How People Experience and Change Institutions

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How people experience and change institutions: a field

guide to creative syncretism

Gerald Berk &Dennis Galvan

Published online: 31 July 2009

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract This article joins the debate over institutional change with two propositions.

First, all institutions are syncretic, that is, they are composed of an indeterminate

number of features, which are decomposable and recombinable in unpredictable ways.

Second, action within institutions is always potentially creative, that is, actors draw on

a wide variety of cultural and institutional resources to create novel combinations. We

call this approach to institutionscreative syncretism. This article is in three parts. The

first shows how existing accounts of institutional change, which are rooted in

structuralism, produce excess complexity and render the most important sources and

results of change invisible. We argue that in order to ground the theory of creative

syncretism we need a more phenomenological approach, which explains how people

live institutional rules. We find that grounding in John Dewey s pragmatist theory of

habit. The second part of the article explains Dewey and shows how the theory of

habit can ground an experiential account of institutional rules. The third part presents

a field guide to creative syncretism. It uses an experiential approach to provide novel

insights on three problems that have occupied institutionalist research: periodization

in American political development, convergence among advanced capitalist

democracies, and institutional change in developing countries.

Institutions explain a lot: national variation in capitalism and the welfare state,

counterintuitive paths of political development, policy variation within nation states,

and why some societies grow while others stagnate. But they have less success in

explaining their own transformation, the nature of informal politics and economy,

entrepreneurship, and diversity within their own boundaries. As institutionalists have

turned to these problems, they have questioned structural and deterministic principles

Theor Soc (2009) 38:543580

DOI 10.1007/s11186-009-9095-3

G. Berk (*) :D. Galvan

University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

D. Galvan

e-mail: [email protected]


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of earlier scholarship, introducing principles of ambiguity, loose coupling and

incongruence into institutional rules, and creativity into institutional action.

We join this conversation on institutional change with two propositions. First,

institutions are composed of an unlimited number of features, which are

decomposable and recombinable in unpredictable ways. Second, action ininstitutions is underdetermined. Actors draw on a wide variety of cultural and

institutional resources to create novel combinations. We call this approach to

institutions creative syncretism.

Creative syncretism serves for us as shorthand for an experiential approach to

institutions and how they change. We admire much in recent efforts to theorize

disorder, ambiguity, and human agency. But, we question the tendency to treat

change as an epiphenomenon of structure, and to attribute human action to cognitive

structures deeper than institutions themselves.

In response we ask: what if we switched perspective and rethought institutionsexperientially, phenomenologically? What if, borrowing from classical pragmatists

like John Dewey and successors like Hans Joas (1993,1996), we treated institutional

life as the lived experience of rules, and institutions as always-decomposable

resources, rearranged and redeployed as a result of action itself? This would mean

setting aside depictions of institutions as structural constraints on action, temporal

pathways of regularity, exogenous mechanisms of socialization, or ingrained patterns

of cognition. It would offer an entirely different way of thinking about institutional

periodization, or the convergence of institutional forms, or how they emerge to

promote social change and development. Order, as well as change, would becomeunderstandable outgrowths of action in and through institutions.

We call this creative syncretism because the terminology works on two levels.

First, the original and most common use of the term syncretismpopular

modification of religious orthodoxy through unauthorized recombination of ritual,

symbols, or practicesuggests agency and unexpected change (Shaw1999; Stewart

and Shaw1994). We recognize that the term has long been treated as synonymous

with impurity or apostasy. We explicitly discard this antiquated disparagement, and

make central to our conceptualization the transformative agency implicit in

syncretisms transgressiveness. Syncretism as label and metaphor highlights the

openness and mutability of seemingly coherent structures (like capitalism or

democracy, as much as Catholicism or jazz), as well as how transformation may

originate from actors in most any position. Modernity, with its dislocations,

consolidations, and claims to convergence in language, culture, music, tastenot

to mention political and economic institutionsis a project of promoting

orthodoxies. Syncretism, we argue, is the natural human response to it.

But creative syncretism rests on deeper foundations. It is shorthand for a

phenomenological way of making sense of structure and change. Creative

syncretism is rooted in the idea that institutional structure is not a script or a

schema, but a skill. We draw on the work of John Dewey to argue that action always

takes place in relation to prior rules and practices, which serve not as guides or

constraints, but as mutable raw material for new action. What we call the experience

of living under rules is really an experience of living through rules, of not just

playing by the rules, but actually playing the rules as if they were instruments. That

play is a form of ongoing potential improvisation with regard to the rules

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themselves. Improvisation can be blocked or fall into latency, which can produce

routine. But routine is not the default; it is the exception and necessitates a different

sort of explanation than it receives in structural accounts of institutions.

Orthodoxy and order can exist, but they take real work to maintain. Institutions do

not just stay on path by inertia. They veer off, jump tracks, or break down,not because of outside forces, or because change is functionally necessary, or

because elites choose it, but because there are people living in and through

institutional structures. Whenever there is living, there is the potential, indeed the

likelihood, for perturbation. This means, for institutions, creative syncretism.

This article begins by exploring recent efforts to theorize institutional change

from a structuralist perspective. We show how three forms of institutionalism move

toward the common problematics of structural indeterminacy and the role of human

agency. Serious engagement with these issues, has rendered once parsimonious and

clear theoretical accounts complex and sometimes contradictory.We then ask what if. What if we thought of institutions in experiential,

phenomenological terms? We turn briefly to three authors whose work anticipates

creative syncretism, and then turn to the task of laying a foundation for our approach

in pragmatist theory. We ground creative syncretism in Deweys concepts of habit,

impulse and deliberation, and lay out a framework for seeing institutions, change

and order from inside out, from the point of view of lived experience and through

rules-in-use.

The second half of our article is a field guide.We take up three issues that have

preoccupied institutionalists: periodization and temporal change in Americanpolitical development, institutional borrowing or spatial diffusion across national

boundaries in advanced industrial democracies, and the endogenous sources of

institutional change in third-world development. We show how an experiential

approach, centered on creative syncretism, adds clarity, depth, and empirical novelty

to the study of institutions.

Institutionalism and the turn to ambiguity

Until recently, the study of institutions in political science, sociology and related

fields has centered on order, on how institutional rules channel behavior and ensure

predictability and stability in human interaction and organizational life. This was true

for what is sometimes called the oldinstitutionalism. It became even more evident

once the behavioral revolution and radical critiques submerged the study of

institutions into macro-structural explanations (Orren and Skowronek 2004; Adams

et al. 2005).

Douglass North (1981), Theda Skocpol et al. (1985), James G. March and Johan

Olsen (1989) and others who coined the new institutionalism shifted analysis

towards the conditions under which institutions emerge, function, and change. For

some, this meant an emphasis on rationality in the resolution of collective action

problems (Greif 1989; Bates 1993); for others, the durability of organizations,

practices and rules as historical constructs (Thelen and Steinmo1992; Clemens and

Cook 1999). By the 1990s, a rough consensus emerged around the importance of

time and path dependency, emphasizing crucial periods of great fluidity followed by

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long stretches of stability (Collier and Collier 1991; Pierson 2000; Orloff 1993;

Skocpol1992; Clemens1997).

Some of the most vibrant work in institutionalist research presses the boundaries

of structural necessity and path dependency, turning instead to gaps in order, the

importance of agency, and more complex accounts of structure as a source ofinstitutional disorder.1 We take inspiration from this scholarship, and present below

three works that seek to move the new institutionalism to more fully appreciate

structural ambiguity, change, and agency: Streeck and Thelens efforts to theorize

mechanisms of institutional change, Orren and Skowroneks theory of intercurrence,

and Powell and DiMaggios exploration of loose coupling.

