An Explanatory Division of Labor Strategy : Integrating Institutionalist Approaches to Understand Power, Meaning, and Institutional Change

The institutionalist approach in the social sciences has yielded significant achievements in understanding institutional functions and the reproduction of socio-political order. However, the foundational formulations and dominant branches of neo-institutionalism face serious limitations in providing a comprehensive explanation of institutional change. These limitations primarily stem from the assumption that institutions are relatively stable sets of rules, procedures, and established patterns of action. Consequently, they lack the explanatory power required to grasp the normative, semantic, discursive, and gendered dimensions of institutional life. By redefining institutions as multi-layered and complex phenomena, this study raises two questions: why do dominant institutionalist approaches struggle to explain gradual, endogenous, and semantic-discursive institutional changes, and how can this gap be bridged through a systematic synthesis of classical and recent approaches? Employing documentary research and a critical review of neo-institutionalist literature, the analytical capacities and limitations of each institutionalist branch are examined. Findings demonstrate that while each approach possesses specific analytical sensitivity toward a particular layer of institutional reality, none independently offers a comprehensive picture of institutional dynamics. Accordingly, the “Explanatory Division of Labor Strategy” is proposed as a model for institutionalist research. Rather than an unsystematic integration of approaches, this strategy assigns specific domains of research questions and explanatory capacities to each layer. It enables institutions to be understood as complex configurations of rules, meanings, interests, power relations, and historical processes, thereby providing a more robust framework for studying institutional stability, resilience, and change.