International Review of Sociology

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Innovation as social change: an institutional

analysis

Alejandro Portes

To cite this article: Alejandro Portes (2021) Innovation as social change: an institutional analysis,
International Review of Sociology, 31:3, 356-372, DOI: 10.1080/03906701.2021.2015983

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.2015983

Published online: 11 Jan 2022.

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INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY—REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SOCIOLOGIE
2021, VOL. 31, NO. 3, 356–372
https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2021.2015983

Innovation as social change: an institutional analysis

Alejandro Portesa,b
a
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA; bUniversity of Miami, Miami, FL, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Based on Robert Merton’s typology of social deviance and his Received 17 January 2021
distinction between manifest and latent functions, this article Accepted 30 November 2021
explores the nature and consequences of deliberately-engineered
KEYWORDS
innovation in the modern world. The substitution of spontaneous Institutions; innovation;
scientific and technological innovations by engineered ones social change; stability;
through institutions created for that purpose represents itself a culture; social structure
major innovation of the XX century. However, celebratory
accounts of this innovation neglect the process of reverse
causality created by it, impacting deeper levels of the culture and
social structure of affected societies throughout the world. This
process can have both positive and negative consequences,
including the substitution of real innovations for apparent ones
and the mass displacement of communities and workers linked to
earlier technologies and practices. These often unintended
consequences of deliberately-engineered innovation are
discussed and their implications for individuals and for the social
order identified.

1. Introduction
In his classic essay, ‘Social Structure and Anomie’, Robert K. Merton (1968a) presents a
typology of deviance based on the different stances of people toward cultural ends and
the socially accepted means to reach them. The vast majority of people are ‘conformists’,
agreeing with both established cultural ends and accepted means; on the other hand,
innovators accept the ends, but propose new and unconventional means to attain
them. Such means may be socially acceptable – as new technical or scientific break-
throughs – or unacceptable, such as criminal activities of various kinds. Innovators
differ as well from ‘rebels’ who reject both established ends and means and ‘ritualists’
who blindly embrace established practices without any concern about attaining any
promised goals. This typology is presented in Figure 1.
Merton’s typology offers a fruitful point of departure for the analysis of innovation as
social change. Criminal enterprise aside, the main aim of innovation is to achieve cultu-
rally desirable ends by better means – more economical, faster, more reliable. As such, it
always aims at subverting established practice – a goal that necessarily triggers resistance
among conformists and, especially ritualists.

CONTACT Alejandro Portes Aportes@princeton.edu Princeton University, Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
© 2022 University of Rome ‘La Sapienza‘
 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY—REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SOCIOLOGIE 357

Figure 1. Merton’s typology of social action. Source: Merton (1968a).

Innovation necessarily implies social change, but what type of change it brings about
varies widely – from mere adjustments to what went on before to epoch-making trans-
formations. Furthermore, not all innovations are of a purely technical/scientific sort,
because they also include innovations in the culture and social organizations of existing
societies. To fully appreciate the potential range of effects of innovations, one must have a
clear idea of what the social order in which they occur consists of. For it is not the case
that societies are level ‘playing fields’, instead they are structured hierarchically, compris-
ing a variety of disparate elements arranged in established relations with each other. A
synthetic description of what these are is examined next.

2. Culture and social structure1

From its classical beginnings, modern sociology developed a central distinction, consoli-
dated by the mid-twentieth century, between culture and social structure. There are good
reasons for this distinction. Culture embodies the symbolic elements crucial for human
interaction, mutual understanding, and order. Social structure is composed of actual per-
sons enacting roles organized in a status hierarchy of some kind. The distinction is ana-
lytic because only human beings exist in reality, but it is fundamental to understand both
the motives for their actions and the consequences. Culture is the realm of values, cogni-
tive frameworks, and accumulated knowledge. Social structure is the realm of interests,
individual and collective, backed by different amounts of power. The symbolic distinction
provides the basis for analyzing the difference between what ‘ought to be’ or ‘is expected to
be’ and what actually ‘is’ in multiple social contexts (Merton, 1936, 1968a).
The diverse elements that compose culture and social structure can be arranged in a
hierarchy of causative influences from ‘deep’ factors, often concealed below everyday
social life but fundamental for its organization, to ‘surface’ phenomena, more mutable
358 A. PORTES

