On the Virtues of the Old Institutionalism

Abstract

Institutions are staffed and are created to do the job of regulating organizations. This staffing, and all the creative work that is involved in financing, governing, training, and motivating institutional actions by that staff in organizations, has been lost in recent institutional theorizing. This staffing was central to the old institutionalism, which is why it looked so different. The argument is exemplified by applying the insights of classical institutionalists to the legitimacy of court decisions as determined by the law of evidence, to the legitimacy of competition and the destruction of other organizations by competition, to the noncontractual basis of contract in commitments to maintain competence to do the performances required in contracts, and to the failure of institutions of capitalist competition and the substitution of mafia-like enforcement of contracts in postcommunist Russia. The institutions of the new institutionalism do not have enough causal substance and enough variance of characteristics to explain such various phenomena.