The Discursive Side of New Institutionalism

The Role of Local Actors in World Society

The rise of the new institutionalisms (Hall and Taylor, 1996; Schmidt, 2008) can be seen as part of the same ‘linguistic’, ‘constructionist’ or – if you like – ‘cultural’ turn that also resulted in coining the terms ‘cultural studies’ and ‘cultural sociology’. As Powell and DiMaggio (1991) note, new institutionalism developed from several researchers’ observation in the 1970s that the world is inconsistent with the ways in which contemporary theories – rational choice and functionalism – asked them to see it. Empirical observations spoke against the assumptions that individuals and organizations make rational choices and that organizations are built because of their beneficial consequences:

Administrators and politicians champion programs that are established but not implemented; managers gather information assiduously, but fail to analyze it; experts are hired not for advice but to signal legitimacy. Such pervasive findings of case-based research provoke efforts to replace rational theories of technical contingency or strategic choice with alternative models that are more consistent with the organizational reality that researchers have observed. (1991: 3)

For neoinstitutionalist sociology, the answer to these mysteries is culture. As initiators and carriers of culture, institutions are shaped by historical factors that limit the understanding of and actual range of options open to decision-makers. Besides, the institutional setup of society constitutes actors, providing them with the ‘frames of meaning’ that guide their action.

Because of this emphasis on culture and history, neoinstitutionalists do not conceive of societies as universal, machine-like entities that are governed by universal sociological laws. Rather, the objects of research are considered as contingent historical creations. Thus, neoinstitutionalism approaches contemporary society as a culture of modernity.

Despite these shared starting points, new institutionalisms differ in several ways from the bulk of cultural sociological research. To start with, while cultural sociology often deals with art, popular culture, the media or everyday life, most neoinstitutionalist research deals with macro sociological questions such as organizational change, political or managerial decision-making, and globalization. Secondly, the starting point of new institutionalist economics – i.e. the revision of an underlying premise of homo economicus by acknowledging that transaction costs are not zero (North, 1990; Ostrom, 1990) – sounds like reinventing sociology. After all, sociology was born as an antidote to classical economics, stressing that there is more to the social world than utilitarian individuals. Yet the angle from which rational choice theory and functionalism are challenged, combined with what are – in standard cultural sociology – unconventional objects of research, make institutionalism a refreshing new opening in cultural sociology.

Since mainstream cultural sociology studies informal communities, often engaged in expressive cultural activities, the role of symbols, myths and intersubjective meanings is, not surprisingly, the key to understanding the social worlds studied. Essentially, the meta-narrative of these studies is that culture is cultural. In contrast, by focusing on formal organizations, and by showing that they are no less shaped by a contingent cultural system, new institutionalism directs a frontal attack on rationalist assumptions according to which ‘culture’ is only relevant when dealing with ‘traditional’ societies and informal organizations. In that respect, new institutionalism is akin to social studies of science, which also scrutinize the cultural foundations of activities that are generally considered as universal and a-cultural, and determined by pure reason.

The objects of research also make understandable the tone with which neoinstitutionalists typically discuss the cultural worlds of decision-making and organizational life. Cultural sociological research dealing with people’s everyday lives normally positions its objects of research as underdogs, sympathizing with their views of life, admiring their creativity in transforming living conditions imposed upon them into a tolerable or even enjoyable life, perhaps even celebrating their cultural resistance (see e.g. Becker, 1967; Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Willis, 1977, 1978). Neoinstitutionalist sociology, instead, approaches its objects of research often with an ironic attitude, thus highlighting the paradox between high-minded expectations or expressed principles and actual practices. In both cases, ‘culture’ reveals or refers to the human side of how things actually work, but it is viewed from practically opposite perspectives.

As is implied above, there is not just one but several new institutionalisms, and given the thrust of interest in this approach, there will be more and more internal divisions between them in the coming years. In this article, however, I am going to concentrate on discussing only those variants that are of particular interest from the viewpoint of cultural sociology. Hence the focus will be on sociological institutionalism, particularly the ‘Stanford School’ world society theory, and its developments toward and challenges stemming from what has been labelled as constructivist (Hay, 2006) or discursive (Campbell and Pedersen, 2001; Schmidt, 2008) institutionalism. I will argue that discursive institutionalism is compatible with world society theory in its emphasis on the constitutive role of culture, but concentrates on unpacking the concepts of decoupling and loose coupling by scrutinizing the different ways in which talk, decisions and actions are related to each other.

I will first discuss how sociological institutionalism relates to other institutionalisms and introduce its basic ideas. The subsequent sections will then take up some of its more underdeveloped areas and how they have been tackled in discursive institutionalist scholarship.

New Institutionalisms and World Society

The proliferation of new institutionalist scholarship has multiplied the number of its different branches, so that Colin Hay (2011) ended up adding constructivist institutionalism to the list where B. Guy Peters (1999) had already identified seven variants. Of these institutionalisms, at least the first three, identified by Hall and Taylor (1996) – rational choice, historical, and sociological institutionalism – developed quite independently, mostly unaware of each other. Later, with the surge of interest in new institutionalisms, coupled with texts that introduce and compare its different strands, they formed a field that functions as an incubator of new variants, stemming from mutual cross-fertilization and influences from other scholars and theoretical traditions.

