Aorg320 Organization and Politics / Public Policy I. Organization Theory Course-program legacy and analytical approach History and development of Organization Theory: Decision (original) (raw)
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Historical institutionalism in comparative politics
Annual review of political science, 1992
This article provides an overview of recent developments in historical institutionalism. First, it reviews some distinctions that are commonly drawn between the "historical" and the "rational choice" variants of institutionalism and shows that there are more points of tangency than typically assumed. However, differences remain in how scholars in the two traditions approach empirical problems. The contrast of rational choice's emphasis on institutions as coordination mechanisms that generate or sustain equilibria versus historical institutionalism's emphasis on how institutions emerge from and are embedded in concrete temporal processes serves as the foundation for the second half of the essay, which assesses our progress in understanding institutional formation and change. Drawing on insights from recent historical institutional work on "critical junctures" and on "policy feedbacks," the article proposes a way of thinking about institutional evolution and path dependency that provides an alternative to equilibrium and other approaches that separate the analysis of institutional stability from that of institutional change. . Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by Concordia University -Montreal on 06/13/11. For personal use only.
Nine Questions to a Neo-institutional Theory in Political Science
Scandinavian Political Studies, 1991
The purpose of this article is to point to a number of methodological and theoretical problems connected with a theory of institutional change. Nine philosophical-methodological questions are asked dealing with a wide range of problems rarely raised in neo-institutional political theory. The questions concern the concept of the state, of institutions, and of language and discourse. and deal with the dialectic between individuals and institutions, choice and rationality, formal organizations and institutions as well as prescriptive versus normative analysis. A critical theory of meaning is sought in order to develop neo-institutionalism from a research program into an actual set of descriptive and interpretative theories.
Seek and Ye Shall Find!": Linking Different Perspectives on Institutional Change
Comparative Political Studies, 2001
Two theoretical schools-rationalist and constructivist approaches-dominate the literature on policy and institutional change. They tend to focus the debate on the ontological understanding of human behavior and hence the logic behind change. The authors note that another dimension of change-namely, its scope-is treated unsatisfactorily in the literature due to a neglect of the level of abstraction used as a point of departure by different studies. Hence, the literature is littered with "false debates" couched in the language of ontological disagreement. A regrouping of the literature into structure-and agency-based approaches will help to take for more systematic account of the levels of abstraction problem and therefore the varying measuring rods applied to assess the scope of change. The authors' analytical focus runs orthogonal to the question of ontology and complements the dominant debate by allowing for a separation of different analytical dimensions in the study of political change.
2017
Although most political sociologists and political scientists nowadays either consider themselves or are deemed “institutionalists,” key differences remain among major schools of institutionalism (see reviews in Pierson and Skocpol 2002; Amenta 2005). In this chapter, we review sociological institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and political institutionalism. We discuss their similarities and differences, theoretical and methodological insights, research gains, analytical problems, and prospects for the study of politics. To focus our discussion, we mainly consider research regarding the development of public policy, the terrain on which many advances in political sociology and political science have taken place and an occasional battleground for these approaches. The basic similarity in all institutional theoretical claims is that something identified at a higher level is used to explain processes and outcomes at a lower level of analysis (Clemens and Cook 1999; Amenta 200...