Critical Review
A Journal of Politics and Society
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Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism:
Discourses, Subjects, Power Asymmetries, and
Institutional Change
Oscar Larsson
To cite this article: Oscar Larsson (2019): Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism:
Discourses, Subjects, Power Asymmetries, and Institutional Change, Critical Review, DOI:
10.1080/08913811.2018.1567982
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Oscar Larsson
ADVANCING POST-STRUCTURAL
INSTITUTIONALISM:
DISCOURSES, SUBJECTS, POWER ASYMMETRIES,
AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
ABSTRACT:
Colin Hay’s and Vivien Schmidt’s responses to my previous critical
engagement with their respective versions of neo-institutionalism raise the issue of
how scholars may account for the ideational power of political processes and how
ideas may generate both stability and change. Even though Hay, Schmidt, and I
share a common philosophical ground in many respects, we nevertheless diverge
in our views about how to account for ideational power and for actors’ ability to navigate a social reality that is saturated with structures and meaning. There continues to
be a need for an analytical framework that incorporates discourse and a constitutive
logic based upon the power in ideas. Post-structural institutionalism (PSI) analyzes
discourse as knowledge claims by means of the concept of a constitutive causality,
analytically identified in respect to institutions, such that the substantive content
of ideas/discourse provides ideational power and generates immanent change.
Keywords: constructivist institutionalism; discourses; discursive institutionalism; ideas; neoinstitutionalism; post-structural institutionalism; post-structuralism; power/knowledge.
I greatly appreciate the efforts of Colin Hay and Vivien Schmidt to
respond to the criticism of their views presented in my article “Using
Oscar Larsson,
[email protected], Department of Urban and Rural Development, Box ,
Uppsala, Sweden, is a post-doctoral researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural
Sciences (SLU).
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Post-Structuralism to Explore the Full Impact of Ideas on Politics”
(Larsson b). Both are renowned scholars with busy schedules, and
it is an honor that they were willing to engage in discussion concerning
their respective analytical frameworks and the roles they ascribe to ideational elements and agency in respect to social stability and change.
Schmidt and Hay have done much to pave the way towards a more
comprehensive understanding and acceptance of the roles played by
ideas and discourses. Hay examined the foundations of social constructivism, as well as the causal and constitutive roles that ideas play in political
processes, in his Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction. He observed that
ideas should be accorded a crucial role in political explanation, since actors
behave the way they do because they hold certain views about the social
and political environment they inhabit. Moreover, those ideas cannot
simply be derived from the context itself. . . . Ideas are both real and
have real effects. (Hay , )
Likewise, Schmidt’s article “Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse” substantially advanced discussion of
the role played by both ideas and discourse, making the case that ideational elements, including discursive elements, need to receive proper
attention in political analysis. This publication was groundbreaking in
that it spawned wider recognition of the importance of ideational
elements in mainstream political science. Because of such pioneering
work, I and many fellow social scientists who refer to ourselves as social
constructivists, postmodernists, or post-structuralists enjoy a far better
reputation and acceptance. More importantly, we now have the possibility of engaging in more advanced discussions regarding the various
elements and causal powers possessed by ideas and discourses.
Both Hay and Schmidt have been very influential in introducing ideational dimensions into mainstream political science (Hay , ;
Schmidt , , a, and ). Hay’s constructivist institutionalism (CI) and Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism (DI) have attained an
agenda-setting status, such that scholars critically and explicitly engage
with them order to present contrasting analytical frameworks and findings
or else develop their own. The creators of DI and CI have continued to
develop the basic tenets of these frameworks on the basis of additional
empirical and theoretical insights since the publication of my original
article on the issue (Schmidt b; Schmidt and Thatcher ; Palier
Larsson • Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism
and Hay ; Carstensen and Schmidt ; Hay ). They have thus
responded to certain points I raised, but not all (Schmidt ; Hay ).
It is my intent in the present discussion to clarify our remaining differences
and provide a detailed response to the advances and counter-arguments
that Hay and Schmidt have presented.
My replies to Hay and Schmidt are structured as follows. First, I present
the basic tenets of post-structuralism, a social/political approach that
emphasizes nominalism, intersubjectivism, meaning creation, contingency, and the existence of an intimate relationship between power
and knowledge. While elements of this discussion mirror my previous
description of post-structuralist institutionalism, I now provide a more
thorough philosophical account that specifies the distinctive elements of
this perspective. Second, I revisit my criticism of CI and address Hay’s
reply. This discussion centers, first, on whether ideas should be conceptualized as subjective and/or inter-subjective, and, second, on the degree of
voluntarism we should ascribe to social and political agents situated in a
given institutional context. Third, I turn to DI, focusing on specific conceptualizations of discourse and recent advances concerning how to theorize the relations between power and ideas. Fourth, I bring together
elements of post-structuralism and the concept of institutions in order
to illustrate that a careful combination of the two approaches provides
an analytical framework that accounts for how ideational elements structure the social world and situate agency within contexts that are saturated
with differing layers of meaning.