Sociologist Wolgang Streeck and political scientist Kathleen Thelen (2005)

provide among the most comprehensive and representative efforts to rethink path

dependency and structuralism in advanced capitalist democracies. Institutions, they

argue, are ordering systems, which exercise authority through the formation andapplication of legitimate rules. Streeck and Thelen call attention to imperfections in

the application or enforcement of rules (ambiguity, cognitive limits, conflicting ends,

limits to social control). These imperfections ensure slippage between formal

institutions (defined by their rules) and practice. And it is in that slippage that they

locate agency.

Streeck and Thelen theorize agency in terms of five types of institutional change:

displacement, layering, drift, conversion, and exhaustion. Each is made possible by

the slippage between rules and practice. In displacement, new models emerge and

diffuse, calling into question previously

taken for granted

organizational forms andpractices. In layering, reformers graft new elements onto old core features of an

institution. But in time, the grafts take over and become dominant. In drift,

institutional agents fail to adapt to new situations by recalibrating rules or

renegotiating the relationships between institutional actors. As a result, institutional

authority and routine atrophies. In conversion, the gaps between institutionalized

rules and their local enactment open space for redirecting existing institutional

instruments to new goals, functions and purposes. Finally, institutions can slowly

break down through exhaustion.

Streeck and Thelen open the door to ongoing institutional change, but their

structuralist commitments impose two limitations. First, they treat ambiguity and

transformation as epiphenomenal features of structure itself. Their categories of

change (displacement, layering, etc.) are, on closer inspection, careful descriptions of

structural gaps. For each gap of a particular shape, we find a kind of agency

(mechanism of change) appropriate for gaps of that configuration. When there is

displacement, the mechanism of change is defection from old to new rule systems,

1 For many working in the field, the absence of a theory of change meant new and creative explanations of

institutional disorder, incremental change, and indeterminacy. Such scholarship has yielded manypowerful insights with regard to: rule ambiguity and political entrepreneurship (Hall and Taylor 1996;

Sikkink1991; Blyth2002; Parsons2003; Scheingate2003; Lieberman2002); the ongoing expression of

grievances by losers (Weir2005); lost alternatives (Schneiberg2007; Sabel and Zeitlin1997); redundant

features (Crouch and Farrell2004; Crouch and Keune2005); layering of old and new institutions (Thelen

2004; Orren and Skowronek1994,2002,2004; Shickler2001; Sil2002); the coexistence of traditional

and modern institutions (Dunning and Pop-Eleches2004); change driven by quasi-parameters (Greif

and Laitin2004).

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from Keynesianism to vestigial liberalism in 1970s Britain, for example. If

institutions are layered, people invest in differential growth that advances, say,

private welfare systems over publicly funded safety nets. There is nothing

empirically lacking with these descriptions of types of change, or the associated

mechanisms by which they take place in particular structural conditions. Its just thatthis is not a theory of how institutions change, but rather a thick description of

structural variation and the most common responses to it.

The more we extend this strategy to new terrain (Streeck and Thelen look only at

advanced political economies), the more we expect to find additional, case-specific

descriptions of distinct patterns of structural change. Each of these, like the five

above, would suggest corresponding forms of response to different structural

circumstances. Each instance is likely to produce empirically rich and accurate

descriptions of the many ambiguities in institutional structure. The result will be a

verdant blooming of descriptions and corresponding mechanisms of change, but nota theory of how agency operates and change takes place within institutions.

Second, their exceptions are so empirically compelling, that one wonders what

exactly is left of the depiction of institutions as rule bound ordering systems. In

effect, the strategy of classifying mechanisms of change implies that rules are applied

with legitimacy and authority, except when they are not. The more exceptions and

mechanisms are specified, the more it appears as though authority and legitimacy

might be rare. Moreover, its plausible that exceptions always proliferate in a world of

general, universally applicable, impersonal rules. The more abstract the rule, the less it

will address the specificities of a particular experience, and the more it will generateuncertainty, ambiguity and exception. Critical legal theory calls this the indetermi-

nacy problem(Kelman1987, 4648, 245246, 257262).

Rather than theorize exceptions as structural gaps, or try to arbitrate a debate over

whether indeterminacy is the norm or the exception, we wonder what would happen

if we reconceptualized rules as people experience them. Understanding the way we

live with and use rules will, we argue, help us understand the sources of both order

and indeterminacy.

In US political development, Orren and Skowronek (1994,2002,2004) push the

point further. They challenge institutionalists to theorize politics in the fullness of

time. They focus not on gaps in institutional structure, but on the way institutions

themselves generate structural disorder. For them, political orders always consist of

multiple, incongruous institutions created at different times in response to different

problems. Moreover, because state institutions always attempt to project authority,

they inevitably abrade with one another or other institutions in society. Orren and

Skowronek call this phenomenon intercurrence.In the United States, judicial rules

designed to govern property and contract under simple market capitalism persist

alongside bureaucratic ones designed to cope with the dilemmas of managerial

capitalism. The result is layers of conflicting rules and norms, which result in

disorderly conditions that provide opportunities for leaders or political entrepreneurs

to exploit contradictions and imagine alternatives.

Orren and Skowronek perturb the structuralist foundations of institutionalism.

Disorder generates opportunity for imagination, entrepreneurship, innovation,

creativity. But we dont know much about how these activities work. Although

people follow rules, Orren and Skowronek suggest the rules are multiple, sometimes

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in conflict. So how do people imaginatively deal with this situation? Do they pick a

rule, reconcile divergent imperatives, combine, reinterpret? If institutions routinely

produce disorder through intercurrence, then were left to wonderis rule following

the best way to understand institutions? Is it rule following, except when there are

exceptions, a la Streeck and Thelen? But what if exceptionality becomes the rule?Orren and Skowronek helpfully raise this fertile conundrum. We attempt to surmount

the rule-exception dichotomy by reconsidering institutions as lived experiences.

Finally, in the sociology of organizations, we see a similar trajectory of greater

appreciation of structural indeterminacy and possibilities for agency and change. An

oldschool emphasized processes of normative socialization: organizations were of

course a key site for political contestation, but in the end, they ordered behavior best

when they taught and enforced widely-held cultural norms. A new school best

exemplified by DiMaggio and Powells landmark 1991 edited volume rejected

symbolic and functional consistency within each institution, depicting instead aloose coupling of the standardized components of any organization (rules, role

descriptions, functional divisions of labor, symbolic apparatus) (14).

Organizations composed of loosely coupled parts vary widely in their ability to

order behavior, ensure rule-following or socialize members. Loose coupling makes

agency a central, rather than peripheral feature of organizational analysis. When

organizational fields are unstable and established practices ill formed (30) we

should turn to politics, interests, and collective action, to understand change.

Moreover, ambiguity is not simply an outgrowth of gaps or decay in institutional

structure, as in Streeck and Thelen, because DiMaggio and Powell see institutionallife through the lens of cognitive psychology. When people form organizations or

follow rules, they deploy shared mental maps, taken-for-granted archetypes for

behavior, such standardized cultural forms as accounts, typifications, and cognitive

models(27). There is no one-to-one correspondence between cognitive schema and

organizations. As schemas are partial, multiple, shifting, so too are organizations,

which can thus be understood as loosely coupled.

With this characterization, however, DiMaggio and Powell substitute an old

structuralism for a new one, and unwittingly short-sell agency. The loosely coupled

parts of organizations rest on cognitive schemas, described as higher level

structures,that are taken for granted,producing unreflective activity.Cognitive

schemas as inheritances from culture, the past, or long-sedimented practices are thus

fairly impervious to agency and transformation.

Instead of embedding institutional life in a new, geologically more stable structure

(cognition and its schemas), we ask: what would it mean to assume, along with most

cultural anthropology of the last several decades, that these cognitive frames and

cultural codes are themselves rather mutable and subject to political contestation?

This need not imply a rational choice optimization logic depicting institutions as the

results of intentional actions, as DiMaggio and Powell fear. In between deep

structure and reified individual rationality lies a more phenomenological approach to

rules (and cognitive schemes) as they are lived and experienced.