The new institutionalisms share the conviction that the social world and actors’ decision-making cannot be properly explained without taking into account the role of institutions in constituting the conditions under which actors make their moves and how they expect others to behave. Yet there are significant differences between these approaches as to how they define the relationship between institutions and behaviour, and how they explain the origins of, and changes within, institutions. For instance, historical institutionalism stresses the contingent character of the origins of institutions and their critical turning points, while also underscoring that institutions determine a path-dependent trajectory that polities follow in their policymaking. This means that historical institutionalists consider different societies as idiosyncratic systems in which the same component, say the national railway network, may assume quite different roles and meanings (Hall and Taylor, 1996; Schmidt, 2008). Rational choice institutionalism, on the other hand, contends that actors have a fixed set of preferences, the attainment of which they aim to maximize by behaving instrumentally in environments that are shaped by the institutional arrangements. With several actors pursuing their goals, the final outcome may be unintended and collectively sub-optimal. Rational choice institutionalists also stress that actors’ moves are premised on their expectations about how others are likely to behave – a point that leads to game-theoretical research designs (Hall and Taylor, 1996; Ingram and Clay, 2000; Schmidt, 2008).

Sociological institutionalism, the research tradition that is of particular interest here, differs from both of the above-mentioned approaches. While historical institutionalism points out national differences and path-dependent policy choices, sociological institutionalism directs attention to global isomorphism, evident in the spread of worldwide models even to countries for which they are not suitable in their present situation. In contrast with rational choice institutionalism, sociological institutionalism stresses that institutions constitute actors instead of just constraining them, and that interests emerge within particular normative and historical contexts (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991: 7). That is why sociological institutionalists argue that agents fairly unthinkingly enact global scripts rather than behave in a truly rational manner.

Sociological institutionalism also defines institutions in a much broader sense than the other two approaches. For it, institutions do not just depict formal rules, procedures or norms, but also symbols, scripts, and moral principles that provide the ‘frames of meaning’ guiding human action (Hall and Taylor, 1996: 947). In other words, institutions – or the institutional infrastructure composed of the institutions – are more or less equated with culture and society. This can be seen most clearly in one branch of sociological institutionalism called world polity or world society theory. It is particularly associated with John Meyer and his colleagues, who talk about the contemporary global institutional setup as world society, and the cultural models and scripts that carry it as world culture (Boli and Thomas, 1999; Lechner and Boli, 2005; Meyer et al., 2009).

Instead of focusing on the differences between nation-states and their policies, world society theory raises the point that societies in the contemporary world, ‘organized as nation-states, are structurally similar in many unexpected dimensions and change in unexpectedly similar ways’ (Meyer et al., 1997: 145). The answer to this mystery is world culture, the culture of world society. It comprises norms and knowledge shared across state boundaries, which are rooted in 19th-century Western culture, but since then have become globalized, and carried by the infrastructure of world society (Lechner and Boli, 2005: 6). As a shared cultural frame much larger than states or nations, world culture as the culture of modernity constitutes actors and makes them respond and behave in the same ways. World cultural principles and institutions shape the actions of states, firms, individuals, and other sub-units. Within the world polity organized this way, many ideas and principles are shared across state boundaries, and the desires and pressures to keep up with global trends are infiltrated to domestic politics through many routes. Consequently, nation-states are more isomorphic than most theories would predict, and change more uniformly than is commonly recognized (Meyer et al., 1997: 173).

The story of the global diffusion of models, including the nation-state as a building block of the international political system, and the ideas about how the government and economy of such a state can be best organized, resembles the functionalist account of social development, according to which societies go through the same stages determined by the functional requirements of each stage (Parsons, 1964, 1966). New institutionalism, however, opposes this view, criticizing the ‘optimistic functionalism’ that explains institutions by their allegedly beneficial consequences. Instead, new institutionalism stresses that institutions may persist even when they serve no-one’s interests, and that they are end products of random variation, selection, and retention, rather than individual foresight (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991: 4). Instead of treating the idea of functional requirements as a natural explanation for isomorphism found among nation-states, world society theory treats it as a justification that actors use to promote global models to countries that have not yet enacted them. Such a justification appeals to policymakers and the general public because the world culture of modernity is ‘rationalistic’. As Meyer and colleagues (1997: 162) point out, in the name of (social) science, policymakers are consulted about the functional requirements of the modern society, organization, and individual, and the linkages among them, which justify the assumption that there is basically only one correct, or research-based, way to organize society and its institutions. Almost every aspect of social life is discussed, rationalized, and organized, including rules of economic production and consumption, political structure, education, and people’s private and public everyday lives. ‘In each arena, the range of legitimately defensible forms is fairly narrow. All the sectors are discussed as if they were functionally integrated and interdependent, and they are expected to conform to general principles of progress and justice’ (1997: 162–3).

Sociological institutionalism stresses that rationalism and conformity are the core underlying reasons for actors’ willingness to enact the same worldwide models. Rationalism creates a tendency of many actors to be overtly organized, because it gives the outer appearance of being rational and efficient. Due to the great belief in and respect for rational planning, actors develop increasingly detailed plans, which policymakers in peripheral states also adopt, though they have no need for or resources to implement them (Boli, 1987; Meyer et al., 1997: 144). Decoupling is an inevitable outcome: actors adopt inconsistent structures from different global sources and symbolic frames without substantive meaning. Hence hypocrisy is prevalent.

Such hypocrisy is often pointed out in an ironic tone. For instance, in one article John Meyer (2004) describes how in a rural school in sub-Saharan Africa, a language teacher was giving a lesson:

She was the only teacher present. It was Friday, and none of the other teachers had bothered to come. The instructor was only semi-literate, and not a single one of her sixth-graders could read the simplest sentence. The Ministry of Education official accompanying us seemed not to notice. He turned to me and said improved textbooks and instruction in science were really needed: ‘After all, our children have to compete in the global economy.’ (Meyer, 2004: 42)

According to Meyer, this excerpt illustrates how ministry officials at the national level are thinking in terms of world educational fashions, quite out of touch with local problems and realities. That is because leading nations, global institutions like the World Bank, and social movements like human rights campaign groups encourage standardized social arrangements around the world, and national governments turn out to be conformists although their official conformity is often superficial and hypocritical.

