The English School meets the Chicago School: the case for a grounded theory of international institutions

The concept of primary international institutions is a core idea of the English School and central to those scholars from Bull to Buzan who have sought to take it in a more sociological direction. Yet the English School has traditionally found it difficult to define and identify with consistency the institutions of international society. A group of scholars, here called the “new institutionalists,” have recently sought to address this problem by devising tighter definitions and applying them more rigorously. But different understandings and lists of institutions continue to proliferate. The source of the problem is the reliance on “stipulative” definitions, drawn from an increasingly abstract theoretical literature. The problem is compounded by the new institutionalists’ employment of social structural and other “outsider” methods of social research. This article argues that it is only possible to empirically ground institutions, a task on which all agree, by returning to the interpretive “insider” approach traditionally associated with the school—but employing it in a much more rigorous way. To this end it makes the case for a “grounded theory” of international institutions inspired by Chicago School sociology.