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cussednesses and controversies in social sciences. The ‘ontological antinomies’ for
Jessop are those of ‘structural determination and social agency’, ‘holism and
individualism’, and ‘necessity and contingency’. However institutions, as the loci of
‘the necessarily contingent and contingently necessary’, are explicitly about mesolevel
phenomena. They are almost middle passages for microphenomena and macrosocial
mechanisms inside a truly sociological thinking. Epistemologically, institutional
analysis rebuffs the cul-de-sac of ‘abstract-concrete’, ‘simple-complex’, empiricism-
meta theory, and ‘idiographic-nomothetic’ abstractions. And methodologically,
institutional middle-rangeness would extenuate the strictly ‘anascopic(bottom-up)’ or
‘katascopic(top-down)’ methods, and strictly globalist or localist analyses of spatial
and scalar phenomena. Ontological institutionalism on the other hand is decidedly
more radical than the first two institutionalist makeovers. Here collective
socialisation is explainable on the basis of institutions and institutionalisation alone.
Unlike in methodological institutionalism, the latter are not merely robust terminus a
quo for the analysis of socioeconomic routines. Further research on microsocial or
macrosocial elements and circumstances as such is redundant in the ontological
method. Thereby institutions are the only prodigious units of analysis because these
anticipate ‘the ways things are to be done if they are to be done, as path-dependent
path-defining complexes of social relations, as the macrostructural matrices of
societies and social formations’(Jessop 2001:1217). Plainly theoretical models for
already-at-large instituted inclusive social networks prior to any politics/political
ontology of institutionalisation concomitantly extinguishes any further research into
the empirical circumstances of the inaugural design or real-time ongoingness of
institutions.
Jessop’s model of threefold institutionalisms contrasts with Cammack(1990)’s
arguments on ‘new institutionalism’ to a certain degree. Even though both figures
analyse the general patterns of institutionalist thinking as a historically specific effort
at theoretical soul-searching and as part of an immediate yet larger diorama of
transformations within the social sciences, the modalities of institutionalism in Jessop
more explicitly expatiate on the strategic terms and the inadvertent consequences of
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