Institutional Continuity And Change

This article advances an integrated perspective on institutional continuity and change. It argues that continuity in informal institutions (such as norms or embedded ideas) can influence change in formal institutions (such as laws and written rules) when lesson-drawing from external sources becomes an informal institution, and when foreign exemplars inject new ideas into domestic debates. The history of race relations policies in Great Britain illustrates this dynamic. When British race institutions were established in the 1960s, they reflected the prevailing idea that British policies should incorporate lessons learned from North America. When Britain revisited its race relations provisions in 1976, policy experts looked to North America and found that much had changed there in the interim. They subsequently altered Britain's formal institutions to include US-inspired ‘race-conscious’ measures. By building bridges between scholarship on sociological institutionalism, lesson-drawing and policy transfer, and historical institutionalism, this article offers new insights into the dynamics of institutional change.