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ABSTRACT
From the complex literatures on "institutionalisms" in political science and sociology, various components of institutional change are identified: mutability, contradiction, multiplicity, containment and diffusion, learning and innovation, and mediation. This exercise results in a number of clear prescriptions for the analysis of politics and institutional change: disaggregate institutions into schemas and resources; decompose institutional durability into processes of reproduction, disruption, and response to disruption; and, above all, appreciate the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the institutions that make up the social world. Recent empirical work on identities, interests, alternatives, and political innovation illustrates how political scientists and sociologists have begun to document the consequences of institutional contradiction and multiplicity and to trace the workings of institutional containment, diffusion, and mediation.
KEY WORDS: institutional theory, politics, social change
INTRODUCTION
Institutions endure. As a reaction against methodological individualism, technological determinism, and behavioralist models that highlight the flux of individual action or choice (March & Olsen 1989), the resurgence of institutional analysis in recent years has forcefully reminded social scientists of the significance of this "relative permanence of a distinctly social sort" (Hughes 1936:180, Zucker 1988:25). Observing that organizations and nation-states resemble one another more than one would predict given their different circumstances (DiMaggio & Powell 1983, Meyer & Rowan 1977, Meyer et al 1977), institutionalist analyses have developed compelling explanations for the relative absence of variation across cases or over time. Institutional arguments may also explain persistent differences, as when national industrial policies toward comparable technical issues consistently diverge (Dobbin 1994). In both instances, the core theoretical insight is the same: The patterning of social life is not produced solely by the aggregation of individual and organizational behavior but also by institutions that structure action.
This important contribution has generated new puzzles. One challenge follows from institutionalism's emphasis on enduring constraint. Institutions, it too often seems, "explain everything until they explain nothing" (Thelen & Steinmo 1992:15). Insofar as institutional arguments maintain that variation and change are minimized, those same arguments are ill-suited to the explanation of change (North 1981, Orren & Skowronek 1994, Powell 1991: 183-200). A second challenge is to determine the locus of change. Insofar as institutional change happens, where and when is it most probable and why?
These questions are particularly...