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DOI 10.1007/s11186-009-9095-3
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 institutions creative 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
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 in
institutions 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 institutions
experientially, 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 become
understandable 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 “syncretism”—popular
modification of religious orthodoxy through unauthorized recombination of ritual,
symbols, or practice—suggests agency and unexpected change (Shaw 1999; Stewart
and Shaw 1994). 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
syncretism’s 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, taste—not
to mention political and economic institutions—is 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 Dewey’s 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 American
political 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 “old” institutionalism. 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 Steinmo 1992; 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;
Skocpol 1992; Clemens 1997).
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 of
institutional 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 Thelen’s efforts to theorize
mechanisms of institutional change, Orren and Skowronek’s theory of intercurrence,
and Powell and DiMaggio’s 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 and
application 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 and
practices. 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 many
powerful insights with regard to: rule ambiguity and political entrepreneurship (Hall and Taylor 1996;
Sikkink 1991; Blyth 2002; Parsons 2003; Scheingate 2003; Lieberman 2002); the ongoing expression of
grievances by losers (Weir 2005); lost alternatives (Schneiberg 2007; Sabel and Zeitlin 1997); redundant
features (Crouch and Farrell 2004; Crouch and Keune 2005); layering of old and new institutions (Thelen
2004; Orren and Skowronek 1994, 2002, 2004; Shickler 2001; Sil 2002); the coexistence of “traditional”
and “modern” institutions (Dunning and Pop-Eleches 2004); change driven by “quasi-parameters” (Greif
and Laitin 2004).
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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. It’s just that
this 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 not
a 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, it’s 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 generate
uncertainty, ambiguity and exception. Critical legal theory calls this “the indeterminacy problem” (Kelman 1987, 46–48, 245–246, 257–262).
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 don’t 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 we’re left to wonder—is 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
“old” school 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 Powell’s landmark 1991 edited volume rejected
“symbolic and functional consistency within each institution,” depicting instead a
“loose 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 institutional
life 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 commitments 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 life—experience—always 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.
Sabel’s (1994) project is to understand how institutions facilitate learning, which
he 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 to “bring 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 “sociable” and “reflexive” nature of human
beings that guides individual interpretation. It proceeds, he writes, through “argumentative 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
possibilities” for action. Thus, rules-in-action do not constrain action in Sabel’s 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 rulefollowing 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 Dewey’s 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 Weick’s (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 the
rules 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 phenomenological 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 that’s arisen as institutionalists proliferate casespecific mechanisms of change, unearth the layering of history, diagram the coupling
of parts, or shift causality to structuring structures. It’s not that these insights are
flawed, as we’ve noted above. It’s that they have unwittingly made institutionalism a
noisy 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 Dewey’s 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 Dewey’s
thread in various ways (Joas 1996; Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984). 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 Dewey’s concept of habit, rather than Bourdieu’s (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 Bourdieu’s work, agency consists mainly of aligning and realigning action to a pre-existing habitus that
embeds in peoples’ cognition 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. Bourdieu’s 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 “projective” and “dynamic,” and “operates in some…subdued form
even when not dominating activity” (40–42). Four aspects of habit help us ground
our experiential account of institutions. Habits are situational, integrating the body
and 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 they’re temporal. Institutions
are not constraints on action, they’re 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 the
body in ways that make use of and incorporate worldly materials. Just as involuntary
physiological functions are more than the action of the body—“breathing is an affair of
the air as truly of the lungs…walking 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 dependent
on support from objects and assistance from tools” (15). Thus, habit is not action upon
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 habit—custom or institutions—is openly available and
4
See, for example, West African “joking kinship” or Obama’s March 2008 race speech (Launay 2006;
Obama 2008).
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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 action—or choosing means. They discover and revise their
“volitions” 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?” “How we 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 Dewey’s 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 oftmentioned notion “rules-in-use,” and a means to rethink institutions in phenomenological 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” (92–93), 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 impulses—to eat, to defecate, to be held close to human skin—
but babies are dependent beings. Very quickly, if they are to survive, they come to
understand 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 discharge—blind, 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-Straus’s 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 Dewey’s
terms, a “path of action”. When we deliberate, we consider a set of already presituated 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 artist’s 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” (71–72).
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, 72–74). Deliberation is inherently social
because it is temporal. The projector screen doesn’t 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.
It’s 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 by
the 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 Dewey’s 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 only “the
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 who
wish 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 Dewey’s 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 powerful
alike 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 routine—is artificially undiscerning; the more it faces new circumstances and impulses, the more it produces unintended consequences, confusion of
expectation and outcome. Likewise, institutionalism without habit—rules only
understood as routines—can 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 experiential one, 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 and
undermine experimentation. For Dewey, this is a sociological rather than a cultural or characterological
condition. In “the Orient,” Dewey suggests that “thought is submerged in habit…not because of any
essentially Oriental psychology, but because of a nearer background of rigid and solid customs” (61). We
applaud Dewey’s 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 circumstances—even
for one actor—is 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 the
reproduction 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 arm’s 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 order as lived experience. We can thus tackle the basic
puzzle of institutionalism, both of Dewey’s 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 transformation, 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 Skowronek’s Building a New American State (1982), anticipates
the theory of intercurrence; while the second, Gerald Berk’s 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 Germany’s nonliberal market economy. The first, Kozo Yamamura
and Wolfgang Streeck’s 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 Herrigel’s (2008) “Rules and Roles: Ambiguity, Experimentation
and New Forms of Stakeholderism in Germany,” adopts a pragmatist perspective to
show 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 Knight’s (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 private
property institutions. The second, Dennis Galvan’s The 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 Galvan’s 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:
Skowronek’s path breaking study of railroad regulation, the military, and civil
service reform and Berk’s recent study of the Federal Trade Commission. We choose
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Skowronek’s 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 Berk’s
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 Skowronek’s book
to the case of railroad regulation.
Skowronek’s 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 commission’s
enabling statute, writes Skowronek, was no more than “patchwork.” It subordinated
professional autonomy and rational policy to the interests of congress’s 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 ICC’s mandate was full of contradictions, which would ultimately serve no one’s
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. Although
presidents 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 carriers’
need 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 ICC
not 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 industry’s 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 ICC’s 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 Berk’s history the Federal Trade Commission
(the second federal regulatory agency in the US). Institutionalists typically tell the
same 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, 711; 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 of
the structural standards institutionalists associate with modern Weberian bureaucracy, 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.
Berk’s story begins with the great merger wave at the turn of the Nineteenth
Century. For some progressive era presidents and most economists, this event proved
the 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 party’s 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 Wilson’s 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. In
his 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 through
observation, 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 as
scientific 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
Brandeis’s 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 succeed
in 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 Wilson’s 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 that
once 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 Brandeis’s 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 found
resources for innovation, where institutionalists only see constraints.
In 1915, the FTC’s 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 Manufacturer’s 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 Hurley’s guidance,
the FTC turned to these groups to cultivate capacities for regulated competition.
Hurley’s 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 Schneiberg 2005).
Thus, by focusing on the way actors reinterpreted, recomposed and created new
rules, instead of how rules constrained action, Berk’s 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 TwentiethCentury 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 among
advanced 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 marketization 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 Streeck’s (2003)
edited volume on Germany and Japan, and Herrigel’s 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 market
pressures 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 employers’ associations. Works councils schedule work, deploy technology, and process
grievances 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, productivity, 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 after
unification, 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 councils—fearful of unemployment—have 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, manufacturers 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 this account, there is reform
toward more marketized, neoliberal models, alongside stability of more coordinated
rules and practices. Two categories of institutional-structural types exist side by side
for the time being. The implication is that someday, one type will supplant the other,
but for now, they co-exist. Some authors call this hybridity.
Yamamura and Streeck thus conclude that, like industrial relations, German
financial, corporate, and regulatory institutions are becoming increasingly heteroge-
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neous and hybrid. In some instances, like the one described by Thelen and Kume,
this has meant that the core of solidaristic institutions has remained stable, while a
growing periphery of liberal institutions has grown up next to it. In other instances,
liberal features have been grafted onto existing institutions. For example, although
German corporations remain closely held and controlled, they have become much
more responsive to shareholders and stock markets. At its best, the resulting hybrid
introduces flexibility into slow moving organizations. At its worst, however, it has
begun to challenge fundamental German values of industrial citizenship, social
solidarity, and economic equality. Yamamura and Streeck are agnostic about the
future. But they conclude that the recent history of Germany and Japan challenges
institutional theory to make more room for loose coupling, creative entrepreneurship,
rule ambiguity, and radical uncertainty.
Notice how the account is rooted in categorical descriptions of structural types
(liberal verses coordinated markets). These can coexist, and sometimes elements
from one type can be inserted into a structure of another type. But the types remain
fairly extant, and the combinations are assumed to represent ephemeral and awkward
mixtures awaiting reconciliation, evolution (or regression) towards one or the other
of the clear typological forms.
Compare Herrigel’s (2008) “Roles and Rules: Ambiguity, Experimentation and
New Forms of Stakeholderism in Germany.” Herrigel agrees that Germany’s dualist
system of industrial relations is under stress. But he does not see path dependency,
widespread defections, or marketized hybrids. Seen from the local level (rather than
from the perspective of national institutions or the scholarly debate over
convergence), Germany reveals a great deal of experimentation that defies received
categories. Herrigel argues that it is difficult to make sense of these experiments, or
to even see them, with conventional institutionalist tools of analysis. Instead,
drawing upon pragmatist and constructivist traditions, he redefines institutions as
“groupings of rules that represent provisional solutions to collectively defined
problems.” When institutions no longer work, actors break rules in a variety of ways:
they can agree they do not apply to the situation at hand, or if they do, to set them
aside; or they can knowingly violate rules; or because every rule has an ambiguous
relationship to facts and other rules, they can re-combine and reinterpret them to
license novel actions. Such “normal rule breaking” inevitably calls into question
existing roles and identities and opens possibilities for reconfiguration. Like Dewey,
Herrigel calls this process “experimentation.”
Herrigel agrees that competitive conditions have changed for German manufacturers.
Unable to take a premium for quality, they find themselves subject to the twin pressures
of cost reduction and an accelerated pace of innovation. In response, most manufacturers
have spun off elements of production in order to reduce costs and increase access to a
wider range of expertise. But subcontracting does not have the qualities of arm’s-length
markets. Instead, manufacturers balance their desire for diverse relationships with deep
collaborations by carrying long-term contracts, but limiting the total amount of inputs
they buy from any one supplier. The result is a constant recombination of resources and
personnel, as manufacturers engage in multiple collaborations to devise new products
and processes. This is a novel institutional form that cleverly and smoothly integrates the
corporatist personalism of deeply collaborative subcontracting with the impersonal
market flexibility of limited supply arrangements.
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Along these lines, consider three experiments with rules and roles: a joint venture
between the city of Wolfsburg and Volkswagen, works councils as co-managers, and
union consulting on restructuring in Wuppertal.
The first example shows how actors creatively adapted rules to be able to engage
in roles that are explicitly prevented by other rules. Volkswagen wanted to build a
research and development facility in Wolfsburg to incorporate its suppliers into
iterated process of design refinement and production called “simultaneous
engineering.” But German law prohibited companies from employing suppliers in
production plants, in order to keep employers from hiring short-term workers outside
of collective bargaining agreements. With the support of the nation’s largest
industrial union, IG Metall, and the local works council, VW and the city of
Wolfsburg circumvented the law by forming a joint stock company, in which the city
and the corporation share ownership of an independent company. That company,
then, was made owner of a new production and design facility where VW and
suppliers, as legal tenants, can conduct simultaneous engineering and collaborate on
just-in-time production.
Thus creative conflation of rules redefined the roles of manufacturer, union,
subcontractor and city in the production process, and generated a new form of social
cooperation. It’s hard to make sense of this as a variation on the existing institutions of
corporate governance or as a neoliberal turn. As roles shift and rules are subverted,
distributive negotiators become collaborators in a process to upgrade production,
yielding new practices and relations of “stakeholderism.” This is not hybrid putting
together or grafting of elements. Instead, it is an experiential innovation, the on-the-spot
concoction of a new form of corporatism that allows the kind of communication and
flexibility not possible under prior corporatist rules. This innovation is much easier to see
and make sense of if we look at rules and roles as resources, to be taken apart and
combined in practical, experiential ways, in effect to be played and riffed.
Herrigel also reports on experiments in the re-deployment of works councils from
distributive stakeholders, responsible for scheduling, training and processing
grievances, into co-management units, which participate in product design, process
optimization and cost reduction. These new roles go well beyond the rights and
responsibilities outlined for works councils in the Works Constitution Act. They
came about as labor and management responded to the twin pressures of innovation
and cost reduction. Works councils, with their presence in all departments, proved to
be ideally situated to accumulate information about work flow, inventory, the
efficiency of work organization, and design flaws.
New roles alter identities. Works councils have begun to see themselves as
guardians of new rights, namely, to ensure that in the constant process of reassigning, redesigning, and eliminating jobs, management finds ways to reduce costs
without speeding up work or cutting wages. This means that workers must develop
broad technical capabilities in design and optimization in order to participate in the
new roles for works councils, because specialization is self-defeating. Thus, comanagement recasts the nature of stakeholderism within the firms. Works councils
seek to maximize the contribution employees make to a firm’s capacity to innovate
and reduce costs. This new role is proactive and rights creating. Like the old works
council, co-management gives workers power in the organization, but power is
enacted differently even though the insistence on mutual recognition is the same.
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The changing roles of works councils have been reproduced in unions. Herrigel
reports that in Wuppertal, the local office of IG Metall is defining a new role as a
restructuring consultant, alongside its traditional role in bargaining with local
employers associations and ensuring compliance. IG Metall consultants are called
into firms, often by management, to help with the process of reforming production
and marketing strategies. Although there are no rules governing this activity, the
union has the legitimacy to press works councils to embrace new roles, and the
expertise to teach it how. Consultants push employers to focus on optimizing
production and reducing costs in the whole organization, not merely by driving
down labor costs. In this way, the union induces management and works councils to
give up their attachments to formal and informal rules and practices that traditionally
governed the firm, and to encourage both to take on new roles as stakeholders in
upgrading products and production processes.
In summary, Herrigel argues that institutional experimentation in German
industrial relations is not well understood with botanical metaphors, like hybridization and grafting. German employers, subcontractors, unions, works councils and
municipal governments do not add liberal features to existing institutions. Nor do
they create a more heterogeneous order by simply defecting from solidaristic
associations and the rules that governed them toward market-like relations. Instead,
they act like creative syncretists, who deliberate over why existing rules and roles
prevent them from responding to the twin pressures of cost reduction and innovation.
In doing so, they try out experiments. Sometimes they agree to set some rules aside,
reinterpret others, and combine others in novel ways. This generates both new roles
and new collective identities. In Wolfsburg, a union, works council, municipal
government, and VW shared a proximate goal to save jobs and increase productivity.
In experimenting, they redefined their stake in industrial restructuring and their role
in collaboration. Works councils have circumvented statutory rules to experiment
with new roles. And, in experimenting with a new role, a powerful union has begun
to reshape labor rights in Germany.
