Economic Institutions and Institutional Change

Abstract

Interest in the institutions that structure economic behavior has a long history in sociology, extending back to the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Polanyi. With the rise of new economic sociology in the 1980s, scholars have direct renewed attention toward the informal and formal rules and conventions that structure economic life. Money, financial markets, complex organizations, and economic policies have received particular attention. One branch of scholarship in this area focuses on uncovering factors that drive the emergence or development of economic institutions. Another branch of scholarship examines the role of institutions in structuring economic behavior. A third line of research takes up the puzzle of institutional change: how stable economic conventions crumble and come to be replaced with new ones. The present article offers a broad survey of scholarship on economic institutions, with a particular focus on institutional variation and institutional change.