New Institutionalism - History

History

Thinkers have long recognized that institutions interact with one another in ways that can be studied and understood. Sociologists in the late 19th century and early 20th century began to systematize this study. Economist and Social theorist Max Weber focused on the ways bureaucracy and institutions were coming to dominate our society with his notion of the Iron cage that rampant institutionalization created.

In Britain and the United States, the study of political institutions dominated political science until after the post-war period. This approach, sometimes called 'old' institutionalism, focused on analysing the formal institutions of government and the state in comparative perspective. After the behavioural revolution brought new perspectives to analysing politics such as positivism, rational choice theory and behaviouralism, the focus on institutions was discarded as it was too narrow. The focus moved to analysing the individual rather than the institutions which surrounded him/her.

In the 1980s however, new institutionalism, sometimes called 'neo-institutionalism', has seen a revived focus on the study of institutions as a lens for viewing work in a number of disciplines including economics, sociology, international relations and political science. John W. Meyer proposed an early influential formulation (Meyer and Rowan 1977). Authors like Paul DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell consciously revisited Weber's iron cage in the early 1980s (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, 1991). The following decade saw an explosion of literature on the topic across disciplines. DiMaggio and Powell's 1991 anthology summarizes work in sociology. In economics, the new institutionalism is most closely associated with Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where Douglass North, who won a Nobel Prize in 1993 for his work in new institutionalism, currently teaches.