I. POST-STRUCTURALISM AND THE IMPORTANCE OF A
SOCIAL ONTOLOGY
Post-structuralism is not a discrete theory, but comprises a social philosophy and an approach to the social world that builds on specific ontological and epistemological premises. The social ontology emphasizes the
constitutive function of ideas. It stresses the importance of intersubjectivity and shared meanings, without which there would be no social or cultural reality (Pouliot ; Hacking ; Adler ; Wendt ).
Social kinds exist as socially constructed entities that are upheld by
social, political, and cultural conventions, and they require the active
acceptance and support of actors/individuals by means of intersubjectively
shared meanings (Wendt ; Pouliot ).
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The central claim of post-structuralism is that social inquiry should
recognize the causal power of both observable and unobservable entities.
These may produce change regardless of whether they operate through
individuals’ mental states. A secondary claim is that there is no independent “essence” or “nucleus” in events and objects that determines how
they must be interpreted. They are unstructured; social inquiry is required
in order to understand and explain this post-structural world (Derrida
). While post-structuralism leaves room for new interpretations,
however, it emphasizes the social foundations of the structures that
shape actors and argues that hegemonic discourses and present institutions
might always be disrupted (Foucault , -). In addition, it is very
likely that multiple and contradicting discourses, rationalities, and ideas
are at play at one and the same time in any given setting (Larsson
a). Even if the setting appears to be highly stable, this is only due
to its being located in the eye of the storm. Furthermore, the instability
of our analytical and grammatical concepts is not valid only for ideas (Carstensen ) insofar as all situations are marked by a fundamental heterogeneity, instability, and tension among ideas, actors, and institutions that
may not be recognized by, or even visible to, the actors involved. The
emphasis in post-structuralism upon contingency, heterogeneity, and
power/knowledge reveals that even those situations that appear stable
actually contain hidden conflicts and suppressed voices, such that
change and resistance to current institutional arrangements is always
possible. Laclau and Mouffe (, ) summarize this point by stating
that “neither fixity nor absolute non-fixity is possible,” implying that a
completely static relationship between individuals and institutions is not
possible. Furthermore, since power is not to be equated with domination
and surrender, but rather with struggle, no social situation or institutionalized discourse can ever be completely stabilized (Foucault , ).
Post-structuralists do not search for the essences of things, but rather for
how “things” are constituted through language and meaning-making and
thereby brought into being (Bacchi and Goodwin ; Bacchi ;
Hacking , ). That is to say that we can never know the world
beyond our concepts, knowledge, and existing discourses. We thus
inhabit a world of differences in which language and texts, broadly understood, serve as barriers to signifiers that become interwoven in complex
chains of intertextuality in which a given signifier, concept, or symbol
is intimately connected with others. This leads to the creation of virtually
infinite chains of signifiers, concepts, and symbols. Derrida’s statement
Larsson • Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism
that there is nothing beyond text should be understood metaphorically in
the sense that created meanings, knowledges, and images are as far as we
can go. The firming up of particular social arrangements and the creation
and maintenance of institutions necessarily involves the key element of
social and political power that is reinforced by prominent discourses,
which, in turn, give way to specific institutions. From this perspective, discourse “is a constitutive dimension of social relations” (Griggs and
Howarth , ).
Accordingly, discourse is not reducible to language or communication,
for it consists of socially produced forms of knowledge that establish the
limits of what it is possible to think, write, or say about any given social
object or reality (Panizza and Miorelli , ). Michel Foucault is one
of the more renowned scholars to champion the alternative view of discourse as knowledge claims rather than language and communication,
observing, for example, that “discourse . . . is not a language, plus a
subject to speak it. It is a practice that has its own forms of sequence
and succession” (Foucault , ). Nelson Phillips, Thomas
B. Lawrence, and Cynthia Hardy () state in this regard that institutions are constituted through discourse and it is not action per se that
provides the basis for institutionalization, but rather the texts that describe
and communicate those actions (Phillips et al. ). Discourse thus provides structures and shapes institutional arrangements, including both
formal and informal institutions. One may also argue, without taking a
nihilist stance (Dillet , ), that post-structuralism does not regard
knowledge as “true,” but rather as powerful truth claims or “in the
true” (Bacchi and Goodwin , ).
