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.
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For many working in the field, the absence of a theory of change meant new and creative explanations of institutional disorder, incremental change, and indeterminacy. Such scholarship has yielded many powerful insights with regard to: rule ambiguity and political entrepreneurship (Hall and Taylor 1996; Sikkink 1991; Blyth 2002; Parsons 2003; Scheingate 2003; Lieberman 2002); the ongoing expression of grievances by losers (Weir 2005); lost alternatives (Schneiberg 2007; Sabel and Zeitlin 1997); redundant features (Crouch and Farrell 2004; Crouch and Keune 2005); layering of old and new institutions (Thelen 2004; Orren and Skowronek 1994, 2002, 2004; Shickler 2001; Sil 2002); the coexistence of “traditional” and “modern” institutions (Dunning and Pop-Eleches 2004); change driven by “quasi-parameters” (Greif and Laitin 2004).
The concept of habit has a history, which is beyond the scope of this article and fully documented in the work of Charles Camic (1986). Of particular importance for us, Camic depicts habit as part of a lost alternative in social theory, an approach that integrated, rather than dichotomized, structure and agency. By the interwar years behavioral psychologists, bearing the apparent authority of the physical sciences, narrowed the meaning of habit to neurologically determined action. In response, sociologists largely abandoned the term, turning instead to attitude and purposeful choice to conceptualize agency. In Twentieth Century social theory that internal, cognitive, individual framing of agency would evolve into rational choice theory as the main alternative to historical, cultural, and other structuralisms. By contrast, Camic shows that at the time sociology abandoned habit, Dewey was laying out an alternative that used the concept to integrate inherited structure and ongoing reflective choice. Others have picked up Dewey’s thread in various ways (Joas 1996; Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984). In rethinking institutions, we find it useful to go back to Dewey to recover his alternative approach and ground our theory of creative syncretism in a concept originally intended to overcome the intractable dichotomy between structure and agency.
We draw on Dewey’s concept of habit, rather than Bourdieu’s (1977) closely related habitus, because we find in the former greater sensitivity to ongoing creativity and experimentation as features of action itself. Habitus tells us much about the alignment of external conditions (field), inner orientation, and behavior. In Bourdieu’s work, agency consists mainly of aligning and realigning action to a pre-existing habitus that embeds in peoples’ cognition and bodies the structural arrangements of a social field. That field of course changes and in response, the habitus will adapt, resulting in new internalizations of a new field. Many who apply Bourdieu follow his suggestions that autonomous change of habitus is also possible, and that this is the source of creativity and reinterpretation beyond adjustment to the external conditions of the field (Sewell 1992; Powell and DiMaggio 1991). We see this potential in Bourdieu, but agree with Butler (1999) that Bourdieu does more to theorize habitus as a mechanism for the ongoing internalization of adjustments in the context or field than as a site for creative action itself. The findings of our own research conform more fully with the Deweyian account presented here, in which habit is both a repertoire of prior patterns of action (a collection of parts and oddments) and the will to rearrange this repertoire to craft new action (a new arrangement of parts) in response to circumstances that are never really twice the same. Habit balances the constraints of a limited collection of parts with rummaging, cobbling and the inventiveness of action. Bourdieu’s habitus leans more to the former.
Dewey offers a third reason that we find somewhat unsatisfying: rigid custom can force routine and undermine experimentation. For Dewey, this is a sociological rather than a cultural or characterological condition. In “the Orient,” Dewey suggests that “thought is submerged in habit…not because of any essentially Oriental psychology, but because of a nearer background of rigid and solid customs” (61). We applaud Dewey’s effort to distinguish the sociological production of rigid custom from essentialist notions of cultural or psychological determinacy. But in the end, a legacy of rigid custom is nothing more than a history of failures to engage in deliberation, an accumulation of routinized action. As an explanation for why habit can disintegrate into routine, this is a tautology.
Although they refer to change in norms, their conceptualization of norms fits with what we consider in this paper institutions.
In addition to promoting individualization of tenure, colonial officials sought to wipe out matrilineal inheritance in favor of patrilinealism (which they considered more “civilized”). The Serer had long been bilineal, inheriting different kinds of property and rights through each line. The effort to eliminate Serer matrilinealism accelerated after several infamous 1930s debtors refused to “inherit” their father’s financial debts (owed to French commercial houses for tools and seeds), insisting that by matrilineal custom, debts were passed from mother’s brother to maternal nephews, not from fathers to sons.
As Berry’s seminal work (1993) notes, this is no surprise: for much of rural Africa, competing tenure systems and contradictory types of claims are more the norm than the exception.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge three thoughtful and very helpful anonymous reviews from Theory and Society; the always helpful input from our colleagues and students in the Political Science Department at the University of Oregon; Richard Bensel and Gary Herrigel, who commented on earlier versions of this article; and the tireless patience of Karen, Kirsten, Jacob, Ben, Sam, and Jeep.
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Berk, G., Galvan, D. How people experience and change institutions: a field guide to creative syncretism. Theor Soc 38, 543–580 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-009-9095-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-009-9095-3