Figure 2. The elements of social life. Source: Portes (2006).

and more readily evident. This hierarchy is presented in Figure 2. Language and values
are the ‘deep’ elements of culture, the first as the fundamental instrument of human com-
munication and the second as the motivating force behind ‘principled’ action, individual
or collective. The importance of values can range, in turn, from core moral imperatives of
a society to traditions prized mostly out of custom. In every instance, values point toward
a clear continuum between the good and desirable and the bad and abhorrent. ‘Neu-
trality’ is the exact opposite of this basic element of culture (Durkheim, 1897/1965;
Weber, 1904/1949). Values are deep culture because they are seldom invoked in the
course of everyday life. Values come to the fore only in exceptional circumstances (Mer-
ton, 1968b; Weber, 1904/1949). Yet, they underlie, and are inferred from, aspects of
 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY—REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SOCIOLOGIE 359

everyday behavior that are the opposite of unrestrained self-interest, the ‘constraints’ that
North (1990) Ostrom (1990) and others refer to.
Norms are such constraints. Values are not norms and the distinction is important:
values represent general moral principles while norms embody concrete directives for
action (MacIver & Page, 1949/1961; Newcomb et al., 1965). Values underlie norms,
which are rules that prescribe the ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ of individual everyday conduct.
These rules can be formal and codified into laws, or they can be implicit and informally
enforced. The concept of norms has been used, at least since Durkheim (1903/1982), to
refer to this restraining element of culture. The significance of the values embodied
within norms is reflected in practice in the level of sanctions attached to the latter.
Hence, life in prison or the death penalty awaits those found guilty of deliberate murder,
while loud protest and insulting remarks may be the lot of those seeking to sneak ahead of
a queue (Cooley, 1902; Goffman, 1959; Simmel, 1908/1964).
Norms are not free floating, but come together in organized bundles known as roles.
This sociological concept has been neglected in the institutionalist literature in econ-
omics that thus deprives itself of a key analytic tool. For it is as role occupants that indi-
viduals enter into the social world and are subject to the constraints and incentives of
norms. Roles are generally defined as the set of behaviors prescribed for occupants of par-
ticular social positions (Linton, 1945; Newcomb, 1950: Ch. 3). Well-socialized persons
shift from role to role effortlessly and often unconsciously as part of their daily routines.
An extensive literature in both sociology and social psychology has analyzed roles as the
building blocks of social life and as one of the lynchpin concepts linking the symbolic
world of culture to that of real social structures (Cottrell, 1933; Goffman, 1959, 1961;
Goode, 1960; Linton, 1945; Merton, 1957).
Along with normative expectations, roles also embody an instrumental repertoire of
skills necessary for their proper enactment. Language is the fundamental component
of this repertoire for, without it, no other skills can be enacted. These cultural ‘tool
kits’ also contain many other elements – from scientific and professional know-how to
demeanor, forms of expressions, manners, and general savoir faire suitable for specific
social occasions. In the modern sociological literature, these elements are referred to
by the concepts of ‘cultural capital’ and ‘skills repertoires’ (Bourdieu, 1979; 1984; Swidler,
1986; Zelizer, 2005).
Parallel to the component elements of culture run those of social structure. These are
not made up of moral values or generalized ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’, but involve the specific and
differentiated ability of social actors to compel others to do their bidding. This is the
realm of power, which, like that of values, is situated at the ‘deep’ level of social life
influencing a wide variety of outcomes. Weber’s classic definition of power as the ability
of an actor to impose his or her will despite resistance is still appropriate, for it highlights
the compulsory and coercive nature of this basic element of social structure. It does not
depend on the voluntary consent of subordinates; and, for some actors and groups to
have power, others must be excluded from access to it (Mills, 1959; Veblen, 1899/
1998; Weber, 1922/1947). While values motivate or constrain, power enables. Naturally,
elites in control of power-conferring resources seek to stabilize and perpetuate their pos-
ition by molding values so that the mass of the population is persuaded of the ‘fairness’ of
the existing order. Power thus legitimized becomes authority, in which the subordinate
masses acquiesce to their position (Bendix, 1962: chaps. 9,10; Weber, 1922/1947).
360 A. PORTES

In Marx’ classic definition, power depends on control of the means of production, but
in the modern post-industrial world this definition is too restrictive (Marx, 1867/1967,
Part VII; Marx, 1939/1970). Power is conferred as well by control of the means of produ-
cing and appropriating knowledge, by control of the means of diffusing information, and
by the more traditional control of the means of violence (Poulantzas, 1975; Weber, 1922/
1947; Wright, 1980, 1985). In the Marxist tradition, a hegemonic class is one that has suc-
ceeded in legitimizing its control of the raw means of power, thus transforming it into
authority (Gramsci, 1927–33/1971; Poulantzas, 1975).
Just as values are embodied in norms, so power differentials give rise to social classes –
large aggregates whose possession of or exclusion from resources lead to varying life
chances and capacities to influence the course of events. Classes need not be subjectively
perceived by their occupants in order to be operative, for they underlie the obvious fact
that people in society are ranked according to how far they are able to implement their
goals when confronted with resistance (Poulantzas, 1975; Wright, 1985; Wright & Per-
rone, 1977). Class position is commonly associated with wealth, but it is also linked to
other power-conferring resources such as expertise or the ‘right’ connections (Bourdieu,
1980, 1984; Hout et al., 1993; Portes, 2000). As emphasized by Bourdieu (1985) dominant
classes generally command a mix of resources that include not only wealth, but also ties
to influential others (social capital) and the knowledge and style to occupy high-status
positions (cultural capital).
The deep character of power seldom comes to the surface of society, for, as seen pre-
viously, its holders aim to legitimize it in the value system in order to obtain the voluntary
consent of the governed. Legitimized power (authority) produces, in turn, status hierar-
chies. Most social actors actually perceive the underlying structure of power on the basis
of such hierarchies and classify themselves accordingly. In turn, status hierarchies are
commonly linked to the performance of occupational roles (Linton, 1945; MacIver &
Page, 1949/1961; Newcomb et al., 1965, pp. 336–341).
The various elements of culture and social structure, placed at different levels of causal
importance and visibility, occur simultaneously and appear, at first glance, as an undiffer-
entiated mass. Their analytic separation is required, however, for the proper understand-
ing of social phenomena, including economic phenomena. Not everything is ‘constraints
on behavior’; some elements constrain, others motivate, and still others enable. As the
citations accompanying the above text suggest, this framework is neither new nor impro-
vised, but forms part of an intellectual legacy neglected in the current enthusiasm for
institutionalism.
As indicated in Figure 2, status hierarchies with attached roles do not generally exist in
isolation, but as part of social organizations. Organizations, economic and otherwise, are
what social actors inhabit, and they embody the most readily visible manifestations of the
underlying structures of power (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Granovetter, 2001). Insti-
tutions represent the symbolic blueprints for organizations; they are the set of rules, writ-
ten or informal, governing relationships among role occupants in social organizations
like the family, schools, and other major institutionally structured areas of organizational
life: the polity, the economy, religion, communications and information, and leisure
(Hollingsworth, 2002; MacIver & Page, 1949/1961; Merton, 1968b; North, 1990).
This definition of institutions is in close agreement with everyday usage of the term, as
when one speaks of ‘institutional blueprints’. Its validity does not depend, however, on
 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY—REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SOCIOLOGIE 361

this overlap, but on its analytic utility. A definition that limits the scope of this concept
while systematically relating it to other elements of social life, gives us the necessary lever-
age to understand phenomena that otherwise would be obscured. For example, the dis-
tinction between organizations and the institutions that underlie them provides the basis
for analyzing how events actually occur in social and economic life. For it is not the case
that once institutional rules are established, role occupants blindly follow them. Instead,
actors constantly modify the rules, transform them, and bypass them in the course of
their daily interaction.
No doubt, institutions matter, but they are themselves subject to what Granovetter
(1985, 1995) referred to as ‘the problem of embeddedness’ i.e. the fact that the human
exchanges that institutions seek to regulate affect, in turn, these institutions. That is
why formal goals and organizational hierarchies come to differ from how organizations
operate in reality (Dalton, 1959; Granovetter, 2001; Morrill, 1991). Absent this analytic
separation, as well as the understanding that institutions and organizations flow from
deeper levels of social life, everything becomes an undifferentiated mass that produces,
at best, descriptive case studies and, at worst, circular reasoning.

