Inhabiting Institutions: Critical Realist Refinements to Understanding Institutional Complexity and Change
基于批判实在论本体论，提出一个理论框架来阐明行动、情境与制度逻辑之间的相互依赖关系，重新审视“嵌入性行动者悖论”，为研究行动者如何栖居复杂制度环境提供概念和方法论指导。
This paper builds on recent contributions to understanding conditions of institutional complexity by developing a theoretical framework to elaborate the interdependencies between actions, contexts and institutional logics. Our aim is to refine existing explanations of how actors inhabit complex institutional settings. Drawing on a critical realist ontology, we treat agency and structure as analytically distinct phenomena to advance our understanding of conditioned action. This is subject to relational analysis in order to explain the structural conditioning that shapes particular socio-historical contexts, the potential ‘action options’ contained within these contexts and the processes through which actors draw upon these. This reading of institutional reproduction and transformation allows us to reassess the ‘paradox of embedded agency’ by advancing understanding of the historically grounded and multilevel nature of structures and agency in institutional processes. Our approach offers conceptual refinements, a new sensitizing framework and methodological insights to guide studies of the ways actors inhabit complex institutional settings.