On the other hand, world society theory scholarship shows that loose coupling between ‘ceremony’ and substance does not always mean that national leaders fail to make real reforms despite the international treaties they ratify. Loose coupling may also entail substance without ceremony: global changes in a policy area have an effect on actual practices without any changes in national legislation (Schofer et al., 2012). For instance, due to the pressure of the global human rights movement, human rights practices improve even in countries that fail to ratify the treaties (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui, 2005).

Instrumental and Expressive Culture

The idea of national uniqueness is also part of world culture. John Meyer (2000), however, suggests that the uniqueness of national cultures is expressed in ‘expressive culture’. By this concept he depicts areas that are irrelevant from the viewpoint of ‘instrumental culture’, i.e. from the perspective of rational action. According to him, nation-states do not want to be too unique in, for instance, their divisions of labour, forms of state structure, or educational or medical systems. Instead:

Uniqueness and identity are thus most legitimately focused on matters of expressive culture: variations in language, dress, food, traditions, landscapes, familial styles and so on. These are precisely the things that in the modern system do not matter, which is to say they have no direct, rational relation to instrumental actorhood. Nation-states and organized ethnic groups within them do not claim to have their own styles of wife- or child-beating, of economic production and so on. Such claims would violate global principles and pressures, and actual traditions along these lines are suppressed in reconstructions or revitalizations of history and tradition. (Meyer, 2000: 245)

Meyer certainly has a point here: worldwide models that can be justified by science and rationality spread more easily. Yet his argument is questionable. What about the fact that practically all nation-states want to express that they belong to the civilized world by establishing the classical European art institutions of opera, ballet and classical music (Adams, 1999, 2010)? Although established art is some distance away from activities that are most essential for people’s livelihoods, in this area too individual and collective actors such as nation-states do not want to appear too different from each other. It is part of the ‘nation branding’ of a ‘civilized’ and ‘modern’ nation to have cultural heroes in the established fields of art: a national poet, sculptor, composer, etc. Those artists are expected to reflect a distinctive style that somehow also reflects ‘national culture’, but on the other hand the style cannot be too exotic, for then it would fail to be recognized as belonging to an international sub-field of the high arts (Alasuutari, 2001). The same goes for individual artists, for instance film directors: they walk a fine line between an idiosyncratic style and the isomorphic pressures of the field (Alvarez et al., 2005).

By using ‘pop-rockization’ of popular music as his case example, Motti Regev (2013) has elaborated on this phenomenon. He notes that the globally institutionalized fields of art ‘dictate to aspiring artists, creative workers, and cultural consumers around the world what are the art forms, the stylistic elements, and the aesthetic idioms that should be adopted in order to count as candidates for recognition, participation, and parity in the innovative frontiers of world culture’ (Regev, 2013: 11). Consequently, certain institutionalized art forms such as pop-rock spread throughout the world and merge with national traditions. By extending the work by Meyer and others to the realm of expressive culture, Regev refers to this process as expressive isomorphism, leading to aesthetic cosmopolitanism. In the field of popular music this process has led to pop-rockization, by which he means the global spread of pop-rock music, throughout the world, creating fusions with, and integrating, folk and traditional elements.

To illustrate this interlacing of the expression of national cultural uniqueness with world-cultural aesthetic cosmopolitanism, Regev mentions two songs, La Argentinidad al Palo performed by Argentinean rock band Bersuit Vergarabat, and Kama Yossi by Israeli rock auteur Berry Sakharoff. Sung in national languages, engaging in dialogue with earlier moments in local history, both celebrated hit songs stand as expressions of current ethno-national uniqueness, in these cases Argentineness and Israeliness. Yet the sonic elements are easily identifiable. ‘The electric and electronic instrumentation, the sophisticated studio production techniques used for their creation and the presence of the stylistic influence of global pop-rock genres, make each of these songs an art work that shares much aesthetic common ground with many songs produced elsewhere in the world’ (Regev, 2007: 318). Thus the model of world culture is not confined to the realm of instrumental rationalized culture. Similar isomorphism takes place in expressive culture, when national artists are self-mobilized to create ‘their own’ version of a global art form, in this case pop-rock, while simultaneously adapting to globally-spread aesthetic idioms.

From Diffusion to Translation and Domestication

By regarding the global system as an institutional order ingrained in world culture, world society theory marks a stimulating departure from the conventional macro-realist view, which treats the world system simply as a battleground on which national states, blocs or civilizations fight each other while defending their interests. However, as expressed in the bulk of world society theory scholarship, the emphasis of culture as constitutive of the actors, considered as agents enacting world cultural scripts (Meyer, 2010), underlines a structuralist view of culture at the expense of actually studying their views, understandings or aspirations. This emphasis on the constitutive role of culture is understandable since world society theory developed as a corrective to, and an antipode of, rational choice theory, which treats actors’ interests as a self-evident starting point. However, while actors’ ‘objective interests’ are a pre-given fact for rational choice theorists, mainstream world society theory research also fails to study actors’ motivations. This disregard for the role of local actors in the enactment of global models is an obvious shortcoming, which has been given more attention in recent developments within neoinstitutionalism.