If one thought that Deweyan routine emerged from the exercise of power and
socialization, this account might appear to be driven by the pressures of
globalization, which force workers to accept subordinate roles in a neoliberal order.
Consistent with our account of routine—it cannot be read as an epiphenomenon of
structure, but must be assessed experientially—employers, works councils, unions
and government face pressures to “normalize” towards a neoliberal model. And they
do not.
As Herrigel demonstrates, the appropriation of new roles by unions and works
councils is not subordination. It is proactive and rights creating. In reimagining
themselves as new stakeholders in economic improvement, workers also recompose the
means to economic improvement (not by cutting wages) and the metrics by which it is
evaluated (throughout the firm, not just in labor). All this would be invisible or easy to
overlook if we expected that pressure to liberalize would produce conformity and the
founding of new routines. We might easily dismiss the richness of what Herrigel
describes as ephemeral hybrids of contract (liberal market) and coordination (corporatist
market), or an intermediate stage toward “normal” neoliberalism.
None of these examples would be visible or intelligible without something like
the theory of creative syncretism. More structuralist ways of seeing institutions
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recognize changes in classificatory type—has diffusion or convergence displaced
coordinated practices in Germany? Can we classify new practices in a third, mixed
or hybrid category? Our approach, by contrast, sees institutions differently. Like
Herrigel, we suggest an ontological shift with regard to institutions, seeing them in
terms of lived experience, everyday practice, and the perturbations and transformations that naturally result. As a result, one focuses on new empirical terrain,
one is able to track and account for tinkering and innovation by VW, the city of
Wolfsburg, and IG Metall. More profoundly, our approach suggests a very different
conceptualization of institutional experience and the bases for change, in which the
“drivers” are not the interaction or evolution of structures, but the kind of everyday
use of institutions in practice that we see so clearly in Herrigel’s examples (see also
Herrigel 2005).
Endogenous change in developing countries
For institutionalists who study development, the central problematic has been the
origin of rules, norms and practices that foster “desirable” forms of social change (e.g.,
reducing poverty, ending civil violence, mitigating social marginalization, or making
authority less arbitrary6). Where do developmentally useful rules and norms come
from? What makes them work (promote developmental goals)? What makes them
stick (gain social adherence and legitimacy)?
This section touches briefly on the conventional answer to these questions, before
contrasting rational choice institutionalist and experiential accounts of endogenously
generated, developmentally useful institutions. Given the importance of agriculture
in many developing societies, both our examples focus on land tenure and property
rights.
Peter Evans (2004) calls the conventional approach to development “institutional
monocropping,” the replacement of local rules and practices with those derived from
more advanced societies (constitutions, mass parties, private property, legal orders,
human rights regimes, etc.). Social change in this view depends on borrowing or
transferring effective institutions from places where they already work. Demonstration effects should convince people to adhere to new rules and practices, giving up
old ways as needed (in the colonial era, this was done through assimilation,
conversion or education).
For generations, however, transfer and tutelage have run aground on the
persistence of local cultures and rules. Often, these don’t fade with exposure to
modernity, but continue to organize people’s lives. Indeed some institutionalists, led
by Douglass North, argue that developmentally useful institutions only emerge when
informal rules, norms and values support and help engender new formal institutions.
This is what North argues occurred very slowly in the West, to eventually make
possible market exchange and constitutional governance (North 1981, 1991). In the
developing world, North and followers probe this interplay between formal and
informal to track obstacles to institutionalization (Helmke and Levitsky 2006),
6
Desirable ends and the telos of development are of course highly contested (see Escobar 1995). Sen
(1988) sketches an alternative to development teleology that is close to both local experience and our own
phenomenological formulation, discussed below.
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classify intermediate forms (Haggard 2004; Dunning and Pop-Eleches 2004) or find
traces of the endogenous emergence of successful institutions out of the local mix of
informal practices, norms and circumstances (North 2003; Tsai 2002).
Ensminger and Knight (1997) offer one of the more theoretically explicit and
ethnographically rich such accounts of endogenous change.7 They describe three
examples of institutional change among Orma herders of northeastern Kenya.
Starting with basic rational actor assumptions, they posit three possible mechanisms
of endogenous change: coordination on focal points, competitive selection among
contracts, and bargaining. For purposes of comparison between this structuralist
account and Galvan’s experiential account of land pawning in Senegal, we will focus
on Ensminger and Knight’s exploration of changing property rights mediated mainly
by bargaining, with some role for competitive selection.
Through a two-stage institutional evolution, the Orma people transformed their
land tenure arrangements to arrive by the 1990s at private property. Each stage
involved exogenous pressure on a prior equilibrium arrangement and identifiable
mechanisms by which rational actors dealt with the new situation and endogenously
generated new institutions.
Prior to the first perturbation in the mid-Twentieth Century, the Orma had lived as
pastoralist nomads who held land in common but controlled livestock (sheep, goats,
and cattle) individually, following rainfall to the best grazing areas. Things began to
change in the 1950s, as demographic pressure and new job opportunities led some
wealthier Orma to settle down.