But are there no agents who inhabit this type of social ontology? An
important theoretical concept in post-structuralism is subject-position,
which explains how subjects come into being through social processes
of subjectification. Subjects, including actors, targets, and identities, are
thereby understood as the effects of politics and the products of powerknowledge relations (Golder ). This particular manner of imagining
political subjects and actors calls into question the more widespread
approach to the rational autonomous individual that is typical of Enlightenment humanism (Bacchi and Goodwin , ). Instead, subjects and
political actors are thoroughly contingent, emergent, and constituted
through discourse and particular institutional contexts. This ontological
approach to emergent subjects is often understood and utilized in
policy analysis in terms of target groups that stand in need of correction,
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support programs, and empowerment management, such as obese adults
and children, the poor, criminal youth, the unemployed, immigrants, and
so forth (Schneider and Ingram ; Hacking ). While social actors
obviously occupy multiple conflicting subject positions, it is important to
note that they are also structurally constrained by others’ perceptions and
denials of recognition (Dagg and Haugaard ).
How, then, can we account for resistance and change? I follow Foucault (, ) in this regard, who argues that we may understand
resistance as a “chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations,
locate their position, and find out their point of application and the
methods used.” This implies that if resistance is a result of power
relations, then a given counter-action itself is a power strategy/relation
that dictates the types of resistance that not only may eventually
prevail, but may even be logically entailed in light of the concrete configurations of discourses/knowledge/power and existing institutions
(Lilja and Vinthagen ). In turn, while “institutions” comprise an
analytical category that is useful for understanding patterned behavior
and the “rules of the game” (North ), institutions are also messy
and contingent. Contestation and change can emerge from within the
instability of those power relations that are produced through discourses
and made manifest in institutions, formal and informal (Beunen and Patterson ). I recognize that we need to think carefully about the roles
that social and political actors play in respect to institutional change,
including the fact that various actors may perceive the same institutions
differently and possess differing abilities/resources to change them.
Much of my controversy with Hay and Schmidt concerns precisely
this issue, namely, the degree of leverage we should ascribe to individuals/actors in respect to institutional change.
Hay and Schmidt describe their motive for introducing their respective
analytical frameworks as dissatisfaction with existing neo-institutional
approaches, insofar as they proved unable to account for institutional
change, at least not without referring to external shocks or disturbances
as the primary cause. Ideas could provide a means of explaining incremental and internal change (Larsson b, ). In the neo-institutional tradition itself, ideas help to explain informal institutions, norms, traditions,
cultures, and ideologies: intersubjective structural elements that are shared
among the various actors but that incline them toward stability rather than
change. Both Hay and Schmidt seek to explain institutional change,
undermining the notion that institutions are necessarily “sticky,” by
Larsson • Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism
introducing subjective ideas, thus challenging the neo-institutional restriction of ideas to intersubjective and thus binding elements of formal and
informal institutions.
II. THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND THE
DANGERS OF VOLUNTARISM
In order to provide the leverage necessary for actors to cause change, Hay
points to “interests” that supposedly are not created by contexts and structures, but rather result from interpretive processes in which actors conceive of their interests and subsequently pursue institutional change.
This understanding of change starts with actors’ ideas (Hay , ).
In a previous text that presents the basic framework of CI, Hay observes
that “ideas in the form of perceptions matter” insofar as they shape the
individual’s orientation towards her context, making it necessary to separate “institutions and ideas of institutions” (Hay , ). He also maintains that perceptions are “socially constructed,” which takes on an
individualistic and subjective cast when individuals’ ideas do the construction. Hay, however, claims that such a reading is unfortunate because, if
my criticism is correct, CI would basically ignore intersubjective elements
and promote a subjectivist view that ushers in voluntarism, which makes
institutional change appear far simpler than it actually is (Hay , ).
Moreover, he argues, “things that are socially constructed (social facts) are
not, and can never be, purely subjective,” adding that there are “important subjective elements to how we encounter, experience and act with
respect to them” (ibid.). Thus, if I am correct in describing CI as subjectivist, then it could not be genuinely constructivist. This summarizes my
concerns perfectly: CI may not be as consistent with social constructivism
as it initially appears to be.
