Between 1900 and 1925, the American economy witnessed a remarkably successful effort to upgrade competition through associations. Unlike the prevailing interpretation of American industrialization, in which associations fell prey to antitrust and collective action problems, we find many associations that reinvented themselves from cartels to developmental associations. This transition marked two previously unrecognized varieties in economic institutions. In the first, associations joined markets and corporate hierarchies to create variety in American capitalism. In the second, associations used deliberation, cost accounting, and (...) benchmarking to enhance productivity and create varieties of collective governance. This article explains the origins of developmental associations, outlines their principles, traces their implementation in the commercial printing industry, and surveys their distribution and performance effects across 344 industries. Based on these findings, we revise conventional institutionalist assumptions about order and agency to make room for institutional diversity and actors’ capacities for reflexivity and learning. (shrink)

Hidden within the office of the Secretary of War during World War II was a little-known agency called the Advisory Specialist Group. Strategically located between the laboratory, the factory, the battlefield, and civilian bureaucracy, the ASG solved the complex problem of reconciling new technologies and new military operations. In doing so, it combined incongruous domains of activity, contributed to Allied victory, and opened a channel to the problem-solving state. It is easy to overlook or misunderstand the ASG, because it was (...) born in processes, addressed problems, and took a form unfamiliar to historical institutionalists. Drawing on Padgett and Powell’s networked theory of organizational genesis and pragmatist theories of experimentalist governance, this article explains the ASG’s emergence, networked form, and experimentalist procedures. A founding moment for the problem-solving state, this case provides empirical and theoretical guidance to study its historical and ongoing evolution. (shrink)

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. (shrink)