3. Institutions, change, and stability2

As blueprints for organizations, institutions seldom change themselves from within. On
the contrary, they embody stability and continuity since they codify the set of norms,
knowledge, and practices that role occupants are expected to observe and enact. For
this reason, the idea of ‘institutionalizing’ something means to render it stable and per-
manent (Scott, 1995). National constitutions represent the most important institution in
modern democratic societies insofar as they embody the key stable blueprints for the
behavior of the most important and powerful organizations and political actors. Radical
change is the opposite of institutionalization and, for that reason, constitutions are
designed to stop, moderate, and channel processes of social change.
Institutions and the organizations that they underlie can and do change through the
operation of other forces. The most continuous force transforming them is precisely the
interplay between institutions as cultural blueprints and the really-existing organizations
populated by social actors. As seen above, the problem of embeddedness refers precisely
to how actions and relations between these actors, the networks and practices that they
develop can modify institutions, either de facto or by forcing changes in the formal blue-
prints. Institutions, for example, can prescribe meritocratic recruitment and promotion
of their personnel while, in practice, these are done on a personalistic basis. More for-
mally, major societal institutions can be replaced or amended to adapt more closely to
changing social and economic realities. The interplay between formal institutions and
really-existing organizations represents one of the most important sources of change
and one of the key topics in the study of socio-economic development (MacLeod,
2004; MacKenzie, 2006; Portes & Smith, 2012: chap. 1).
Aside from ‘embeddedness’, other sources of institutional change are found at deeper
levels of the culture and social structure. These becomes evident by a simple look at
Figure 3. Religion and religious prophecies can affect the culture in radical ways because
they impinge directly on the value system (Wuthnow, 1987, 1998). Weber’s theory of
social change focuses on the history of religion and, specifically, on the role of charisma
362 A. PORTES

a force capable of breaking through the limits of reality, as hitherto known, and providing
the impetus necessary to dismantle the existing order and rebuild it on a new basis. The
influence of the Protestant Reformation, especially Calvinism, in revolutionizing econ-
omic life in Western Europe is perhaps the best-known illustration of the effects that
charismatic prophecy can have on society (Weber, 1915/1958; 1904–05/1985).
For those who dismiss the role of religious charisma as a thing of the past, one need
only point to the decisive influence that Evangelical Christianity continues to have in
transforming large portions of American society (Roof, 1999; Wuthnow, 1998) and to
the emergence of a fundamentalist brand of Islam set on ultimate confrontation with
the West. The ‘war on terrorism’ that is today an overriding concern of states in
North America and Europe is interpretable as a direct consequence of a re-energized,
charismatic religious prophecy seeking to remake the world in its own image (Kastor-
yano, 2007; Kepel, 1987).
Revolutionary change can also occur in the realm of social structure, as when power is
wrested away from its current possessors and vested in a new elite. The question of power
and of class struggles has been addressed by a long line of historians and social scientists,
classic and contemporary. Vilfredo Pareto’s (1902/1966) theory of the circulation of elites
and his famous remark that ‘history is but a graveyard of aristocracies’ focus on the fact
that dominant groups have never been able to maintain power indefinitely and on the
analysis of the mechanisms leading to their demise. From very different theoretical quar-
ters, Marx privileged the class struggle and, at a deeper level, the conflict between modes

Figure 3. Levels and forces of change. Source: Portes (2006); Portes and Smith (2012).
 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY—REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SOCIOLOGIE 363

of production and entrenched ‘social relationships of production’ as the master mechan-