From the perspective of cultural sociology or anthropology, it can be said that a conception of culture as a set of models or scripts that produces its agents is wanting. In contrasting this view of actorhood with rational choice theory, by stressing that actors’ choices cannot be deduced from their ‘objective interests’, in a peculiar way world society theory ends up repeating the old imagery of primitive culture as a belief system and as a social organization that functions as a copying machine, producing its members as duplicates programmed by the scripts, norms and beliefs of the culture (see e.g. Mauss, 1979). Although it is a fair point to say that from the outset modern individuals or collective actors appear to be in many ways conformists who follow fashions and do not want to look too different from others in their reference group, it is not sufficient to explain global isomorphism only by reference to processes of imitation or to scripts which actors are programmed to enact. As an early interpretation of primitive cultures, it is obviously an inverse mirror image of the self-conception of the moderns. Several scholars have pointed out that members of indigenous cultures are perfectly capable of strategic action and that rationality is always culturally conditioned (see e.g. Bourdieu, 1977; Sahlins, 1976). In that sense, insisting that the global order is rooted in world culture does not necessarily lead to the assumption that individuals are incapable of strategic action and instead only imitate others. Instead, the next step to take is to ask what are the actual discourses that motivate actors in the modern world to behave so uniformly in several ways, even though the culture of modernity specifically celebrates individualism and sovereignty and denounces mindless compliance. Meyer and Jepperson (2000) open up this perspective in an insightful way, but it has attracted little attention in the bulk of world society theory scholarship thus far.

Vivien Schmidt (2008) has dubbed this view of the relationship between actors and institutions as discursive institutionalism, although she admits that the scholars she lists as its representatives are a diverse group. Methodological orientation is probably the clearest common denominator. While the standard research design within world society theory has been to scrutinize the variables – such as memberships in international governmental and non-governmental organizations – that explain the spread of a particular worldwide model to different nation-states, a discursive institutionalist orientation applies a qualitative case study approach. From the perspective of local processes through which global ideas are adopted, local actors are not passive, nor are nations mindless emulators. Instead, contemporary scholarship emphasizes the active role of local actors in promoting exogenous ideas in ways that make the process compatible with the culture of modernity. That is, the adoption of new institutional practices requires domestic ‘policy entrepreneurs’ with the interests and capacities to promote them in a new context (Appel and Orenstein, 2013; Campbell, 2004). This does not mean that neoinstitutionalist sociology takes a step back toward a more actor-centric position, but rather that it takes a next step after the acknowledgement that world culture constitutes actors, by asking how local actors utilize world cultural discourses. In other words, the task of discursive institutionalism is to scrutinize and reconstruct the cultural logic of people’s actions.

As Maman and Rosenhek (2007) show in their analysis of the adoption of the policy of central bank independence in Israel, even external pressure from actors such as the IMF, the World Bank and the US government, is mediated and processed by local actors. In this case, local academic economists, who earlier had a marginal role, became key players with the capacity to promote their agenda of institutional reform.

Their success resulted both from their ability to formulate concrete and authoritative policy and institutional alternatives based on scientifically-accepted theoretical frames, and from a crucial resource held by them: their close ties with leading American economists. The dense network of cross-national academic economists enabled them to gain access to both the Israeli decision-makers and the American administration, which on the basis of inter-state dominance used its coercive power to put pressure on the Israeli government. (2007: 270)

The active role of local actors in the diffusion of ideas and policy models has been noted in a number of studies and research traditions. Actors do not just enact a ready-made model, but adapt it to local conditions and to their own interests. Local actors contest and socially construct the ‘success’ of a model policy and the ‘appropriateness’ of the proposed reform (Acharya, 2004; Callon, 1986; Cook, 2008; Cortell and Davis, 2000; Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996; Evans and Davies, 1999). Consequently, the original model is transformed in several ways.

To take an example from consumer culture, in her analysis of the localization of McDonald’s to Russia, Caldwell (2004) argues that the active role of Muscovites in incorporating McDonald’s into their daily lives complicates the argument that global processes such as McDonaldization (Ritzer, 1996) elide meaning from daily life.

Muscovites have incorporated McDonald’s into the more intimate and sentimental spaces of their personal lives: family celebrations, cuisine and discourses about what it means to be Russian today. In so doing, Muscovites have drawn McDonald’s into the very processes by which local cultural forms are generated, authenticated and made meaningful. It is by passing through this process of domestication that McDonald’s has become localized. (Caldwell, 2004: 6)

These studies about the adoption of global ideas to local contexts have also challenged the accuracy of the image of diffusion in capturing what happens when ideas travel. Instead of talking about diffusion, a group of scholars known as Scandinavian institutionalists have suggested that translation is a more adequate metaphor (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005; Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevón, 1996). The concept of diffusion conveys the impression of ‘packages’ of ideas, forms, or policies flying around and sticking to organizations. This physicalist term implies that nothing happens to these ideas during the process of diffusion, which is not the case as far as the spreading of ideas or forms is concerned. Following Latour’s (1986) lead (see also Callon, 1986), Scandinavian institutionalists prefer to talk about a process of translation, in which human actors have an active role in circulating and shaping ideas. As Latour puts it, according to the model of translation, the spread in time and space of anything is in the hands of people:

Each of these people may act in many different ways, letting the token drop, or modifying it, or deflecting it, or betraying it, or adding to it, or appropriating it. The faithful transmission of, for instance, an order by a large number of people is a rarity in such a model and if it occurs it requires explanation. (Latour, 1986: 267)

By utilizing the concept of translation, Sahlin-Andersson (1996) explains the circulation of ideas by approaching it from the perspective of local actors: why, for instance, organizations seek to imitate others. According to her, actors are motivated to make changes in their organization to solve problems, which are constructed through comparing the local situation with that of other organizations. That is why actors want to imitate success: they adopt ideas and strategies from organizations that are judged successful. Such copying is, however, an editing process:

Imitated ‘successes’ are formulated and reformulated as they are circulated. Similarities are emphasized while differences that might lead to a conclusion that the imitated prototype does not fit in the local setting are played down. In order to attract attention, imitated prototypes are reformulated in more dramatic terms. In such processes of translation, new meanings are created and ascribed to activities and experiences. (1996: 70)

Scandinavian institutionalism is particularly interested in public or private organizations, but the same principles – defining problems by comparing them to others, and copying ideas to be more successful – apply to political decision-making. Nation-states or other polities do not adopt the same models in order to look similar to each other but rather in order to do well in international competition. That is why political actors produce and use international league tables and comparisons as means to justify or criticize political reforms.

