Much social science still fails to employ a now standard philosophical and scientific conceptualization of levels of analysis.In so doing, it still largely avoids the multilevel reasoning appropriate for social science, instead maintaining dogmatic attachments to one or another level of analysis, especially an individual-level one.

An analysis of the nature of modern “actors” or actorhood.Offers direct arguments about how the modern (European, now global) cultural system constructs the modern actor as an authorized agent for various interests. Seeing modern actorhood in this way helps greatly in explaining a number of otherwise anomalous or little analyzed features of modern individuals, organizations, and states.

Clarification of the ideas of institution, institutionalization, and institutionalism.Conceives of institutions as controlling patterns of widely varying sorts, relevant to the explanation of, and stabilization of, the behavior of the full range of modern actors.

Discusses empirical examples showing how the preference for individual-level explanation – that is, for psychological, social-psychological, and microeconomic explanation – has limited the explanation of a wide range of macrosocial outcomes: of European economic history, of postindustrial development, of world economic development and globalization generally.

Presents the main arguments of sociological neoinstitutionalism in the areas of organizations, states, and identities.Illustrates the arguments with empirical research conducted through the year 2000.

A new basic introduction to “sociological neoinstitutionalism,” placing the line of thought in intellectual context, and discussing the linkages of the core ideas to empirical research.

Works in detail through important empirical examples – including a canonical one from Max Weber – showing how supra-individual social causal processes often provide more sensible depictions of historical processes than do cumbersome ones imagining highly autonomous individual and organizational actors.

Much contemporary social science still imagines a “society without culture,” and still works with limited conceptions of institutions that understate their effects.

Actors and social structures in retrospect. The remarkably unrealistic qualities still attributed to individuals, organizations, and states in much contemporary social science.

The cultural frameworks organizing social activity in three distinct periods within the postwar era:embedded liberalism, neoliberalism, and now an emergent postliberal period. As institutional theories were useful in analyzing the effects of liberal models, they are likely to be useful in understanding waves of postliberalism.