Sociological institutionalism for a (mostly) economist audience
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Sociological Institutionalism argues that institutions shape actor preferences and available choices rather than actors rationally designing institutions. It focuses on how shared understandings, norms, and routines develop through fields and isomorphic processes like mimicry. While providing explanations for stability, it has faced criticism around allowing for innovation and change given its emphasis on taken-for-granted practices and copying between actors. The theory is argued to be most applicable in situations where symbolic dimensions dominate, technical dimensions are immature, or long time frames are considered.
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Sociological institutionalism for a (mostly) economist audience
- 1. Sociological Institutionalism for a (mostly) Economist Audience Charles Kirschbaum VI Research Workshop on Institutions and Organizations October 4 th , 2011
- 3. What is going on? Sociological Institutionalism (SI) key-insights
- 7. Sociological Institutionalism: its nuts and bolts
- 10. Major Criticism
Editor's Notes
- These institutional reserachers in late seventiers and early eighties tried to infer what could be driving “irrational behavior”
- Because there is no perfect relationship between the symbolic dimension of any given phenomena and its true reality, it is possible (and needed) to decouple between what actors do and what they account for what they are doing A great example of symbolic dimension underlying rational solutions is the evolution of math systems; Cassirrer shows that the Ancient Greek were not able to express the relationship between a square’s diagonal and side, because they were constrained by the idea of ratio; it was only when it was possible to express irrational numbers that they were able to go beyond and propose new math systems; Cassirrer suggests that rationality here is constrained by the very language we encapsule phenomena The gap between doing and accounting of what is done is also central to Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological insights; Decoupling is also important for maintaining the institution intact (Hirsch)
- Probably it was a big thing at the eighties to trash rational choice based on “atomistic, egoistic, maximizer” individual; to be sure, any of these characteristics have been relaxed... To a certain extent, there is a tautology in the idea of “field”; at the same time it is defined as where actors look for solutions; then, if isomorphism among field members follows, it is exactly because the boundary conditions are located within the field universe
- These institutional reserachers in late seventiers and early eighties tried to infer what could be driving “irrational behavior”
- These institutional reserachers in late seventiers and early eighties tried to infer what could be driving “irrational behavior”
- Stinchcombe has expressed frustration in relation to educational policies: “wouldn’t we care that our kids fail to learn math?”