Four forms of institutional analysis are identified, and these become the four component parts of the book, with two chapters each: rational choice individualism (represented by Jack Knight, and Edgar Kiser and Aaron Matthew Laing); historical institutionalism (Bruce Western, and Bruce Carruthers, Sarah Babb, and Terence Halliday); organizational institutionalism (David Strang and Ellen Bradburn, and Campbell); and discursive institutionalism (Colin Hay, and Peter Kjaer and Pedersen). Fortunately, the individual authors do not stay in their designated boxes, and one frequently has to glance back at the contents page to remember which type of institutionalism one is supposed to be sampling.

Indeed, one of the editors’ main conclusions is that a convergence is in process among the different forms of institutional analysis. But the book remains a reminder that in the social sciences, American academic life increasingly resembles the French, where scholars identify with a particular groupuscule and then go forth to wage war on others. (The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis is, in fact, an American-Danish collaboration, but the former intellectual tradition dominates the overall approach, though not the individual studies.) A few years ago we were content to identify institutionalism, or neoinstitutionalism. Will the next evolutionary stage be one of further fragmentation, so that by 2005 we shall have books on, for example, three different forms of historical institutionalism, or will the convergence the editors identify bring us back to a single product?

One is thus led to inquire into the mechanisms that produce this approach to intellectual work: Why should anyone want to carry the standard of a particular subdivision of an analytical tradition, when eclecticism will bring a more rounded account? There can be two answers: one highly cynical, one less so. The former points to the increasingly competitive market for citation index scores, itself motivated by the search for better chairs and higher salaries. If one can be the first to label (in the right journals, of course) a particular subsubbranch of study, then one stands a good chance of being cited whenever that particular product is referred to. For those unable to win the labeling game in this way, the second-best strategy is to become tied to an existing label, so that one might rise out of anonymity by being included in textbook lists of contributors to particular schools. This is the process that creates the artificial distinctions between schools and subschools against which the contributors to this volume frequently and creditably rebel.

A less cynical motive is to try to construct coherent and parsimonious paradigms, since these generate bodies of theory to which one can contribute in a cumulative way. This, after all, is what economics has done, and this has helped it to become the undisputed queen of the social sciences. But economics has paid a heavy price for its exclusion from consideration of so many variables relevant to economic behavior that do not fit its paradigm— exclusions that in fact provide the vast neglected spaces into which institutional analysts have swarmed. To apply institutional analysis itself to what has been going on within economics, the dominance of a single, one-sided paradigm has been facilitated by its conquest of major real-world institutions that have the capacity to reward and to exclude. Neoclassical economics has become a regime, with sanctions at its disposal. The other social sciences lack this external institutional apparatus, and therefore lack means of imposing disincentives to what is otherwise an overwhelming temptation for entrepreneurial intellectual spirits: to find the excluded variables, the neglected perspectives of any particular paradigm. And so, as fast as some researchers erect a particular adjectival form of any -ism within political science or sociology, some creative spirit will pop up to show how the new variety can be fruitfully combined with another, previously thought to be its rival. The contributors to this book are all such creative spirits, and that is what makes the volume thoroughly worthwhile.

We learn a good deal of substance about neoliberalism on the way, but here I can just pick out one point, which fits my other theme in an ironic way: We discover that neoliberalism, too, has subcategories! Since it is a political practice rather than a form of academic study, identification of its internal divisions serves a valuable analytical purpose and not just a process of intellectual product differentiation. This is where the Danish contributions, in particular, make their point. At first sight, recent Danish policy developments seem part and parcel of the post-Keynesian economic policy orthodoxy that has come to dominate most of the world since the 1970s. However, as a number of contributors show, there are several crucial differences. Other authors, too, working on aspects of the subject that have nothing to do with Denmark, make fundamentally similar points and further hack away at the apparent monolith. A worthy alternative title for this book might well have been “Neoliberalism Deconstructed: Institutional Analysis Reunited.”