ism leading to revolutionary change. For Marx and his numerous followers, the internal
contradictions of feudalism that brought about its demise were being recreated anew
under capitalism, as rising social forces clashed with the dominant class structure
(Marx & Engels, 1847/1959, p. 20).
Much of contemporary historical sociology – including the writings of Barrington
Moore (1966), Theda Skocpol (1979), Charles Tilly (1986), Immanuel Wallerstein
(1974, 1991), and Giovanni Arrighi (1994) – is concerned with the same question of revo-
lutionary change and elite replacement. To take but one example, Skocpol’s (1979) theory
of social revolutions highlights inter-elite conflict, external military pressure, and an
oppressed peasantry as factors that, when joined together, can drastically transform
the class structure and bring about a new social order.
Other sources of change operate at more proximate levels than either charisma or class
struggles. International diffusion of cultural elements can affect both the skill repertoires
and the normative structure of receiving societies. Diffusion of new technologies, con-
sumption goods, and novel organizational forms represents one of the key ways in
which advanced nations have brought about change in the rest of the world (Meyer
et al., 1997; Meyer & Hannan, 1979; Sassen, 1998). Technological breakthroughs can
also be endogenous, rather than brought about by international diffusion. Once they
occur, such breakthroughs can affect, in a very short time, the skill repertoires and,
hence, the roles played by a vast number of actors. An example is the advent of the Internet,
an innovation that has profoundly altered the content of occupational roles and the insti-
tutional rules linking them in most organizations of modern society (Castells, 1998, 2001).
Figure 3 summarizes the different sources of social change located at various levels of
the culture and social structure. What is important to note is that, whatever their depth
and reach, social change is not durable until it is ‘institutionalized’, that is until it mod-
ifies or creates anew the blueprints governing role performance and role relations in
social organizations. Neither revolutionary struggles nor charismatic prophecies would
have enduring effects unless they transform the institutional/organizational structure
of societies. The same is true for technological diffusion or scientific inventions. Insti-
tutions act, in this fashion, as the repository of major processes of change and guarantors
of their generalized and durability over time (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott, 1995).

4. Institutionalized innovation
Returning to Merton’s typology in the light of the lessons summarized in Figure 3, it is
evident that innovators seldom go for charismatic prophecies or revolutionary uprisings.
Accepting the overall value system and power hierarchies, they set their sights instead on
more modest aims which generally target the existing knowledge-and-skills repertoires of
society or its normative structure: how to do things faster, cheaper, and better; how to
achieve goals flowing from the overarching value system or the goals of power holders
in a more efficient and enduring fashion.
As noted before, not all innovations need to be ‘technological’, in the sense of new
machinery, physical instruments, software, and the like. They can also be ‘social’, in
the sense of organizational innovations that re-arrange roles and role-performers in
new configurations. For James Coleman, for example, the proper call of sociology is
364 A. PORTES

not just to study innovations, but to produce them in the form of organizational change
aimed at enacting and achieving socially-valued goals (Coleman, 1993, 1994). He offered
as examples of organizational innovation the ‘just-in-time’ system of input accessing and
the short-loop collective rewards system in auto assembly introduced by Japanese com-
panies that catapulted them into the world market, besting their American competitors
(Coleman, 1993; Portes, 2000).
Merton’s typology is also useful in reminding us of another key element regarding the
successful adoption of innovations. Most existing organizations impacted by novel ways
of doing things are populated by conformists and ritualists committed to the way things
have always been done. Hence, innovations inevitably meet resistance. The more thorough
and the more radical the changes they propose in the existing structure and functioning of
social organizations, the stronger the opposition. Industrial sociologists of the 1950s, as well
as more recent students of corporate behavior, have made a specialty of documenting the
manifold ways in which organizational personnel by-pass, modify, and even deflect changes
in production systems and organizational practices imposed from the outside or from above
(Dalton, 1959; Granovetter, 1995; Morrill, 1991). In light of this evidence, it becomes
obvious that the expectation that innovations – whether technological or social – will be
accepted because of their intrinsic merits is at best naïve.
These considerations must be taken into account as we examine the contemporary
scene in the production, diffusion, and adoption of innovations. The idea of ‘progress’
as a feature and goal of human societies is a child of the Enlightenment. In feudal
times, the order of things on earth reproduced that of heaven and, as such, was seen
as largely immutable. It took the revolutionary struggles of the XVIII and XIX centuries
to do away with the Divine Right of kings and the dogmatic authority of the Catholic
Church and replace the associated value system with one where Reason, Science, and
Progress became paramount (Arrighi, 1994; Dobb, 1947/1963; Portes & Walton, 1981).
Yet, until early XX century, the implementation of such ideals was largely left to spon-
taneous individual initiative. From Eli Whitney to Henry Ford and from James Watts to
Thomas Edison it was the talented scientist, engineer, and tinkerer who produced new
ideas and machines and compelled society to adopt them. The states of the nations where
such momentous inventions took place, primarily in Western Europe and North America,
benefitted greatly from them, furthering their economic development and political power.
But states seldom initiated these inventions (Arrighi, 1994; Dobb, 1947/1963; Tilly, 1986).
Eventually, it became evident to both states in the advanced countries and large-scale
private capital, that scientific discoveries and technical breakthroughs were too important
a subject to be left to chance. As the XX century progressed, the individual genius and the
spontaneous inventor were replaced by organized enterprise. Thereafter, the sources of
innovation were gradually embedded primarily in states and privately-sponsored labora-
tories and technological centers. The emergence of institutions whose primary goal was
the promotion of innovation amounted to a significant modification in the socio-cultural
order of causality. Whereas, as seen above, the traditional role of institutions was to
embody, reinforce, and perpetuate the existing normative structure and skills, now
there emerged a set of specialized institutions whose mission was precisely to change
these elements of society through deliberately sponsored innovation.
Such change-oriented institutions have proliferated both in the public and private
realms, including a number of state-sponsored ministries and scientific agencies,
 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY—REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SOCIOLOGIE 365