In part, Hay supports his position by reference to a work that was not
yet published at the time of my original article. In this later text (Hay
), he appeals to Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and John Searle,
all of whom are well-known constructivists, arguing that social facts are
different in kind from natural facts, in that they acquire both their facticity
and the ontologically distinct character of that facticity from processes that
are intersubjective rather than subjective. He also maintains in the same
passage that only if something is asocial (that is, purely subjective) and/
or non-contingent (in the sense that it could not be otherwise) is it not
political (Hay , ). Hay then states that he regards this position as
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serving to demonstrate that, as “the focus on social/discursive construction would imply, any genuine constructivism cannot be guilty of the
subjectivist bias Larsson detects” (ibid.). All of this, however, merely
reiterates the social foundations of constructivism by building upon the
notion that social facts, by both definition and necessity, are intersubjective. But my original criticism of CI did not regard the foundations of
social constructivism in general, but rather their relation to the perception
of interests: whether actors subjectively can initiate change by means of
their independent ideas concerning interests, and the extent to which
this entails a voluntarist view of human agency that ignores the sociostructural aspects of human life.
Hay remarks that “social facts are interpreted and interacted with (at
least in part) subjectively,” and that political space is necessarily intersubjective, which supposedly renders all political processes intersubjective
“even if they involve only the clash of narrowly subjective preferences”
(ibid., ff). Hay adds that if we are not to collapse subjectivity into intersubjectivity, as he appears to maintain that I recommend, we need some
conception of subjectivity. To this end, he introduces the notion of intrasubjectivism in order to explain outcomes in a context that is acknowledged to be political and hence intersubjective. By intra-subjective, I
take it that Hay means ideas that, however they might have been acquired
or held, are specific to the individual subject in question, in the sense that
no other subject is assumed to hold them in quite the same way for quite
the same reasons. Put differently, we cannot derive an actor’s (intra-)subjectivity from her social context or conditioning. Actors (even similarly
situated actors) are not, in short, interchangeable (ibid., ff). Hay
argues that intra-subjectivity taken in this sense is “perfectly compatible
with constructivism” (ibid., ), and he asks whether it could be otherwise since political subjects are “at the locus” of decisions involved in
“managing the tradeoffs” between “motivational dispositions” (ibid.,
).
Hay reminds us that even though he uses the familiar notion of perceived interests, he does not regard purely instrumental considerations
associated with the pursuit of self-interest to be of great importance in
motivating political conduct. In this respect, his critique of rationalchoice institutionalism is that actors are not interchangeable, and that
they take into consideration a wide range of motivations for their
actions, including moral, ethical, and sympathetic concerns for the economic, political, and social well-being of others. Actors as reflective
Larsson • Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism
creatures may thus either conform to intersubjective pressures, or place a
greater significance upon one or another motivation for action. The
response and action to which this gives rise is “neither purely intersubjective nor purely intra-subjective, but a product of the interdependence of
the two” (ibid., ). This is an important point that has substantial methodological implications for neo-institutionalism. If we seek to trace institutional change, as well as the power to initiate such change, to individual
actors and their perceptions of interests, we would need to get data about
particular individuals.
Hay argues that if we entertain the view that social and political facts/
things—potentially including institutions as well—are intersubjective by
definition, then we must also investigate whether they somehow exist
on the individual and subjective level. I regard the latter as not necessarily
the case, since institutions are not upheld by individual minds; it is their
intersubjective character that brings them to life and sustains them, regardless of any critical thinking and resistance on the part of individual actors.
Obviously, the claim to have identified a specific institution may be verified by suggestions about how it is sustained by either the mindset or behavior of individual actors. In fact, many informal institutions are not
codified, and they are maintained by the attitudes and actions of social
actors who may have no particular critical perception of them, such as
occurs with gendered norms and racist attitudes. While formal institutions
may be altered by a single legislative or executive decision, the transformation of informal institutions requires gradual change that includes transforming the ways in which most people think and act.
The common feature of all versions of neo-institutionalism is that they
seek to theorize, explain, and understand the relations between structure
and agency. The advance Hay makes in this field is in providing space for
(social) constructivism, ideas, and perceptions of interests. It is interesting
to note in this respect that a recent discussion concerning game theory also
devotes significant attention to cultural and social institutions (Burns et al.
). My criticism of Hay’s position was primarily concerned with the
consequences that follow from the importance it ascribes to individual
ideas and perceptions, or rather, individuals + ideas, which in fact turns
ideas into instruments that can be utilized by individual actors. Jon
Elster, who has supported methodological individualism, makes the ontological claim that “the elementary unit of social life is the individual
human action. To explain social institutions and social change is to show
how they arise as the result of the action and interaction of individuals
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(Elster , ). This observation is useful for restating my criticism,
which is that CI, at least in the manner presented in the texts I originally
investigated, has a marked tendency towards methodological individualism and voluntarism. This reduces both ideational elements and constructivism to individual interpretations and perceptions, thereby ignoring
some of the more prominent propositions of the social ontology that
forms the foundation for social constructivism and post-structuralism
alike.
