New Institutional Analysis

Abstract

New institutionalism emerged in the 1980s as an alternative to old functional institutionalism. It focuses on the importance of informal actions on the persistence of institutions through time, discovering institutional underlying patterns and processes. The new institutionalism tends to reduce variety, operating across organizations to override diversity in local environments. The mentioned elements derive legitimacy from more symbolic elements, sensible to cultural forms and cognitive models rather than from the discursive reason. The concept of agency emerged as the answer to the question of how to improve public institutions with the emphasis on larger autonomy, flexibility, performance, and more direct contact with the environment and citizen's needs. The agency's apparent hybrid nature based on private-sector methods could gain some advantage when formal goals would be not only quasi but de facto optimised with practice when the agency's autonomy and independence are balanced with control and accountability.