TY - JOUR
AU1 - Wilson, Peter
AB - Abstract The concept of primary international institutions is a core idea of the English School and central to those scholars from Bull to Buzan who have sought to take it in a more sociological direction. Yet the English School has traditionally found it difficult to define and identify with consistency the institutions of international society. A group of scholars, here called the “new institutionalists,” have recently sought to address this problem by devising tighter definitions and applying them more rigorously. But different understandings and lists of institutions continue to proliferate. The source of the problem is the reliance on “stipulative” definitions, drawn from an increasingly abstract theoretical literature. The problem is compounded by the new institutionalists' employment of social structural and other “outsider” methods of social research. This article argues that it is only possible to empirically ground institutions, a task on which all agree, by returning to the interpretive “insider” approach traditionally associated with the school—but employing it in a much more rigorous way. To this end it makes the case for a “grounded theory” of international institutions inspired by Chicago School sociology. The English School (ES) concept of primary international institutions, having lain dormant for several decades, has recently been picked up by a number of theorists (for example, Buzan 2004; Holsti 2004; Clark 2011; Navari 2011; Schouenborg 2011) and deemed a highly promising tool for empirical analysis and theoretical development in International Relations (IR). Primary institutions, to provide a preliminary definition, are not formal organizations such as the EU, NATO, or the UN, but “set[s] of habits and practices shaped towards the realization of common goals” (Bull 1977:74). They are more diffuse and fundamental than international institutions in the “organizations,” and in ES parlance, “secondary” sense. When it is claimed (for example, Suganami 1983, 2003:253–254; Dunne 2001a:69–80; Buzan 2004:161, 166) that concern for the institutional structure of interstate relations is a defining feature of the ES or that “Bull…worked in conjunction with a group of theorists and practitioners, now identified as the founding fathers of the ES of IR, who stressed the importance of the institutional foundations of state behaviour” (Williams and Little 2006:1), it is institutions in the primary sense to which reference is being made. According to Buzan (2005b:190), the concept of primary institutions is the “core idea” of the ES. In Clark's view (2011:46), it is its “central insight.” According to Schouenborg (2011:27), it is its “central concept.” Given this, it is perhaps surprising that there is little agreement within the ES about the number and identity of international society's primary institutions. Various lists have been drawn up with some containing as few as three institutions and one containing as many as 26. Initially, the problem was considered to be definitional. Pioneers of the concept such as Hedley Bull put forward definitions that were vague and/or had a tendency to shift and/or were not applied with sufficient rigor. If a tighter definition could be devised, it was believed, and applied more consistently, agreement would soon ensue. On this definitional front, some progress has been made. But a more fundamental problem remains. While definitions of institutions in ES writing have got tighter, they remain “stipulative,” that is, they are conjured up by the researcher with no reference to the language and understandings of the practitioner (more on this below). No end of work on the definitional problem will lead to a more satisfactory and objective list of institutions as long as definitions remain stipulative. In this article, I argue, firstly, that the fundamental problem is the failure to ground institutions empirically, and by “grounding institutions empirically,” I mean empirically determine not only their identity but how we should conceive them. Secondly, I argue that the only way this problem can be effectively combated is by constructing a grounded theory (GT) of international institutions inspired by the Chicago School of Sociology. No amount of social structural or other “outsider” theorizing (for example, Buzan and Albert 2010) can provide the material needed to properly ground primary institutions (and, as we shall see, related concepts such as “practices”). The “insider” approach of GT provides our best, perhaps our only, hope. The Classic English School Agreement among members of what has been termed the “classic” ES (Navari 2009b:1; Wilson 2009:167) on the institutions of international society was not extensive despite the considerable mutual influence among them. In one place (see Table 1), Wight (1978:111) lists the institutions of international society as diplomacy, alliances, guarantees, war, and neutrality. In another place, they are messengers, conferences and international institutions (meaning organizations), a diplomatic language, and trade (Wight 1977:29–33). In a celebrated introduction to Wight's thought, Bull lists Wight's institutions as alliances, diplomacy, and war (Bull in Wight 1977:6; see Table 2). Yet some pages later, he offers a different list: international law, resident embassies, great powers, and the balance of power (Bull in Wight 1977:17; see also Wight 1978:12; Hall 2006:123–126). In Wight's (1991:141) celebrated lectures on international theory, they are listed as diplomacy, alliances, the balance of power, guarantees, arbitration, and war (see Table 1). 1 Institutions of International Society: Wight Wight 1 Wight 2 Wight 3 Diplomacy Messengers Diplomacy Alliances Conferences & international institutions Alliances Guarantees Diplomatic language Balance of power War Trade Guarantees Neutrality Arbitration War Wight 1 Wight 2 Wight 3 Diplomacy Messengers Diplomacy Alliances Conferences & international institutions Alliances Guarantees Diplomatic language Balance of power War Trade Guarantees Neutrality Arbitration War View Large 1 Institutions of International Society: Wight Wight 1 Wight 2 Wight 3 Diplomacy Messengers Diplomacy Alliances Conferences & international institutions Alliances Guarantees Diplomatic language Balance of power War Trade Guarantees Neutrality Arbitration War Wight 1 Wight 2 Wight 3 Diplomacy Messengers Diplomacy Alliances Conferences & international institutions Alliances Guarantees Diplomatic language Balance of power War Trade Guarantees Neutrality Arbitration War View Large 2 Institutions of International Society: Wight According to Bull Wight According to Bull 1 Wight According to Bull 2 Alliances International law Diplomacy Resident embassies War Great powers Balance of power Wight According to Bull 1 Wight According to Bull 2 Alliances International law Diplomacy Resident embassies War Great powers Balance of power View Large 2 Institutions of International Society: Wight According to Bull Wight According to Bull 1 Wight According to Bull 2 Alliances International law Diplomacy Resident embassies War Great powers Balance of power Wight According to Bull 1 Wight According to Bull 2 Alliances International law Diplomacy Resident embassies War Great powers Balance of power View Large Wight was first and foremost a historian, not a theorist. He put thinking about the institutional structure of the society of states (and historical societies of states) on the map, but conceptual analysis was not his forte. It might be said, therefore, that it is to the more sociologically orientated Bull that we should turn for a definition and more rigorously determined list. Indeed, it is Bull to whom IR theorists sympathetic to the ES project almost invariably turn when thinking about the institutions of international society. In The Anarchical Society, he established the benchmark institutional list—the P5, we might say, of international theory: the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war, and the concert of Great Powers (Bull 1977: Part II; see Table 3). In one place, however, he suggests that “states themselves…are the principal institutions of the society of states” (Bull 1977:71; see also Bull 1972:34), and in one of his last works, Bull unaccountably abandons war as one of his institutions, putting in its place international organizations (Bull 1990:90; see also Bull and Watson 1984:118). 3 Institutions of International Society: Bull Bull 1: P5 Bull 2 Bull 3 Balance of power States Balance of power International law Balance of power International law Diplomacy International law Diplomacy War Diplomacy International organizations Great power concert War Great power concert Great power concert Bull 1: P5 Bull 2 Bull 3 Balance of power States Balance of power International law Balance of power International law Diplomacy International law Diplomacy War Diplomacy International organizations Great power concert War Great power concert Great power concert View Large 3 Institutions of International Society: Bull Bull 1: P5 Bull 2 Bull 3 Balance of power States Balance of power International law Balance of power International law Diplomacy International law Diplomacy War Diplomacy International organizations Great power concert War Great power concert Great power concert Bull 1: P5 Bull 2 Bull 3 Balance of power States Balance of power International law Balance of power International law Diplomacy International law Diplomacy War Diplomacy International organizations Great power concert War Great power concert Great power concert View Large The difficulties of including war as an institution of international society have been much commented upon (for example, Suganami 1983:2379; Holsti 2004:275–299; Jones 2006:162), and there is no need to discuss them here. Suffice it to say there are far-reaching ethical, legal, and theoretical problems with an undifferentiated concept of war that no doubt prompted Bull to think again about its elevation to institutional status. Yet the lack of an explanation for his change of mind is not the main problem. The main problem is the lack of a precise and stable definition. To his initial definition, cited above, of institutions as “set[s] of habits and practices,” Bull adds, for example, “a common diplomatic language” and “shared beliefs” (see Little 2006:107). In one place, he talks not of “habits and practices shaped towards the realization of common goals” but, even more generally, of “a settled pattern of behaviour” (Bull 1977:184). In a major work in which the notion of institutions in the primary sense receives wide iteration, there is no attempt to define it at all (Bull and Watson 1984). In fact, Wight does rather better than Bull on the definitional front. He says that by “institutions,” he does not mean “determinate organizations housed in determinate buildings such as the League of Nations in the Palais des Nations or the United Nations in the East River building,” but “recognised and established usages governing the relations between individuals or groups” such as marriage or property; or, alternatively, “enduring, complex, integrated, organized behaviour pattern[s] through which social control is exerted and by means of which the fundamental social desires or needs are met” (Wight 1991:140–141, quoting sociologist Morris Ginsberg). However, while this attempt to root his understanding in the sociological literature is to be welcomed, there is little evidence that Wight applied it at all rigorously. We have the definitions, and we have the lists but nowhere is there an attempt to systematically link the two. The variation and uncertainty about which “sets of habits and practices,”“recognized and established usages,” or “organized behavior patterns” are to count as international institutions has persisted among those directly influenced by Wight and Bull. In an admirable assessment of the prospects for progress at the millennium, James Mayall declares that “the framework that I have adopted describes the context of international relations in terms of a set of institutions—law, diplomacy, the balance of power, etc.