Social science


The study of institutions has a long pedigree. It draws insights from previous work in a wide array of disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The reappearance of interest in institutions in the early 1980s followed a familiar pattern: it was a reaction to dominant strands of thought that neglected institutions, historical context, and process in favour of general theorizing. Accordingly, institutionalism is frequently characterized by the attention it gives to history. The institutionalism that emerged in the 1980s is called new institutionalism (NI), but it is less “new” than it is a restatement of previous scholarship. The following discussion traces the development of institutionalism from the 19th century to the emergence of NI in the last decades of the 20th century.

European institutionalism during the 19th century

A full overview of the institutionalist tradition would go back to Aristotle’s discussion of regime types (politeia). More recent interest in institutions emerged during the 19th century among the German historical economists (GHE), also called the institutional economists. Providing a critical response to the universal theories of the classical economists, these scholars disparaged deductive work, which they considered to be self-referential mathematical modeling. They argued that economic life is better understood through empirical work rather than through logical philosophy.

Their key insight was the need for historically and sociologically informed empirical analysis of reality. The earliest figure from this group was the German economist Wilhelm Roscher. His work insisted on the importance of context—historical, social, and institutional—for understanding the laws of political economy, economic behaviour, and the empirical diversity of social life. Early research focused on the relationship between the social and economic organization of society, stages of development, and evolutionary processes. Bitter conflicts with their Marxist contemporaries (followers of the theories of Karl Marx) notwithstanding, some scholars have come to see a close analytical affinity between the two traditions.

It is customary to divide the GHE into three generations: Early, Younger, and Last. The latter is noteworthy because it encapsulates some of the work of the German sociologist Max Weber, who was influenced by early GHE. Weber is perhaps the most influential modern institutionalist. Contemporary institutional works that posit institutions as an independent and non-epiphenomenal variable are indebted to Weber’s theorizing a political realm that is autonomous from economics and ideas. In his discussion of the state and bureaucracy, he proposes a macrosociological theory of institutions.

Institutionalist insights are also present in Weber’s theory of authority. For Weber, charismatic authority is inherently transient. As charisma exhausts itself and becomes routinized, traditional or rational-legal forms of authority take its place. With routinization, social relations and interactions become increasingly regular, predictable, and impersonal. Under modern capitalism, these take on a rational-legal form and become more extensive and elaborate. Some usages of the term institutionalization are thus a subset of Weber’s process of routinization.

Early 20th-century American institutionalism

Institutionalism appeared in American scholarship during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the works of the American institutional economists (AIE). The American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen was a pivotal figure who criticized the neoclassical approach for its focus on individuals. He argued that individuals are shaped by their institutional and sociocultural context. He emphasized habit, instinct, and emulation as alternatives to utility-calculation models of behaviour. Veblen theorized institutional persistence and developed several mechanisms of change, including conflict between institutions, exogenous shocks, and the interplay between routines and the variable and volatile action of agents.

Although Veblen embraced an organicist approach to social science, favouring the biological metaphor of evolution over the physical metaphor of mechanics deployed by economists, he was explicitly antifunctionalist. He raised the possibility of social breakdown and described history as an unfolding process that is cumulative but also crisis-ridden, rather than as a self-balancing smoothly changing system.

A later figure among the AIE was the American economist John R. Commons, who in the 1920s and ’30s rejected the framework of the classical economists in which providence endows individuals with freedom to enter into relations of economic exchange and economics is separate from politics. Commons argued that economics was a series of transactions that were made possible by institutional supports. He identified three types of transactions: rationing, managerial, and negotiated (associated with communism, fascism, and capitalism respectively). Institutions have to guarantee liberty and property before negotiated transactions can occur. He defined institutions as the working rules of collective action that are laid down and enforced by various organizations including the state. Institutions produce order by creating expectations toward which individuals can orient their economic behaviour. This interpretation of institutions is at the heart of rational choice institutionalism (RCI) and the new institutional economics (NIE).