corporately-sponsored research laboratories, and the like. The ‘reverse causality’ that
this development has given rise to is portrayed in Figure 4. Institutions of this kind
replace what previously was a spontaneous and happenstance process of change in
norms, scientific knowledge, and technical skills by a rational, systematically-
pursued search for novel ways of doing things and new instruments for accomplishing
explicit goals.
The extent to which change-oriented institutions manage to accomplish their goals is
variable and governed by the same set of dynamics affecting all other institutions, namely
the operation of ‘embeddedness’. The actual actions and interactions of role occupants in
the real organizations set up to implement institutional blueprints for change will deter-
mine the extent to which explicitly laid out goals are fulfilled. As elsewhere in social life, a
range of outcomes is possible – from organizations that meet institutional blueprints to
the letter to others that become self-serving and dysfunctional. These possibilities are
explored in detail next.

Figure 4. Innovations, institutions, and reverse causality.

366 A. PORTES

5. Pitfalls of institutional innovation

The ever-present tension between ‘what ought-to be’ and ‘what actually is’, influenced by
the operation of social embeddedness is, if anything, more acute in that institutional sec-
tor dedicated to the systematic production of innovation. This is so because the mission
of such entities clashes with what otherwise is the goal of most institutions, namely to
crystallize and perpetuate what already exists. Instead, innovative organizations are expli-
citly tasked with subverting the present in order to transform the future. That goal meets
several important obstacles.
The first, and most obvious, as already seen, is the resistance of stakeholders invested
in past practice. Change is always costly because it entails abandoning what is familiar
and known for unfamiliar ways of doing things. While the change may be welcome by
the general public, it is costly for those invested in the practices and technologies of
the past. The advent of the Internet revolutionized communications, with major and
mostly negative consequences for post offices and their employees (Castells, 2001). Simi-
larly, the imminent arrival of electric self-driven vehicles will have vast and mostly nega-
tive consequences for a number of businesses – from gasoline stations to trucking and
taxi companies and their employees. Technological unemployment has been a constant
companion of scientific-technical innovation, with workers and enterprises affected
mobilizing for resistance, even if it is only to delay the inevitable. The arrow in Figure
4 from scientific-technical organizations to the class structure aims to capture this poten-
tial of major technological innovations to subvert existing class arrangements, either by
rendering sectors of the middle-and working-classes obsolete or by suddenly empower-
ing others able to understand and operate the new technologies.
A second problem has to do with the orientations of the personnel employed in scien-
tific/technical organizations. By their very nature, organizations tend to be peopled by
conformists and even ritualists, not innovators. This is the case because, to perform
their assigned roles, actors must accept the normative/skill packages attached to them.
Even if the institutional blueprints privilege change over permanence, the operation of
the organization over time necessarily leads to the emergence of stable norms, practices,
and interests.
A common and particularly problematic pattern is the substitution of apparent inno-
vations for real ones in change-oriented organizations. This happens when, as a result of
the operation of embeddedness, managers and personnel become more interested in self-
preservation than in fulfillment of the original institutional goals. An example comes
from the recent efforts of the French state to neutralize widespread discontent in the
immigrant-populated suburbs of major cities and promote instead integration and edu-
cational advancement among Muslims youths living in them (Entzinger, 2009; Schnei-
der, 2008).
This program, costing billions of euros, represented a major attempt at social engin-
eering in these urban settings. To that effect, training centers, specialized language and
citizenship schools, and community outreach programs were created by the dozens.
Adhering to established norms, city authorities, however, conditioned the benefits pro-
vided by the new facilities to conformity to the principles of laicite and acceptance of a
French identity. In effect, discontented migrant youths were required to accept a priori
the goals of the program as a precondition for participating in it. Consequently, only
 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY—REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SOCIOLOGIE 367

