Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

Institutions Within Which Real Actors Innovate
Colin Crouch
Neo-institutionalist analysis has been highly successful at both making possible
a critique of neo-classical accounts, and rendering analytical an approach
which might otherwise lapse into narrative empiricism. It has also
established the importance of institutions among the characteristics of national
economies which confer comparative advantage (Hall/Soskice 2001a:
36–44). This has further made possible analysis of the diversity of contemporary
capitalism, challenging the view that capitalism must mean perfect
markets, with empirical variations from this ideal implying imperfections
which will disappear through competitive struggle.
However, in its currently dominant forms neo-institutionalism embodies
two flaws which limit its application and distort its conclusions. The first is
a conflation of theoretical models and empirical cases through a research
strategy of seeking the unique theoretical box to which an individual case
shall be assigned. The second is a tendency to ignore human actors’ capacities
to react creatively to constraints imposed by their institutions. The two
flaws come together in that the seamless web of institutional coherence implied
by the former leaves agents no scope to practise creativity.
Neo-institutionalist theory is therefore ripe for confrontation with the arguments
developed by Renate Mayntz and Fritz Scharpf in their concept of
actor-centred institutionalism. This provided a balanced approach. On the
one hand it did not follow neo-classical economics into elaborate but abstract
theories in which institutional constraints and particularities were assumed
away. At the same time – and this is more important for our present
task – it did not reify institutional constraints to the point where they denied
the role of maximizing, if boundedly rational and imperfectly knowledgeable,
collective and individual agents. The Mayntz/Scharpf model: