The focus on institutions as a foundation concept in the social sciences has given rise to a variety of new institutionalist approaches. Not since the behavioral revolution of the 1950s has there been so much interest in a cross-disciplinary concept; one that offers a common theme for exchange and debate. The writings of Ronald Coase, Douglass North, and Oliver Williamson on the endogenous emergence and evolution of economic institutions have inspired a broadly based movement in economics. In sociology, neoinstitutionalists—principally John Meyer, Richard Scott, Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell—have redirected the study of organizations by analyzing how institutional environment and cultural beliefs shape their behavior. In a parallel shift of analytic attention, economic sociologists—Neil Fligstein, Richard Swedberg and I—argue for a new focus to explain how institutions interact with social networks and norms to shape and direct economic action. The common starting point of these approaches is the claim that institutions matter and that understanding institutions and institutional change is a core agenda for the social sciences.

This essay does not seek comprehensiveness in its coverage of the new institutionalisms in the social sciences. 1 Instead I focus selectively on the new institutionalisms in economics and sociology as a means to lay out core features of a New Institutional Economic Sociology, which brings back into the research agenda a crucial