The growing sedentary population needed space to keep their livestock. Those
who could hired herders to tend their animals. Most tried to keep their animals in the
lands just around the sedentary villages. But nomadic Orma wanted access to those
grazing lands, too. To resolve that conflict, the Orma resorted to a mechanism that
Ensminger and Knight call bargaining, “strategic conflict” in which actors make or
change institutions “in the process of seeking distributional advantage” (4–5). The
outcome of bargaining is a function of one’s bargaining power, operationalized here
as resource control. Those with more resources (sedentary Orma) drive the
bargaining process, while those with fewer resources (nomadic Orma) “will adjust
their strategies to achieve their best outcome given the anticipated commitments of
others.”
Knowing the basic structural asymmetries of power, it is no surprise that the
sedentary Orma used bargaining to establish “exclusion zones” around villages to
keep nomadic Orma out. By the 1980s, exclusion zones stretched more than a day’s
walk beyond settlements. Although access conflicts were at first handled informally
with the help of community elders, eventually the chief (a state civil servant) and his
police got involved. Thus, in response to external pressure, Orma used the
bargaining mechanism to develop a new institution that represented a partial step
toward privatization.
In the 1990s, this arrangement faced new perturbation. In response to conflict within
neighboring Somalia, ethnic Somalis living in Kenya migrated toward Orma grazing
lands and sought access to them. They claimed that communal lands were a national
7
Although they refer to change in norms, their conceptualization of norms fits with what we consider in
this paper institutions.
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resource, and they, as Kenyan citizens, should have access to any communal land in
Kenya. The state had long been ambiguous on traditional, ethnically exclusionary
commons land. It promoted uniform national land policy, but lacked the capacity or
political will to challenge de facto ethnic commons like those of the Orma.
In Ensminger and Knight’s account, this type of threat triggered another
mechanism for institutional change—competitive selection over contracts. They
read the Somali threat as a proposed new contract they call “open access,” a land
tenure arrangement in which anyone, regardless of group membership, can graze
animals on any land. Ensminger and Knight suggest that this may have been the
deeply historic form of land tenure for the Orma, before they developed a distinctive
ethnic identity coterminous with their Orma-only commons tenure regime.
Thus, as the Somalis moved in, sedentary Orma faced a choice between two kinds
of tenure arrangements: they could either accept the Somali bid for open access, or
they could petition the state to treat their exclusion zone as a privately held ranch.
They did not think they could defend their “exclusion zone” against Somali
incursion without asking the state to formally privatize their land. Although there
was some internal debate and partial indication of new bargaining among the Orma,
the final decision was to seek privatization and set up a ranch. And thus, in Northian
fashion, the endogenous interplay between formal rules and informal practices,
mediated by identifiable, rational mechanisms, birthed private property afresh in
northeastern Kenya.
The account is streamlined and clear, but on closer examination the proposed
mechanisms don’t seem to fully capture Ensminger and Knight’s own rich
ethnography. With regard to bargaining, the nomads accede to the exclusion zone,
but we don’t know what the zone means to them materially, or how they come to
accept the bargain. They are simply defined structurally as lacking the resources to
do anything other than adapt to the demands of the powerful. Likewise, the state
enforces the bargain, but as if it were a homogenous, exogenous third party with a
clear stance on property. In this case, the state means the chief, a complex figure who
is both civil servant and neo-traditional customary authority. His multiple interests
and polyvalent roles remain unexplored.
Ensminger and Knight recognize this kind of polyvalence, and in doing so,
actually suggest why bargaining should not apply to their case. In an early footnote,
they acknowledge that institutions may carry different meaning for the same actors,
depending on their roles or on context. Institutions may be polyvalent. Ensminger
and Knight note: “when this is the case, an explanation in terms of bargaining is
undermined” (5). But they “doubt that there are many social norms [institutions]
with long term distributional effects so unclear as to make it impossible for actors to
choose among them.” This misses the point. The issue is not so much choice among
institutions, but the fact that polyvalent meanings create ambiguity in the bargaining
model. How can actors meaningfully be said to bargain when they do not share a
common definition—even for themselves, let alone with others—of the object of
their haggling?
Thus, when bargaining re-emerges at the end of the story, in the internal Orma
debate over the decision to privatize, it cannot meaningfully contain the details of the
situation. Some poor Orma favor the ranch because it will include a stone quarry
where many of them work, apparently safeguarding their jobs there. Some rich Orma
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favor privatization in principle but oppose the ranch because they worry about where
to put their cattle. Those who rely entirely on hired herders oppose privatization
because it will surely mean that their agents will need to travel farther with their
animals (8). Resource endowments and bargaining thus fail to capture the multiple
meanings and multiple experiences that property holds for both rich and poor Orma.
Similarly, in the second phase of the privatization process, Somali pressure and
Orma response also overflow the mechanism of competitive selection of contracts.
Somali migrants did not just propose a new contract. When they claimed that
“communal” means national and open “for all Kenyans,” they creatively reappropriated decades of rhetoric of national unity and took advantage of ambiguities
in state tenure policy. They reframed themselves and their claim in national terms.