those youths who were already predisposed to shed their Arab and Muslim identities
joined the program, while others stayed away. For managers running this program, how-
ever, appearances counted more than realities. According to a community organizer in
the Parisian suburb of Les Bosquets:
All that the city government is interested in are the statistics, not what happens on the
ground. (Eseverri-Mayer, 2018)

As a result, a number of immigrant youths were motivated to re-affirm their Muslim

identity by re-joining mosques, many of them run by clerics of the Salafist sect. Many
of these imams preached exactly the opposite message to what the French state was trying
to achieve: rejection of Western culture, loyalty to the migrants’ religious traditions, and
avoidance of French citizenship. Unanticipated consequences of this sort are common
when organizational leaders and personnel concentrate on fulfilling formal quantitative
goals rather than substantive ones. Meeting quotas and highlighting exceptional positive
cases rather than achieving actual institutional ends can give rise to a make-believe world
where the ‘appearance’ of innovation may be worse than the situation it aimed to replace.
A third, somewhat different problem is illustrated by the attempt of the World Bank to
impose International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on all governments and all
major banks and other financial entities worldwide. World Bank officers were genuinely
committed to this plan which they saw as a means to create transparency in financial
transactions and hence facilitate the movement of capital, including foreign investment
in poorer countries. The problem was that the complex and demanding IFRS stemming
from Western business and financial institutions clashed with the traditional practices
and rules in many of the nations where they were been imposed (Irvine, 2008).
As a consequence, state and private managers in these countries sought from the start
to circumvent the new regulations by endorsing them publicly in order to please World
Bank officials and potential investors, but actually finding multiple way to undermine
them. They did this less as a result of embeddedness, than of cultural conviction.
Loyal to traditional values and established norms, they regarded the IFRS not so much
as a boon to business growth than as a foreign imposition and an illegitimate intrusion
into their countries established ways. In such cases, the adoption of an innovation
becomes a myth. As Meyer and Rowan (1977, pp. 340–41) put it:
To maintain ceremonial conformity, organizations that reflect institutional rules tend to
buffer their formal structures from the uncertainties of technical activists by becoming
de-coupled, building gaps between their formal structures and actual work activities.

Whenever externally-imposed innovations clash with the value system and the power
structure of target societies (see Figure 2), the result is likely to be a distortion of the orig-
inal goals and the emergence of a separation between appearances and realities (Evans,
2004; Portes, 2000). This is just an extreme form of the problem faced by the reverse caus-
ality of deliberately- engineered institutional innovation. As Figure 4 above shows, such
attempts ‘push from below’ hierarchically organized social structures and cultures.
Hence, they are bound to find resistance at deeper levels of causality.
All of this is not to say that technical and social innovations are not possible and,
indeed, they happen all the time. The major lesson of this analysis is that attempts to pro-
foundly transform institutionalized practices and ways of life through deliberate
368 A. PORTES

intervention must be weighed carefully and implemented cautiously, lest they lead to
consequences that are different and sometimes opposite to those anticipated. While
the idea of ‘progress’ has become enshrined in the value system of modern societies, insti-
tutions created to deliberately implement this value must be closely monitored to ensure
that the technical and social novelties that they bring about can be actually absorbed by
society and improve general well-being.
Because the transition from innovative idea to actual implementation is seldom
unproblematic, organizations charged with furthering technological and social progress
must themselves be closely monitored by independent external bodies cognizant of the
possible pitfalls of deliberately engineered social change.