In organization theory, US political development and political economy, we applaud

the widespread attention to the inherent indeterminacy of institutions, and the search for

new ways to theorize agency in institutional change. Given the structuralist commit-

ments of neo-institutionalism, these efforts read agency off gaps in structure, as a

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function of layering, or an outgrowth of alternative structures. We follow this lead, but

suggest that as long as institutionalism remains tied to structuralist preconceptions, clear

and compelling theorization of change and action will remain elusive.

What if we rethought institutions: antecedents

We thus shift ground. We ask: what if we shifted to the experience of living, practicing or

doing rules? Seen from the perspective of situated practice, rules are not so much

ambiguous (that is, constraints that permit more than one course of action), as they are

partial guides to action, because lifeexperiencealways overflows their authority.

This means that rules are incessantly corrigible, always open to syncretic recombination.

We are not alone in this project. Among others (Stark 1996; Stark and Bruzst

1998; Fung and Wright 2003; Strang and Meyer 1993; Hwang and Powell 2005;Sewell 1992; Scott 1998; Smith 1992; Zeitlin and Herrigel 2000), we take

inspiration and guidance from the work of political economist Charles Sabel, legal

theorist Roberto Unger and organization theorist Karl Weick, who also draw on

pragmatist philosophy and constructivist social theory to make sense of institutional

or organizational change. Where we hope to develop a theory of creative syncretism

to account for diversity and change, Sabel focuses on institutional learning, Unger

on the disentrenchment of legal structures, and Weick on organizational innovation

through managerial improvisation. In many ways, their theories prefigure our own.

Sabels(1994) project is to understand how institutions facilitate learning, whichhe considers the source of innovation and change. In doing so, he writes that people

experience rules both as social facts and as guides to deliberation. On the one hand,

concurring with Powell and DiMaggio, rules powerfully shape what individuals

regard as desirable and legitimate in taking their world for granted. On the other

hand, what Streeck and Thelen call exceptional, Sabel considers ubiquitous: rules

are never so precise or persuasive as to determine action.

Individuals must interpret rules tobring them to bear on their actual situation.There

is nothing in the cognitive or rule-following theories of institutions, however, that

explains how this is done. For Sabel, it is the sociableandreflexivenature of human

beings that guides individual interpretation. It proceeds, he writes, through argumen-

tative encounters in which the individual attempts to establish an equilibrium between his

or her views and social standards by recasting both.It is this socially reflexive capacity

that makes it possible for people in institutions to innovate by creating new interpretive

possibilitiesfor action. Thus, rules-in-action do not constrain action in Sabels view, so

much as they enable discussion, experimentation, and institutional learning (156).

Similarly, Unger (1987) conceptualizes the experience of lived rules as

inescapably dual in character: they make human coordination possible, but become

the locus of individual improvisation; they are the focus of passionate human

attachments, but also protection against the domination that people risk from those

attachments; and they are experienced as comforting sources of conformity, but also

oppressive reasons for defiance. Unlike mainstream institutionalism, in which rule-

following is the norm, Unger argues that their guidance is palpable but always

partial. Life inevitably and routinely overflows the strictures of rules or cognitive

schemas; and it is in that space that imagination takes hold. Imagination, as Unger

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understands it, is not a separate faculty, which kicks in during crises or when all else

falls apart, but an integral quality of our mental faculties: the quality of seeing more

things and making more numerous and varied connections among ideas about things

than any prospective list of rules or schemas can countenance (204). In a passage

that anticipates our discussion of Deweys notion of habit, Unger writes

We sometimes act as if our shared institutional and imaginative context did not in

fact bind us. We hold on to deviant examples of human association, often the

leftovers of past or rejected bids to establish a settled ordering of social life. We pass

occasionally and often unexpectedly from context-respecting disputes to context

defying struggles (7).

Perhaps Karl Weicks (2001) theory of organizational improvisation is closest to our

own approach to creative syncretism. Like Unger and Sabel, Weick understands

organizational rules or principles through lived experience, which always overflows therules themselves. But he also explicitly demonstrates how organizations are never

monoliths, but are made up of segments, which can be recombined by innovative

bricoleurs. Thus, creativity and recombination are central to his theory of

organizational change.

Weick imagines organizations not with architectural metaphors, but with experiential

and practical ones. They are not designs that house people, but rather space in which

people collectively puzzle about their world and give meaning to their collective projects.

Life in organizations, he writes, is less like the enactment of rules or schemas, pre-given,

than it is like a process of collective cartography, where the terrain is never fully known,the destination changes, and the terrain itself shifts. Organized people, nevertheless, make

provisional maps that provide collective meaning of the experiences they share.

But sensemaking in organizations, Weick adds, is always segmented. Organizations

divide tasks and write separate maps that accord the segments different meanings.

Segmentation also means that it is impossible to ever get a single, unified sense of the

organization or to redesign it from the top down when it faces unfamiliar challenges.

Instead, Weick (2001, 62-64) thinks that organizational redesign is more like a

process of bricolage than of making architectural blueprints to control change in

its details. People look back to the intimate knowledge they have of the parts of the

organization and recombine those parts to cobble together a novel response to a new

problem. Only in retrospect do they give the new combination a coherent form and

name.

Unger and Sabel go further than the structuralist theorists in showing how

imagination works and how it arises during the normal experience of living in

institutions. Weick ties the human capacity for improvisation to the loose coupling of

institutional parts. All three make a break with conventional accounts of institutions

but in the service of slightly different projects than our own. They develop a

phenomenological account of institutions in order to open new theoretical terrain and

possibilities in the world (learning, emancipation and better management).

We share the theoretical project, but want to show how this same phenomeno-

logical turn would enhance the rich, empirically grounded, often historical tradition

of institutionalism in political science and sociology. We build an alternative

experiential foundation under institutionalism in order to address current tensions

within this field of knowledge. Our goal is to try a new way to bridge the artificial

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divide between regularity and perturbation, structure and agency. We believe this can

harmonize some of the cacophony thats arisen as institutionalists proliferate case-

specific mechanisms of change, unearth the layering of history, diagram the coupling

of parts, or shift causality to structuring structures. Its not that these insights are

flawed, as weve noted above. Its that they have unwittingly made institutionalism anoisy hall of competing and contradictory adjustments to what had once been more

parsimonious (if reductionist) models and arguments.

Most importantly, regrounding the study of institutional change and diversity

from the point of view of lived experience, as opposed to durable structure and

exceptional openings, will improve our empirical accounts of what people do in and

to institutions. This is the purpose of the latter half of this article and the main goal

of our project, which rightly provides the subtitle of our work. But first we turn to

Dewey to ground our experiential account of institutional life.

Rethinking institutions: habit

In Deweys pragmatism, institutions are composed of widespread uniformities of

habit.2 Habits, in our view, stand in for rule-in-action. They anchor an experiential

account of how people follow rules, use rules, and perturb rules in ways that are

never exactly the same. Habits live and thrive in ambiguity. And they cannot help

but necessitate deliberation and their own transformation.3

2 The concept of habit has a history, which is beyond the scope of this article and fully documented in the

work of Charles Camic (1986). Of particular importance for us, Camic depicts habit as part of a lost

alternative in social theory, an approach that integrated, rather than dichotomized, structure and agency. By

the interwar years behavioral psychologists, bearing the apparent authority of the physical sciences,

narrowed the meaning of habit to neurologically determined action. In response, sociologists largely

abandoned the term, turning instead to attitude and purposeful choice to conceptualize agency. In

Twentieth Century social theory that internal, cognitive, individual framing of agency would evolve into

rational choice theory as the main alternative to historical, cultural, and other structuralisms. By contrast,

Camic shows that at the time sociology abandoned habit, Dewey was laying out an alternative that used

the concept to integrate inherited structure and ongoing reflective choice. Others have picked up Deweys

thread in various ways (Joas 1996; Bourdieu1977; Giddens1984). In rethinking institutions, we find it

useful to go back to Dewey to recover his alternative approach and ground our theory of creative

syncretism in a concept originally intended to overcome the intractable dichotomy between structure and

agency.3 We draw on Deweys concept of habit, rather than Bourdieus(1977) closely related habitus, because we

find in the former greater sensitivity to ongoing creativity and experimentation as features of action itself.

