Steps towards a theory of institutional stability and change as dialectically related opposites

This paper argues that recent attempts to transform and/or extend new institutional theory to explain institutional change fail to overcome new institutionalism's limited capacity to deal with the question of change for two reasons. First, there is a tendency to preserve the dualism of structural constraint and free agency. Second, they tend to rely on functionalist explanations to account for institutional change. It is argued that a social constructionist theory of institutional change that frames institutional stability and change as dialectically related opposites has the potential to overcome these two significant shortcomings. Mainly drawing upon Berger & Luckmann (1967)'s seminal account of social constructionism, which paradoxically forms an important part of new institutional theory's microsociological underpinnings, the paper identifies and explores 10 sources of institutional stability. These sources are developed into a proposition framework for institutional stability analysis that can be used to explore questions of institutional change. The application of this framework to the everyday example of 'queuing' is used to illustrate the paper's main contention that it is through stability analysis that specific institutional change sequences can be better understood.