Bottom-Up Collegiality, Top-Down Collegiality, or Inside-Out Collegiality? Analyses of Multilevel Networks, Institutional Entrepreneurship and Laboratories for Social Change

Abstract

This paper argues that the analysis of multilevel networks (AMN) is useful to understand politics, institutional entrepreneurship, and social change. AMN helps identify multilevel relational infrastructures (in particular multilevel social status) on which institutional entrepreneurship depends, especially in collegial oligarchies as laboratories for social change. In heavily bureaucratized societies, these laboratories take various forms such as bottom-up collegiality, top-down collegiality, and inside-out collegiality. We argue that, in an era of vital transitions, one of the main challenges for social network analyses is to use AMN to observe these collegial oligarchies and to model and understand social (in)capacities to build alternative multilevel relational infrastructures promoting social change. This challenge leads to another: that of understanding the conditions under which a form of collegiality is selected by contextualizing institutional entrepreneurship and its multilevel relational infrastructures. The paper theorizes organized mobility and relational turnover as important dimensions of this contextualization of institutionalization processes.