Book Content

The book Institutional Grammar -- Foundations and Applications for Institutional Analysis (available here; note: your academic institution may have a library subscription that may make the book accessible at no cost) contains nine chapters that cover general background on institutional analysis, an introduction to the original Institutional Grammar by Crawford and Ostrom, followed by a motivation and introduction of the refined Institutional Grammar 2.0, before providing introductory guidance on encoding institutional statements and providing an outlook on analytical opportunities associated with the Institutional Grammar. The book ends with a discussion of opportunities for institutional analysis more generally, the contextualization of the IG within the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, and positions the IG as an analytical paradigm.

In addition to the overview of the individual chapters, this page further contains specific resources referenced from the book. This includes an overview of selected figures that are reproduced here for better readability (due to layout constraints in the book), as well as an overview of all institutional statement examples encoded in the IG Script syntax introduced in Chapter 7, and applied throughout Chapters 7 and 8. Finally, a list of errata of the current edition can be found under Errata.

A concise overview of the individual chapters is provided below:

Chapter 1 - Introduction

The introductory chapter lays the foundation for the book by providing the reader with an accessible introduction to the concept of "Institutions", and "Institutional Analysis", sampling across a wide range of different disciplines, exposing the various research foci within and across. This is followed by a high-level description of central features of the Institutional Analysis and Design Framework (IAD), with specific focus on Ostrom's rule typology, and continues with the introduction of Crawford and Ostrom's original Institutional Grammar, alongside ongoing conceptual developments since its inception in 1995. The chapter concludes with an overview of the remaining book structure.

Chapter 2 - Review of Institutional Grammar Research: Overview, Opportunities, Challenges

The second chapter shifts the primary focus to the Institutional Grammar, detailing the themes of research to which the Institutional Grammar has been applied, and identifies research questions central to IG studies more generally. The chapter finally samples the different analytical techniques and associated innovations developed over time, before motivating their conceptual integration, as well as collating outstanding challenges in IG research.

Chapter 3 - Motivation for a New Institutional Grammar

Chapter 3 sets the stage for a refined Institutional Grammar in the upcoming chapters by summarizing challenges highlighted in the previous chapter and identifying distinctive limitations of the original Institutional Grammar, including various kinds of ontological challenges, the exclusive focus on institutions expressed in terms of regulative statements, as well as the limited computational tractability that enables richer applications of the IG. Central to the discussion in this section is further the explicit discussion of a Grammar in the institutional sense in contrast to grammar as understood in the linguistic sense.

Chapter 4 - Institutional Grammar 2.0: Conceptual Foundations and General Syntax

Chapter 4 provides a detailed introduction to the basic syntax of the Institutional Grammar, linking the original Institutional Grammar with the refinements proposed as part of the Institutional Grammar 2.0. This specifically includes the refined Context component that stratifies into activation conditions and execution constraints, an extended Object characterization, as well as principles of nested institutional statements. In addition, a novel constitutive syntax is proposed that complements the refined original regulative syntax. The chapter further leads with introducing the concept of levels of expressiveness that allow for the customization of the IG to diverse analytical needs. Concepts introduced in this chapter reflect the features of the lowest level of expression IG Core.

Chapter 5 - Institutional Grammar 2.0: Deep Structural Parsing and Hybrid Institutional Statements

Chapter 5 builds on the basic syntax introduced in Chapter 4 and highlights refinements that allow for a deep structural parsing of institutional statements to leverage detailed institutional information relevant for advanced analytical treatment, which are captured under the label IG Extended. Beyond a richer parsing of institutional information held within components, IG Extended is concerned with extracting conceptual relationships between entities and richer annotation of Context observed in institutional statements. Finally, the chapter discusses the notion of hybrid institutional statements; statements that contain both regulative and constitutive information in variable form.

Chapter 6 - Institutional Grammar 2.0: Semantic Features and Analytical Linkages

Chapter 6 introduces the final and highest level of expressiveness, IG Logico. Specific features associated with this level are related to the semantic treatment of institutional information, manifesting the IG's potential as an interdisciplinary interface by leveraging epistemological linkages to theory and concepts borrowed from specific domains and disciplines, thus harmonizing generality of the IG with application-specific customization. This is enabled by the support for semantic annotations based on predefined or customized taxonomies (or ontologies) that the analyst can draw on for their analyses. This chapter further formalizes the Institutional Grammar syntactically and semantically, and introduces transformation rules that facilitate the logical transformation of institutional information encoded in institutional statements to meet a diverse array of novel analytical opportunities.

Chapter 7 - Methodological Guidance for Encoding Institutional Information

Chapter 7 provides a general introduction into the encoding of institutional statements by first outlining general methodological guidelines and considerations relevant as part of the research design process, before giving operational guidance on the encoding of institutional information based on a novel notation, IG Script, that captures all features introduced as part of IG 2.0. The concrete coding of sampled statements is highlighted and discussed. The chapter concludes with a general discussion of operational challenges related to reliability testing.

All IG Script-encoded examples from Chapter 7 can be found here.

Chapter 8 - Institutional Analysis and Applications

The penultimate chapter provides a repository of analytical opportunities, combining both established approaches of descriptive analysis as applied in the context of the original Institutional Grammar, as well as novel research directions enabled by the refinements introduced throughout the book. The chapter stratifies those into analyses operating on statement and systemic level on the one hand, and static vs. dynamic approaches to institutional analysis on the other. To support quantitative analysis, the chapter proposes a set of metrics related to the complexity of institutional information, exemplifies the establishment of field-/domain-specific theoretical linkages to encoded institutional statements, and showcases the potential of reconstructing fine-grained encoded institutional information to extrapolate institutional information from multi-actor perspectives. The chapter concludes with a summary of the general kinds of analyses performed based on different levels of encoding and points to further analytical directions enabled by IG 2.0.

All IG Script-encoded examples from Chapter 8 can be found here.

Chapter 9 - Contextualization and Future Development of the Institutional Grammar

The final chapter positions the IG as introduced in this book as an analytical paradigm, highlighting the way in which institutions are perceived and analyzed, and guiding the analytical process, while being agnostic about specific analytical facilities the analyst may choose to employ based on disciplinary traditions or methodological suitability. The chapter further highlights future directions in development specific to the IG itself and recontextualizes the IG within the broader IAD framework in which the original IG embeds. It concludes by motivating the need for an interdisciplinary approach to institutional analysis, emphasizing the importance of ensuring methodological rigor in IG studies, and highlighting the IG as a catalyst for theory development, positioning it as a lingua franca for institutional analysis.