—and principles” (Mayall 2000:149–150). In the “principles” category, he includes sovereignty, territorial integrity, nonintervention, self-determination, nondiscrimination, and respect for human rights (see Table 4). Earlier in the book, however, he implies that sovereignty is an institution, along with diplomacy and international law, with the balance of power, the special role of the Great Powers, and war occupying an ambiguous position as quasi- or contested institutions (Mayall 2000:11–12; see also 41–42, 83, 132). Yet he also refers to the balance of power as a principle, and moreover one of “such convenient plasticity that it could be advanced in defence of almost any conceivable policy” (Mayall 2000:12)—an assertion that somewhat undercuts the idea that it is one of international society's institutions. 4 Institutions and Principles of International Society: Mayall Institutions Principles Diplomacy Sovereignty International law Territorial integrity Great power concert? Nonintervention Balance of power? Self-determination Sovereignty? Nondiscrimination War? Human rights Balance of power Institutions Principles Diplomacy Sovereignty International law Territorial integrity Great power concert? Nonintervention Balance of power? Self-determination Sovereignty? Nondiscrimination War? Human rights Balance of power View Large 4 Institutions and Principles of International Society: Mayall Institutions Principles Diplomacy Sovereignty International law Territorial integrity Great power concert? Nonintervention Balance of power? Self-determination Sovereignty? Nondiscrimination War? Human rights Balance of power Institutions Principles Diplomacy Sovereignty International law Territorial integrity Great power concert? Nonintervention Balance of power? Self-determination Sovereignty? Nondiscrimination War? Human rights Balance of power View Large As with Wight and Bull, therefore, there is a good deal of ambivalence in Mayall on the nature and identity of international society's primary institutions. The same could be said of other notable members of the school (cf. Bull and Watson 1984:24–25; Watson 1992:202–213). Taken as a whole, it is evident that the only institution on which classic ES thinkers agree is diplomacy. Yet even here there are complexities. For Wight (1978:113), diplomacy was the “master institution” of international society. For Bull, however, the most fundamental institution was the balance of power (Bull 1977:106–107; Alderson and Hurrell 2000:5; Little 2007:128–129). Interestingly, those successors of Bull and Wight who have given most attention to the role of diplomacy in international society have not made much of its institutional character. For James (1993a:94–96, 100), diplomacy is fundamental to the existence of international society, but he has reservations about the virtue of designating it an institution. Watson (1983) accepts the designation but does little with it, not delving into its theoretical implications. In the most detailed recent exploration of diplomacy from an ES perspective, Paul Sharp accepts Wight's view of its master institutional status but also suggests (echoing James) that in a very specific sense it is presocial, not an institution of international society but a precondition of its existence. According to Sharp (2009:11), it is “diplomacy which constitutes, and diplomats (in the sense of those who act diplomatically) who produce, the international societies which put relations between separate groups on a more stable and peaceful footing than they otherwise would be.” It is diplomacy that enables international society to emerge from a mere system.2 The New Institutionalists Noting some of these difficulties, in particular the failure of Bull et al. to define in sharper detail what they understand by “the institutions of international society,” several scholars have recently sought to pin down the concept and/or put ES use of it on firmer methodological ground. In this section, I focus on the efforts of, respectively, Buzan, Holsti, and Schouenborg, who together might be regarded as the avant garde of what the latter author has termed a “new institutionalism.” Buzan begins by relating ES uses of “institutions” to those of other schools, notably neoliberalism and regime theory. As well as an attempt to find common ground and build a transatlantic bridge between these prominent bodies of theory,3 Buzan uses comparative analysis to tease out their relative strengths and weaknesses. The aim is to forge a much more robust, theoretically self-conscious, and analytically inclusive concept. Building on the work of Keohane, Searle, Mayall, Wight, Bull, and Holsti among others, he arrives at a much expanded list of institutions, which he subdivides into primary and secondary institutions, with primary institutions also subdivided between master and derivative. Derivative institutions are subordinate to and generated by master institutions (Buzan 2004:161–204; see Table 5). 5 Primary Institutions of International Society: Buzan Master Institutions Derivative Institutions Sovereignty Nonintervention Law Territoriality Boundaries Diplomacy Bilateralism Multilateralism Great power management Alliances War Balance of power Equality of people Human rights Humanitarian intervention Market Trade liberalization Financial liberalization Hegemonic stability Nationalism Self-determination Popular sovereignty Democracy Environmental stewardship Species survival Climatic stability Master Institutions Derivative Institutions Sovereignty Nonintervention Law Territoriality Boundaries Diplomacy Bilateralism Multilateralism Great power management Alliances War Balance of power Equality of people Human rights Humanitarian intervention Market Trade liberalization Financial liberalization Hegemonic stability Nationalism Self-determination Popular sovereignty Democracy Environmental stewardship Species survival Climatic stability This is Buzan's list of contemporary (cf. historical) institutions. Changes in and of primary institutions occur over time. View Large 5 Primary Institutions of International Society: Buzan Master Institutions Derivative Institutions Sovereignty Nonintervention Law Territoriality Boundaries Diplomacy Bilateralism Multilateralism Great power management Alliances War Balance of power Equality of people Human rights Humanitarian intervention Market Trade liberalization Financial liberalization Hegemonic stability Nationalism Self-determination Popular sovereignty Democracy Environmental stewardship Species survival Climatic stability Master Institutions Derivative Institutions Sovereignty Nonintervention Law Territoriality Boundaries Diplomacy Bilateralism Multilateralism Great power management Alliances War Balance of power Equality of people Human rights Humanitarian intervention Market Trade liberalization Financial liberalization Hegemonic stability Nationalism Self-determination Popular sovereignty Democracy Environmental stewardship Species survival Climatic stability This is Buzan's list of contemporary (cf. historical) institutions. Changes in and of primary institutions occur over time. View Large Buzan (2004:165, 169) contends that the ES has been far more interested in primary than secondary institutions. Secondary institutions are conceived as formal bodies and organizations founded for a specific purpose, with the capacity for purposive action. Yet they can also consist of “related complexes of rules and norms, identifiable in time and place” (Keohane quoted in Buzan 2004:164–165) or “relatively stable collection[s] of practices and rules defining appropriate behaviour for specific groups of actors in specific situations” (March and Olson quoted in Buzan 2004:165)—definitions akin to conventional understandings of “regimes.” Primary institutions, on the other hand, are “more fundamental practices” (Keohane quoted in Buzan 2004:165), rules, and constraints which may be “embedded in structures of meaning and schemes of interpretation that explain and legitimize particular identities and the practices and rules associated with them” (Meyer, Boli, and Thomas quoted in Buzan 2004:165). Such practices and rules are evolved more than designed, and they are “constitutive of actors and their patterns of legitimate activity in relation to each other” (Buzan 2004:167). In contrast to secondary institutions (the focus of regime theorists) which are “for the most part consciously designed by states,” primary institutions (the focus of the ES) are “constitutive of both states and international society in that they define the basic character and purpose of any such society” (Buzan 2004:166). They are “durable and recognised patterns of shared practices rooted in values held commonly by the members of interstate societies, and embodying a mix of norms, rules and principles” (Buzan 2004:181). In a later article, Buzan helpfully simplifies this attempt to distil from several quite diverse bodies of literature a definition of both primary and secondary institutions. He defines