Habitus tells us much about the alignment of external conditions (field), inner orientation, and behavior.

In Bourdieus work, agency consists mainly of aligning and realigning action to a pre-existing habitus that

embeds in peoplescognition and bodies the structural arrangements of a social field. That field of course

changes and in response, the habitus will adapt, resulting in new internalizations of a new field. Many

who apply Bourdieu follow his suggestions that autonomous change of habitus is also possible, and that

this is the source of creativity and reinterpretation beyond adjustment to the external conditions of the field

(Sewell 1992; Powell and DiMaggio 1991). We see this potential in Bourdieu, but agree with Butler(1999) that Bourdieu does more to theorize habitus as a mechanism for the ongoing internalization of

adjustments in the context or field than as a site for creative action itself. The findings of our own research

conform more fully with the Deweyian account presented here, in which habit is both a repertoire of prior

patterns of action (a collection of parts and oddments) and the will to rearrange this repertoire to craft new

action (a new arrangement of parts) in response to circumstances that are never really twice the same.

Habit balances the constraints of a limited collection of parts with rummaging, cobbling and the

inventiveness of action. Bourdieus habitus leans more to the former.

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In Human Nature and Conduct (2002 [1922]) Dewey describes habit as an

acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, which is influenced by

prior activity,is projectiveand dynamic,and operates in somesubdued form

even when not dominating activity (4042). Four aspects of habit help us ground

our experiential account of institutions. Habits are situational, integrating the bodyand worldly materials. They are social and historical. They propel action in a way

that blurs distinctions such as means-ends, thought-practice, or structure-agency.

And they cannot be reduced to routine.

Put in more familiar terms: institutions are composed of rules that are not enacted

schemas, but lived skills. Institutions are social because theyre temporal. Institutions

are not constraints on action, theyre made through action. Order is not a prior or

necessary condition of institutions, but a possible result of particular forms of

experiencing rules in action.

First, habit is embodied and situational. It is experienced and expressed through thebody in ways that make use of and incorporate worldly materials. Just as involuntary

physiological functions are more than the action of the bodybreathing is an affair of

the air as truly of the lungswalking implicates the ground as well as the legs(14)

acquired habits also embody worldly materials. They involve skill of sensory and

motor organs and craft learned through discipline, repetition and manifest

technique.We embody the material world in the acquisition of skill, as we learn, in

part, from and through the materials themselves how they are to be handled, cut,

shaped, and used. Thus, we should laugh at anyone who said that he was master of

stone working, but that the art was cooped up within himself, and in no wise dependenton support from objects and assistance from tools(15). Thus, habit is not actionupon

the environment. Worldly materials intrude. Habits are ways of using and

incorporating the environment in which the latter has its say as surely as the former.

Thus, habit challenges conventional notions of institutional action, which

privilege exogenous rules and abstract schemas. Habit makes institutions a matter

of skill, not script. Thus, the skillful jurist does not mechanically apply precedent to

new situations, but creates analogies out of a body of law and a world of facts.

Likewise, inter-ethnic relations follow neither epic tropes of antagonism nor cool

calculation of gains and losses. Rather, ethnic difference is subject to improvisational

hailing and experiments in fictive kinship conducive to new forms of recognition

and identification4. People do not follow rules or enact cognitive schemas, as much

as they learn how to align situations, actions and expectations.

Second, habits are social and historical: conduct is shared such that a society

of some group of fellow-men is always necessary before and after the fact of

conduct.This is not an ontological statement for Dewey (although he does think it a

mistake to see habits as the aggregation of individual practices). It is impossible, he

writes, to arbitrate the metaphysical debate over whether human nature is social or

individual. Instead, he says that habits are social because they are always historical:

they grow out of earlier, similar, efforts to align situation, action and expectation.

The complete legacy of prior habitcustom or institutionsis openly available and

4 See, for example, West African joking kinship or Obamas March 2008 race speech (Launay 2006;

Obama2008).

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shared. We call upon and use that legacy when we act in any new situation, giving

all action an inherently social cast. As discussed below, present use of the shared

repertoire of prior habit also makes action inherently a process of narrative story

telling.

Third, habits are propulsive. They are demands for certain kinds of activity,which constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word, Dewey writes,

habits are will. They form effective desires and furnish us with our working

capacities. For the will, Dewey argues, cannot be formed independent of action. It

is not prior to habit, set down by individual preference, by moral compulsion,

functional necessity, normative agreement or by institutional constraint. Nor is habit

the means to a prior end. It is, at once, the discovery and rediscovery of the will

through skillful application of principle in the world. Charles Lindblom (1990) calls

the propulsive nature of habit probing volitions. People, he writes, do not have

preferences prior to actionor choosing means. They discover and revise theirvolitions through action.

Fourth, habits are not, by definition, routines, the mere repetition of what has

been done before, because the alignment of skill, rule and material is never exactly

the same. To be sure, habits may devolve into routine, compulsive action, or

enslavement to old ruts. But this is not, as many institutionalists tell us, because

routine economizes on past practice, locks in previous commitments, or is

functional. Rather, as we show below, Dewey thinks routine is not the norm, but an

anomalous breakdown of habit resulting from authoritarian education or domination

born of the artificial separation of thought and action.Thus, seen from the perspective of habit, institutional rules and standards are

powerful forces. Dewey writes that they reconstruct. They open new avenues of

endeavor and impose new labors. But they do not determine behavior, thought, or

social relations in any direct sense. From the point of view of mainstream

institutionalism, Dewey leaves us in limbo; he leaves us with questions: "What

authority have standards and ideas? What claim have they upon us? Howwe are

going to use and be used by these things?This is where Dewey wants us to be. This

is habit. It is how we live rules (81).

Rethinking institutions: habit-in-motion

By living rules, we put habit and institutions themselves in a state of constant,

creative flux. The key to understanding this flux, to setting habit in motion and

seeing institutions syncretically, is the link between habit and Deweys concept of

impulse. This section explains how impulses perturb habits and presents the three

ways people use impulse (action in the moment, deliberation, and yielding to

routine). We show how creativity is manifest or latent in all three (including routine),

and argue that routine is not the characteristic mode of institutional action. Habit

understood in terms of impulse yields habit-in-motion, a theorization of the oft-

mentioned notion rules-in-use, and a means to rethink institutions in phenome-

nological terms as both the raw material and the outcome of creative syncretism.

Habits do not just come from nowhere. They emerge in relation to impulses,

which are original unlearned activity (9293), or more precisely "highly flexible

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starting points for activities which are diversified according to the ways in which

they are used" (95). Impulses although first in time are never primary in fact(89),

because they have no meaning until human interaction and learning makes them into

habits. Babies have impulsesto eat, to defecate, to be held close to human skin

but babies are dependent beings. Very quickly, if they are to survive, they come tounderstand and begin to manage the social meaning of their crying, the habituated,

socially determined means to induce responses from the adults they need for their

care.

At one level, habit domesticates impulse. But this is not the whole story: impulse

sometimes overflows the structure of existing habits, sometimes refuses to be

domesticated, and is central to how we understand the constant reformulation of

habit itself. When reformulation happens, impulses become the pivots upon which

the re-organization of activities turn, they are agencies of deviation, giving new

direction to old habits and changing their quality (93).In other words, impulses challenge existing habits. The interplay between

impulses and the prior repertoire of habits is the key to understanding perturbation

and ambiguity on the one hand, and routine and order on the other. There are three

main pathways of interaction between impulse and habit: raw action, deliberation,

and routine. First, people may simply act in the moment, driven by a surging,

explosive dischargeblind, unintelligent (p. 156). Impulsive action is important,

and clearly creative in making new paths of action. But by itself it is often

ephemeral, reactive or destructive, rather than reconstructive, with regard to habit.

