Contrasting origins of the two institutionalisms: the social science context

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Abstract
Work of institutionalists, both old and new, is usually compared to that of other economists. Here it is compared to developments in other social sciences. Old institutionalism is based on a strategy of seeing mankind as product of culture; old institutionalism is part of culture-based twentieth-centry social science. New institutionalism has developed in a peiord when the trend is to favour a view of mankind as ‘rational chooser’. In part this trend reflects an adoption of the models of neoclassical economics by other social scientists. Parallels in the development of the new institutionalism and the development of choice-focussed approaches in other social sciences are too many and too close to be coincidental, but there are no simple explanations of why the two developments are so similar. Comparison of the two contexts does, however, allow clarification of debates over rationality and endogeneity of institutions. It also leads to the conclusion that the questions aksed in the two institutionalisms are so difference that there is no common measure of the effectiveness of the old and new institutionalisms.