In this chapter, we argue that the origins of both institutional order and change lie in human creativity. In a previous article, we looked at institutions from the inside out.¹ From that perspective, we showed how people experience institutional rules as bundles of resources available for creative reinterpretation and recombination. We called this process “creative syncretism” and conjectured that it produced institutional order and change simultaneously. In this work, we unpack creative syncretism by conceptualizing the interplay among creative projects undertaken by the powerful and the weak in the name of both seat-of-the-pants problem solving and grand institutional engineering. To...

If, as this volume suggests, reigning theories of institutions have difficulty in explaining institutional change, then new insights might come fromhowwe explain things in the social sciences. From that starting point, thisessayexplores a style of explanation only dimly perceived as a distinctive form—ecological explanation. Although ecological explanation has important and long-standing roots in the social sciences—reaching back at least to the work of the Chicago school of sociology—it is presently much better known as a strategy for explaining the natural world.¹ Natural ecologists adopt a variety of specific explanatory techniques, but are broadly...

For most of its post-1992 rapid industrialization, Chinese manufacturing excelled in global markets as a platform for high-volume and low-cost, export-oriented production.¹ Since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, however, the fruits of rapid industrialization have been creating home market conditions for very different manufacturing strategies. Successful export-led industrialization has created more sophisticated domestic Chinese demand for a broad array of manufactured goods. In an effort to capture this emergent demand, Chinese producers are shifting their focus toward more advanced production and away from what was traditionally needed (or possible) within the framework of export processing relationships....

The federal government’s rescue of General Motors and Chrysler in 2008–2009 was a dramatic reminder that a liberal state can exert plenary powers to stem a public crisis by controlling the primary agents. Yet federal action came at a moment when social science debates about how institutions shape change had reached a point where government intervention is less significant than the ways that agents are able to innovate from institutional routines.¹ The successful auto bailout raised questions about the evolution of government-market relationships and the capacity of government to improve on market outcomes. The U.S. auto crisis began in...

“If this is all about creativity, how do you account for continuity and order?” This is a question that scholars who emphasize the role of creativity, agency, and ambiguity in the study of institutions often face. This question arises because these scholars, as well as their critics, who focus more on positive feedbacks and path dependence, often associate creativity, agency, and institutional ambiguity and incompleteness only with processes of institutional change. Continuity and stability are still too often seen as the result of the mechanistic functioning of self-reinforcing institutions. Drawing on the contributions of subaltern creativity to the development of...

A central theme guiding this volume is that politics is marked by everyday forms of innovation, what Gerald Berk and Dennis Galvan refer to as creative syncretism.¹ Focusing on this creativity, they argue, offers key insights into the nature and conduct of politics. What at first may appear to be fixed and rigid structures, such as rules and roles, interests and institutions, are in fact multiple and malleable elements of political life. This diversity allows actors to combine and recombine elements in pursuit of their political goals. The payoff from such an analytical move is twofold. First, attention to the...

The System of National Accounts (SNA) is a massively ambitious institutional enterprise that aims to clarify the overall structure and dynamics of a country’s economy. As a single standardized system, it is the basis for virtually every comparative economic indicator used today, including gross domestic product. By structuring the content and meaning of aggregate economic information, the SNA makes economies legible to governments, firms, citizens, and external observers, and informs the development of policy and policy assessment.

Yet despite its apparently firm footing as the global institution for national economic data, the SNA is a relatively recent, mid-twentieth-century innovation, and...

Images of disaffected workers rising up against communist regimes—most evident in the case of the Solidarity-led movement in Poland and the 1989 miners’ strikes in the Soviet Union—initially spawned hopes that unions could spearhead the emergence of civil society throughout the postcommunist world. Within a decade after the fall of communism, however, a much bleaker picture emerged: “Not only have unions not experienced a rebirth—on the contrary, they have seen a drop in membership—but they have been largely unable to create for themselves a pronounced political role to allow them to shape the postcommunist transformation.”¹ Labor...

In September 2003, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice began laying claim to the legacy of the civil rights movement to authorize the U.S. war in Iraq. The speeches themselves are arresting, as familiar political affinities between race, war, and political party identification are dramatically rearranged. The strangeness of the political position Rice is attempting commands attention. Are Rice’s efforts to realign Republican foreign policy with a civil rights agenda sincere? Or is the equation of liberation in the American South with liberation in Iraq mere window dressing for the Bush administration’s military aims, divorced from deeper political commitments? Put differently,...

In politics, time is a structuring force that shapes collective and individual identities, subjectivities, and imaginaries. We can see the role of political temporality in sweeping historical narratives, such as those a nation tells itself about its founding moment and subsequent arc of development, an arc that almost always legitimizes the status of the contemporary social and political order. We can see it in more quotidian forms such as the calendars that organize people’s lives and in so doing habituate citizens into annual practices of remembrance, memorialization, and obligation. These examples point to the fact that political time is a...

Several authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa were taken down in 2011, but this wave of challenges to strong states missed Algeria. In Algeria, large demonstrations in January 2011 and new efforts at political mobilization were overwhelmed by state security and could not continue. What Algeria lacked were the alliances built in other nations. Algeria’s civil war (1993–2000) left deep rifts and mistrust between groups.¹ Profound dissatisfaction with the state and desire for change could not take the place of the political work, underground or in open, of bridging interests and shaping alliances among democratic forces,...