secondary institutions as “designed, instrumental arrangements and organizations” and primary institutions as “deeper, more organic, evolved social practices that constitute both the actors and the ‘game’ of international society” (Buzan 2006:366). With regard to their relationship, primary institutions are the “enduring fundamental practices which shape and constrain the formation, evolution, and demise of secondary institutions” (Buzan 2005a:120). At the same time that Buzan was seeking to strengthen the foundations of the ES approach to international institutions, another book appeared (Holsti 2004), which had the notion of primary institutions at its core. While its principal object was not to identify these institutions and further the theoretical debate about them, it is arguably the most systematic study to date of the nature and role of institutions in international society. Moreover, it is one that uses Bull's work as a starting point and draws on Bull's insights at many points in the argument. It might be considered a work of the ES in all but name.4 For Holsti, institutions are the “context within which the games of international politics are played. They represent patterned (typical) actions and interactions of states, the norms, rules, and principles which guide (or fail to guide) them, and the major ideas and beliefs of a historical era” (Holsti 2004:18). In adopting this broad approach, Holsti explicitly follows Bull. He acknowledges that there is no consensus on the meaning of institutions in the IR literature and declares that his preference for Bull's understanding is based on its reference to ideas, practices, and beliefs of state actors as well as the rules and standards which comprise, for example, Keohane's understanding (Holsti 2004:21). He also subscribes to the understanding of Wendt and Duvall (1989) who assert that the ES notion of institutions (meaning, it should be noted, Hedley Bull's understanding) is similar to the notion of gemeinschaft. It entails shared intersubjective understandings and practices which constitute and are constituted by state interaction (Holsti 2004:21). So how do we know what institutions exist internationally? Holsti posits three criteria. International institutions consist of (i) patterned practices; (ii) “coherent sets of ideas and/or beliefs that describe the needs for the common practices and point out how certain goals can be achieved through them” (Holsti 2004:21; emphasis in original); and (iii) rules and etiquette which prescribe and proscribe certain kinds of behavior. These rules and this etiquette reflect norms which are “shared expectations about appropriate behaviour” (Finnemore quoted in Holsti 2004:22). Alternatively, they are stipulations of the “parameters of acceptable collective behaviour” (Jean-Louis Durand quoted in Holsti 2004:22). The three major components of international institutions are thus (i) patterned practices; (ii) ideas and beliefs; (iii) rules and norms. Holsti then distinguishes between two types of institutions. Foundational institutions, on the one hand, define and give privileged status to certain actors. They stipulate the fundamental principles, norms, and rules upon which their mutual relations are based. The foundational institutions of international society, for example, distinguish the states-system/international society (Holsti uses these terms by and large interchangeably) from other modes of world political organization. The foundational institutions of the Westphalian international system “include sovereignty, territoriality, and the fundamental rules of international law” (Holsti 2004:25). Procedural institutions, on the other hand, comprise “repetitive practices, ideas and norms that underlie and regulate interactions and transactions between the separate actors” (Holsti 2004:25). They are principally concerned with setting the boundaries of legitimate conduct. The procedural institutions of the Westphalian system “include diplomacy, trade, colonialism, and war” (Holsti 2004:27; see Table 6). 6 Institutions of International Society: Holsti Foundational Institutions Procedural Institutions Sovereignty Diplomacy Territoriality Trade Law Colonialism State? War Market? International monetary system? Aid? Foundational Institutions Procedural Institutions Sovereignty Diplomacy Territoriality Trade Law Colonialism State? War Market? International monetary system? Aid? View Large 6 Institutions of International Society: Holsti Foundational Institutions Procedural Institutions Sovereignty Diplomacy Territoriality Trade Law Colonialism State? War Market? International monetary system? Aid? Foundational Institutions Procedural Institutions Sovereignty Diplomacy Territoriality Trade Law Colonialism State? War Market? International monetary system? Aid? View Large Armed with these conceptual tools, Holsti sets about identifying logically and transparently the institutions of international society—something that Bull, as he rightly says, failed to do. Holsti rejects two of Bull's institutions: great power concert and the balance of power. The activities of the great powers, he argues, do not meet the criterion of patterned practices, except perhaps for the period of the Concert of Europe, 1815–54.5 It is generally believed that the status of great power carries with it certain responsibilities—for managing the system, providing stability, and ensuring international peace and security. But individual great powers from the time the concept was first specified (in the Treaty of Châtillon, 1814) have acted to undermine these responsibilities as much as to discharge them. Similarly, it is hard to identify a consistent pattern of behavior with regard to the balance of power. States have balanced, bandwagoned, and retreated to isolation with seemingly equal frequency. The idea of the balance of power may be a strong one in international politics, but there are no concomitantly strong or settled rules and norms that stem from it.6 In contrast to Buzan and Holsti, Schouenborg sets out not to identify the primary institutions of international society as such but to provide a “structural functional” method equipped for that purpose. He accepts Buzan's definition of primary institutions as “durable and recognised patterns of shared practices” and proposes a number of “functional categories” as lenses through which these institutions (the “key objects” of a properly sociological and scientific analysis) can be identified and differentiated. By “differentiated,” he means the separation of different kinds of primary institutions from each other. The general idea, although Schouenborg does not make this explicit, is that all societies attempt in one way or another to perform these functions, and therefore, we can most effectively get at and understand the institutions that societies generate in relation to them (Schouenborg 2011:28–31; see also Buzan and Albert 2010:318). Schouenborg's functional categories are derived from five proposed but not developed by Buzan: (i) membership; (ii) authoritative communication; (iii) limits to the use of force; (iv) allocation of property rights; and (v) sanctity of agreements, and six proposed by Donnelly (2006): (i) communicating and interacting; (ii) regulating the use of force; (iii) regulating ownership and exchange; (iv) making rules; (v) aggregating interests and power; and (vi) regulating conflicts. Schouenborg welcomes these categories as an important step forward but finds them inadequate in several respects. In particular, he finds them too closely tied to a modern, Westphalian, conception of the international system and therefore unsuited to analysis of a more ambitious “genuine historical-sociological” kind (Schouenborg 2011:31). Buzan's categories, for example, privilege the state, and both Buzan's and Donnelly's categories put undue emphasis on another largely “modern” phenomenon, the attempt to limit morally and legally the resort to force. Under what he calls the “constitutive functional category” of “legitimacy and membership”7 Schouenborg places “polities” rather than the state (the state being the dominant modern form of polity), and he broadens the “regulative functional category” that relates to constraints on the use of force to “regulating conflicts.” In brief, Schouenborg's putative transhistorical and transcultural scheme contains five functional categories, divided into two types of functional categories, constitutive and regulative, with 10 institutions listed as possible candidates in the former and 12 in the latter (see Tables 7 and 8). 7 Schouenborg's Constitutive Functional Category and Institutions Legitimacy and Membership Sovereignty Dynasticism Popular will Nationalism Communism Liberal democracy Standard of civilization Capacity to govern Peace-loving nation Human rights Legitimacy and Membership Sovereignty Dynasticism Popular will Nationalism Communism Liberal democracy Standard of civilization Capacity to govern Peace-loving nation Human rights View Large 7 Schouenborg's Constitutive Functional Category and Institutions Legitimacy and Membership Sovereignty Dynasticism Popular will Nationalism Communism Liberal democracy Standard of civilization Capacity to govern Peace-loving nation Human rights Legitimacy and Membership Sovereignty Dynasticism Popular will Nationalism Communism Liberal democracy Standard of civilization Capacity to govern Peace-loving nation Human rights View Large 8 Schouenborg's Regulative Functional Categories and Institutions Regulating Conflicts War Great power management Alliances Trade Relay trade Tribute systems Free trade Authoritative Communication Messengers Diplomats Embassies International Organization Religious sites and festivals Conferences and congresses Multilateralism Regulating Conflicts War Great power management Alliances Trade Relay trade Tribute systems Free trade Authoritative Communication Messengers Diplomats Embassies International Organization Religious sites and festivals Conferences and congresses Multilateralism View Large 8 Schouenborg's Regulative Functional Categories and Institutions Regulating Conflicts War Great power management Alliances Trade Relay trade Tribute systems Free trade Authoritative Communication Messengers Diplomats Embassies International Organization Religious sites and festivals Conferences and congresses Multilateralism Regulating Conflicts War Great power management Alliances Trade Relay trade Tribute systems Free trade Authoritative Communication Messengers Diplomats Embassies International Organization Religious sites