Lost in Transposition? (A Cautionary Tale): The Bank of North Dakota and Prospects for Reform in American Banking

Abstract

Recent institutional scholarship has discovered new possibilities for change in both the accumulation of incremental transformations and in the skillful action, institutional work, and creative activities of political and institutional entrepreneurs. Lurking behind stability and change lie actors who can act reflexively within and with existing institutions, and who do so on a routine, rather than exceptional basis, redeploying, recombining, and transposing extant systems to solve problems of identity and control. This paper probes the potentials and limits of those possibilities – and the prospects for reform in American banking – via a case study of the Bank of North Dakota and efforts to transpose its hybrid model of state and community logics into other states. The analysis first finds a full range of institutional labors and skillful activities emphasized by recent work as the foundation for transposition. It finds crisis; the presence of multiple logics; the mobilization of boundary spanning networks; the use of conferences and theorization to sustain independent discourse and collective identities; skillful framing; and substantial editing and recombination to fit the model with receiving states’ institutions. It then juxtaposes these conditions with outcomes in the states, developing some implications for actor-centered institutionalisms, current preoccupations with mechanisms, and state-level strategies for financial reform.

Citation

Schneiberg, M. (2013), "Lost in Transposition? (A Cautionary Tale): The Bank of North Dakota and Prospects for Reform in American Banking", Lounsbury, M. and Boxenbaum, E. (Ed.) Institutional Logics in Action, Part A (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 39 Part A), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 277-310. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X(2013)0039AB013