COMMUNICATION AS POWER IN PETER HALL’S WORK

Abstract

Meta-power is communicated in our media age. Memories, expectations, assumptions of audiences, and decision-making practices take into account many messages and images. When democratic decision-making is expedited to enact policies that contradict the democratic process underlying a free society, then more than “politics as usual” is at work. Rather, the appearance of the political process has changed; it no longer matters that Congress pass legislation in a hurry because the “urgency demands it.” This is not easy to accomplish, and it is more difficult to understand. Peter Hall’s work offers some insights into these exciting, yet perilous times. Hall’s conceptualization suggests that social policy is reflexive of communication, meso-structure, and meta-power. Hall certainly complies with Vidich’s directive that “The source of some of sociology’s most compelling and important contributions to the understanding of social phenomena is the capacity for the sudden insight and the interpretative analysis…at its best it is an interpretative, creative craft” (Vidich, 1991, p. 522). Now more than ever it is imperative to understand the relationships between action, structure and history and their grounding in information technology, impression management, asymmetrical control. As Hall suggests, “Reviving the concept of institution would focus our attention upon the meso domain where social arrangements exist in and through processes that render them operational and operative. That is where the action is” (Hall, 1988, p. 355).

Citation

Altheide, D. (2003), "COMMUNICATION AS POWER IN PETER HALL’S WORK", Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 13-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(02)26003-2