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Abstract:
Studies on societal path dependencies tend to focus on mechanisms that anchor
and stabilize national trajectories while paying less attention to transnational interactions
and multilevel governance. This paper explores processes of path transformation in
societies that are presumed to have the characteristics of open systems. Two pairs of case
studies are presented and compared. The first illustrates institutional change through
collision, when a national path meets with another. The second describes the emergence of
transnational institutional paths and the impact of that process on national institutions and
their (potential) transformation. The results indicate that path transformation often stems
from a gradual succession and combination of incremental steps and junctures – change is
gradual but consequential. They also point to increasing co-evolutionary interaction
between national path transformation and transnational path creation. This implies a need
for analytical tools that are adapted to the analysis of multi-level, nested processes of
institutionalization and de-institutionalization. The paper suggests that the concept of path
generation allows for a better specification of the conditions for change in existing societal
paths and for the emergence of new paths in the case of open systems than the concept of
path dependency.