When talking about political decision-making it is, however, important to note that although all actors appeal to the best of the nation or another imagined community, politics consists of several parties and stakeholder groups. They are all engaged in suggesting how the facts of, say, an international comparison must be interpreted and what needs to be done, trying to translate their stakeholder interests into the common interest. The political processes triggered by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in several countries give a prime example. The results have created heated debates and reform demands in countries whose performance was judged poor (Ertl, 2006; Ringarp and Rothland, 2010; Takayama, 2008, 2010; Waldow, 2009), but also success has political repercussions. Finland’s top ranking was a problem for the Finnish teachers’ trade union in the sense that since the education system appeared to be excellent in international comparison, it was difficult for the teachers to find arguments to justify receiving more school resources (Rautalin and Alasuutari, 2007). On the other hand, the domestic public praise for the high international ranking allowed the Finnish ministry of education to carry through a curriculum reform that ran contrary to how national educational experts had interpreted the reasons behind the country’s resounding PISA success (Rautalin, 2014).

These conundrums that different stakeholders face in defending their views stem from certain cultural features of modernity. As Meyer and Jepperson (2000: 115) point out, modernity places high regard on putatively disinterested agency for the common good, which is why agents for different interest groups strive to articulate their objectives in the interest of the whole nation as an imagined community.

When the local-global interplay related to the global circulation of ideas is perceived from this perspective, the issue at hand is no longer whether or how much; models or formats are transformed when they are instituted in different local contexts. Some ‘policy formats’ such as the national bioethical committee (Syväterä and Alasuutari, 2014) may be internationally codified, so that national organizations dutifully subscribe to the same practices. In some other cases, a local version may be unrecognizable in comparison with its international exemplar. What is at stake is not how much original models are modified to fit local contexts. Rather, the point is that the local process through which policies or ideas are instituted, makes them experientially domestic, and such a process of domestication (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014b) entwines a cosmopolitan consciousness with banal nationalism (Billig, 1995) or localism.

Consider a study that analysed the effects of an R&D project aimed at developing local government cultural activities in Finnish towns and cities (Alasuutari, 2013). One aim of the project organized by the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities (AFLRA) was to create a statistical standard about how to calculate the costs and profits of cultural activities, so that cities could learn from each others’ experiences of good practices. In that sense the project dealt with local government cultural activities in a national comparative perspective, and the final report ALFRA published also placed cities’ cultural policy programmes in international perspective, referring to all the global buzzwords like ‘creative cities’. Therefore one could expect that the project would have advanced a broader national or global perspective, but that was not the case. When the final report was released, the media immediately interpreted the results in terms of the cultural framework of competition. Independently of each other, local newspapers uniformly presented the ranking of their city as the headline news of the report. Thus the media reception of the project drew on and enhanced identification with one’s city as an imagined community – invigorating banal localism. The framing of the issue was thus similar to the PISA case discussed above, only this time in a city rather than a national context.

While there is a plethora of concepts ¹ which capture the transformation of the original when an idea or policy is introduced to a local context, the concept of domestication pays attention to a local field battle as a condition of its acceptability. When an idea, concept, model or a comparison to other entities becomes part of local politics, local actors and spectators to the political drama retain their sense of agency, and the eventual policy changes do not seem to be a mere imitation of what has been done elsewhere.

This phenomenon was substantiated in a study that compared the press coverage of the 2011 Egyptian uprising in British, Finnish and Pakistani newspapers (Alasuutari et al., 2013). The British and Finnish newspapers used several discursive means to bring the events experientially closer to their readers, and through their selection of interviewees, sided with the protesters, making their fight against the regime emotionally understandable and sympathetic. In the Pakistani Daily Times, on the other hand, the coverage of the Egyptian events was fairly neutral, and it only covered them as hard news, using the international news agencies as their sources. Yet the neutrality of the coverage did not prevent the Arab Spring from becoming a reference point in Pakistani politics, and also forcing the President to take part in the debate that evolved. That is because Pakistani political actors domesticated the Egyptian uprising to Pakistani politics. They tried their best to capitalize upon the attention and sentiments that the events aroused in the population, bringing ideas and principles evoked by them to the domestic agenda. Thus ideas, in this case the exemplar of a popular uprising, seem to travel best across borders when they cease to be viewed as exogenous and foreign.

In that sense, the persistent parochialism found in the domestication of foreign ideas is not an antithesis of global isomorphism or a ‘countervailing force to the pull of globalization’ (Gurevitch et al., 1991: 207). These two phenomena are instead intertwined in the domestication of global trends.