6. Conclusion
The substitution of spontaneous scientific and technical innovations by engineered ones
through institutions created for that purpose was itself a major social innovation of the
Twentieth Century. Thereafter, all sorts of new products and instruments have reached
markets improving both productivity and the health and well-being of the general popu-
lation. This positive record must be balanced, however, by the more problematic, and often
unanticipated consequences, that the reverse causality of engineered change can create.
First, as we have seen, not everyone benefits equally from the advent of innovation and
it is a common experience that many people and entities lose in the process of their
implementation. The notion of ‘technological unemployment’ was coined to refer pre-
cisely to this outcome. Industrial employment within rich countries has been decimated
by the advent of new technologies that facilitated the transfer of production to poorer
nations. Variously known as ‘industrial downsizing’ or ‘industrial re-structuring’, this
major process of change has had profound social and political consequences for the
population and the regions negatively affected by it (Bluestone & Harrison, 1982; Fernan-
dez-Kelly, 1983; Portes, 2000).
Second, the interaction between explicitly laid-out institutional goals and the organ-
izations that they govern is constantly affected by the operation of embeddedness. As
in all real organizations, the tendency among managers and personnel is to enhance
their own security and rewards, even at the expense of organizational ends. In deliber-
ately created innovative institutions, the effect of embeddedness is still more dangerous
because it threatens to substitute substantive goals for formal conformity with the rules
and actual achievements for apparent ones. In the Parisian suburbs, a massive program of
deliberately engineered social change ended up producing results that were largely the
opposite of those originally intended. That did not prevent authorities from claiming suc-
cess. As an informant in the suburb of Les Bosquets reported:
I believe Muslim communities are closing themselves off more and more, but the govern-
ment doesn’t deal with this … the mayor goes to the Eid party once a year – ‘How beautiful
you are! Now vote for me!’ – This is what puts social cohesion at risk (Muslim City Coun-
selor of Les Bosquets). (Eseverri-Mayer, 2018)

Merton’s (1968b) distinction between ‘manifest’ and ‘latent’ functions comes in handy to
clarify the difference between appearances and realities. In the case of the mayor of Les Bos-
quets, the manifest function of the government program was to integrate Muslim youths into
 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY—REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE SOCIOLOGIE 369

French society, but the latent one was to keep him in office. The same distinction is applicable
to the myths created by the attempted imposition from the outside of rules and practices at
odds with the home culture. The reporting practices dictated by World Bank officials are
manifestly adopted worldwide, but they are latently undermined in many nations such as
to preserve the status of power holders and the traditional value system.
Coleman’s (1993, 1994) injunction that the proper role of sociology is not only to
study organizations, but to design them is acceptable, but with a major caveat: The use
of sociological knowledge for deliberate social innovation, such as the ones cited by Cole-
man, is appropriate provided that we remain aware that they are subject to the set of pro-
blems cited previously. For that reason, the proper role of sociology is to monitor
innovations employing the instrumental and conceptual arsenal of the discipline to
identify unanticipated consequences (both positive and negative), gaps between manifest
and latent functions, and the emergence of mythologies in lieu of implementation of
official goals.
Indifference to their human and social consequences has been the mark in the
implementation of many modern innovations. A proper task for sociology is to replace
that indifference with systematic attention to the communities and groups affected by
introduction of technical and organizational innovations and the ways in which they
modify existing elements of the culture and social structure. The concept of reverse caus-
ality, introduced in this article, represents a tool to implement this task.

Notes
1. This section is based on prior publications See Portes and Smith (2012), ch. 1 and Portes and
Marques (2015).
2. This section is partially based on Portes (2006) and Portes and Smith (2012).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Alejandro Portes is professor of Sociology (emeritus) at Princeton University and professor of Law
and Sociology and Distinguished Scholar of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami. Born in
Cuba, he came to the United States in 1960 and received his doctorate from the University of Wis-
consin ten years later. He is the author or editor of forty books and close to 300 articles and chap-
ters on immigration and ethnicity, national development, urbanization, and other topics. Portes is
a past president of the American Sociological Association and a member of the National Academy
of Sciences of the United States. In 2019, he received the Princess of Asturias Prize in the Social
Sciences from the Kingdom of Spain.

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