print“Institutionalism”:
Towards an Interpretation of the Term in Sociology
Popov N.G.
PhD Student, HSE University; Senior researcher, Public Opinion Foundation, Moscow, Russia ng.popov@hse.ru
Popov N.G. “Institutionalism”: Towards an Interpretation of the Term in Sociology. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2025. No 11. P. 149-161
The a rticle i s devoted to defining the boundaries of applicability and the research potential of the term “institutionalism” in sociology. It is shown that the economic and political science interpretations of institutionalism are inadequate for sociology. The economic interpretation covers only economic constructions that take into account the role of institutions in modeling economic behavior. Such an understanding is too narrow for sociology and designates only a very small part of sociological theory dealing with institutions. The political science interpretation, on the contrary, encompasses the entire range of theoretical frameworks that consider the influence of institutions on social reality, regardless of their disciplinary origin. This interpretation is too broad and embraces almost the whole of sociological theory, making it impossible to use the term as a meaningful marker. At the same time, it is argued that a distinct sociological interpretation of institutionalism can be useful for systematizing research programs that study institutions and for analyzing the relationships among these programs. A possible sociological reconstruction of institutionalism is proposed – as a set of research programs that employ a developed concept of the institution, or a closely related formal analogue, to explain social reality. This interpretation places specific requirements on the role of the institution within a research program in order for it to be regarded as a form of institutionalism: the program must (1) possess welldeveloped conceptual frameworks for describing the content of institutions, their dynamics, and their influence on the individual and on social processes; (2) provide the possibility of operationalizing the key concepts of the theory; and (3) have an established practice of applying these conceptual constructions to the interpretation of empirical facts.
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