and festivals Conferences and congresses Multilateralism View Large Problems with the New Institutionalism These three authors have made a valiant attempt to grapple with an exceedingly difficult matter. But problems remain. While the ground on which we are to build a theory of primary institutions has been usefully surveyed, it remains worryingly unstable. On a first reading, the “institutional density” (Onuf 2002:218) that Buzan imputes to international society is not implausible. It incorporates a number of potential candidates for institutional status—notably sovereignty, the market, nationalism, and human rights—that Bull and others failed to consider. The messiness of the list conforms better to what many professional IR students feel about the normative and/or regulatory architecture of the international scene. Bull's scheme seems just too neat.8 However, Buzan's list of institutions reads like an enumeration of all the significant general developments, ideas, policies, principles, practices, and goals that have attained a degree of international permanence over the last few centuries. While the definitions Buzan puts forward certainly do not bar these items from consideration, one wonders where to draw the line. If the market, for example, can be viewed as a master institution (with trade liberalization, financial liberalization, and hegemonic stability as their derivatives), why not capitalism (with free trade, capital mobility, labor mobility, privatization, and currency convertibility as derivatives)? If equality of people can be viewed as a master institution (with human rights and humanitarian intervention as derivatives), why not peaceful settlement of disputes (with arbitration, mediation, and adjudication as derivatives)? If nonintervention and international law can be considered derivative institutions of sovereignty, why not territoriality and boundaries, given the sovereign state is a constitutionally independent territorial entity?9 Democracy is deemed a derivative institution of nationalism. Could it not, with equal logic, be deemed a derivative institution of equality of people? If environmental stewardship can be regarded as a primary institution, why not protection and promotion of human rights, international peace and security, and sustainable development (all of them being established aspirations of the international community which have brought into being a complex body of rules, practices, and secondary institutions)? The possibilities seem almost endless. The problem will not, however, be solved by tighter or more complex definitions as all the definitions produced so far leave plenty of room for observer subjectivity. In other words, even if we could agree on a common definition of primary institutions, there is no reason to believe that our application of it would lead to our lists and taxonomies of institutions significantly converging. With regard to types of primary institution, Buzan's division of master/derivative is no better or worse than Holsti's foundational/procedural or, for that matter, Reus-Smit's (1997) division between “constitutional structures” and “fundamental institutions.” These are three among many possible ways of differentiating between types of institution. They are logical on the abstract plane but empirically entirely ungrounded. Holsti's analysis, as with Buzan's, contains a number of plus points. It demonstrates why, for example, contrary to the claims of the ES pioneers, we should be skeptical about the attribution of institutional status to the balance of power and great power concert. Yet the subjective element in Holsti is still strong. With regard to foundational institutions, he concedes, firstly, that “sovereignty” and “territoriality” might be conceived as part of a single institution of sovereignty, but as they refer to “rather unique aspects” he chooses “to separate them for analytical reasons” (Holsti 2004:26). When it comes to determining the institutions of international society, however, should this choice depend on analytical utility? Holsti generally writes as if his institutions have ontological status, that is, they exist in some sense in the real world regardless of the analyst's cognition of them. How else, if they do not have this status, could they be deemed (as Holsti does) markers of real-world international change? But if such status is granted, they cannot be chopped and changed for analytical convenience. Secondly, while the state or statehood meet his criteria of institutions, he dismisses them on the ground that they are agents whereas his other institutions “are not agents, but structures of norms, rules, and ideas that influence the behaviour of agents” (Holsti 2004:27). In the concluding chapter, however, Holsti repeatedly refers to the state as one of his “eight institutions” and his “four foundational institutions” (see Table 6). This inconsistency aside, inclusion of the state results in the curious conceptualization of the state, sovereignty, and territoriality as separate institutions.10 Thirdly, Holsti concedes that his list of procedural institutions is not exhaustive. The market, the international monetary system, or foreign aid might also be thought of as institutions. If so, it might be added, why not the protection and promotion of human rights, economic development, self-determination, hegemony (see Clark 2009, 2011), or—a prime candidate that all seem to overlook—summitry?11 Finally, he says that some institutions might be conceived as subcategories of broader institutions, for example, trade+international monetary regulation=the market. This is a suggestion akin to Buzan's (2004:182) notion of “nesting.” But we are furnished with no criteria to determine which “institutions” should be nested with which. After holding out the promise of a more cogent list of institutions than Bull's, therefore, Holsti leaves us with a list no less subjective. Since his main concern is to systematically investigate change in the international system, he declares that it is “not necessary to discuss every conceivable institution”—with the implication that a good many institutions might be conceived. Rather he uses the seven institutions selected as markers of change—and in the substantive chapters that follow, he does indeed provide an account of the nature and extent of change internationally over the last three centuries that constitutes a major contribution to the literature. But the relevant point for our purposes is that, appearances to the contrary, Holsti goes no further than Bull (and indeed Buzan) in providing a definitive, or at least methodologically well-grounded, list of the institutions of international society. Schouenborg's is the most explicit attempt yet to take the ES study of primary institutions in a structural functionalist direction. But while he makes a number of telling criticisms of the current ES literature (especially regarding its eurocentrism), he fails to make a strong case why we should go in this direction at all. He asserts (2011:35) that his functional categories will enable us to “get a handle on empirical reality.” But he does not say how. He claims (2011:27) that his categories “should be able to encompass all the institutions identified by ES scholars throughout history.” But why would one want to do this? Broadening the historical scope of the analytical scheme is in principle fine, but attempting to encompass all the institutions identified by the ES seems a misplaced ambition. It concedes too much to past ES scholarship. The first thing we need to get a handle on is which of the many institutions posited by the ES can be empirically verified. The empirical question is the elephant in the room in Schouenborg's analysis. He declares (2011:28) that “[h]ere I will not go into the problem of how to empirically observe primary institutions, but merely offer some potential solutions to the problem of differentiating between them.” Is it possible, however, to make any progress in differentiating institutions without any empirical observation of them? The problem of empirically observing primary institutions is exactly the problem that needs to be resolved if the institutional project à la ES is to get off the ground. We need data. Until we have data about what institutions exist internationally, our speculations about them will remain just that, speculations, and our taxonomies and theories about them will remain rootless, subjective, and abstract. This is clear from the list of institutions that Schouenberg, with all due tentativeness, suggests. He does not provide any guidance as to why the list of ideas, ideologies, notions, and principles he puts in his “constitutive functional category” of “legitimacy and membership” (see Table 7) should be deemed “institutions.” They all pertain to which actors and/or states can take their rightful place as members of international society, but the logic of classifying them as institutions is not clear. The Diagnosis Why have these recent attempts to put institutions on firmer conceptual and methodological ground failed? Why, despite such valiant efforts, has the problem of varying and conflicting lists and taxonomies of primary institutions persisted? My diagnosis is that ES analysis has moved too far away from what one of its pioneers called “diplomatics” (Manning 1962:1–10, 56–58, 182–184; Wilson 2004:759–60). Too far way, that is, from the understandings, assumptions, and expectations that constitute the “psychomilieu” (Harold and Margaret Sprout, cited in Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff 1981:69–70) of those professionally engaged in interstate (or more broadly interpolity) relations. As Dunne (2005:163) has argued, “it must be doubted how far an elaborate conceptual design favored by Buzan can actually reveal the ‘reality’ of international society” in the absence of a strong “hermeneutic” dimension. In my view, this applies especially to the concept of institutions (though it is also not without significance that in this article Dunne himself uses the term “institutions” in a nonspecified and nonhermeneutic way). Fashioned in the abstract, without reference to actor perceptions and understandings, lists of international institutions will always be in the eye of the beholder, and taxonomies of them similarly groundless. The Importance of Interpretation All three of our new institutionalists claim or assume that primary institutions have ontological status, that is, they are not merely analytical tools but have real-world existence independent of the consciousness