Functionaries: A Distributional Approach to Institutional Analysis

This paper outlines a distributional approach to institutional analysis, reconceptualizing institutions as distributions of knowledge and activity across people. We argue that institutionalization and institutional change are best understood by focusing on actors with the requisite knowledge and motivation to keep institutional patterns going, fix them when they go awry, or transform them when required, here called functionaries. The distributional approach allows us to distinguish between two main types of institutional change often conflated in the literature: Content-based and formal change. Content-based change, the one most often discussed, involves the importation, recombination, or expansion of specific patterns of activity. In contrast, formal change, often neglected in the literature, refers to shifts in the distribution of knowledge and activity within an institution, leading to dynamics of centralization and decentralization of institutional patterns. In this way, the distributional approach highlights the role of functionaries in both institutional stability and change, providing a micro-level perspective on institutional dynamics.