This is innovative play with important rhetorical/symbolic devices, an unexpected
putting together of national citizenship with local grazing rights. It scared sedentary
Orma into privatizing their land not because it forced them to assess two competing
contracts, but because the Somalis had come up with an institutional reinterpretation
loaded with new and unanticipated meaning.
Thus, within Ensminger and Knight’s own ethnographic account, we find a mix
of structural positions, identities, and discourses that remain unaccounted for and
sometimes invisible in their model. The institutions and relations they describe are
too polyvalent for mechanisms like bargaining and competition over contracts to
explain.
This leads us to wonder: what if polyvalence is not some surfeit of ethnography
overflowing theory, but the norm? What would it be like to theorize institutional
change in the full complexity of polyvalent meanings, relations and practices? This
would require, as we have argued throughout this article, a shift to understanding
institutions from within, as they are experienced in all their lived multiplicity.
Consider in this regard a case of land tenure change from the other side of the
African continent, in rural Senegal (Galvan 2004). There, the Serer people, who had
long practiced farming and herding on managed commons, opposed colonial efforts
to privatize land. They instead developed a new institution, land pawning, a
revocable transfer of usufruct rights to land in exchange for a one-time, no-interest
cash payment. Serer land pawning was institutional change, but not explicable
through bargaining or competition. It was not privatization, nor was it reactionary
preservation of a commons system. In order to understand it, we have to look closely
at the discursive and institutional resources that people used to rework both private
property and the pre-existing commons system.
For Serer actors, individuation of land holding threatened to undermine a local
ontology of “ownership” of land as control and maintenance of fields by a key
spiritual/political figure, the head of the lineage of a village founder. This founder,
and later his high-caste heirs, managed community access to land, controlled crop
choice, maintained fallow practices, safeguarded nitrogen-fixing trees, and most
critically, ensured good relations with ancestral spirits thought to ensure soil fertility.
In local culture and practice, these lineage heads were not “owners” of land (since it
was in no way alienable), but land custodians, who managed fields in their material
and spiritual dimensions.
Oral histories report that local people opposed a market in land because individual
holding would break the religiously crucial link between land managers and
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ancestral spirits. People felt (and still feel) that breaking that link would undermine
soil fertility and ensure poor rainfall (matters in the hands of the ancestral spirits).
The colonial state, nevertheless, used its powers of coercion and its control over
information and socialization to promote “appropriate” and “civilized” forms of
property.8 If one were to misread Dewey’s account of the origins of routine in
structuralist terms, this is the kind of exercise of power that “should” split habit from
deliberation, block creativity, and generate routine. This is not what happened.
Instead, Serer actors, mostly beyond the gaze of colonial and postcolonial
officials, responded creatively to the pressure to marketize by hocking fields to each
other. Even when the deck was stacked against them, they acted deliberatively. In the
early and mid-Twentieth Century, these pawn exchanges mapped well onto an
emerging pattern of dual stratification. Low caste people with little access to land
were taking up cash-earning odd jobs in the new economy (as metalworkers, drivers,
translators, maids, etc), and had money, but no fields. Higher caste farmers and
nobles controlled more land, but had not yet worked their way as fully into the new
cash economy. Pawns thus began with the high caste hocking surplus land to landpoor low caste people, who happened to have some money. Over time, the practice
became more widespread.
If we read institutional change in this case off structural positioning or in terms of
competitive selection of contracts, we might see what Ensminger and Knight saw:
movement toward privatization and a market in land. We would miss the most
interesting and innovative part of the story, land pawning, because our microfoundations of change ignored the experiential reality of rules as lived, which turns
our attention to the discursive and identity-forming dimensions of institutional life.
Seeing institutions experientially reveals not just changing social structures (castecash dual stratification), or the “choice” between flexible market exchange and static
hierarchical commons. It also highlights links between land tenure and cosmology,
legitimacy, and identity. The move to pawning was more than a selection between
contract models, because people experienced land tenure relations in the full
complexity of spirituality and social ties within a community. Pawning thus
creatively reworked the old ontology of “custodianship” into a syncretic form.
Even today, if I receive a field in pawn from anyone, noble or not, I am expected
to enact a modified version of old practices of deference toward historic, noble land
custodians. This entails making an annual visit to the person who gave me the field,
offering a token gift (kola nuts, some fruit). This person plays the role of the old
noble land custodian. When he wants his field back, he repays the original pawn
amount, to which I should respond straightaway with the somewhat ritualized phrase
“jange o qol of” (take back your field). This marks the end of the pawn, and the
return of the field. Pawning was thus more than a choice among contracts. It
facilitated quick land for cash swaps and the expansion of cash crop production
8
In addition to promoting individualization of tenure, colonial officials sought to wipe out matrilineal
inheritance in favor of patrilinealism (which they considered more “civilized”). The Serer had long been
bilineal, inheriting different kinds of property and rights through each line. The effort to eliminate Serer
matrilinealism accelerated after several infamous 1930s debtors refused to “inherit” their father’s financial
debts (owed to French commercial houses for tools and seeds), insisting that by matrilineal custom, debts
were passed from mother’s brother to maternal nephews, not from fathers to sons.