of the observer, and that therefore their identification is an empirical matter (see, for example, Buzan 2004:190; Holsti 2004:1–27; Schouenborg 2011:27–28). In asserting this, they do not depart in any shape or form from the epistemology of the ES which is empiricist. Eschewing metaphysics, and distrustful of abstract theory (certainly as a starting point for analysis), members of the ES have been careful not to push their ideas and theories beyond what can be confirmed by observation and experience (Mayall 2009:210). Even their normative theories need to be anchored in the “real, lived, normative world” of the people they are studying, not derived from abstract moral principles or imported from extraneous normative discourses (Jackson 2009:28–30, 34). While they are empiricists, however, they are not positivists. They have been skeptical about general causal statements about human behavior and especially the possibility of arriving at universalizable laws. They pursue “insider” rather than “outsider” accounts of social reality. Their focus has been on the self-understandings, shared meanings, value orientations, and codes of conduct of the actors, the sources of which are speeches, statements, resolutions, communiqués, declarations, press releases, memoirs, and interviews (Jackson 2009:37; Navari 2009c:39–42). According to Navari (2009c:47), their approach is “agent-centered” and “practitioner-orientated.” Their goal in studying international politics is to provide a plausible and coherent interpretation, and general theoretical account, of the political practitioner's world (Jackson 2009:24–26). They are not concerned with objective facts about the international environment so much as what the relevant actors in any given situation deem or assume to be the objective facts. They have tended to conceive the balance of power, for example, as a conscious policy rather than a mechanism or objective feature of international life. Unlike realists of various hues, they have spent little time analyzing the components of material power or its distribution since it is the perception of power that is deemed to have the explanatory efficacy, “and perceptions are revealed by quizzing the actor, not the environment” (Navari 2009b:9). The methodological approach of the ES has been characterized by some (for example, Suganami 1983:2364–2366; Dunne 1998:7–9; Linklater and Suganami 2006:97–108) as verstehen—the Weberian notion of understanding, involving interpretation of the meanings that social actors themselves give to their actions. Allied to this, the ES stresses imaginative identification with and reconstruction of the roles, choices, outlooks, and predicaments of statespersons (Keens-Soper 1978:25–26; Suganami 1983:2364–2365; Alderson and Hurrell 2000:25–28; Linklater and Suganami 2006:109; Jackson 2009:29, 32; see also Butterfield 1965:90–96). It stresses, in other words, the importance of putting oneself in statespersons and other significant actors' shoes and trying to see things as they see them, even though their outlook may be very different to that of our own.12 In sociological parlance, the school's methodological stance is “participant standpoint.” This involves playing “close attention to the language of the actors and the way they explain and justify their actions” (Navari 2009c:42; see also Epp 1998). But this does not mean that analysts must restrict themselves in their explanation and assessment of these actions to the language and mental categories of the participants/actors. Rather they use terms that would be recognized by the participants/actors or would at least be comprehensible to them. If a more theoretical language needs to be employed, for example, to connect with past scholarship or to facilitate academic communication, it should be derived from the ordinary language of the subject, losing as little as possible from the original meaning of that language (Jackson 2009:35–36). In this way, interpretivist scholars seek to get “inside” reality without surrendering to that reality, that is, “surrendering to the beliefs, values and prejudices of the people under study” (Jackson 2000:58; see also Dunne 2001b:235–237). As Bevir and Rhodes (2004:130) argue “[i]nterpretive approaches start with the insight that to understand actions, practices and institutions, we need to grasp the relevant meanings, beliefs and preferences of the people involved.” This does not mean that these meanings, beliefs, and preferences are holy writ and should be accepted uncritically (see, for example, Dowding 2004). All data need to be interpreted in light of all the relevant data that the analyst has the means, time, and skill to gather. It does mean, however, that such interpretative data are essential to a rich, textured, and nuanced explanation of the studied human world. As well as employing language close to the actual language of international politics, the ES has traditionally employed definitions that are rooted in everyday discourse. As Jackson (2000:95) argues: Our theoretical language should…avoid stipulative definitions that have no reference to ordinary language. A stipulated definition is one that is made up by the researcher. Such definitions are arbitrary from the point of view of their subject. They are rejections of the language of experience and practice. They cut us off from the people and activities we are trying to learn more about. They have the unfortunate effect of alienating the world of political science from the world of politics. James (1993b:270) crystallizes the point: “[c]lose regard must be paid to the relevant practitioner usage.” A good example of a stipulative definition can be found in Keohane's seminal article (1988:382–386). Keohane defines institutions as “persistent and connected sets of rules (formal or informal) that prescribe behavioural roles, constrain activity, and shape expectations.” They can take the form of relatively permanent “general patterns of activity,” which arise by and large spontaneously, or specific, human-designed arrangements “identifiable in space and time.” He then declares that “it is difficult to work analytically” with such a broad concept and offers in its place a hybrid understanding of institutions as “related complexes of rules and norms, identifiable in space and time.” This enables him to occlude consideration of “general behavioral patterns” and “general norms” and concentrate on “specific institutions” and “practices.” Why the latter two should be privileged is not explained (nor the boundaries between “institutions” and “practices” demarcated), but the point here is that Keohane's working definition is arrived at through a survey of usages of the term within mainstream IR. No connection is made with practitioner usage. The same applies to Mearsheimer's definition (1994/95:8–9), which also has the hybrid quality of combining a general understanding (a set of prescriptive and proscriptive behavioral rules) with a more specific one (as “typically formalized in international agreements, and…embodied in organizations”). Notwithstanding their more “insider” methodological orientation, constructivists have been just as attracted as neoliberals and neorealists to the charms of the stipulative definition. An example is the definition of practices of Adler and Pouliot (2011:4–5): …socially meaningful patterns of action, which, in being performed more or less competently, simultaneously embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on the material world. [They are]…not merely descriptive “arrows” that connect structure to agency and back, but rather the dynamic material and ideational processes that enable structures to be stable or to evolve, and agents to reproduce or transform structures. Few practitioners would be able to comprehend a definition so abstract and locked in the specialist academic literature such as this. It is in these respects that the new institutionalism marks a departure from the traditional approach of the ES. It is a departure not in epistemology but in method. While members of the ES have traditionally, if not always systematically or rigorously, pursued insider accounts of social reality, the new institutionalists pursue an outsider account.13 They have left behind the language of practice and the assumptions and perceptions of practitioners, employed stipulative definitions and, with respect to Buzan and Schouenborg at least, attempted to identify the primary institutions of international society through the application of abstract analytical categories. The result, as we have seen, has been a failure to make progress in arriving at a less speculative list of institutions around which the important job of theory-building can begin. There is nothing intrinsically wrong, of course, in departing methodologically from a traditional way of doing things. The argument I am making is not about methodological authenticity. Rather I am arguing that the new institutionalists have embarked on a course which is unlikely to lead to the desired destination. Rather than adopting an outsider/structuralist approach, the best hope of reaching this destination resides in reverting back to the insider/interpretivist approach traditionally associated with the ES but, with the aid of Sociology, employing it much more rigorously. Grounded Theory The affinity between GT and the approach to IR of the ES has recently been noted by Navari (2009c:42). Yet the potential for using this qualitative research method, first developed in Sociology, in qualitative approaches to IR such as the ES has gone surprisingly unexplored. GT could be applied to a wide variety of subject matters of central concern to the ES, for example, the role of international law and the place of human rights in international society. But it could also be applied to the stubborn problem of the meaning and identity of international society's institutions. GT has the potential to provide the missing hermeneutic or “insider” dimension to ES thinking on international institutions. The “diplomatics” of the international institutional landscape have been concealed for too long, and GT had the potential to uncover them in a systematic, rigorous way. Uncovering the diplomatics, however, can lead not only to a more empirically grounded list of international institutions but also to more compelling explanations of the role and significance of institutions in international society. There are certainly problems in applying a method mostly used in the sociology of chronic illness, nursing, education, and the family14 to a much more