Globalization and Synchronization

Although sociological institutionalism is critical of, and antithetical to, the functionalist idea of modernization as an evolutionary path, many scholars representing world society theory picture past and future social change in terms of a linear development toward increasing isomorphism. For instance, Boli (2005; see also Boli and Thomas, 1999) presents a fascinating and convincing account of the institutional formation of world society from the late 19th century onward, with a rapid proliferation of intergovernmental and international non-governmental organizations in recent decades. From this perspective, global social change can be characterized as constant expansion and incorporation of global organizational standards to ever more regions of the world and pockets of social life. The future can be extrapolated from the past. Hence, Boli (2005) reasons, though some countervailing forces are evident, world culture is likely to continue to become further codified, institutionalized, and consequential in the coming decades.

This description of a past and future linear development toward increasing homogenization is in fact quite close to the functionalist theory of modernization. The main difference is the driver of development. For world society theory, it is not evolutionary universals of society (cf. Parsons, 1964, 1966) but rather world culture which, once instigated as a set of scripts which constitutes its agents, functions as the Weberian iron cage that determines the future for the entire world society.

However, unlike the optimistic functionalism of modernization theory, world society theorists have a sceptical view as to the contents of the ideas or models that spread globally. Recent research and theorizing has especially pointed out the haphazard nature of the process through which some practices become fads that diffuse. Organizations and national states learn from each other in the sense that they adopt ‘lessons’ from others’ successes or failures, but such learning does not connote improvement: those models are socially constructed by professionals, consultants, and other authoritative interpreters (Strang, 2010; Strang and Macy, 2001; Strang and Soule, 1998). These studies concerning the construction and adoption of world models also complicate the assumption of steady progression toward growing isomorphism; as Strang and Macy (2001: 173) argue, due to the institutional processes behind a search for increased competitiveness, ‘emulation can generate not only convergence but also fad-like cascades of adoption and abandonment’.

Recent research on the practices through which actors create, ‘edit’ and promote an idea also shows that the invention and spread of a policy format cannot be separated from each other. In a seminal article on the institutional conditions of diffusion, Strang and Meyer (1993) suggest that the process begins with the invention of a worldwide model through theoretical abstraction or ‘theorization’, followed by diffusion that accelerates when enacting a model becomes an ‘institutional imperative’ (1993: 495) among potential recipients. It seems, however, that models are created and codified as global standards in parallel with the process of diffusion. For instance, in the case of national bioethics committees (NBCs), organizations such as the International Bioethics Committee, established as part of the process, redefined and codified the NBC as an institution at the same time as it spread to ever more countries (Syväterä, 2014). This also suggests that implementing a policy format in a target country is not the end point of global policy changes; rather, actors running national organizations collaborate with their counterparts in other countries through the international organizations in question, exchanging ideas and publishing recommendations to be used as political capital in steering of national practices in the relevant area (Alasuutari, forthcoming).

In addition, the major attention paid to globally codified policy formats has created a biased picture of nation-states’ interdependent decision-making. When viewed from the perspective of policymaking in a national state, interdependence rarely means promoting a single model implemented in other countries. Rather, political actors typically start with an argument about a problem – for instance, a deficiency in services or inefficient functioning of a sector – often defined in international comparison. Several solutions, justified by alluding to models adopted elsewhere, are proposed, and the eventual policy is adapted to the local conditions, bearing resemblance to several ideas and policies (see e.g. Greener, 2002).

Looking at national policymaking in a cross-national perspective also challenges the impression created by policy diffusion research, according to which new policy models are created in developed economies to solve emergent problems whereas developing countries follow them. The opposite seems to be true. From an analysis of law-making in six countries, it appears that the more a country is integrated with the global system, the more its parliamentary debates feature references to international comparisons or policies adopted elsewhere (Alasuutari, 2014).

Therefore, rather than thinking about world society as a global system in which the diffusion of world cultural models from the leaders to the laggards drives the development to ever increasing homogenization, it is fruitful to think of it as an institutional infrastructure within which nation-states keep an eye on what others are doing and synchronize their policies with their neighbours, competitors and others in their reference group. The same goes for regional polities, as well as public and business organizations. In that sense, members of world society behave like a school of fish, which make the same turns and adjust their movements to each other.

This focus on synchronization does not mean that one does not acknowledge or study the travel of ideas, values or catchwords and the codification of models as global standards. In fact, traveling ideas are often the reason that makes nation-states change their policies, but the ways states react to new ideas vary so that they hold onto their specific trajectories. In that sense, trendy ideas are like shock-waves that make national states take a new turn, but not as proof of increasing isomorphism or of the trickle down of models from the centre to the peripheries. Rather, the differences between the ways different states respond to new ideas and buzzwords also serve as a dynamo of constant change, because a local adaptation of a circulating idea can always be marketed as a new solution for others to learn from (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014b: 9).

The image of synchronization is better than that of diffusion in that it does not imply an assumption of endlessly increasing uniformity. Though fish align their moves with those of others, they still retain their distance to each other and never become a single fish. Such synchronization of behaviour is based on information received from or about other members of the group, but it is two-way rather than one-way communication: it is a dialogue through which members update a shared understanding of the world and their position in it. Thus global models are not the starting point but rather an effect and a political tool of synchronization based on international comparison: a high ranking of some countries is represented as a result of particular ‘best practices’, which are then promoted globally.

The global travel of ideas as an essential element in the synchronization of actions in the global system has also been addressed in a recent discussion on circulation (Appadurai, 2000; Aronczyk and Craig, 2012; Lee, 2002) – a concept that also captures the idea that the flow of ideas is not unidirectional. In a similar vein, Karin Knorr Cetina (2006, 2007; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2002) points out that the constant real-time connection between traders constructs financial markets into a massive global conversation, synchronizing the moves of individual actors.