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because it involved reenactment of old rituals in new ways, thus maintaining an
everyday, experiential link to historic cosmology about land.
But most colonial and post-colonial officials in Senegal never “saw” land
pawning, or if they did, dismissed it as a vestigial and inconsequential informal
practice of marginal peasants, who would soon be swept up by land reform or move
to the city. When the Senegalese government instituted its 1964 land reform, the new
rules (the land for those who farm it; two years use equals title) made long term
pawning illegal, creating a de facto free market in land. Farmers scrambled to put
land in obvious use and gain title under the new rules. The noble lineage heads who
had managed access, fallow, pasturing, and nitrogen-fixing trees were much
weakened by the reform. Not surprisingly, fields were overused, soils became
exhausted, and agricultural yields declined, spawning an ongoing rural exodus of the
most able young people into overcrowded urban centers with few economic
opportunities.
The state’s land reform was itself a syncretic formulation which engendered
further creativity. It was an “African socialist” recombination of secure, official
tenure rights with urban, elite notions about rural Africa as egalitarian, harmonious,
and proto-socialist. It only followed that "the land for those who farm it" should be
the core principle of the 1964 land reform. But for Serer farmers, rules as lived were
not egalitarian and horizontal, but hierarchically organized around noble custodians
who maintained crucial links to ancestral spirits. Again, the results belie a standard
misreading of Dewey and creative syncretism. If people are creative syncretists,
except when certain structural circumstances block deliberation (overwhelming
power or control of information, propaganda and rhetoric), then the state’s land
reform should have eclipsed Serer practices like land pawning. But it did not.
For Serer people today, two syncretic land tenure systems co-exist as experiential
realities and institutional resources.9 Creativity moves in successive chains of action,
with yesterday’s institutional innovations harvested as today’s bases for new action.
Serer farmers can and do switch between these tenure regimes as it suits their needs,
a form of flexibility they appreciate. They can use the official law to “nationalize”
(claim title to) a field if they’ve farmed it for 2 years. They know this risks social
rupture, but sometimes it’s worth the trouble. They continue to pawn, but now
mostly within a restricted circle of kin and trusted allies. Serer farmers may act
creatively, or they may abandon the inherent creativity of action and let routine
emerge. Structural circumstances do not tell us which of these outcomes is more
likely. Action itself is pregnant with both possibilities.
This multiplicity and flexibility of contemporary Serer tenure arrangements
creates uncertainty about which set of rules apply now and in the future. Experiential
creativity helps us account for change, but it in no way guarantees “functionality.”
Galvan’s account, centered as it is on experiential micro-foundations, makes no
assumptions about what will work or stick. He assumes instead that people are
pragmatic actors, like Serer farmers or Somali migrants above, who constantly
experiment with available institutions, decomposing and recombining them to tackle
9
As Berry’s seminal work (1993) notes, this is no surprise: for much of rural Africa, competing tenure
systems and contradictory types of claims are more the norm than the exception.
Theor Soc (2009) 38:543 580
575
everyday problems. While the direction, telos and institutional forms of “desirable”
development are clear in monocropping and strongly implicit in the rational choice
institutionalist approach, they remain ambiguous when seen experientially, a
function of the creativity of local actors who recompose institutional resources in
developing societies.
Conclusion
The way we have understood institutions cannot account for their change.
Institutionalists have come to understand this, and have been developing new
concepts to make better sense of institutional transformation. Intercurrence, layering,
grafting, hybridity, bargaining, and competitive selection suggest that institutions
disorder as much as they order social, political and economic life, and that change is
as fundamental to institutional life as regularity.
Agency is creeping back into the study of institutions. As institutionalists recast
institutions in less deterministic roles, we notice more fully those who build and live
within institutions, and what they do to alter them.
So far, this is being done within fundamentally structuralist perspectives.
Institutionalists find the possibilities for mutability in a closer reading of institutional
structure, or deeper structures of cognition, or the structures that pattern rational
action. Failure to order behavior creates its antithesis, that is, structurally determined
patterns of disorder and irregularity. Change is derivate of structure. Recognizable
forms of agency take a shape that “fits” the geometry of the gaps in institutional
structure. Other forms of agency and possibilities for change go unnoticed and
untheorized.
In this article, we acknowledge these efforts, but insist that advancing them
depends on taking agency more seriously and seeking to explain how it works. To do
this, we have asked: what would happen if we set aside structuralist commitments
about institutions? What if we reconceptualized institutions as not prior to,
exogenous from, or determinative of action, but as the raw materials for action?
This requires rethinking institutions experientially, and as Dewey does, conceptualizing rules as skills. In Dewey’s account of habit, we found a way to conceptualize
rules-in-motion and institutions as living, breathing entities. We showed how
institutional transformation and creative recombination are actually the norm;
reproduction of routine and regularity are possible, but exceptional.
Seeing institutional life this way reveals much that had remained invisible or
ignored in institutional analysis. Even when they theorize ambiguity and agency,
structuralist accounts enable us to see intercurrence and layering, but miss how
creative actors reached across the boundaries of time to decompose old institutions
and recombine them with aspects of new proposals to develop a third way to design
a modern state. Instead of an incongruous layering of old and new institutions,
which resulted in a dysfunctional state, creative actors designed an effective,
cultivational Federal Trade Commission.
