Institution Building for Social and Organizational Change: An Appreciation

Abstract

The study of institution building and institutionalization has engaged the attention of a variety of scholars from several disciplines. However, institution building as a distinct body of knowledge has emerged only in the last decade. The bulk of the literature has been put together as a result of the efforts of a consortium of American scholars working within a common framework developed in the context of aid to the less developed countries through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Unfortunately, while this literature has done much to provide considerable guidance and thrust to institution-building (IB) efforts, it has the danger of producing a cleavage in the social science contributions to this area. True to the spirit in which the various scholars developed the IB model in the United States, this paper attempts to synthesize various relevant streams in this important area of human endeavour. In doing so, it goes beyond the existing models and reports a general processual model of institution building rooted in empirical work. The new model has implications for change at both organizational (microsystem) and social (macrosystem) levels.