Power and Governance in the World Polity

Although all forms of new institutionalism have a direct bearing on power relations, several authors have argued that world society theory elides the question of power and dominance in the global system. Beckfield (2003, 2008) says that world society theory views the structure of the world polity as relatively flat, whereas Hall and Taylor (1996: 954) remark that the focus on macro-level processes of diffusion guided by world culture drops the actors involved from sight, so that the result begins to look like ‘action without agents’. On the other hand, Koenig and Dierkes (2011) argue that while world society theory challenges fundamental assumptions of actor-oriented conflict-theoretical approaches by conceptualizing action as highly scripted and actors as culturally constituted, as a theory it can also shed light on the nature of conflicts in the contemporary world. It may explain latent motives for conflict, as illustrated by the conflict-generative potential of globally institutionalized principles of state sovereignty and human rights. Furthermore, they maintain, ‘the world polity’s associational structure and cultural content also account for the emergence of new methods of conflict resolution, as exemplified not only by the role of IGOs in reducing states’ propensity to use force in dyadic conflict resolution but also by the global spread of triadic forms of conflict resolution such as reconciliation policies, alternative dispute resolution and the like’ (2011: 18).

It is true that world society theory scholarship has paid little attention to the question of power and the way in which frames of meaning, scripts and symbols emerge not only from processes of interpretation but also from processes of contention (Hall and Taylor, 1996: 954). On the other hand, at times the critics miss the point that world society theory has particular relevance in elucidating ‘community power’, as discussed by Steven Lukes (2004 [1974]). While the actor-centric approaches to power typically conceive of it as a hierarchical zero-sum game based on different forms of coercion, neoinstitutionalism directs attention to world-cultural values and scripts that make actors voluntarily act in a uniform manner. In world society theory, the focus is on the models that spread as a consequence of such shared views or standards, but if we ask about the nature of the struggle through which a unanimity or compromise is reached, ideas and beliefs came to be seen as the primary battleground. This is how Schmidt (2008: 305) characterizes the contribution of discursive institutionalism: it provides insight into ‘the questions that political philosophers through the ages have puzzled over, such as the role of ideas in constituting political action, the power of persuasion in political debate, the centrality of deliberation for democratic legitimation, the construction and reconstruction of political interests and values, and the dynamics of change in history and culture’.

This is also what Michel Foucault had in mind when he introduced the neologism of governmentality, which depicts government that guides the comportment of others by acting upon their hopes, desires, or milieu (Foucault, 1991a; Inda, 2005). According to Foucault, this kind of governance became increasingly crucial for the political elite when the sovereign power of monarchy was gradually replaced by a constellation in which the art of government consists in managing public opinion and the support of several factions of society (Foucault, 2007, 2008). The same has been said about governance at a global scale: national states adopt global standards and policy models not because they are forced to do so, but primarily because governments are convinced that it is good for them, and hence global governance works particularly through knowledge production and consultancy (Alasuutari, 2011; Buduru and Pal, 2010; Radcliffe, 2010).

This kind of epistemic governance (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014a) is based on struggles over meaning and over a hegemonic definition of the situation at hand. Or let us say that policy decisions are reached through such struggles. They are not just struggles that consist in facts and ontological claims, because actors also appeal to values and principles; they justify policies by bolstering shared values and by suggesting what they oblige us to do. Epistemic governance thus works by acting upon other people’s view of reality and their conceptions of what is feasible, acceptable or desirable, but it does not mean that this analytic of governance only applies to subtle influence or ‘soft power’ (Nye, 2004). Rather, the epistemic governance analytic depicts an approach to studying governance, however rough, violent and easily discernible or ‘dislocational’ (Foucault, 1977) or subtle it is. Hence governance can be understood as more or less unself-conscious ways by which actors work on people’s conceptions of reality. This entails strategies that affect people’s wishes and aspirations, but a threat or use of military force and economic constraints are also means to affect people’s conceptions of the situation and hence make them adopt a particular line of action. Whether actors use, say, science, money or tanks as their consultants, the objective in utilizing those resources is to convince others of what they want, should or must do in a given situation.

The so-called governmentality studies have come close to these questions by investigating the rationales and effects of public policies on individuals’ mentalities (see e.g. Dean, 1998; Rose, 2000). These analyses show that the self-regulating capacities of subjects, created by different indirect ‘technologies of government’, are important for governing in liberal democratic societies, even extending to controlling populations beyond the state’s purview (Rose and Miller, 1992). But rather than rushing into the effects of a policy, similar questions can be asked about political decision-making: How are decision-makers and the general public led to think that a particular policy must be adopted? What are the means by which political actors try to convince others of the adequate solutions to the problems on the agenda? And how are issues constructed as problems in need of a policy reform?

Scrutiny of the debates and discussion on political issues shows that actors are engaged in what can be called epistemic work, in which they do not only appeal to facts but also to commonly shared values. Furthermore, they address their audience as a community with shared interests, such as the nation. Indeed, there seems to be an analytical unity in the techniques by which policy-makers generally get convinced of, and in turn try to convince others of, policy solutions. Epistemic work can be targeted on three different aspects of the social world: what is the environment, who are the actors, and what is virtuous or acceptable. In actual practice, these three objects of epistemic work appear in combination so that there is no epistemic work that does not entail all three objects. When, for instance, a politician in national politics promotes a reform, she or he would provide sources of authority aimed at convincing the citizens that the current state of affairs is unsatisfactory and that the proposed measures will be effective and in the best interests of the nation. Such an argument obviously appeals to claims about reality, but arguing for a reform on that basis also includes a normative element. And to say anything about what must be done implies actors and what they identify with (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014a).

