Combining New Institutionalisms: Explaining Institutional Change in American Property Insurance

Abstract

Why and how do institutions change? These questions await comprehensive answers, yet scholars have pursued two promising new institutionalist agendas. One approach is economistic: Institutions emerge to produce collective goods or capture rents, to reduce uncertainty in exchange, and to safeguard actors from opportunistic trading partners. Institutions change when new economic conditions fuel market failures or shifts in relative prices, creating gains from new schemes that exceed the costs of organizing collectively to implement them. And while competition may promote efficient alternatives, the outcome of change depends on the payoffs to transformation and the collective-action capacities of interested groups

Refraining from Imitation: Professional Resistance and Limited Diffusion in a Financial Market

“…This idea is most clearly expressed in the "paradox of institutional success" Hinings 1996, Leblebici et al 1991), which suggests that the institutionalization of practices contains the seed of deinstitutionalization and self-destruction, a compelling explanation of endogenous institutional change (Schneiberg 2005). Stated this way, endogenous institutional change seems a likely event.…”

Social Movements and Institutional Analysis

“…Institutionalists face persistent difficulties in these tasks. Working from arguments about isomorphism, diffusion, or path dependence, they often invoke ad hoc explanations like exogenous shocks in order to reconcile change and path creation with theories that stress the contextual sources of stability, continuity and conformity (Greenwood & Hinings 1996;Clemens & Cook 1999;Campbell 2004;Streeck & Thelen 2005;Schneiberg 2005;Guillén 2006). To address these difficulties, institutionalists have begun to revise both their conceptions of fields and their views of action.…”

Explaining Large-Scale Policy Change in the Turkish Health Care System: Ideas, Institutions, and Political Actors

“…The discussion on critical conjunctures focuses on a major "exogenous" event, such as an economic or military crisis, a change in the political system, a technological development, or a demographic change (Thornton and Ocasio 1999;Dobbin and Dowd 2000;Schneiberg 2005). This type of change-described with various terms including radical, major, profound, striking, drastic, pathbreaking, trajectory inflecting, and disruptive-was associated with institutional breakdown or innovation.…”