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During the past three decades, “new institutionalism” has become the main methodological battleground among political scientists. This is because political scientists differ in their preferred “new institutionalist” approach to political science. There are four basic institutionalist approaches: three older new institutionalisms—rational choice, historical, and sociological institutionalism—plus a fourth newer new institutionalism, called discursive institutionalism. This chapter explores the relationship between ideational and discourse analysis, on one hand, and various forms of new institutionalism, on the other hand. It makes the case for a discursive institutionalism, concerned with ideas and discourse, because it has the greatest potential for reconciling existing institutionalist approaches.

Reviews the new institutionalist literature on institution-building and derives expectations based on rational choice and sociological institutionalism for explaining the empowerment of the European Parliament. Since concerns about ‘democratic legitimacy’ are cited frequently in the literature on European integration as ad hoc-explanations for the empowerment of the European Parliament, this chapter will also turn to work on the ‘democratic deficit’ and inquire whether this literature offers any cues to improve our understanding of the existence and empowerment of the European Parliament.

Whereas Chapter 1 reviews general theories of European integration, Chapter 2 contains a review of theories of institutional change with a particular emphasis on a troika of institutionalist theories: Rational Choice Institutionalism (RCI), Historical Institutionalism (HI), and Sociological Institutionalism (SI). RCI is this book's theory of choice, essentially amounting to an assumption that institutions are fairly easy to change and an explanation that actors compete to change them when status quo institutions prevent them from achieving their preferences. The book's RCI‐based argument claims that power‐changing informal accords get created in the EU when constraints on the EU's primary political actors change, the actors being the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, and the European Parliament. It predicts that the Parliament as the weakest actor succeeds in bargaining for advantageous informal accords with its stronger counterparts when one or more of a serious of specific conditions temporarily empower it.

Principal‐agent theories of delegation generate specific, testable hypotheses about delegation to supranational organizations in the European Union, including: the specific functions delegated to such agents; the conditions under which member‐state principals delegate greater or lesser discretion to their agents; and the conditions under which supranational organizations such as the Commission are able to pursue their distinct preferences, within the limits of their statutory discretion. Such principal‐agent analyses, drawn from rational choice theory and transaction‐costs approaches, represent a parsimonious and internally consistent approach to the study of delegation; however, a competing approach, derived from sociological institutionalism, generates strikingly different predictions. This book examines both the delegation stage (at which member‐state principals create supranational organizations, delegate powers to them and establish control mechanisms to limit their discretion) and the subsequent behaviour of supranational agents in the day‐to‐day conduct of their executive, judicial and legislative powers. Although causally related, these two stages raise very different methodological challenges, and thus the two parts of the book utilize distinct research designs and methods to answer the questions posed in each.

To explain the often radical changes in policies and practices that depend on overcoming entrenched interests, institutional obstacles, and cultural blinkers to change, the usual explanations in terms of rational choice, historical, and sociological institutionalism will not do. This chapter provides a new framework for the analysis of such change, by examining discourse in institutional context or discursive institutionalism. Discourse consists of both a set of ideas containing cognitive and normative elements and an interactive process consisting of a coordinative discourse of policy construction among policy actors and a communicative discourse of policy legitimization between political actors and the public. In Britain, France, and Germany, such discourse differs not only in ideational content but also in the relative importance of the coordinative or communicative discourses—largely related to differences in single‐actor and multi‐actor systems—which is only further complicated by the addition of the European level. After discussing how discourse matters in terms of its substantive content and where discourse matters in terms of institutional context, the chapter ends with a discussion of the causal influence of discourse or when discourse matters.