Second, actors can respond to impulse deliberatively. When actors deliberate,impulse may:

become a factor coordinated intelligently with others in a continuing course of

action. Thus a gust of anger may be converted into an abiding conviction of

social injustice to be remedied, and furnish the dynamic to carry the conviction

into execution (p. 156).

Deliberation involves the application of reflective imagination to sort out

competing paths of action suggested by a new impulse, circumstances, and prior

habits. We respond to impulse-in-context by drawing on a repertoire of partially

salient ways of responding to similarly shaped circumstances from the past. These

prior habits exhibit both the onward tendency and the objective conditions which

[are] incorporated within (182) all habit. Prior habits may apply only up to a point

in new circumstances, and may not represent complete or coherent expectations for

action because old habits as far as they are checked, are also broken into objects

which define the obstruction of ongoing activity.

When we deliberate, we work in effect as Levi-Strauss bricoleur (1966),

rummaging through the available resources of partially relevant habits, whole and

broken, as well as salient impulses, to cobble together a new solution, in Deweys

terms, a path of action. When we deliberate, we consider a set of already pre-

situated lines of possible action, as:

each conflicting habit and impulse takes its turn in projecting itself upon the

screen of imagination. It unrolls a picture of its future history, of the career it

would have if it were given head (190).

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The projection process is not a process of selection, but of recombinatory

bricolage, of putting together creative new possibilities, an experiment in making

various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses (190). With

regard to institutions, we call this deliberative process of decomposing and

recombining habits creative syncretism.Deliberative creativity is not a process of planning or goal-seeking outside of

everyday practice. It is a feature of practice itself, of living in the world, with

impulses and through existing habits. Thus, for Dewey, an artists creativity is part of

the everyday acquisition of a skill, which happens not for any instrumental reason

but simply because the practice of skill is more important to him than practice for

skill (7172).

Deliberative creativity is also not merely an individual matter. As Mead puts it,

taking the attitude or role of the other is a constitutive feature of every action,

individual and collective (Cook 2006, 7274). Deliberation is inherently socialbecause it is temporal. The projector screen doesnt show utility functions for each

of my solitary choices of possible action. It plays out new lines of action in light of

prior ways, hopes and examples or combinations of these old actions. Where do

these come from? They come from a socially shared repertoire of relevant impulses

and habits.

Its no accident that to describe the social nature of deliberation, we think of

lines of action or story lines. Deliberation is narrative making. As Somers

(1994) writes, we make sense of who we are and how we are situated in institutions

through narrative. While temporal, our story lines are never linear or determined bythe past. Instead, as we craft real resolutions to the practical problems raised by

impulse, we contribute concrete episodes and vignettes to new, unfolding tales

about ourselves and others. Story-making underscores the inherent sociability of

deliberation: contributing to shared story lines offers meaning that is at once

individual (my character acts) and social (my character acts in a tale connected to

the actions and reactions of others). Because these story lines are constitutive of

cultural meaning, deliberation as we understand it is always a cultural process. It

reworks the meaning of institutional custom, as it recombines habits in creative

experiments.

Third, actors can respond to impulse through compulsive routine, or actions that

reinforce old habits. Dewey thinks there is nothing particularly natural or inevitable

about routine. It occurs only when actors separate habit from thought, action from

the possibility of deliberation. In fact, he considers routine, as such, an artificial

separation of mind and body, in which actors yield to unintelligent habit(77). For

Dewey, this is an empirical observation about institutions and action, not merely a

normative position.

Curiously, from a Deweyian point of view, the primary focus of mainstream

institutionalism is this peculiar and artificial sub-type in the life of habit. But, this

treats the part for the whole and naturalizes routine, which is actually just a particular

species of human agency.

Impulse and environmental change guarantee that it takes effort to separate habit

from thought or deliberation from action. We face new situations and new desires all

the time, and cannot help but employ these in the perturbation, sometimes minor,

sometimes major, of habit. In Deweys view, routine necessitates explanation,

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because deliberation always remains latent and possible. Dewey offers two5 salient

reasons why habit sometimes is separated from thought. First, the separation of

thought from habit can result from education and socialization highlighting onlythe

stocks of information adults wish to impose and the ways of acting they want to

reproduce. Second, the separation may result from domination, when those whowish a monopoly of social power find desirable the separation of habit and thought

[enabling] them to do the thinking and planning, while others remain docile(72).

Let us be clear: socialization and domination are not structuralist deus ex

machinae that lurk beneath Deweys conceptualization, which determine when

habit is creative and when it degenerates into routine. As our empirical examples in

the second half of this article demonstrate, it is not possible to read from

asymmetrical power or mechanisms of socialization the emergence of routine. Even

in the face of such forces, actors retain the capacity for creativity, and, as we will see,

exercise that capacity to transform institutions. Often, analysts and the powerfulalike dismiss these transformations, as inconsequential irregularities or transitional

stages toward normalization.

It is not possible to read routine from structure because action is always pregnant

with creativity and routine. Creativity is so fundamental to action that even in

contexts of great subordination or hegemonic socialization, actors can recognize

their capacity to perturb and escape routine. Scott (1985) illustrates this with his

explorations of shirking, sabotage, and other weapons of the weak. Routine can

result from certain forms of socialization and power asymmetries. But it is not a

necessary consequence of them.This is because, for Dewey, the separation of habit and thought (like the

separation of mind and body or theory and practice) is never really sustainable.

Thought without ordinary habits of action, he writes, lacks a means of execution. In

lacking application, it also lacks tests, criteria. Hence it is condemned to a separate

realm. If we try to act upon it our actions are clumsy, forced. Habit without thought

or compulsive routineis artificially undiscerning; the more it faces new circum-

stances and impulses, the more it produces unintended consequences, confusion of

expectation and outcome. Likewise, institutionalism without habitrules only

understood as routinescan account for human creativity and change only through

a series of ad hoc and cumbersome mechanisms to derive disorder from order,

creativity from structure and position. The crucial question is an experientialone, not

a structural one. Impulse is always active, and it always throws up expectations

associated with habits. Depending on the particular and distinct nature of experience

in any given moment, for any given actor, situated in an always shifting repertoire of

prior habits, impulse may rule the day, it may trigger deliberation, or it may default

5

Dewey offers a third reason that we find somewhat unsatisfying: rigid custom can force routine andundermine experimentation. For Dewey, this is a sociological rather than a cultural or characterological

condition. In the Orient, Dewey suggests that thought is submerged in habitnot because of any

essentially Oriental psychology, but because of a nearer background of rigid and solid customs (61). We

applaud Deweys effort to distinguish the sociological production of rigid custom from essentialist notions

of cultural or psychological determinacy. But in the end, a legacy of rigid custom is nothing more than a

history of failures to engage in deliberation, an accumulation of routinized action. As an explanation for

why habit can disintegrate into routine, this is a tautology.

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into routine, with no deliberation. The complex of experiential circumstanceseven

for one actoris never twice the same, and so it is impossible to read off of

circumstances, or structure, whether deliberation will take place or not.

As institutionalists, then, we need not turn to gaps in structure to explain

ambiguity or claim that rules or organizations have agency to explain thereproduction of order. We need not turn to quasi-cognitive mechanisms that

mediate action and field of play producing forms of agentless agency. We need

not artificially separate structural conditions from exceptional openings for

imagination. We need not hold agency at arms length for fear that it entails an

absolute force of unfettered pure choice.

