Institutional (Re)Turns and the Strategic-Relational Approach

This online paper may be cited or briefly quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. You may also download them for your own personal use. This paper must not be published elsewhere (e.g. to mailing lists, bulletin boards etc.) without the author's explicit permission. Please note that if you copy this paper you must: • include this copyright note • not use the paper for commercial purposes or gain in any way • you should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form: Bob Jessop, 'Institutional (Re)Turns and the Strategic-Relational Approach', published by The institutional turn can be defined in very broad and loose terms as the more or less consistent elaboration of the intuition, hypothesis, or discovery that 'institutions matter' in one or more theoretical, empirical, or practical contexts where their existence and/or relevance had previously been overlooked, denied, or ignored. (1) This definition does not take us very far, however, because there can be many forms of institutional turn. There is wide variation in how institutions are defined, the respects in which they are held to matter, and the reasons for suggesting that they do. The institutional turn can also refer to the personal intellectual trajectories of individual scholars; to general developments within a particular approach regardless of individual proponents; and to changes in the relative weight of different approaches in a broader disciplinary field – or even in the social sciences more generally. Thus one can say that a scholar makes an institutional turn when she rejects her earlier, essentialist account of patriarchy and examines the institutional specificities and dynamics of different gender regimes; that neo-classical economics made an institutional turn when it adopted a transaction costs approach to explain the problematic existence of the firm as an economic institution; that political science as a discipline made an institutional turn when interest in individual or group political behaviour and/or structural functionalism began to lose favour with the growth of neo-institutionalism on the grounds that political choice occurs in specific institutional contexts and/or that functions are always institutionally mediated; and that the social sciences as a whole have grown more interested in institutions in the last two