Hay’s response to my critique thus resides upon a commitment to
social constructivism and the intersubjective character of facts and things
that also provides space for resistance on the part of actors. But this is
nonetheless accompanied by the danger of assigning too much space to
individual abilities to change institutional structures, which is what we
do when we move towards methodological individualism and fail to
include the complex institutional settings of a socially constructed
world. One specific route to institutional change is also omitted,
namely, change as it can be brought about by alternative discourses
through the constitutive effects of discourse upon the social world. I
will provide an example in the concluding section of institutional
change that was generated by changes in the discourses central to security
and crisis management, which illustrates how social actors can be of assistance in a process of substantial institutional change without directly
driving that process forward in a voluntarist fashion.
III. DISCOURSE: A TERM FOR CONFUSION WITHIN NEOINSTITUTIONALISM
At first glance, the fact that Schmidt has developed an analytical framework that she terms “discursive” institutionalism (DI) suggests that my
focus on discourse is redundant. However, there are important differences
between DI and an alternative approach that may be termed post-structural institutionalism (PSI), based on substantially different conceptions
of discourse. These ontological and epistemological differences are relevant to the preceding discussion of intersubjectivity.
Schmidt (, ) regards my claim that DI displays an orientation
towards subjectivism and voluntarism to be unwarranted, insofar as she
herself highlights “the interconnections of the subjective and intersubjective nature of ideas in many different works, empirical as well as theoretical” (Schmidt , ). “Individuals,” she argues,
Larsson • Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism
act within the context of ongoing, existing institutions even as they may
seek to change or maintain them. Background ideational abilities and foreground discursive abilities operate in tandem . . . [making it possible] to
think outside the institutions in which [individuals] continue to act, to
talk about such institutions in a critical way, to communicate and deliberate
about them, to persuade one another to change their minds about their
institutions, and then to take collective action to change them. (Ibid.,
ff)
I argued that this understanding of the “discursive” overemphasizes the
autonomy of reflexive agents’ ideas and actions as well as their usefulness
in explaining change. It also omits subject-position and power asymmetries (Young ; Hendriks ; Mansbridge ). In her reply,
Schmidt (, ) states that she uses the term discourse “because it
spans the divide between the substantive content of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse through its embodiment of both.” Although
she refers to “the benefits of post-structuralism in exploring the
meaning content of discourse in innovative ways” (ibid.), she remarks
in her article that she stripped the word discourse of “postmodernist
baggage to serve as a more generic term” that captures “the interactive
process by which ideas are conveyed” (Schmidt , ). An endnote
in her Critical Review article relates how “discourse” was viewed
by mainstream political scientists as a dangerous word in the late s
and early s. Schmidt says that this “should help explain [her]
comment about using discourse as a generic term ‘stripped of post-modernist baggage’”: the term otherwise would have made political scientists
turn a deaf ear to the importance of ideas altogether (Schmidt , ). She continues: “What I intended to do . . . was to develop an application of the term [discourse] in a manner that was different from the way
in which it had been used before” (ibid., ). One might thus safely say
that DI diverges, quite deliberately, from some of the basic tenets of poststructuralism in that it aims to provide a different notion and application of
the term. I do not understand, then, Schmidt’s unwillingness to agree that
DI presents an understanding of “discourse” that differs significantly from
that which is directly associated with post-structuralism.
Briefly stated, the way in which Schmidt conceptualizes discourse
emphasizes the exchange of ideas and the logic of strategic communicative
action. She remarks in this regard that scholars who speak of discourse
address the representation of ideas (how agents say what they are thinking
of doing) and the discursive interactions through which actors generate
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and communicate ideas (to whom they say it) within given institutional
contexts (where and when they say it) (Schmidt , ). I argued in
response that this conception of discourse leaves out of consideration
important social processes through which actors become specific types
of subjects, which involves what it means to inhabit an identity and a
subject-position shaped by norms and restrictions as well as how that
inevitably shapes one’s ability to engage in strategic communication
(Larsson b; Bacchi and Rönnblom ). Feminist Institutionalism
(FI) has made great progress in this regard by explicitly theorizing how
formal and informal institutions are gendered, requiring us to take into
account how actors’ gendered perceptions of the institutional context
influence their behavior and strategic choices (Chappell and Waylen
; Erikson ). For instance, studies of the Swedish Parliament
have revealed that, in spite of formal rules concerning equality, men
and women have different professional opportunities and encounter a
broad set of norms in their everyday work associated with gender that
dictate their conduct and strategies of speaking and acting (Erikson
). Another current example is the global #MeToo campaign,
which has revealed the very widespread, and even institutionalized, practice of sexual harassment that had previously been blamed on women
rather than men, silencing the former. Who speaks, and from which
subject-position/identity, makes a great difference in institutionalized discourses (Epstein ; Phillips et al. ). If discourse is regarded as comprising knowledge claims, rather than merely as discursive communicative
action, then discourse has different implications for power relations and
resistance than Schmidt is willing to acknowledge.
