Page 208 - The Resilient Organization

194 Part Four: Step 3. Rehearsing a Culture of Resilience

in overcoming Europe’s problems. Indeed, when Delors joined the
European Union, he joined a movement called the “Single Market
Program” already launched in the EU bureaucracy by officials who, like the
ODDsters, saw a need for change. It sought to radically reduce remaining
European trade barriers. Delors’s political skills invigorated the movement,
and it succeeded. EU nations agreed to 264 directives in the name of the
Single Market Program, eliminating taxes and barriers and harmonizing
rules such as health and safety codes. The program went into effect in 1992,
and Europeans became habitualized quickly. Moreover, innovation did
increase and prosperity returned. The program’s success allowed Delors to
help create additional new institutions, including European monetary union.
Fligstein builds on this to present a new analysis of how politics can
change institutions, which he calls “the political-cultural approach”
(Fligstein, 2001). He describes processes and tactics that institutional entre-
preneurs (Delors and the officials who worked with him) can use to remake
institutions.
Traditional economics and much political science use rational-actor
models of change. They see the emergence of new institutions as bargain-
ing. Environmental change makes existing arrangements suboptimal, and
actors, who have fixed preference functions, bargain to create new arrange-
ments (Shepsle & Bonchek, 1997). These models are not useful to activists,
who perceive problems that others do not yet see.
Fligstein, on the other hand, notes that often parties in a problematic
situation do not understand each other’s positions. Negotiations may be
stymied because of their different perceptions. In this situation, institutional
entrepreneurs may promote the emergence of a new “cultural frame” that
will cause people’s understandings and thus preferences to change. This is
how institutional entrepreneurs bring about major change. Existing institu-
tions and organizations “constrain and enable” actors, structuring what is
possible. However, people’s interests are not fixed. Institutional entrepre-
neurs give actors a new sense of their interests and thus support changes in
the rules.
They can lead a redesign of areas that are unformed (new technical
fields, for instance) or that are in crisis (like that experienced by Europe’s
markets in the 1980s). They succeed if they unite the right kind of core
group to support something powerful and (to the entrepreneurs)