Focusing on environmental policies, this chapter aims to contribute to the debate on the politics of Europeanization by presenting the conceptual and theoretical state of the art of research into this specific sector of potential European Union (EU) impact on domestic political systems. The chapter first provides some background information on the essential properties of environmental policy and on the development of EU environmental policy; this is done to explicate the defining characteristics of this sector vis-é-vis other sectors. Next, three recent comparative case studies on the determinants of national adaptation to EU environmental policy requirements are reviewed; these are theoretically informed by either sociological institutionalism or rational choice institutionalism, and arrive at different and partially competing explanations for the variation in national adaptation to European environmental policies. Despite disagreement about the relative importance of the factors and mechanisms of Europeanization, the results of the comparative case studies offer elements for a theory about the conditions of policy adaptation and, by implication, about convergence. Building upon these findings, elements are suggested for a future research agenda based on theoretically informed comparative case studies that gradually include new policy sectors and countries; in addition, the use of counterfactual arguments is proposed to isolate the causal impact of the European Union.

The conclusion addresses three areas of theoretical interest posed by empirical and theoretical arguments made in the substantive chapters of Manufacturing Possibilities. First it elaborates more precisely the ways that pragmatist notions of creative action and recomposition are superior to various forms of institutionalism (sociological, rational choice and historical institutionalism). Second it more explicitly elaborates the non-structural, relational and contextual understanding of power that undergirds the analysis of industrial change. Thirdly it points out that pragmatism involves a distinctive approach to social science : It encourages the search for interesting possibilities, rather than determinate forms of causality which tend to place undue attention on constraint. Pragmatist social science, ultimately, is science in the interest of greater democracy

Historical institutionalism has not yet grappled with the deeper intellectual challenges of “going global.” Understanding international, particularly global, institutions, requires attention to and theorizing of a global social context, one that does not rely on a national government in the background, ready to enforce laws and rules. It also requires theories about the global organizations themselves. In this chapter, the authors argue that a historical institutionalism that engages with the many varieties of sociological institutionalism would be a richer tradition that could more systematically examine the role of norms and ideas, thereby expanding its analytic range to institutional contexts beyond the state.

This chapter presents the theoretical framework, building on sociological institutionalism and its two strands, namely organization studies and world society theory. The chapter starts with a presentation of how world society is formed, which actors are important and how change in world society can be caused. The idea of institutional entrepreneurship is introduced, including a section on how institutional entrepreneurs can be analyzed and how they can use networks to bring change. The chapter continues with an analysis of the concepts of rationalization. The oft-assumed homogenous world culture is analyzed with regard to internal variance, relying on the concept of institutional logics. In the final section, these findings are connected to institutional entrepreneurship and the analytical framework that guides the rest of the book’s chapters is established. The chapter concludes with a hypothesis on how institutional entrepreneurship and rationalization determine different forms of global governance.

This introductory chapter takes a broad approach to introduce global crime governance and represents a substantial overview of the research field, the book, and its findings. The first section clarifies what global crime governance is and how it relates to domestic crime policies. The second section presents perspectives on crime and its governance, shedding light on research questions related to crime in different academic disciplines. In the third section, available explanations for global crime governance are presented, including the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. In the fourth section, sociological institutionalism is introduced, placing emphasis on world society theory as well as organizational analyses, and elaborating on how to link these strands. The chapter concludes with a detailed plan of the book.

This chapter provides an introduction to the informal level of decision-making and presents the book’s central argument. That is, the ways in which actors interact and negotiate within international organizations can explain why some find consensus more quickly than others. The chapter adopts sociological institutionalism as a theoretical framework and applies it to explain how informal norms and informal relations among key actors affect speed of response. The text distinguishes between informal and formal modes of decision-making and the conditions under which informality can facilitate the building of consensus and, ultimately, quicker multilateral responses to crises. As the argument is unpacked, interpersonal trust is identified as a key mechanism. The chapter offers two final and detailed sections: one providing the theoretical argument behind the role of informal norms and one providing the theoretical argument behind the role of informal relations.

This chapter shows that four major theory-driven interpretations of change in the European wine industry are incomplete or wrong. More fundamentally, it identifies why the general assumptions about politics, economics, and change that underlie each of these four approaches—namely institutionalist economics, regulationist economics, sociological institutionalism, and actor-network theory—urgently need replacing. The first two of these approaches are excessively materialistic. Although their claims contrast sharply, they both interpret policy and political change as the consequence of exogenously caused changes in stocks of material resources and power. In contrast, analyses based on sociological institutionalism and actor-network theory are insufficient analytically because they give excessive explanatory weight to the interactions between individuals and groups (or objects). In so doing, and despite their considerable differences, they focus on the positioning and repositioning of firms within networks and underestimate the unintentional resonances between differentiated, historically structured, and partially autonomous spaces.