It would nevertheless be unfair to suggest that she completely ignores
the relations between ideas/discourses and power. In a recent article with
Martin Carstenson, she provides a chart that provides theoretical insight
into how ideas and power may be interrelated in order to clarify the
basic tenets of DI. Carstenson and Schmidt () distinguish three perspectives: power through, power over, and power in ideas. Referring to this
article in her reply to my intervention, she specifies that “ideational
power [is] the capacity of actors (whether individual or collective) to
influence other actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs through the use
of ideational elements. We note that acts of ideational power—whether
successful or not—occur in only a subset of the relations relevant for
understanding how ideas matter, namely when actors seek to influence
the beliefs of others by promoting their own ideas at the expense of
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others (Schmidt , ). She then identifies three ways of theorizing
about the power of ideas and discourse that involve persuasive power
through ideas by means of discourse, coercive power over ideas and discourse, and structural or institutional power in ideas and discourse
(Schmidt , ). Although both power through and power over
ideas give substantial preference to a conception of actors + ideas,
power over ideas can also be used to explain how powerless actors with
limited access to resources can exert influence over others insofar as discursive means can be used to shame powerful actors to act in ways they
otherwise would not have. This is the case with various progressive
social movements, including the #MeToo campaign, when relatively
weak actors persuade powerful actors to change not only their behavior,
but even the “rules of the game.” We may say in such cases that ideational
power levels the field of power relations by means of immaterial resources,
a specific logic of communication, and successful framing and
argumentation.
Powerful examples of change in this respect include the bans on land
mines (Price ) and whaling (Epstein ), as Schmidt notes, but
these in fact serve to showcase the importance of framing and linking
issues to alternative discourses. As such, this requires that the actors in
question are located in circumstances where foreground discursive abilities
prevail, and that they know their interests and concerns, are aware of the
formal and informal contexts they inhabit, and have (probably) tried a
number of different approaches to convince others of their position,
both allies and adversaries. It is also important that those who have the
power to change existing institutions need not take full responsibility
for their existence. Another instance of such a situation concerns the persistence of racial discourses and practices by means of informal institutions,
regardless of the “colorblindness” of formal institutions. For example, the
historical intertwining of colonial and racial dispossession in the United
States continues to play a very large role in the everyday life of AfricanAmericans and other ethnic groups in the country. Racism remains a
pressing issue in spite of the abolition of slavery, the annulment of Jim
Crow laws, the successes of the civil rights movement of the s and
s, and the election of Barack Obama as the first black president in
. Although the Black Lives Matter campaign that was launched in
aims to counter the extreme police brutality against Africans-Americans in the United States as well as socio-economic divisions, both mass
incarceration and deadly violence against unarmed African-Americans
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continue. The March killing of Stephon Clark by police officers,
who fired rounds at him as he was holding a cell phone in his grandmother’s backyard, claiming they feared for their lives, is telling evidence.
Ibram Kendi discusses the persistence of racist ideas and the racial consequences of policies in his Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History
of Racist Ideas in America. He describes how while though there no longer
are any official and formal apartheid structures in the United States, there
is also little investigation into and understanding of norms, attitudes, and
the historical legacy of previous formal and informal institutions (Kendi
). Alyosha Goldstein argues in this regard that anti-discrimination
law, as with jurisprudence in the United States more broadly, serves to
enforce evidentiary logics that weigh against adjudicating systemic culpability. A fundamental premise of such jurisprudence is that discrimination
is a discrete set of identifiable and attributable acts that, even if pervasive
within a government agency or institution, remain external to the logic of
that agency or institution’s purpose (Goldstein ). As a result, each
individual case and each item of antidiscrimination litigation ultimately
reinforces the legitimacy of racialized institutions, along with the social,
economic, and political norms predicated on the corresponding logics.
Since official policy, and most likely foreground discursive abilities as
well, are anti-discriminatory in character, each case or instance of racial
discrimination is regarded as a violation of formal policy, and there is
little willingness to admit the existence of underlying racist attitudes and
related problems. This explains why there is virtually no real change in
spite of overt resistance, awareness, and public debate concerning issues
that are at least as important as whaling or the ban on land mines. This
also illustrates the importance of subject-positions and of who speaks in
relation to prevailing discourses. We should thus be cautious about limiting our understanding and definition of ideational power to the capabilities of the actors involved without accounting for the more complex
interplay of powerful formal and informal discourses.