Such a discursive institutionalist perspective on politics and power relations enables us to better understand why nation-states in their policies end up reacting to the same global ideas and buzzwords. It is because actors throughout the world share the same world-cultural values and premises, which means that the same arguments and discourses appeal to them. One of these globally shared premises is a strong belief in science and rationality, which is why actors justify their claims by referring to empirical evidence and to the authority of science. It may result at times in scientists as an epistemic community playing a decisive role in decision-making (Carayannis et al., 2011; Haas, 1992; Miller and Fox, 2001), but more generally it means that scientific evidence and authority are key weapons in the political battlefield. Consequently, national states and stakeholder groups alike resort to knowledge production organizations such as the OECD and the World Bank or various privately-funded think tanks.

One would think that increased use of research and evidence leads the way to increasingly scientific planning and organization of society, but in fact it drives the creation of policy fashions. In recent decades there has been a global trend to transform older social forms – traditional bureaucracies, family firms, professional associations – into the same standard format of a formal organization. For example, traditional charities are now ‘nonprofit organizations’ (Meyer and Bromley, 2013). From the perspective of political actors, what counts is not whether they believe in a new policy, concept or principle but whether they think that other actors and so-called ‘public opinion’ consider it important. Hence individuals who want to influence decision-making need to align with other actors’ views and sentiments, influence others with their own moves, or affect the beliefs about what the ‘general public’ thinks. In other words, politics is increasingly dependent on impressions and impression management, which leads to ‘signalling games’ discussed in rational choice institutionalism (Hall and Taylor, 1996: 956).

Discussion

In this article I have introduced new institutionalisms and particularly sociological and discursive institutionalism as approaches to cultural sociology. To reiterate what has been discussed above, there is a tension between different strands of neoinstitutionalism regarding actorhood. The Stanford School scholars have thus far concentrated on studying the diffusion of world culture as scripts that constitute actors as agents. In contrast, discursive institutionalist scholarship has scrutinized the actual practices through which global ideas are incorporated in local contexts, and these studies have highlighted the role of actors and motivating discourses that lead polities and organizations to similar policy outcomes despite political skirmishes and the high value placed on sovereignty and individuality.

Yet these orientations must not be seen as separate schools of thought, but rather as developments within neoinstitutionalist sociology. In other words, recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the forms of local-global interaction (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014c; Drori et al., 2013) and in the ‘receptor sites’ (Frank et al., 2000, 2007; Larson et al., 2008) of global ideas. Case analyses about the enactment and domestication of global ideas have, in turn, shown that conformity is not the only or primary reason for the fact that nation-states and all kinds of organizations synchronize their moves with their reference groups. Rather, synchronization of national policies seems to be a side effect of local actors utilizing broadly shared ideas and values in justifying their political objectives. In this way, the key principle of new institutionalism - not relying on any given assumptions but instead studying actors’ actual forms of conduct in their institutional contexts - has led neoinstitutionalist sociology to new observations and questions.

The particular contribution and future challenge of discursive institutionalist scholarship is to unpack the concepts of decoupling and loose coupling, which have been used as generic terms to depict the total or relative independence of decision-making discourse from decision-making and action in organizational life and nation-state policymaking (Meyer and Jepperson, 2000: 112). By analysing discursive practices in different contexts, the task is to explain how language relates to action, for instance as hypocritical justification (Brunsson, 1989) or as ways to frame and represent policies. Here one might also consult Foucault’s discussion of regimes of practices, which stresses that the intrinsic logic or strategy of a regime cannot be read off from particular programmes of reform or documents that are part of it. Statements and decisions are internal to the workings of a regime of practices and are not their raison d’être (Dean, 1999: 22; Foucault, 1991b).

As has been implied in the discussion above, neoinstitutionalist sociology is also akin to the sociology of knowledge and to social studies of science. That is, in new institutionalism existing theories of the social world are not considered simply as contestants of the neoinstitutionalist account, but rather as frameworks that people apply in making sense of their environment, which guide their conduct and become real when institutionalized into organizational forms. This is captured well by Meyer and Bromley, who stress the role of science in providing a universalistic basis for rules applicable to the domains of natural and social life alike:

Scientization rapidly turns the chaos surrounding human life into articulated uncertainties and structures the proper management of the risks involved. As an instance, scientific analyses of childhood and its problems blossom and provide bases for social organization extending to the global level. New organizations arise, and older ones take on responsibilities for dealing with various dimensions of childhood – health, education, consumption behavior, protection from abuse by families and firms, and so on. (Meyer and Bromley, 2013: 370)

In this instance, and more generally too, sociological institutionalism is indebted to Michel Foucault’s discussion about the power/knowledge couplet. Foucault talks about the way in which the formation of knowledge and the increase of disciplinary power working through surveillance and standardization regularly reinforce one another in a circular process, making possible ‘the formation of clinical medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychology, the rationalization of labour’ (Foucault, 1977: 224). The difference is that neoinstitutionalists talk about this phenomenon in a global context, as part of the formation of the worldwide culture of modernity.

As a strand of cultural sociology, the strength of new institutionalism is that instead of focusing on everyday life, art and entertainment, it treats the core areas of modern society such as science, politics and organizational life as cultural phenomena. That does not mean, however, that it is only relevant to those interested in macro-sociological phenomena. Neoinstitutionalist sociology also makes understandable action in local contexts and the ways that local contexts are intertwined with global ideas and considerations. Furthermore, as Motti Regev (2013) has shown in the case of popular music, the dynamics of global isomorphism at play in the domain of instrumental culture also apply to expressive culture. In the future, more research needs to, and most likely will, be done on how fads spreading in different walks of life synchronize social change on a global scale.