About

The research unit “Big Structural Change” (BISC) contributes from a micro-perspective to the theory and empirics of institutional change. We define institutions as formal or informal rules, e.g., laws or social norms, to which stakeholders may ascribe a normative quality. The unit focusses on changes that are “big” in the sense of potentially unsettling the societal structure. This structure is defined as the total web of formal and informal rules that determine how state, economy, and society organize the political system, produce and distribute welfare, and shape their social relations. The societal structure is not simply given but can be traced back to the agency of individual stakeholders reproducing or changing it by their daily practices. Its changes can be incremental and rather slow, long-term, or disruptive and rather fast.

BISC defines externalities, beliefs, and legitimacy as three channels of impact to these changes, and specifies their interconnections in the Beliefs-Externalities-Legitimacy-framework (BEL model). We define externalities as reallocation of both material and immaterial costs and benefits among stakeholders, occurring when global trends (drivers of change) hit the societal structure. In response to those externalities, people change their beliefs about the properties and expected outcomes of existing institutions; and new political, social, and economic conflicts emerge. Belief changes caused by externalities can, but need not, affect the legitimacy of institutions. If belief changes affect the legitimacy of central institutions of societal structure, and therefore the legitimacy of the societal structure itself, societal responses to the new conflicts may trigger off disruptive big structural change. If institutional legitimacy stays unaffected, incremental big structural change may be triggered off.