How Agents Change Institutions: Institutional Entrepreneurs and the Reform of Commercial Training in Switzerland

Historical institutionalist research has long struggled to come to terms with agency. Almost thirty years after Paul DiMaggio has introduced the notion of “institutional entrepreneurs,” many historical-institutionalist accounts are still free of agents. Injecting agency into historical-institutionalist accounts is, however, no easy task. Peter Hall refers to this as the “problem of plasticity.” If institutions are structuring agents’ behavior, while they are simultaneously being structured by these very agents’ behavior, the ontological status of institutions remains unclear. Hence, most historical-institutional accounts tend to downplay the role of agency. However, in this way, they also remain incomplete. Marrying historical institutionalist considerations concerning the coalitional basis of institutions with sociological accounts of institutional entrepreneurship, we develop a new account of institutional change and stability that awards a central role to agency. At the heart of our approach is the notion that both the stability and the change of institutions presuppose constant coalition building by institutional entrepreneurs. While social coalitions supporting institutions provide stability, we argue that institutions are also often contested by minority coalitions that disapprove of the status quo. The stability of institutions thus presupposes coalitional work by the incumbent coalition in order to defend the status quo. On the other hand, challengers need to engage in coalitional work as well in order to build up a powerful challenger coalition. However, for a variety of reasons, collective action is complicated for challenger coalitions. In all these processes, institutional entrepreneurs are key actors because they are the agents that do the coalitional work. To illustrate the potential of our agent-centric approach to institutional change, we analyze the reform of commercial training in Switzerland, which is by far the most popular apprenticeship, tracing developments from the beginning of the 1980s until today. In the 1990s, a reform process was set in motion that fundamentally changed the governance of commercial training. While commercial training was originally strongly shaped by commercial schools and stabilized by a coalition between the schools’ association and the responsible state agency, business interest associations now dominate the governance of commercial training. Importantly, the reform of commercial training served as the pace setter for subsequent reforms of Swiss vocational education and training. Methodologically, we conduct a systematic process analysis. In order to be able to trace back the decisive steps of the reform process as well as the actors involved in that process, we systematically examined primary resources and conducted twenty-one expert interviews with people who were actively participating in the reform process. The interview data were triangulated with the primary resources and secondary literature and with newspaper articles on the reform of commercial training in Switzerland. We find that the large and well-organized Swiss banking industry initiated coalition building between the involved business actors. Because of the inability of the institutional incumbent to engage in coalitional work and because of external pressures, this coalition managed to induce transformative institutional change and gain control over commercial training.