How people experience and change institutions: a field guide to creative syncretism

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 Theor Soc (2009) 38:543-580

Political Accountability

“…Thus, such a narrow focus easily ends up ignoring basic facts like the competitive and embedded settings in which these rules are applied. Above all, as Berk and Galvan (2009) argue, they overlook an important thing: actors, whether MPs or ordinary citizens, do not necessarily follow rules or enact cognitive schemas but really more realistically 'live' institutions in the sense of learning how to align situations, actions and expectations. Echoing an influential description of the way policies in the U.S. are made: decision-makers 'muddle through' achieving only incremental steps at a time (Lindblom 1959).…”

Rorty, Addams, and Social Hope

“…For example, we might want to help people in the community but we do not have a set of habits that will help us to act. We are stuck and begin to experiment, making space for contingency in a process of "creative syncretism" [52,53]. Hans Joas [54], a pragmatist who has much in common with Rorty on ideas concerning the generation of values through experience, sees this creative action as lacking a specific telos.…”

Towards a more pragmatic sociology of markets

“…2 Experimentalist governance forms part of a more general neopragmatist theoretical approach to organization and governance (cf. Herrigel 2008;Berk and Galvan 2009). nature of socially constructed ideas (such as expert knowledge systems) to leave aspects of social reality out of the frame. These omissions constitute the "normal" surprise that yields problems or, in Callon's terminology, "overflows."…”

“…Similarly, Berk and Galvan (2009) have recently rejected the treatment of dynamism as "epiphenomena of structure," as political economists do, or attributing "human action to cognitive structures 'deeper' than institutions themselves," as institutionalists do (pp. 544-545).…”