Conventional accounts recognize grafting and hybridity across different types of
national capitalism, but fail to see how works councils, managers and state actors in
Germany neither capitulate to the market nor defend corporatist arrangements.
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Instead they invented new roles and forms of stakeholderism, in which workers take
proactive stances on restructuring to ensure that productivity and innovation do not
come at the expense of wages, labor dignity, or citizenship in the workplace.
Likewise, mainstream institutionalists focus on recognizable forms of property
that result from familiar mechanisms of change, like strategic bargaining and
competitive selection. But outcomes that resemble neither modern privatization nor
traditional commons are ignored or dismissed. Among Somalis in Kenya and the
Serer in Senegal, processes of change that reflect the multiple, polyvalent meanings
of institutions remain blurry, at best. As our field guide demonstrates, shifting to an
experiential account of institutions allows us to systematically theorize behavior and
practices sometimes bracketed as undifferentiated drivers of change, or more often
dismissed as static.
Thus, when compared to structuralist approaches, creative syncretism is an engine
of indeterminacy and possibility in institutional life. It draws our attention to
innovation, and meaningfully accounts for the unexpected, for new paths and the
rediscovery of old ones, and for the sense of déjà vu that one has been on this trail
before, though the trail is really never twice the same.
Yet creative syncretism is not a chaos machine, it is not a descent into relativism,
one damn thing after another, or turtles all the way down. We recognize that while
perturbation is regular, regularity exists. It exists not because structure makes it so,
but as an exceptional consequence of the nature of action itself. We produce order
and routine when we cut off our inherent tendency to tinker, to take apart, or to
rework, which is the essence of Dewey’s concept of habit.
Brandeis and Hurley, German workers, and Senegalese peasants all faced
powerful actors armed with command over information and socialization. They
were in structural contexts that “should” have forced the naturalization of fixed cost
accounting, a decline in collaborative roles for workers, and the complete
individualization of land tenure. Misreading Dewey and creative syncretism, new
routine should follow from these structural circumstances. But this is not what
happened; even in these conditions, actors tinkered and modified, doing the
everyday work of creative syncretism.
Creative syncretism is an invitation to unshackle theories of institutional change
from the constraints of structuralism and the related confines of agency as an
overdetermined or residual category. This is a leap, of course, but not into darkness.
Pragmatists and constructivists have been theorizing in this way for over a century. If
we follow their lead and ground our understanding of institutional change in the way
people experience institutions, we equip ourselves with the tools to make three
contributions to the study of institutions.
First, we transcend rigid, ontological debates about the nature of agency. Yes, it is
rational, without being mere calculation, and yes, it is concerned with social
meaning, without mindless devotion to a cultural script. Creative action subsumes
rationality, because practical problem solving through decomposition and recombination is intentional. Creative action subsumes culture, because it operates through
shared story lines, rewriting them along the way and transforming culture.
Second, understood syncretically, institutions become more, not less important, to
the analysis of political and social life. No longer order-making machines, they
become the medium of creative action and thus sites for political contestation. We
Theor Soc (2009) 38:543 580
577
were always right to focus on institutions, but allowed structuralism to constrain our
view of what they make possible.
Third, this suggests new terrain for a reinvigorated understanding of agency
within and on institutions. Who recrafts institutions in what ways, under what
circumstances, with what results? A full grasp of the implications of creative
syncretism—well beyond this effort to rethink institutional change—would organize
these and related questions. It would be largely interpretive, in its concern for
situated sense making of creative actors, but could also ground a positivist project of
inductive classification of patterns and results of creative transformation. The crucial
first step is to recast institutions in looser terms and recognize the ubiquity of
change, grounding the entire project in the experiential nature of rules as lived and in
a robust account of the creativity of human action.
Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge three thoughtful and very helpful anonymous reviews
from Theory and Society; the always helpful input from our colleagues and students in the Political Science
Department at the University of Oregon; Richard Bensel and Gary Herrigel, who commented on earlier
versions of this article; and the tireless patience of Karen, Kirsten, Jacob, Ben, Sam, and Jeep.
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Gerald Berk is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. He studies historical
alternatives to corporate capitalism and redistributive regulation in the United States. Berk is the recipient
of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Hagley Museum and Library, the
American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book on railroads,
Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1870 1916 (Johns Hopkins, 1994)
received the APSA’s J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in history and politics in 1995. His book,
Louis Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900 1932 was published by Cambridge
University Press in 2009.
Dennis Galvan is Associate Professor Political Science and International Studies, and Head of the
International Studies Department at the University of Oregon. He has published widely on development
and institutional change in sub-Saharan Africa. His books include The State Must be Our Master of Fire:
How Peasants Crafty Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal (California, 2004, winner of the
2005 Best Book Award from the African Politics Conference Group), and Reworking Institutions Across
Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Development (Palgrave,
2007, co-edited with Rudra Sil). He is currently writing a book manuscript entitled Everyday Nation
Building, which explores the ongoing reworking of political community and cultural identity in Senegal
and Central Java, Indonesia.