complex social environment such as the society of states. International society, it should be remembered, is not a real society, a society comprised of “flesh and blood” human beings. Rather it is what Manning called a quasi-society (Manning 1962:21–22, 27–31; Wilson 2004:759–760), or a second-order society “where the members are not individual human beings but durable collectivities of humans possessed of identities and actor qualities that are more than the sum of their parts” (Buzan 2004:24–25, 188–190). We cannot ask the members of this society about the institutional complexion of their lives. The only people we can ask are the representatives of those members and those in prominent and influential positions in the activity of world politics. This means we have to adapt GT to our specific needs. But one of the strengths of GT is its flexibility. It consists of a systematic yet flexible set of procedures for theory-building. In this section, I set out the principles of GT research15 and provide some hypothetical examples of what the elements in a GT research program on the institutions of international society might look like. In the next section, I explore further the complementarity of the two approaches. In the final section, I spell out the mutual advantages of bringing together GT and the ES before concluding on the next step to be taken to get an ES-inspired GT of institutions up and running. At its origin, GT was an attempt to blend the sociological methods of Columbia School positivism and Chicago School pragmatism. Its classic text is Glaser and Strauss (2008). As with much ES theory of the time, the starting point for GT was skepticism about the assumptions underlying quantitative social science, such as the possibility of “reducing qualities of human experience to quantifiable variables” (Charmaz 1995:29), the possibility of scientific objectivity, and the goals of establishing causal relationships and deriving universalizable propositions about social behavior. From the Columbia School, it took the need to be systematic in analysis, explicit about research procedures, and generative of abstract theory. From the Chicago School, according to some the senior partner (hence the tendency to equate GT with this school in the literature), it took the emphasis on agency, the assumption that process was more important than structure (the latter being created by humans engaging in processes), the stress on subjective and intersubjective understandings, and its focus on the intimate relationship between language, meaning, and action. Essentially, Glaser and Strauss sought to put qualitative research on a much more systematic footing, in order to counter claims from quantitative researchers that such work was impressionistic and unscientific (see, for example, Glaser and Strauss 2008 [1967]:10–18, 223, 259–262). They contended that the “logico-deductive” approach, increasingly dominant in the social sciences, of testing hypotheses derived from existing theory risked “forcing the data” (see, for example, Glaser and Strauss 2008 [1967]:98, 142–144, 261–262). This could only be avoided by taking a more inductive approach in which theory emerged from the data. The strategies they proposed involved simultaneous data collection and analysis, deriving “codes” (essentially analytical categories) from data rather than from extant theory and developing theory at each stage of the data collection and analysis. Through inter alia interviews and participant observation, researchers immerse themselves in the lived lives of their subjects, but with the object of going beyond the description of classic ethnography to the construction of an abstract, conceptual understanding of the studied phenomenon. While GT might be considered a form of ethnography in its desire to obtain a nonjudgmental, dense, textured, “insider” understanding of the life of a particular group, unlike classic ethnography it is not concerned to record every dimension of that life, only those dimensions which have pertinence to the emerging theory. While classic ethnography and GT both amass data, the latter is more focused and selective and avoids the accumulation of “mountains of unconnected data” (Charmaz 2006:23). In sum, while the approach of GT is empirical and nonpositivist, its object is eminently theoretical. Glaser and Strauss (2008) define it as “the discovery of theory from data systematically obtained from social research.” A typical GT is constructed in five stages: data gathering; coding; memo-writing; theoretical sampling; and theory drafting. These stages, in practice, are rarely discrete. Questions arising in one stage frequently require returning to an earlier stage of the process. The first stage involves the gathering of “rich data.” These are the data that enable the researcher to see the world from the research participants' point of view. The grounded researcher employs a variety of data collection methods, including participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, and textual analysis of records and reports. The object of the exercise is to reveal the participants' views, feelings, experiences, intentions, actions, as well as the contexts and structure of the aspect of their lives under scrutiny. From this first stage, GT pursues a flexible approach. The methods of collection employed vary according to the research problem. Sometimes issues arising from the very process of data gathering require them to be modified. The initial course of study will be shaped by certain background assumptions and perspectives, including disciplinary perspectives. Indeed it is neither possible nor desirable for the researcher, no matter how skilled, to come to the data cold. The researcher needs certain “background interests” or “sensitizing concepts” in order to begin the process of thinking analytically about the data (Charmaz 1995:32, 49; Glaser and Strauss 2008 [1967]:3, 46). For the ES, the relationship between “principles,”“practices,”“institutions,” and international behavior could constitute such interests and concepts. But the skilled and/or experienced grounded researcher would recognize these as valuable but not limiting points of departure. He or she strives to be as open as possible to changes in direction, and guards against locking the process into original conceptual frameworks and forcing preconceived ideas and theories onto the data. One sense in which the stages of research should not be regarded as discrete is that in GT research data and concepts exist in constant tension and mutual relation. Unlike classic ethnography, there is no separation between data collection and analysis. The two occur simultaneously. The object is not description but theoretical interpretation. The grounded researcher moves backward and forward from theory to data. In this way, the theoretical framework becomes progressively refined. With regard to participant interviews, for example, the grounded researcher prefers a semistructured or an unstructured approach. This enables interesting ideas and issues to be explored as soon as they arise. These ideas and issues, in turn, may influence the shape and content of subsequent interviews. In this way, the data collection becomes not only more focused, but intimately connected with the emerging theory. The next step in GT is known as “coding.” It involves giving segments of data a label that categorizes and summarizes that data. This is the first formal step in providing a conceptual understanding of the data. In the words of one leading proponent, “[c]oding is the pivotal link between collecting data and developing an emergent theory to explain these data” (Charmaz 2006:46). Codes “are elements of a nascent theory that explains the data and informs further data gathering” (Charmaz 2006:46). They capture and condense often complex meanings and actions. The researcher constantly revises and refines his/her codes in light of new data. “Initial” codes, highly specific and detailed, give way to “focused” codes, more conceptual and synthetic, as the theoretical direction of the study takes shape. Some grounded researchers utilize in vivo codes. This is the use of “telling phrases,”“activity-specific terminology,” or “insider shorthand” as a code. Such language is characteristic of many social activities (“going native,” being “on/off message,”“speaking truth to power,” and “frank exchange of views” being examples from politics and diplomacy). The advantage of such codes is that they anchor the analysis in participants' worlds and provide texture that ex vivo codes, no matter how accurate a representation of the data, are unable to do. Coding enables a leap to be taken, but not in any predetermined way, from the specific and concrete to the general and abstract. The process is taken further with memo-writing. Memos are informal and provisional analytic notes written whenever codes prompt broader ideas. These ideas may relate, for example, to commonalities in the data where participants relate common views and experiences. Memos expedite the identification of themes and patterns and help to direct and fine-tune future data gathering and coding. They identify ways in which codes can be “clustered” and subsequently framed as analytical “categories,” which are construed as the principal conceptual elements in the emerging theory. One could envisage, for example, different understandings of institutions among diplomats as such categories in an emergent theory of the institutional structure of international society (for example, “institution as organization,”“institution as regime,”“institution as practice”). Categories might consist of in vivo codes taken directly from the discourse of participants, or the researcher's own comprehension and summation of what is happening in the data. The purpose of theoretical sampling, the fourth stage in GT research, is to refine and strengthen the analytical categories. This is achieved by returning to the data to gauge the extent to which conjectures or hypotheses contained within any given category (for example, “the balance of power understood as a set of assumptions and expectations is a major factor in the determination of state behavior”) stand up. If they are found to insufficiently capture participants' views and experiences, they will need to be elaborated or refined (for example, “the balance of power understood as a set of assumptions and expectations is an ever-present background factor in the determination of state behavior but becomes a foreground factor at times of instability and tension”). At