The Dilemma of Institutional Adaptation and the Role of Syncretism

Abstract

Forty years ago, Reinhard Bendix (1967) attacked the “invidious distinction between modernity and tradition” upon which then-prevailing approaches to political and economic development were predicated. Around the same time, a number of other scholars began to identify processes through which quintessentially “traditional” social formations became resilient elements of new strategies and structures in the pursuit of “modern” developmental ends (Riggs 1964; Rudolph and Rudolph 1967; Whitaker 1967). Such studies undermined the spurious dichotomies, analytic universalism, and teleological assumptions of then-prevalent theories of “modernization,” and eventually paved the way for newer approaches to the study of political and economic change. Collectively, these approaches would prove to be far more attentive to the significance of international demonstration effects, path-dependent historical trajectories, variations in institutional design, the role of informal norms and social networks, and the strategic calculations of individual actors. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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