In the late 1990s, a sixty-year-old Canadian institution underwent transformation. The changes to the Canadian Wheat Board were neither radical nor incremental. The Wheat Board did not lose its monopoly to export prairie-grown grain, as its critics had urged. However, the institution did undergo "its greatest period of reform in more than half a century" Wilson, 1998: 1!, with path-breaking changes to one of its core principles and alteration of its governance structure. Denounced by its critics as insufficient, these same reforms were also criticized by some of the Wheat Board's most ardent supporters for being too far-reaching and putting the institution's future at risk. The institutional transformation of the Canadian Wheat Board raises an important theoretical question about institutional change. More particularly, it poses the following question: What explains institutional change whose scope is more substantial than incremental adaptation but less than the paradigmatic change that would overturn an institution? This scope of change extends beyond what Hall~1993! would describe as adjustment to "instrument settings" to entail change to a core policy instrument even while maintaining other core policy instruments and overarching institutional goals. Institutional change of this midway scope has been neglected by institutional theorists who have focused overwhelmingly on either incremental or radical, path-breaking change. Accounts