Shifting to a practice-phenomenological approach to institutions lets us use habit

to account for the lived experience of perturbation and change, as well as the

reproduction of routine and orderas lived experience. We can thus tackle the basic

puzzle of institutionalism, both of Deweys day, and our own:

The problem of how those established, more or less deeply grooved systems of

interaction which we call social groups, big and small, modify the activities of

individuals who perforce are caught up within them, and how the activities

of component individuals remake and redirect previously established customs (60).

We tackle this puzzle through an account of experience and practice. This enables

us to understand how living in complex and changing contexts (of modernity, late

capitalism, postcolonialism, etc) affords ongoing possibilities of syncretic transfor-

mation, as Dewey suggested with such prescience in 1922:because of present mobility and intermingling of customs, an individual is now

offered an enormous range of custom-patterns, and can exercise personal

ingenuity in selecting and rearranging their elements (75).

We draw on Dewey to shift to a practice-phenomenonological approach to

institutions, referring to institutions as always recombinatory, subject to ongoing

dynamics of perturbation and reformulation we call creative syncretism. As

described in the sections that follow, we think this shift clarifies issues that remain

murky in more structuralist accounts of change, simplifying efforts to make sense of

institutional order and breakdown, as well as periodization, convergence, and

development.

A field guide to creative syncretism

The remainder of this article applies the concept of creative syncretism to three empirical

problems that have pre-occupied institutionalists: periodization, convergence, and

development. By comparing a prominent institutionalist example to a creative syncretist

example in each category, we show how our approach resolves institutionalist

conundrums, provides greater parsimony, and opens novel lines of empirical inquiry.

The first example addresses the problem of historical periodization in American

political development. We compare two studies of national state building in the US.

The first, Stephen Skowroneks Building a New American State (1982), anticipates

the theory of intercurrence; while the second, Gerald Berks Louis Brandeis and the

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Making of Regulated Competition (2009), applies the theory of creative syncretism.

We shall see how, instead of rigid conflict between institutions rooted in different

eras (intercurrence), Berk demonstrates how creative actors reached across the

boundaries of time to craft institutions (temporal syncretism), which have remained

invisible to institutionalists.The second example addresses the debate in political science and economic

sociology over whether advanced industrial democracies are converging toward a

single form of national capitalism. We compare two studies of the diffusion of liberal

institutions in Germanys nonliberal market economy. The first, Kozo Yamamura

and Wolfgang Streecks edited volume, The End of Diversity? (2003), applies the

mechanisms of institutional change outlined by Streeck and Thelen above to the

question of whether German institutions can survive the pressures for marketization.

The second, Gary Herrigels(2008) Rules and Roles: Ambiguity, Experimentation

and New Forms of Stakeholderism in Germany, adopts a pragmatist perspective toshow how the pressures for economic change have led local actors in Germany to

recompose institutional rules in a plethora of creative experiments, which, have been

invisible or incomprehensible to institutionalists.

The third example addresses the debate among political scientists, sociologists

and anthropologists over what sorts of institutional processes promote positive social

change in developing nations. We compare two works on the changing nature of

property in Africa. The first, Jean Ensminger and Jack Knights(1997) study of the

Orma in northeast Keyna, demonstrates how structural conditions, which shape

competition and bargaining among peasants, have led to the adoption of privateproperty institutions. The second, Dennis GalvansThe State Must Be Our Master Of

Fire (2004), demonstrates how creative syncretists in the Serer region of Senegal

decomposed colonial efforts to impose private property and recombined them with

local cosmologies to create a vibrant land pawning system. The multiple meanings

of rules as lived elude the structuralist account, while Galvans experiential approach

reveals innovative and overlooked forms of property rights.

Periodization in American political development

Making sense of institutions in the fullness of time necessitates grappling with the

problem of periodization. In the path dependent version of periodization,

institutional histories are marked by long periods of elaboration on existing rules,

punctuated by bursts of radical change. Although this approach facilitates

periodization, it lacks an endogenous account of change. In the intercurrent version

of periodization, there are clear distinctions between eras, but multiple, layered, and

incongruous institutions mark every period, and the conflicts between them provide

the impetus to change. Periods are distinguished by conflicts that result in durable

changes in authority. Finally, in our version of institutional history, periodization

becomes less important, because it is always possible for creative actors to find

resources for recomposition by reaching across temporal boundaries. Time provides

resources, instead of cordoning institutions off from one another.

This section compares two accounts of national state building in the US:

Skowroneks path breaking study of railroad regulation, the military, and civil

service reform and Berks recent study of the Federal Trade Commission. We choose

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Skowroneks work, because it is an excellent example of intercurrence (even though

it was written a decade before Orren and he named the concept). We choose Berks

study of the FTC, because it covers similar ground from the perspective of creative

syncretism. For the sake of comparison, we limit our account of Skowroneks book

to the case of railroad regulation.Skowroneks narrative is organized in two periods, each structured by the layering

of institutional orders. In the first, administrative innovations were stitched onto an

old order of courts and parties and subordinated to their purposes. He calls this

patchwork. In the second, state structure was reconstituted and public

administration took hold. But in a mirror image of the patchwork era,

administrators were buffeted by partisan and judicial contests for authority.

Intercurrence, then, ensured disorder and dysfunction in the modern American state.

The story begins with nineteenth century state structure. Unlike Europe, where

central state bureaucracies preceded industrialization and state building, in the U.S.democratization came first, followed by industrialization and only then by state

building. The result was a state dominated by patronage parties, whose only

limitation on distributing the spoils of office came from the courts.

The Nineteenth Century, state of courts and parties was weak by European

standards, but it was as strong as it needed to be for an agrarian society; that is, until

the railroads threw the old order into crisis. Bitter conflicts between labor and

management, shippers and railroads, and among the railroads themselves threatened

social peace. When everyone turned to the state to redress their grievances, courts

and parties proved unable to respond.In the 1880s, a new class of professional economists began to propose an independent

government commission, staffed by experts, to reconcile the demands of railroad

economics and distributive politics. In 1887, Congress took up their proposal, and created

the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate the railroads. But the commissions

enabling statute, writes Skowronek, was no more than patchwork. It subordinated

professional autonomy and rational policy to the interests of congresss most powerful

constituents: agrarian and small business shippers.

The economists complained. They saw statute of 1887 as patronage, driven by the

base impulses of political machines. Seen from the perspective of economic science,

the ICCs mandate was full of contradictions, which would ultimately serve no ones

interests. The economists proved prescient. Prodded by the railroads, the courts

seized on the confusions in the law to disempower the ICC. And by the turn of the

century, the crazy quilt of regulation proved too disorderly to hold. Seen from an

intercurrent structuralist point of view, the ICC was incapable of rationalizing policy

or serving partisan interests.

The fortunes for state building improved after the turn of the century, when the

structural conditions of party competition changed. Electoral politics in the late

nineteenth century had been extremely competitive. The presidential election of

1896, however, ushered in an era of stability, in which the parties settled into

sectional alignment. A dominant Republican Party controlled the north, while the

Democrats controlled the south. As competition declined, space opened for

progressive era presidents to take bold initiatives in state building. Thus, as the

parties passed through a structural realignment, state building passed from the era of

patchwork to reconstitution.

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Skowronek tells a fascinating story of presidential creativity during the

progressive era. In many ways, progressive presidents acted like Deweyan

deliberators, forging experiments from the materials of law and economic science

and testing them against the possibilities of partisan politics. In the end, however,

their reforms ran up against the structural constraints of intercurrence. Althoughpresidents and professional state builders guided the US into the era of

administrative government, their capacity to rationalize policy and assert autonomy

was ultimately constrained by the structural residue of courts and parties.

After more than a decade of initiatives from progressive presidents, Congress

finally gave the ICC the tools to regulate railroads according to scientific principles.

