Reconfiguring Institutions across Time and Space Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation

by Sil, Rudra; Galvan, Dennis

• ISBN13: 9781403978172
• ISBN10: 1403978174
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This volume explores the unanticipated consequences of emulating, importing, or imposing new institutional models without commensurate attention to the particular constellations of interests, identities, norms, and social relations embedded in local communities. Each chapter is organized around a common problematic that has received only limited attention in the literature on institutional change: the dilemmas of deploying the rules, practices, and design of institutions that have been imported or imposed from external environments in regions where actors are more familiar with and find more legitimate locally embedded norms, practices, social relations, and knowledge structures. The volume strives to illustrate the analytic power of the concept of 'syncretism,' a concept that can be fruitfully deployed to analyze common aspects of institutional change not easily captured in existing frameworks.

Author Biography

Dennis Galvan is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies, University of Oregon.

Rudra Sil is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania.

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Notes on Contributors	p. xi
List of Abbreviations	p. xiv
Introduction
The Dilemma of Institutional Adaptation and the Role of Syncretism	p. 3
Political Institutions
Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Rural Senegal	p. 33
Institutional Syncretism and the Chinese Armed Forces	p. 61
Syncretism in Argentina's Party System and Peronist Political Culture	p. 83
(En)Durable Syncretism: Hizballah in the "Space Between"	p. 114
Economic and Social Institutions
The Dynamics of Institutional Adaptation and the Fruitful Emergence of Managerial Syncretism in Japan	p. 139
Legal Syncretism and Family Change in Urban and Rural China	p. 164
Working is Celebrating: The Syncretic Politics of Labor Transformation in Rural Zambia	p. 188
Pathways of Institutional Diffusion under Leninism: A Historical Comparison of Romania and Hungary	p. 205
Brazils 1964-67 Economic Stabilization Plan as Institutional Syncretism	p. 225
Index	p. 245
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