The three institutionalisms and institutional dynamics: understanding endogenous and exogenous change

Abstract

Although new institutionalism has long been criticised for presenting overly static accounts of social reality, that critique is becoming increasingly unwarranted. In recent years, historical, ideational and rational choice institutionalists have produced a rich body of literature on mechanisms and processes of institutional change. This article reviews this emerging literature and concludes that the most promising avenue for future research is to further explore the potential for combining insights from the three subtypes of institutionalism. In the hopes of encouraging future studies of institutional change to engage more explicitly in theoretical integration, this article proposes a sequential approach to combining insights from different traditions and providing comprehensive accounts of exogenous and endogenous processes of institutional change.

The Punjab Revenue Authority: Meeting the challenges of a new institution

“…If the prevailing norms in the existing institutional landscape are considered to be problematic (e.g., supportive of corruption) from the point of view of organizational designers, the challenge becomes that of trying to change the existing informal norms. By creating new routines, the organizational leaders might be able to impose new types of organizational fields and change patterns of behavior through altering the interpretive frames, cognitive templates, beliefs, and aspiration levels of the employees (March & Olsen, , ; Koning, ; DiMaggio & Powell, ; Scott, ).…”

“…The HI approach would argue that the main obstacle to establishing a new institution is path dependence, and SI would point to difficulties in changing the existing norms. (Peters, 1999;Hope & Raudla, 2012;Koning, 2016;Raudla et al, 2018). We examine these challenges more closely below.…”

Policy entrepreneurship and institutional change: Who, how, and why?

“…As North famously put it, a central puzzle of our time is to understand which institutional types "induce economic stagnation and decline" and which facilitate success; a grand project to realize optimization in institutional design and with it successful societal outcomes (Lecours, 2005;North, 1990, p. vii). Getting institutions "right" has thus been a recurrent scholarly concern and reflected in development practice in the work of multilateral development organizations whose modus operandi has rested on institution building as key to economic and social progress (Blyth, 2002;Chang, 2007; because the costs associated with isomorphism, the uncertainties, and disruptions this may cause become greater as institutions become more deeply embedded (Bush, 1987(Bush, , 1989Harty, 2005, p. 59;Koning, 2015).…”

Governing Transformation towards Low-carbon Societies: An Ideational Perspective from Developing Countries

“…Various accounts of modern new institutionalism complement each other in explaining both stability and change (Koning 2016). Some historical institutionalist approaches attribute change to exogenous events, stressing how, as the outcomes of policy-making processes, institutions are resistant to change due to path-dependency and policy inertia that locks transition into the existing models (Pierson 2000).…”

“…From this perspective, the most valuable insight of ideational institutionalism is that objective conditions are not enough to explain institutional change (Koning 2016) and that policy institutions are in large part embedded ideas that are subject to reinterpretation (Béland and Cox 2011;Somers and Block 2005). The majority of discursive institutionalists share the assumption that assemblages of ideas communicated in public eventually becomes rule-based systems of concepts and frameworks of meaning (Lynggaard 2007).…”