The Mann-Elkins Act of 1913 empowered the commission to set maximum rates,

and the Railway Valuation Act of 1914 empowered it to measure the value of

railroad property. Together, they provided the ICC with the capacity to set rates

according to a reasonable return on investment and thereby balance the carriersneed to re-invest and the shippers right to fair rates. By 1914, the ICC finally had

the capacity to do what economists had proposed for a generation.

The hopes of professionals and presidents were quickly dashed. Despite its

newfound capacities, the ICC did not exercise administrative autonomy. Instead, it

heeled closely to a congressional mandate to serve shippers. The ICC reviewed

railroad requests for rate increases with the narrowest standard: did existing rates

provide railroads with a fair return on the value of property when compared to other

industries? In virtually all cases, the commission answered yes. But, railroads faced

pressures to reinvest in intensive development, as traffic continued to grow. The ICCnot only starved the industry of savings, it made it impossible to raise capital in an

increasingly competitive market. Thus, the promise to reconcile railroad economics

with distributive justice by augmenting administrative capacity and autonomy

proved elusive. The modern state was born into a world of intercurrent institutions,

where it was continually buffeted by old institutional imperatives.

By the time the US entered the First World War, the railroads were in a shamble and

President Wilson had little choice but to nationalize the industry for the duration of the

war. In its first act, the Railway War Board granted the carriers an across-the-board rate

increase, finally fulfilling the administrative promise envisioned for the ICC since 1887.

When the carriers returned to civilian control in 1920, the Wilson administration

joined Congress in a comprehensive effort to rationalize railroad regulation. But the

Transportation Act of 1920 failed to resolve the contradictions in regulatory law or

provide the ICC with a clear mandate to reconcile the industrys health with

distributive claims on its income. Congress left most of the difficult and

controversial questions to ICC discretion. And, even though the statute redressed

the ICCs earlier bias in ratemaking powers by authorizing it to set minimum, as well

as maximum, rates, Congress failed to articulate any clear rate making standards. As

a result, ICC autonomy would be in constant jeopardy, as disgruntled interests

continued to seek redress through the layered institutions of the old order: parties,

congress, and the courts.

In short, although the American state was reconstituted, it did not settle into an

orderly path dependent era. Instead, hemmed in by old structures, the administrative

state became a hapless giant, bloated by extensive powers, accompanied by little

real authority or autonomy. The structures of modern American government, in other

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words, are well understood as intercurrent. Institutions created for different purposes

at different times found themselves in incongruous disorder. The modern

administrative state was born dysfunctional.

Compare this story of the ICC to Berks history the Federal Trade Commission

(the second federal regulatory agency in the US). Institutionalists typically tell thesame sort of story about the FTC that Skowronek tells about the ICC. Caught in the

stalemate between old order and new, the FTC was stillborn with the vague and

incoherent mission to regulate unfair competition. Finegold and Skocpol (1995)

characterize the FTC as a weak ad hocracy, which lacked autonomy, monitoring

capacity, internal hierarchy, and a professional culture (see also Carpenter 2001, 7-

11; McCraw 1984, 125-128). It is little wonder, in this view, that the commission

failed to respond effectively to the persistent crises of overcapacity in the 1920s,

which presaged the great depression.

But, seen from the perspective of lived rules and Deweyan deliberation, instead ofthe structural standards institutionalists associate with modern Weberian bureaucra-

cy, the early history of the FTC looks quite different. Berk shows how creative

syncretists recomposed old institutions and new blueprints to devise an agency

whose mission has been invisible to institutionalists in search of bureaucratic

hierarchy and autonomy. He also shows how creative administrators found

resources, where institutionalists see only constraints, to cultivate capacities for

economic improvement in civil society.

Berks story begins with the great merger wave at the turn of the Nineteenth

Century. For some progressive era presidents and most economists, this event provedthe inevitability of giant enterprise. They exploited their positions of power and

cultural authority, shaping public interpretation and socializing a new generation of

Americans to naturalize corporate power. Conventional institutionalists reading

Dewey might call this the origin of routine, wherein the powerful split habit from

deliberation. They might understand it as conjectural moment, the founding of a new

corporate order. Taken-for-granted assumptions about modern industry should have

blocked deliberation over the causes of corporate power and creativity in devising

alternatives. This is not what happened.

Agrarian and small business populists continued to question the official narrative

of the trusts and the result was not, as Skowronek suggests, a structural stalemate

between tradition and modernity. Instead, the election of 1912, opened the field to

deliberation, when the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, enlisted Louis

Brandeis to help rework his partys antitrust policy. Wilson found himself with a

unique opportunity to forge a reform coalition with progressive Republicans. The

Republicans were divided over antitrust policy. A conservative wing wanted the status

quo; while progressives wanted an independent commission, modeled on the ICC

(regulated monopoly). When the progressives bolted from their party and enlisted

Theodore Roosevelt to make a third party run for the presidency, Wilson made a bid

for progressive support. Although he suspected he could win the election with a

plurality, he knew the Democrats fortunes would be short lived, if he did not make

coalition with progressive Republicans.

But Democrats and progressives were deeply divided over antitrust reform in

1912. The populist base of Wilsons party hated the idea of a regulatory commission.

Instead, they wanted to strengthen antitrust law so the Department of Justice could

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reverse corporate concentration (they wanted to enforce competition), not an FTC,

which would accept economic power and only try to manage it. With the factions

divided, Brandeis and Wilson deliberated.

As Brandeis saw it, the problem was to re-narrate the causes of American distress

in a way that both populists and progressives could find a place for themselves. Inhis view, populist Democrats were correct: corporate power endangered the republic,

and it was unlikely that a commission could redress that power. Progressives were

also correct: markets were no longer self-regulating and a commission was necessary

to ensure that they realized civic ends. But Brandeis thought both factions falsely

reified particular institutional forms and in doing so, they reached unwarranted

conclusions about the causes of big business, restricted policy imagination and

diminished the possibilities for experimentation.

Populist Democrats failed to see the ambiguities of competition, because they

placed blind faith in self-regulating markets. Brandeis and others knew throughobservation, however, that competition could be predatory or productive. Hence, a

blanket rule against restraints of trade would undermine the many productive

restraints business had learned to place on rivalry. Enforced competition, in other

words, would have perverse outcomes.

Similarly, Brandeis held that the progressives mistakenly reified the large-scale

corporation as inevitable and efficient. In the absence of a policy that distinguished

predatory from productive competition, however, no one really knew whether

economic concentration was caused by efficiency or the desire for power. The

progressive economists, Brandeis charged, were incorrect to naturalize bigness asscientific law. Even though the economists were the more prestigious experts,

another group of professionals acted deliberatively and completely out of view of

institutionalists. Cost accountants had demonstrated how the obsession with mass

production and bigness was driven more by cost conventions that overvalued

volume than by the immutably high fixed costs of modern technology (as the

economists theorized). In experiments with manufacturing and railroads, the cost

accountants showed that when firms adopted new metrics, they found many ways to

realize efficiency and profit without increasing the scale of production. Thus, in

Brandeiss view, the advocates of regulated monopoly not only capitulated to

unnecessary power; they cut short the search for techniques to reconcile the ends of

equality and economic prosperity.

Instead of reifying markets or corporations, Brandeis proposed an ongoing

experiment. Create an agency with the capacity to distinguish predatory from

productive competition and then use it to channel rivalry from the former to the

latter. Brandeis called this option regulated competition and proposed two warrants

for the FTC. The first combined deliberation and coercion. Empower the

commission to work with business to identify predatory methods of competition

and check them before they turned into unassailable power. The second was

cultivational. Empower the commission to perturb destructive business habits though

education, information, and disciplined comparison. Brandeis proposed the FTC hire

cost accountants, not economists, to oversee its cultivational mission.

Even though structural conditions seemed conducive for routine, regulated

competition challenged progressives and populists to set aside blind faith in markets

or administration for an experiment. Empower a trade commission to channel

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competition from predation into improvements in products and production processes

and see what happens. Brandeis bet that the outcome would better reconcile the

populist goal of equality with the progressive goal of scientific mastery than either

enforced competition or regulated monopoly.