this point, additional data may be required to test the new category. But it is important to note that the burden of this task is now lighter due to the sharper focus of the study. In addition, unlike positivist and deductive research programs, all the hypotheses and conjectures tested emerge from the data. The researcher avoids as much as possible the insertion of extant theory. The intimate connection between data and emergent theory is maintained at every stage of the process. As well as refining and strengthening categories, sampling helps the researcher to identify gaps, where the categories do not accommodate the full range of relevant participant experiences. It also helps the researcher to know when to stop data gathering. This happens when the categories are “saturated,” that is, when fresh data gathering no longer generates new theoretical insights. The flexibility of GT is maintained in the final, drafting, stage. Grounded theorists take a critical stance toward conventional formats for the presentation of academic research. They tend to conduct a literature review, for example, toward the end of the drafting process, not the beginning, so as not to be unduly influenced by received theory. They sometimes include more raw data in their texts, for example, excerpts from interviews, than is usual in order “to keep the human story in the forefront of the reader's mind and to make the conceptual analysis more accessible to a wider audience” (Charmaz 1995:47; Glaser and Strauss 2008 [1967]:228–229). The accessibility issue is important to grounded theorists. They contend that good theory as well as being empirically robust, accurate, logical, and parsimonious, should be useful, that is, helpful not only to other social scientists but to students and practitioners. It is vital therefore that it is readily comprehensible and free of unnecessary jargon (see, for example, Glaser and Strauss 2008 [1967]:1, 3, 76, 98, 237). In the spirit of science, they also argue that it should be free of sentimentality. But while advocating the adoption of a neutral tone, they nonetheless acknowledge they are engaged in an act of persuasion, that theorizing is an argumentative practice, that while their theory may be richly informed by the data no research process is perfect, and that their search for accuracy and objectivity will always be to some extent deficient. It is at the drafting stage that the individual skill of the researcher is most in evidence. But the skill and judgment of the researcher is a major factor in all stages of the process, GT being a set of flexible research procedures and a craft rather than a set of rigid prescriptions. Common Ground It might be said that GT and the ES share the same general starting point and goal, but GT has made much greater progress in identifying a rigorous method for getting from one to the other. The goal is straightforward: a general, conceptual understanding of the studied phenomena. This is what the ES hopes to achieve through its concepts inter alia of international society and primary institutions. The starting point is a shared epistemology in empiricism. But it would be wrong to think proponents of GT and the ES are naïve empiricists. While they maintain that knowledge claims must not extend beyond what can be observed or experienced, they accept that observation and experience are far from unproblematic. At the outset of his classic study of world order, for example, Bull (1977:xv) declared that no investigation of the social and political world can be value-free. Social and political analyses are always derived from certain premises. All the analyst can do is subject these premises to investigation and criticism and resist the temptation (strong in a politically highly charged subject such as IR) of partisanship (Jackson 2009:24–26). In this way, it is possible to achieve a higher degree of scholarly detachment than would otherwise be the case. GT occupies exactly this ground. While it places great stress on the role of data, it does not view data as lying idly on the wayside waiting to be discovered. Data do not objectively exist but are constructed through the interaction of observer and observed. The premises and preconceptions of the observer are an eradicable part of the equation. All the researcher can hope to do is reduce this element through self-reflexivity, that is, by consistently reflecting on his or her premises and preconceptions and how they might affect their collection and interpretation of the data. In sum, both the ES and GT reject scientific neutrality, but they aspire through what might be termed self-reflexive empiricism to relatively objective knowledge. There are two other important areas of common ground between GT and the ES that need to be highlighted. First, both schools pay close attention to language. As we have seen, the ES, if not the new institutionalism, has been concerned to keep the language of theory and practice close together. The way practitioners speak has been seen as a vital window into the way they think, and the way they think an indispensable guide for making sense of the actions and activities of the collective bodies they represent.16 Similarly, grounded theorists stress the importance of recording the views and experiences of research participants in their own terms, paying close attention to words and phrases that may carry special meaning. In so doing, researchers may be able to enter implicit worlds of meaning otherwise closed to them. This does not mean they are barred, once the data have been collected, coded, and categorized, from using the language of their disciplines or wider “external” discourses to relate the bigger story. But they are alert to the danger of casting this story in “a lifeless language that better fits our academic and bureaucratic worlds than those of our participants” (Charmaz 2006:69). Paying close attention to participants' language helps the researcher bridge the gap between the lived experience of the former and the sometimes blinkered disciplinarity of the latter. It also helps them to enter the normative worlds of their participants and discern the standards of value that guide their conduct. Having an insight into such standards is an essential ingredient of any humanistic as opposed to purely physical or mechanical study (Jackson 2009:21–32). Secondly, both schools are united in their conviction that methods alone do not guarantee good research. According to Jackson (2009:33), the attainment of a high level of academic knowledge “is not merely a question of good methodology. It is far more a question of academic virtue.” The academic virtues involved in the study of human affairs include intellectual honesty, impartiality, imagination, and love of learning. According to Charmaz (2006:15), “[a] method provides a tool to enhance seeing but does not provide automatic insight.” There are no foolproof methods. The skill of the researcher is always an essential ingredient. Researchers continuously exercise judgments, and the quality of these judgments will always be a function of their individual capabilities and experience. This is the “craft” element that proponents of both GT and ES are keen to emphasize (Jackson 2000:91–96, 2009; Charmaz 2006:10–12). While GT has developed a widely accepted and practiced set of research procedures, there is no litany to be faithfully reproduced regardless of circumstance. As in the ES tradition, a large degree of latitude is given to the judgment and imagination of researchers to frame their study as they see fit given their purposes and the resources available to them. What is sacrosanct is that the theory should emerge from the data, not be forced upon it, and that researchers should be prepared to reframe their study if the accumulating data call into question the original design. Toward a Grounded Theory The common ground between the ES and GT is too fertile not to be cultivated. The ES provides GT with a new area—international society—in which to extend and test its research strategy. In the view of Charmaz (1995:28–29), GT methods are appropriate for studying “individual processes, interpersonal relations and the reciprocal effects between individuals and larger social processes.” The extent to which they can usefully be applied to intercommunal relations, where individuals are primarily agents of large and complex social groups, is the test. It is certainly a demanding test given the second-order and anarchical nature of international society, its cultural diversity, its multiplicity of languages, and its vast array of national traditions. These basic features engender an environment in which there is often a big gap between appearance and reality, between what people say and what they do, between what they say and what they think, and between what they say to one audience and what they say to another. While “doublespeak” (Orwell 1981 [1949]), “two level games” (Puttnam 1988), and “strategic cover-ups” (Mearsheimer 2011), to cite some of the terms invented to capture this reality, are far from unknown in domestic settings, in the international setting they are normal. Accurate interpretation of the multiple layers of meaning in international society is certainly a challenge. But the recent application of interpretative techniques to areas such as diplomacy (Neumann 2011) suggests that this is a challenge we should not be too daunted to meet.17 Nor is it one entirely without precedent in ES thinking.18 The ES also provides GT with a point of departure in the international realm with “background interests” such as the search for the bases of international order (for example, James 1973; Vincent 1974; Bull 1977; Hurrell 2007) and the relationship between order and justice (for example, Bull 1977:77–98; Harris 1993; Wheeler 2000; Williams 2005), and “sensitizing concepts” such as primary institutions, secondary institutions, and international society. Grounded theory provides the ES with a set of techniques to enable the systematic gathering of data on practitioner understandings of the institutional structure of international society. Depending on the size and geographical scope of the study, the patterns we discern may be complex, but for the first time we will have detailed evidence of how practitioners conceive that structure and its component parts. For the first time, our understanding of the nature and identity of the international institutions would be empirically grounded. It may turn out that the putative central idea/concept/insight of the ES, primary institutions, is