ABSTRACT
By attending to “thick” history and long trajectories for change, historical institutionalism adds additional layers of explanation to any analysis of diffusion and translation. Just as historical institutionalism can take globalization and cross-national trends into account for explaining national-level outcomes, world polity theory can consider national sequences, critical junctures, and enduring national paths as intermediary variables that provide a holistic explanation for diffusion. Similarly, just as historical institutionalism can focus on variability in the enactment of a local institution, Scandinavian institutionalism can consider how sequences of actions and critical junctures at a national level shape both the likelihood of adoption and the translation of a practice itself. When the three institutional theories are viewed as bridging levels of analysis, the benefit of combining the perspectives becomes particularly apparent. World polity theory offers a causal explanation for processes of global diffusion and provides an argument for why some ideas are more likely to spread than others (Meyer 1996). Critical junctures and path dependence, though, channel diffusion processes in novel directions, and translation takes place as the “meaning constellations” of recipients filter and refract global ideas (Czarniawska and Sevón 2005; Schriewer 2012).4