Although Brandeis cracked open the terms of debate in 1912, he did not succeedin convincing populists and progressives to merge their identities into a single

political bloc. Wilson won the election with a plurality, but the problem of

assembling a reform coalition remained.

Under Wilsons watchful eye, Congressional entrepreneurs took up the cause of

reform. By 1914, Congress had created a Federal Trade Commission, which progressives

and populists supported for very different reasons. The heart of the Federal Trade

Commission Act empowered the FTC to regulate unfair methods of competition.To

populist Democrats, this was a prophylactic power. The FTC would use it to check

predatory activity before it turned into unassailable power. For progressives, it meant thatonce firms grew big for reasons of efficiency, the FTC would ensure they used that power

responsibly. Both factions took credit for the statute, and the law (with multiple

meanings) licensed multiple projects, among them regulated competition.

Creative administrators at the FTC picked up Brandeiss project and carried it

forward. Their work has been invisible to institutionalists, because institutionalists

believe the FTC was born a structurally weak agency. Congress saddled it with

multiple missions, few resources, and the unprecedented mandate to regulate the

whole economy. Seen from the perspective of lived rules, or habit-in-motion,

however, the story recounted below shows how creative administrators foundresources for innovation, where institutionalists only see constraints.

In 1915, the FTCs second chair, Edward Hurley, invited Brandeis to address the

commission. To their surprise, Hurley and Brandeis found they shared an enthusiasm

for cost accounting. (Hurley was a Chicago manufacturer, who learned about cost

accounting when he served as president of the Illinois Manufacturers Association).

A great deal of destructive competition in manufacturing, Hurley and Brandeis

agreed, was caused by the unreflective obsession with volume. This was Deweyan

routine, which generated perverse consequences. But, cost accounting was a

deliberative alternative, which showed there was nothing inevitable about accounting

conventions that valued volume over all other ends.

Hurley and Brandeis agreed that the commission ought to take up the

accountants project and teach business new methods to measure costs and then

pool information about what worked and what did not. By doing so, the FTC could

check the tendency to corporate growth by channeling competition from cutthroat

pricing into improvements in products and production processes.

Hurley considered approaching Congress for a license to set uniform national cost

accounting standards and the resources to carry it out. The political conditions

appeared inhospitable. But, the older order in Congress did not block creativity.

Hurley searched instead for resources in civil society, where he found the cost

accountants, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and a number of trade associations in

manufacturing industries in the midst of parallel projects. Under Hurleys guidance,

the FTC turned to these groups to cultivate capacities for regulated competition.

Hurleys efforts bore fruit. The cost accountants founded a new professional

association, devoted working with the state and trade associations. The U.S.

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Chamber of Commerce assembled accountants, state officials, and trade associations

in four national meetings to cull from their experiences a model of trade associations

devoted to regulated competition. And by 1928, 15% of all trade associations in 25%

of manufacturing industries in the United States had adopted the features of those

associations in whole or in part. Many succeeded in improving productivity,augmenting labor skills, adopting new technologies and increasing profits in their

industries by redirecting competition from volume into product quality and diversity

(Berk and Schneiberg2005).

Thus, by focusing on the way actors reinterpreted, recomposed and created new

rules, instead of how rules constrained action, Berks history of the FTC shows how

creative syncretists found resources for experimentation in putatively unlikely

places. Instead of yielding to the incongruities between Nineteenth and Twentieth-

Century institutions, Brandeis reached across temporal boundaries to reconfigure the

trust problem. Instead of yielding to a stalemate between populists and progressives,creative syncretists in Congress crafted a statute with multiple meanings. Instead of

surrendering to structural constraints on bureaucratic autonomy and capacity,

creative administrators recomposed resources from civil society to cultivate

capacities for regulated competition. The result was a successful institutional path,

which has been invisible to institutionalists.

Convergence in comparative capitalism

Institutionalists have long been concerned with the question of convergence amongadvanced industrial democracies (Berger and Dore 1996). Many excellent studies

since the 1980s have demonstrated how unique patterns of institutional

development have resulted in diverse national systems of capitalism. But,

globalization, poor performance in non-liberal market economies, such as

Germany and Japan, and the diffusion of liberal reforms have challenged this

inference and resurrected the convergence thesis. This debate has sparked a good

deal of research and creative thinking among institutionalists about how nations

with non-liberal market institutions are responding to the pressures for market-

ization or liberal reform.

This section compares two works on responses to the recent spatial diffusion of

neoliberal institutions in two non-liberal systems: Yamamura and Streecks (2003)

edited volume on Germany and Japan, and Herrigels study of industrial relations

and corporate governance in Germany. The former explains change by pushing the

boundaries of structuralist institutionalism; the latter rejects structuralist formulations

for a pragmatist and constructivist approach, which shares much with our concept of

creative syncretism. In order to facilitate comparison, we will focus our discussion of

Yamamura and Streeck on industrial relations in Germany.

Taken together, these works show how a shift to creative syncretism provides a

more consistent and systematic theory of institutional life. Change is no longer

bracketed as an epiphenomenon of structure, or a theoretically anomalous

interruption of order. The result is a more consistent and simple theory of

institutional action. This requires a shift in focus, away from structural typologies,

toward lived experience. Such a shift opens new empirical terrain, exposing as a

new, central analytic theme how people live, experience, and perturb institutions.

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In The End of Diversity?, Yamamura and Streeck assemble a group of

contributions, which compare German and Japanese responses to the challenges of

the market in a variety of settings, from banking and finance to technological

innovation and industrial relations. Each chapter describes the existing institutions of

coordinated market capitalism and then asks how actors are responding to the marketpressures for flexibility, low costs, and technological innovation and political

pressures for liberal reform. The goal is to assess the resiliency of coordinated

market institutions and to speculate on their future in Germany and Japan.

Consider the example of German industrial relations, which is taken up by several

chapters. Labor markets in Germany have been governed in much of the post-World

War II period by a dual system of centralized collective bargaining and plant-level

works councils. Through this period, wages and benefits have typically been set

through national bargains negotiated by encompassing national unions and employ-

ers associations. Works councils schedule work, deploy technology, and processgrievances at the plant level. National statute governs the activities of works

councils. In practice, there is a good deal of coordination between unions and works

councils, and the result has been high and equal wages. The relatively high costs of

German industrial relations has pushed employers to seek market advantages

through incremental improvements in product quality, product diversity, productiv-

ity, and labor skills. These institutions were successful as long as German

manufacturers could charge a premium price for quality, custom products.

But German industrial relations have come under stress. Competitors have

challenged manufacturers on both price and quality. Germany, especially afterunification, has suffered prolonged unemployment, weak economic growth, and

demands for much greater flexibility in wages, benefits, and the design of work.

More and more employers have defected from national bargains. Many plant level

works councilsfearful of unemploymenthave capitulated to employer pressure.

And both unions and employer associations have watched their membership shrink.

Nonetheless, contributors to the volume demonstrate that German industrial

relations institutions have proven far more resilient than this picture suggests. A

chapter by Thelen and Kume (2003) shows that, far from attacking the system, most

German employers continue to define their interests within its rules. Faced with the

need to manage tightly coupled supply chains with just-in-time delivery, manufac-

turers are ever more vulnerable to disruptive labor relations. Collective bargaining

and works councils deliver peace and predictability. To be sure, institutions are not

static. Small and medium sized manufacturers, who are the most vulnerable to price

competition, are opting out of the old system in larger numbers than large firms, who

now make up the bulk of active participants in centralized bargaining and traditional

works councils. Moreover, many local works councils have bowed to pressures for

flexibility in labor deployment and wage dispersion. Nonetheless, there is no

imminent sign of collapse of the system as a whole. In t

How People Experience and Change Institutions

Documents