Schmidt (, ) acknowledges that there is a power in ideas that
may be regarded “as even more ‘powerful’ in some sense than coercive
or structural power.” She maintains, however, that even though this
power may be considered to be structural or institutional in character, it
results from the actions of agents who have established “hegemony
over the production of subject-positions, and [this] is generally the
focus of post-structuralists” (Schmidt , ). She allows that inasmuch
as this position recognizes that such power is a consequence of institutions
Larsson • Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism
imposing constraints upon ideas that agents have to take into consideration, it falls within the domain of historical institutionalism. She and Carstensen thus observe that while other forms of ideational power
concentrate on the interactions between ideational agents, power in
ideas mostly concerns the deeper-level ideational and institutional structures that actors draw upon and relate their ideas to in order for them
to gain recognition from elites and the mass public (Schmidt , ;
Carstensen and Schmidt , -).
It is unclear to me why power in ideas should be restricted to having an
historical and temporal quality. In contrast, post-structuralism regards this
type of power as making possible an exploration of the substantive content
of discourses as knowledge claims that are ever-present, form the basis for
subject-positions and the structuring of the social world, and are continuously being produced. The definition of ideational power provided by
Schmidt thus seems to me to illustrate the central point of my argument:
that DI gives analytical preference to an actor’s ability to influence another
actor’s normative and cognitive beliefs through the use of ideational
elements. As a result, discursive institutionalism, in spite of its name, is
biased towards actors + ideas, with ideas being used instrumentally by
actors in political controversies. This leaves “power in ideas” with little
or no opportunity to cast light upon contemporary institutional change.
For such reasons, I continue to maintain that there is a need for a neoinstitutional framework that starts from the original post-structuralist
understanding of discourse as comprising knowledge claims, such that it
is constitutive of the social world and gives rise to specific institutional
arrangements (Larsson b). The concluding section ties these elements
together and provides a current example of how institutional changes can
stem from discursive alterations.
IV. POST-STRUCTURAL INSTITUTIONALISM IN THE HERE
AND NOW
Why is it a good idea to bring together post-structuralism and neo-institutionalism? Why not stick with unadulterated post-structuralism?
The view that discourse theory primarily provides an analysis of the
power in ideas seems to me to be correct to an extent, revealing some
of the shortcomings of post-structuralist analysis. Thus, on the one
hand, post-structuralists often display great interest in the content and representation of realities but only later add the theoretical element of
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constitutive causality, which can transform a given discourse into a supposedly indisputable social fact without investigating either its intersubjective
or subjective status. While this type of discourse analysis serves to help
reveal knowledge claims (often in texts), it encounters difficulties in
recognizing that a particular discourse may exercise constitutive causality
in particular instances and acquire a hegemonic position. An increasing
number of researchers therefore adopt the view that discourse analysis
needs to be complemented with other methods of empirical research in
order to be able to verify the mechanisms involved in such claims of causality (Marttila ; Bacchi and Goodwin ).
Some post-structuralists argue that the move towards an institutional
framework is not only redundant, but violates the ethos of contingency
in post-structural thought (Bacchi and Rönnblom ). Other scholars
maintain that insofar as both discursive institutionalism and post-structuralist discourse theory comprise discursive approaches to the study of politics, they can mutually enrich their each other’s frameworks (Panizza and
Miorelli ). In this respect, David Moon proposes that it is possible to
move towards a post-structural institutionalism by integrating a variety of
“discursive-constructivist approaches” (Moon ).
I have endeavored throughout the present discussion to illustrate how
post-structural institutionalism, in contrast to Moon’s framing, involves
particular ontological and epistemological disagreements with both CI
and DI that cannot be reduced to simply growing “tissue on the bones”
(Moon ). This is why I am inclined to use the term post-structural
institutionalism rather than constructivist or discursive institutionalism
(to add to the confusion, that latter term was already in use prior to
Schmidt’s adoption of it; see Campbell and Pedersen , ). Terminology aside, the key advantage of combining post-structuralism with an
institutional framework is that we can thereby substantiate the claims
that a given discourse possesses constitutive causality, and that its relative
influence is manifested through formal and informal institutions. We can
also then argue that evidence of the power or weakness of a given discourse is provided by its relative institutionalization, which illustrates
how individual perceptions, actions, and resistance become structured
in relation to the substantive content of discourses (Phillips et al. ).
