights the pure interdisciplinary character of the study of the urban phenomenon (city), because of the contributions that has received from diverse epistemological fields, without implying that the ‘city’ phenomenon is only confined within this particular bibliography. This research consists of three basic Sections. Section A illuminates conceptually the terms urbanisation, development and space. For this reason, it initially performs a small introduction to the city, and afterwards, it timely presents the various approaches of regional and urban development. Section B includes the central schools of thought of the bibliography concerned, from the dawn of the 20th century and the Chicago School, till the first decade of the new millennium, including the most recent approaches. Section C passes the afore-mentioned approaches through a filter of critique, either in respect to standalone hypotheses of their own, or for the introduction of holistic (cosmopolitan) narrations that take into account all cities. The Conclusions of the research sum up the literature review, and simultaneously trace the common ground of the last approaches of Economic Geography with the corresponding approaches of the global/world city bibliography, as well as pose several research questions in relation to the political strand of the topic.

For more info, please contact me via my emai: avgevl@gmail.com

Reference:
Vlachos A. (2015), Global cities & World cities: Issues of urbanisation, globalisation & development (in greek), Research thesis supervised by Assist. Prof. Athanasios Kalogeresis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: School of Spatial Planning & Development

Handout used for presentation of the paper, DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION AND MARKETS:  Segmentation, Privatization and Commodification.  The  paper begins with a discussion of Amy Gutmann's Democratic Education,
and then, half as a conceit,  half as a description, argues that contemporary efforts at reforming education  in the US –on which there is much bipartisan consensus-- seem determined to be systematic in their rejection of Gutmann's conclusions. 

The handout provides a theoretical framework which revolves around theories of paradigm change, social learning and hegemony.

I argue that, in addition to the three orders
of change that Peter Hall employed to explain shifts from Keynesianism to
Monetarism -- changes in goals, techniques and fine tuning of instruments --
we should also consider a 4th order of change -- the justification of goals
by reference to principles, values, ideologies and visions of the future.

That leads right into Gramsci and Kuhn, most of the discussion of which is
in other papers/chapters, but I have included a two page handout that I use in presentations to explain the connection between Social Learning and Hegemony  The intention, by the way, is to turn this into a book, which would
be my second.  The first, Respect for Teachers, was published by
Rowman and Littlefield about a year and a half ago.

»Der Sammelband stellt ein komplexes Thema in überzeugender Weise vor, wobei neben der schlüssigen Einführung von Abelshauser, Gilgen und Leutzsch auch die Strukturierung und Zuordnung der einzelnen Beiträge zu einem nachvollziehbaren Gesamtkonzept als gelungen bezeichnet werden darf.«
Neue Politische Literatur (Peter E. Fäßler)

Reviews:
http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/id=1813
http://geschichte-transnational.clio-online.net/rezensionen/type=rezbuecher&id=18136,
Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. 298, 2014, 577-578
Portal für Politikwissenschaft, http://www.pw-portal.de
Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) (17./18.11.2012),
Neue politische Literatur, 57, 3 (2012) 479-480,
Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 2013, 2, 245-248,.
In media: Wirtschaftswoche, Aug.,23.2012

See:
http://www.v-r.de/de/kulturen_der_weltwirtschaft/t-0/1007472/

This essay aims to bring to light a quality of Professor Sir Hall that is often overshadowed by his major works in planning: his contribution to the quantitative inquiry of cities. For him geographical models and conventions were part of the larger picture and as such none was absolute. He requested from his students, including myself, a thorough understanding of all the elements that contributed to the phenomenon we were investigating. This approach to analysis reflected his uncanny ability to thread narratives through complex phenomena and as such posed a challenge for those who sought clarity and simplicity through the use of quantitative methods.