Mid-20th-century American institutionalism

An anthropological version of economic institutionalism emerged later in the work of Karl Polanyi. Influenced by the GHE, he argued that economic relations are historically contingent and cannot be understood outside of their social context. For Polanyi, economics is always embedded in society. Rather than economic relations producing social integration, Polanyi argued, the social background, and institutions in particular, integrated the economy. According to this logic, markets are not the product of spontaneous acts of exchange. Instead, personal-level acts of exchange produce prices only under a system of price-making markets—a system that cannot arise solely from random acts of exchange. Historically, the market system is a relatively recent innovation and only one of several, contingent institutional solutions to the problem of economic integration. Additional forms of integration are reciprocity (e.g., lend-lease) and redistribution (e.g., the Soviet Union).

Polanyi defined institutions broadly as uniting, stabilizing, and giving structure to the economic process. Although economic institutions such as price and money are important, Polanyi also stressed the importance of noneconomic institutions such as religion and government. Haggling over price and individual choice are understood as a product of institutions; this foreshadows later sociological institutionalists (SI) who see human behaviour as following a “logic of appropriateness” and institutions as creating identities. Like his predecessors, Polanyi rejected the idea that contemporary economic science can universally capture economic relations.

Institutionalism also appeared in political science during the mid-20th century, when American political science was dominated by the study of democratic progress in the United States. Analysis of other countries was rare. Nevertheless, theorists such as Carl J. Friedrich focused on institutions in their cross-national work on constitutionalism. For Friedrich, constitutionalism was characterized by both a concern for individual autonomy and institutional arrangements—divided government and federalism—to prevent the concentration of power, especially in the state. Institutions are the rules of politics and the instruments of their enforcement. However, Friedrich was careful to note that institutions must reflect social and political reality, and without belief in their legitimacy they are greatly weakened. Friedrich sharply contrasted modern constitutionalism from nonconstitutional systems such as totalitarianism, and his work on the latter influenced an entire generation of Sovietologists. Finally, he was also interested in questions of institutional crafting, although he was agnostic about the existence of a “universal common denominator” for institutional design. Friedrich’s insights can be seen in both HI and RCI.

Institutionalism appeared in sociology with the emergence of organizational science (OS), which was a response to the rapid growth in the size of firms starting in the 1860s. The earliest and most influential figure was Chester Irving Barnard, who in the 1930s argued that an organization is a complex system of cooperation and highlighted the need to understand the behaviour of the individuals that compose it. He identified a disconnect between an organization’s conscious system of coordination (formal aspects) and its unconscious processes (informal aspects). The latter include customs, habits, attitudes, and understandings. The role of the executive is to create open communication and inducements for individual members.

Barnard stressed the importance of nonmaterial inducements, which facilitated individuals’ carrying out orders without consciously questioning authority. From this perspective, a manager directs the values of the organization so that individuals work toward a common purpose. He also argued that organizational forms vary across organizations because the configuration of individuals is unique to each organization, as is the appropriate organizational solution.

Institutionalism revisited

After World War II, institutionalism lost some of its prominence in the social sciences, displaced by theories focusing on social structures or individual behaviour. In the 1980s, however, research on social structures led to a revival of interest in institutions and the emergence of new institutionalism (NI). Theorists of comparative politics suggested that the state was autonomous and called for bringing the state back in as an explanatory variable. The study of institutions was significantly advanced with research in political economy on the state-led development of the Asian NIEs, as well as institutional reforms in the developed countries. Researchers also became increasingly interested in cross-national comparison of institutions, with a view to understanding the process of democratization. Finally, the global expansion of capitalism and European Union (EU) integration led to significant research demonstrating the role of institutions as intermediaries between structures and outcomes.

Some social scientists explicitly referenced earlier institutional works in their call for bringing institutions back in. This new body of work that came to be labelled NI sought to investigate among other things the interaction of society and institutions, the sources of institutional coherence, how historical processes lead to delayed outcomes, and nonutilitarian models of behaviour.

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