not corroborated. It may turn out that secondary institutions loom far larger in the psychomilieu of practitioners. This should be grist to the ES mill. The point about an ES-inspired GT of international institutions is it provides a starting place and initial sense of direction for systematic research but should in no way predetermine its course and destination. In the process, important light could be thrown on another stubborn problem in IR theory: the relationship between institutions and practices. More than 30 years ago, Keens-Soper (1978) bemoaned the lack of unified usage of these terms and the conditions that qualified a “practice” to be named an “institution.” A few years later, Suganami (1983:2365) conceived practices as one element of institutions along with social rules, conventions, and usages. As we have seen above, Holsti's understanding of institutions makes strong reference to “patterned practices,” as does Buzan's to “durable shared practices” or “enduring fundamental practices” (see also Reus-Smit 2002:503; Hurrell 2007:59). According to Navari (2011:618–621), the ES' understanding of institutions is identical to understandings of practice prevailing in social practice theory (in particular those of Stephen Turner and Ted Schatzki). However, Duffield (2007:11) contends that the identification of institutions with practices “has found little favor” in IR, and he excludes the latter from his unified definition of the former. Here, he sides with these rationalist and constructivist analysts who contend that associating institutions closely with practices and/or patterned behavior limits its explanatory value because it is precisely the impact of institutions on practice that they wish to explain. The explanans needs to be kept separate from the explanandum. In line with this, constructivists Adler and Pouliot (2011) draw a sharp distinction between practices and institutions. However, they provide as examples of the practices a series of things (for example, diplomacy, the balance of power, international law, and human rights) that the ES would regard as institutions. We have therefore a confused picture in IR of the meaning of and relationship between institutions and practices. With practices, as with institutions, the source of this confusion is reliance on stipulative definitions and the failure to ground interpretations in practitioner understandings and experience. Until definitions become more firmly grounded in the social reality of practitioner understandings and experience, there is every likelihood that conceptualizations and disagreements will continue to proliferate and conceptual anarchy reign. But a GT of international institutions would go beyond definition and seek a general conceptual understanding of the role and importance of institutions, and an evaluation of how they might be made more effective or otherwise improved. It would be a general understanding, however, that emerged from the data, an “insider” understanding of what those professionally or otherwise intimately involved in IR conceive to be the role, importance, value, and potential for progressive change of institutions. Such an approach will not, of course, provide all the answers. But it holds out the prospect of grounding our understanding and evaluation of institutions in empirical reality, something which “outsider” accounts, despite the importance they attach to empirical validation, have so far failed to do. The Next Step A GT of international institutions along these lines, however, cannot be built overnight. The resource implications are considerable. To get such a project properly off the ground will require substantial institutional funding. But this does not mean that the “lone scholar,” the main modality of research within the ES, cannot make progress on small projects, focusing on particular foreign service departments, particular groups of international civil servants, or gatherings of particular international fora. With regard to perceptions of the international institutional environment, one can envisage interviews of experienced practitioners, supplemented by questionnaires, providing a rich source of data. But it is only once the data are collected that the process of mapping, for the first time confidently, the institutional contours of international society can begin, and it is only once we have begun to put together a reliable map that we will be in a position to begin the job of exploring the terrain more theoretically. One of the limitations of the approach is that it cannot be applied to historical international societies, or rather it can only be applied in the form of analysis of extant texts—historical documents, memoirs, personal papers, and the like. But one of the advantages is that there is considerable scope for conducting GT research collectively, utilizing a division of labor, and involving doctoral students, early-career researchers, as well as more seasoned scholars. In this sense, the notion of an ES research “project” (see, for example, Clark 2011:49; Schouenborg 2011:28) can be made real, and the problem of lack of cumulation, which has dogged studies in the ES tradition, for the first time properly addressed. While it would be foolish to ignore the difficulties in producing a fully fledged GT, the potential long-term gains are considerable. In the process, the analytical promise of the ES, long recognized, could be substantially delivered. Footnotes Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the annual convention, British International Studies Association, Cambridge, 2007; research workshops at the LSE in 2010 and 2011; and the Institute for Policy Research, Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Center, 2012. I am grateful for the helpful comments received, in particular from Mats Berdal, Barry Buzan, Richard Campanaro, Marco Cesa, Jens Meierhenrich, and three anonymous referees of this journal. 2 Note, however, that for James diplomacy is a prerequisite of both an international society and an international system. It is hard to conceive of relations of any scale or significance occurring, according to James (1993a,b), without the system of communication called diplomacy. 3 Some of the likely construction difficulties are pointed out in Evans and Wilson (1992:340–341) and Dunne (1995:140–143). A more positive assessment is provided in Buzan's (1993) classic article. 4 Common ground between Holsti (2004) and the ES is substantial, for example, regarding membership of the “club of states” (pp. 117, 121); the relationship between sovereignty, law, and international order (pp. 118, 142); the importance of normative rules (pp. 174, 304); and the ethical merits of international society (p. 323). Note also his recent inclusion (and largely positive assessment of Bull) in Navari 2009a, an explicitly ES volume. 5 Something, incidentally, that Bull mentioned in one of his early essays (1966:48) but did not develop. 6 Note, however, that Holsti comes very close to conceiving the balance of power as an institution (according to his own definition) in a paragraph on the strong antihegemonial tendencies of international society (Holsti 2004:306–307; see also 313). 7 Schouenborg (2011:32–33) arrives at this formulation following engagement with Ian Clark's argument that legitimacy is a “more fundamental” property of international society than an institution. But Buzan's “membership” functional category accommodates the notion of rightful membership. Therefore, to add “legitimacy” to “membership” seems on the face of it superfluous. 8 A few years earlier, Nicholas Onuf (2002:223) spotted a possible paradox: “Short lists of international institutions belie claims of historical grounding, and they betray a narrow set of assumptions about what rules do and what institutions count. Long, open-ended lists would honour the historical record, but they would also make any general pattern or developmental tendency impossible to discern.” 9 Much, of course, depends on what one means by sovereignty. Conceptualizations abound (for example, James 1986, 1999; Jackson 2007). Note that according to Schouenborg (2011:36–37), international law should not be considered an institution at all since “explicit rule-making” is a property of all institutions. 10 It should also be noted that his use of the term institutions is not entirely consistent. He sometimes uses it to signify (in Buzan's scheme) secondary as well as primary institutions (for example, pp. 4, 19, 20, 28, 305). 11 It might be contended that summitry is an aspect of the larger institution of diplomacy. In response, it could be said (i) summitry performs a variety of functions, not all of them diplomatic (for example, enhancing the domestic political prestige of the participants, raising the international profile of the host venue, and putting the host venue on the economic/tourist map), and (ii) if territoriality, statehood, and sovereignty can be conceived as separate institutions, why not summitry and diplomacy? See Dunn (1996). 12 Which Butterfield (1965:9) contended must be possible otherwise people would be “for ever locked away from one another,” and all generations (and by extension all classes, nations, cultures, professions, etc.) “must be regarded as a world and a law unto themselves.” 13 Note in this regard Dunne's (2001b:230) observation that Buzan and Little (2000) pursue “a quasi-positivist approach to history that is at odds with the hermeneutic approach of earlier English School research.” 14 Seminal works include Glaser and Strauss (1968), Hood (1983), Biernacki (1986), Chenitz and Swanson (1986), and Charmaz (1991). 15 I draw primarily on Glaser and Strauss (2008), Charmaz (1995, 2006). 16 Navari (2009b, 2011) emphasizes the importance of intentionality in ES thinking and its concern with conduct—self-conscious acts informed by normative rules—rather than “raw” behavior. 17 Neumann (2011:1) describes his work as a “historically informed ethnography of diplomacy.” It contains many valuable observations and provides a texture to our understanding of diplomacy missing in many general accounts. 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TI - The English School Meets the Chicago School: The Case for a Grounded Theory of International Institutions
JF - International Studies Review
DO - 10.1111/misr.12001
DA - 2012-12-16
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-english-school-meets-the-chicago-school-the-case-for-a-grounded-fc0gYpll0M
SP - 1
EP - 590
VL - Advance Article
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -