Monetarism conquered Britain by staged diffusion from journals to bureaucrats to boardrooms.

Evidence

Gradually, in the more hospitable climate of the 1970s, these seeds began to bear fruit. First in the learned journals, then in the senior common rooms, and finally in informal exchanges between the “new academics” and the more “sensitive” senior civil servants, a monetarist version of neoclassical economics came to provide the accepted frame of reference for economic debate. The economic journalists helped to make this revolution in ideas acceptable in the media and the serious financial press—and thus, not long after, in the boardrooms of enterprises which everyone imagined had long since abandoned open competition for the safer waters of state capitalism. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1109

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors how think tanks seed policy shifts described in works like The Ideas Industry and Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt; a staged social-diffusion model of intellectual change.
• SEED: A clean essay angle: tracing the staged career path of any contested economic doctrine through the same four institutional sites — who occupies each stage today?