Institutional archaeology

Institutional archaeology is “a careful exercise in distinguishing external influences from endogenous changes and identifying the appropriate scale for analysis”
(Goyal et al (2022: 3)

It needs “intricate knowledge of the socio-economic contexts ” to “align them with the appearance and content of the institution in each particular phase”
Fold et al., (2018: 924)

Picture an archaeologist: excavating artefacts while painstakingly preserving contextual information hidden in the soil to understand the meaning of a historical site. Similarly, does the institutional archaeologist minutely document and analyze data from multiple sources, while cautiously scraping away the layers that cover institutions to piece together their significance.

The way to study institutions described above is what the Credibility Thesis aims to achieve through an “Institutional Archaeology”. It is a method that found its inspiration in Original Institutionalism (Clark, 1927), and – when applied correctly – is initially quite likely to disorient and confuse the researcher as one starts to unpack the complexity of institutions.

Aim: uncovering the complex way in which institutions function through meticulous description over time and space, thereby revealing their ascendance, change, and decline. Monkkonen (2016: 3) dubbed it a “thick description” of institutions.

Assumption: institutional archaeology is underpinned by the axiom that the rate of change is a measure of credibility, while institutions are hypothesized to be subject to dynamic disequilibrium, a state of eternal flux, yet, with varying rates of change – at times imperceptibly slow, at times featuring sudden and great shocks.

Approach: as the figure below shows (click to enlarge), institutional archaeology analyzes the complexity of institution via multi-angulation (MA), the pooling of qualitative and/or quantitative data. It can be done in time (T1, 2, 3…n ), space (P1, 2, 3…n ), and/or different levels (micro to macro). If done at, e.g. a dual time-point, it yields an analysis of two institutions (Inst.1 and Inst.2), which can be contrasted to show an evolutionary trajectory.

Application:  institutional archaeology has been applied in different studies, such as artisanal mining (Fold et al., 2018), informal land lease (Goyal et al., 2022), nature reserve management (Wang and Liu, 2022), as well as rent-seeking, monopolization and notaries (Monkkonen, 2016).