Reconfiguring Institutions Across Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation (Political Evolution and Institutional Change)

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. Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Front Matter....Pages 1-1 The Dilemma of Institutional Adaptation and the Role of Syncretism....Pages 3-29 Front Matter....Pages 31-31 Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Rural Senegal....Pages 33-60 Institutional Syncretism and the Chinese Armed Forces....Pages 61-82 Syncretism in Argentina’s Party System and Peronist Political Culture....Pages 83-113 (En)Durable Syncretism: Hizballah in the “Space Between”....Pages 114-136 Front Matter....Pages 137-137 The Dynamics of Institutional Adaptation and the Fruitful Emergence of Managerial Syncretism in Japan....Pages 139-163 Legal Syncretism and Family Change in Urban and Rural China....Pages 164-187 Working is Celebrating: The Syncretic Politics of Labor Transformation in Rural Zambia....Pages 188-204 Pathways of Institutional Diffusion under Leninism: A Historical Comparison of Romania and Hungary....Pages 205-224 Brazil’s 1964–67 Economic Stabilization Plan as Institutional Syncretism....Pages 225-244 Back Matter....Pages 245-250 This book examines how novel institutional forms emerge when actors creatively reinterpret and reconfigure imported or imposed institutional models, using case studies from East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. This book examines how novel institutional forms emerge when actors creatively reinterpret and reconfigure imported or imposed institutional models, using case studies from East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America Edited By Rudra Sil And Dennis Galvan.