This chapter introduces historical institutionalism (HI) to international relations (IR). Historical institutionalism, located outside of IR’s paradigmatic debates, has been given little explicit attention within IR. We argue, however, that scholarship on international institutions is increasingly concerned with issues that HI was developed to address and that this overlap of interests is a compelling reason for IR to explicitly engage with HI. We discuss what is distinctive about HI, especially in relation to rational and sociological institutionalisms. Then, as groundwork for empirical research, we develop a systematic conceptualization of the terms “institutional development,” “stability,” and “change” by distinguishing three dimensions of change: speed, scope, and depth. Finally, we provide an overview of the empirical chapters in this volume and reflect on what status HI should have within the existing field of IR theories.

This concluding chapter summarizes the book and evaluates its findings with respect to world society theory and IR. It also sheds light on future developments of the global crime agenda, including the likely broadening, intensification and further rationalization of global crime governance. The chapter starts with a summary of the main findings presented in the book. It then elaborates on the implications of concepts like institutional entrepreneurship and rationalization, and the relevance of analyzing fragmentation in global governance. The chapter also provides an outlook to broader questions relevant in the field of crime, like the role of numbers in global governance and the important relationship between machinery and substance. The chapter also presents additional perspectives on global crime governance, for example that of Foucault and governmentality.

Political economy has thus far failed to define politics clearly and heuristically. This chapter presents how four dominant theories instead unhelpfully conflate politics with other terms: liberal, neo-classical economics, and International Relations Theory reduce politics to politicians and governments; neo-Marxists confuse it with power; historical and sociological institutionalists use politics as a synonym for conflict; whilst interactionists using Actor Network Theory or a Global Value Chain framework envisage it as networking. Because the chapter sets out each of these theories and their other useful contributions to political economy, it can be read as a short literature review of the field. However, its principal focus consists of arguing why, ultimately, all these theories end up obstructing analysis of the politics of the economic, rather than facilitating and guiding this object of study.

This chapter considers the role of planners in reform processes by outlining how they can be understood as professional technical experts, as subjects of neoliberalism and as frontline ‘Street-level Bureaucrats’. This leads to an exploration of ‘sociological institutionalism’, which draws upon Giddens’ structuration theory, and which provides the theoretical framework for the subsequent chapters. The chapter concludes that planning reform, like other public sector modernisation, must be considered as a ‘peopled process’.

International bureaucracies and their retinue of civil servants are considered important players in world politics, and yet, as exemplified by the United Nations (UN), others see them as an assembly of ineffective, inefficient, and unresponsive bureaucrats. This book explores the influence and dynamics of international bureaucracies in world politics. It draws on the core findings of the Managers of Global Change (MANUS) project, a four-year research program that investigated the type and degree of autonomous influence of international bureaucracies as well as the possible factors which account for any differences in this influence. This research has some similarities with, as well as differences from, two strands of theory on international bureaucracies: Principal-agent theory and sociological institutionalism. The book presents case studies of nine international bureaucracies, including the UN and the World Bank, and looks at two types of bureaucracies: Secretariats of international environmental treaties and environmental departments of the secretariats of intergovernmental organizations. It also reviews the state of the art in the academic disciplines of international relations and organizational and management studies.

This chapter considers whether acculturation processes leave a gap between formal commitments by states and actual practices on the ground. Although such gaps constitute important evidence of acculturation, the process of acculturation may, in other circumstances, foster complete internalization of a norm. The chapter analyzes studies that document just this sort of internalization. The remaining question is whether meaningful change might occur in circumstances in which acculturation does produce gaps between form and practice. On this question, the chapter details processes by which formal, even if shallow, commitments to global legal norms might be translated into meaningful change over time. These processes include shifts in domestic political opportunity structure, the “civilizing force of hypocrisy,” and state learning.