The Plurality of Institutional Approaches and Difficulties of Scholarly Communication

Abstract

Over the past decades, the development of institutional studies has become one of the main directions in the social sciences. Does everything in the organization of science contribute to this research? The main objective of the article is to analyze and assess factors that can have a negative impact on the growth of scientific knowledge about institutions. The first section discusses approaches to the growth of scientific knowledge, the role of scholarly communications in it, and the structure of the conceptual apparatus of scientific research programs. Some features of the competition among research programs that might hinder the growth of knowledge are also analyzed in the first section. The second section examines the variety of institutional approaches and manifold research initiatives and communication processes that derive from them. The third section is devoted to the analysis of microfoundations in economics and organizational science. In the fourth section we analyze approaches to the study of various economic institutions within the framework of organizational institutionalism. The features of the conceptual apparatus of organizational institutional theory and the specifics of its impact on the implemented approaches to the microfoundations of institutions are characterized. It is assumed that the research program of organizational institutionalism contains composite concepts with a heterogeneous content, it may result in the lack of operational definitions. This feature, together with the limited scholarly communications, determines the presence of artificial scientific problems which hinder the growth of scientific knowledge both in the framework of this research program and in the study of institutions in general.