Theories of institutional change need to account for how discourse as
knowledge claims affects the actors who navigate and potentially alter
institutional arrangements. Different actors will obviously possess diverse
capabilities for engaging in institutional change (Alasuutari ;
Larsson • Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism
Epstein ; Bisschops and Beunen ). While political, economic,
and intellectual elites enjoy significant resources, have access to knowledge, engage in ongoing analysis, and may critically contemplate the
rules of the game (Parsons , ), those who are uninformed, vulnerable, and opposed to the dominant ideas and discourses may possess
meager resources for changing existing structures and institutions in
spite of any foreground discursive abilities they may have. Focusing on
resourceful elites who are consciously engaged in either institutional
change or maintaining the status quo tends to overemphasize voluntarism
and methodological individualism, such that all social and political actors
are regarded as able to think in terms of structures/agents and act as institutional entrepreneurs (Battilana et al. ). More importantly, the complexity of the interplay between discourses and institutions often hinders
attempts to strategically engage with, manipulate, and control the effects
of new ideational elements, regardless of any attempts to alter either discourses or institutions (Beunen and Patterson ). We thus need a more
nuanced understanding of who is in fact able to bring about institutional
change and how.
Such an understanding can be fostered by incorporating post-structuralist notions of discourse and subject-position without ignoring the perceptions of interest emphasized by CI or the discursive action
emphasized by DI, which can be useful to a degree in explaining
certain types of institutional change. It should be noted that the relative
importance of these various factors may differ from case to case, which
has been illustrated by the various examples that Hay, Schmidt, and I
have provided in presenting our respective theoretical positions.
Perhaps it is therefore time to move the focus of discussion to empirical
investigation and take advantage of the various insights garnered from
examining particular cases of institutional change, in which perceptions
of interests, the logic of communication, or discourse as knowledge
claims may be dominant depending on the circumstances. One
example from my own research illustrates the potential importance of
the latter.
After the end of the Cold War, Sweden adopted a broader understanding of security that shifted attention from national security,
defense of borders, and military capability to societal and human security.
This change might very well have been impossible if analysis of the geopolitical situation had not indicated that the risk of war in the near future
was low (Larsson a, -). In turn, this new conception of security
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made it possible for critical security scholars, through the application of
securitization theory, to direct attention to security objects that differed
from those with which the state had previously been concerned
(Buzan et al. ).
Securitization theory maintains that issues, objects, and processes can be
securitized by means of speech acts that become accepted by a given audience. The move away from strategic military studies to societal security
also invited the participation of a broad set of private actors who either
managed social issues or sought to contribute to the development of
new governance strategies, marking a transition from the use of administrative hierarchies to the use of networks within a political field that had
traditionally been characterized by the exercise of sovereign and absolute
power (Larsson a). In addition, this more general change altered the
politics of citizenship. Prior to the acceptance of a broader concept of
security, the rationality of the state in large part remained consistent
with the ideas of Hobbes and other social contract theorists insofar as it
centered on its responsibility to prevent harm to citizens. The process
of responsibilization now underway in Sweden, which is led by the
public authorities, instead promotes the view that capable individuals
are not to presume that the state will immediately provide assistance in
times of crisis or emergency, but should rather be prepared to contribute
resources in order to unburden the state and public agencies so that the
crisis management system can function more effectively (Rådestad and
Larsson ). These fundamental alterations in the legal framework, governance, and governmentalities are incorporated in both formal and informal institutions that regulate policies and practices in this field. More
importantly, these changes have resulted neither from actors proceeding
in accordance with their perceived interests, nor from public debates
among conflicting voices. They have instead emerged through the
gradual public acceptance of a new security concept that was initially
developed by critical security scholars who sought to direct greater attention to human rather than state security and foster a clearer understanding
of the social construction of security and security objects. The case in
point makes clear how substantial formal and informal changes can take
place due to discursive alterations that in themselves possess an enabling
logic such that social actors do not have to fall back upon perceived interests or engage in discursive conflict. One caveat in this respect is that there
are very large differences among various political fields, and that security
and crisis management are typically not subject to public debate. This
Larsson • Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism
places more or less all social actors in the same situation insofar as everyone
wishes to be secure and live in a society that is safe and resilient.
It seems to me that we need to further diversify the notion of institutional change by taking into consideration the interplay between
formal and informal institutions and their respective degrees of flexibility
in respect to change. We also need to address how the various subjects
involved either change or sustain the rules of the game; the ways in
which power asymmetries intermingle with ideational elements; and,
most importantly, how change is constant and immanent both within separate and across multiple discourses. For the subject content of such ideational elements as discourses may generate processes of institutional
change in which social actors provide assistance rather than directly
drive changes forward in a subjectivist and voluntarist fashion.
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