Institutions are essentially temporal, in the sense that, definitionally, they endure. Setting aside the conventional understanding of a historical institutionalism, we focus on the interplay of institutions and temporality. The chapter begins with a conception of time that is complex and social, and identifies four concepts amenable to deeper exploration: duration, tempo, and “temporal location,” which itself involves distinct notions of sequencing and timing. Institutions shape and are shaped by all of these aspects of temporality. The chapter surveys a range of institution-theoretic analyses, combining them in myriad ways via more complex notions such as the power of the institutional status quo, institutional intercurrence, punctuated equilibrium, critical junctures, and path dependence. While temporal approaches offer limited leverage on institutional origins, they show great strength in accounting for dynamic persistence and change, especially insofar as they supply means of understanding the layering and corresponding multiplicity of institutions of distinct temporal profiles operating at any given moment in social life.

The Conclusion begins by summarizing the extensive terrain surveyed in Chapters 2–5 on key concepts of sociality, temporality, (in)efficiency, and power, and aggregates findings on institutional origins, maintenance, and change. It then brings work under different conceptual headings into dialogue and identifies many opportunities for mutual enrichment across schools, traditions, and approaches. With respect to the endogeneity problem, our wide-ranging engagement with a number of literatures show it to present local problems, but not a general threat. Indeed, the four concepts together reveal institutional causal autonomy to be overdetermined across a huge number of conditions. Finally, the chapter holds no expectation of, nor does it advocate the pursuit of, a unified theory of institutions. Instead, it sees ample room for mutually intelligible work relying on a “fish-scale model of omniscience,” with unique specialties exhibiting just enough tangency with other work to sprawl continuously across the social sciences.

The human condition teems with institutions, yet scholarly attention ebbs and flows, and scientific progress proceeds unevenly. After almost half a century of “new institutionalisms,” the time has come to take stock of the vast literature, and to identify existing strengths and new opportunities. Building on dozens of conceptions of institutions from across the social sciences, Theories of Institutions defines them as “intertemporal social arrangements that shape human relations in support of particular values.” By definition, institutions endure and institutions are intersubjective. But they are also consequential, impacting aggregate human welfare and very often shaping distributional outcomes. Setting up key concepts of temporality, sociality, (in)efficiency, and power, on which the heart of the book focuses, the Introduction also articulates a set of common questions around institutional origins, maintenance, and change to be addressed throughout. Such analysis promises to shed new light on the dual nature of institutions as human constructs and human constraints, and to identify promising avenues for interdisciplinary dialogue.

Rejecting the notion, endorsed by John Searle, of an “individual institution,” this chapter treats them as inherently social, and expresses no surprise that institutions have formed a central focus of sociological analysis since the discipline's founding. Engaging especially with work in the area of organizational theory and, beyond sociology, organizational and management studies, this chapter identifies an underlying dimension along which the literature can be arrayed, running from (macro, structural) scripts to (more micro, agentic) skills, as embodied in work by John Meyer and Neil Fligstein, respectively. Between these endpoints, this chapter identifies not only a similarly well-known Scandinavian institutionalism associated with March and Olsen and focusing on the microfoundation of bounded rationality, but also literature on institutional logics and institutional work emerging from business and management programs and only now starting to impact the broader social sciences. Beyond traditional strengths in explaining institutional maintenance, work in these idioms is making real progress in accounting for institutional origins and change.

The conventional (political science) account of three new institutionalisms created no distinctive space for power, which has correspondingly been treated in a scattershot fashion across a wide range of schools and approaches. This chapter extracts power from its conceptual entanglements and identifies a number of ways in which it shapes and is shaped by institutions. While very strong power-centered approaches leave little space for autonomous institutional effects, even small wedges of separation can position institutions as intervening or moderating variables, while deeper institutionalization can reverse their causal priority. Beyond causal relations, “institutionalized power” binds the two at a deeper, constitutive level. The chapter ranges widely for applications, going beyond self-identified theories of institutions to draw on examples from the French Revolution, international relations, totalitarianism, “weapons of the weak,” the control of violence, politeness, and other issues that spotlight still-untapped possibilities for studying power and institutions. Not surprisingly, sharpening the focus on power also yields new insights into institutional origins, stability, and change.

Institutions produce social effects, and one vocabulary for thinking about these effects derives from economics and focuses on efficiency and inefficiency. Neoclassical economics held little space for institutions, beyond the sparest notion of uncoerced market exchange. Over the course of the twentieth century, problems associates with transaction costs, bounded rationality, strategic interaction, and puzzles of macroeconomic growth called forth welfare-impacting institutions. Beyond merely impacting incentives (e.g., by economizing on transaction costs), institutions came to play a central role in explaining thorny problems such as collective action and credible commitment. We survey a range of applications in economics or working broadly within its rational choice framework which speak to the increasing centrality of theories of institutions in explaining central social outcomes such as development. Efficiency approaches to institutional origins are superficially attractive, modeling them as choice outcomes, but can slip easily into problematic post hoc ergo propter hoc functionalism. By contrast, they show real comparative strength in accounting for institutional stability and change.

The thematic core of this book involves changes in the territorial basis of politics resulting from broader social, political, and economic changes in the domestic and global political economies. We focus in particular on changes in the territorial organization of authority in the modern state. One of the documents we read at the beginning of this project was titled “Beyond Center and Periphery or the Unbundling of Territoriality” (Ansell and DiPalma 1998). In an effort to galvanize our energies into a collective project, this paper enjoined us to examine ways in which contemporary territorial structures of authority could be “unbundled” or “unpacked” so as better to understand changing configurations of power and authority in the modern state.

In part, this guidance was motivated by an emerging literature on the “new medievalism” (Anderson 1996) as well as by persistent critiques that contemporary research in comparative and international politics was state-centric and caught in a “territorial trap” (Agnew 1994). Just as the transition to the Westphalian order involved a consolidation of rule and territory, so the neomedieval turn implies a loosening of the ties among authority, sovereignty, and territory.

The medieval model of rule was marked by three integrated properties of governance. Governance was parcellized and personalized in use and function and aspatial in its underlying conception and physical organization. Parcellization implies no overarching system of rule for all subject matters. Separate authorities existed within the same physical space, without clearly demarcated jurisdictions.