ABSTRACT
Stated simply, historical institutionalism sheds light on the long-term historical processes that generate global models, world polity theory provides a framework for understanding diffusion of these models to new settings, and Scandinavian institutionalism illustrates how external models change as they are enacted at the micro level. But integration across time and levels of analysis rests on the assumption that these lenses are equally valuable and simply provide different insights. That is, theoretical integration assumes that social phenomena are like a hermeneutic circle: The parts and the whole of a social and cultural phenomenon are inseparable and we cannot fully understand one without the other.
