4.4 Identifying a conceptual framework
I have produced what is becoming a long list of concepts that are important in helping us to understand institutions and institutional development:
- rules and norms
- meanings and values
- big players
- compliance
- shared experience
- individual agency
- institutional contradictions
- relationships
- power
- levels of action: macro, meso, micro.
I want to draw this course’s studies to a close by suggesting you can treat this set of concepts – or, indeed, any other set you might have created – as a conceptual framework. By ‘conceptual framework’ I mean that these concepts can be connected with each other, enabling you to look at institutions and institutional development in a disciplined and powerful fashion.
I will illustrate what I mean by using these concepts to analyse a particular institutional landscape that I’ve needed to understand in my own work.