Institutions matter. That was the basis on which I began the research in graduate school for the dissertation on which this book is based. But how they mattered and their implications were, at that time, beyond me. I had been motivated by dissatisfaction with both sides of the micro—macro debate in the philosophy of social science. The fact that social outcomes were a product of both individual action and social structure seemed self-evident to me. All of the discussion that focused exclusively on one side or the other of this question seemed beside the point.

So I set out to learn everything I could about the different ways that social institutions were treated in the social sciences. Over time I decided that the way to explain the institutional effects on social life was to concentrate on the relationship between rational action and institutional constraints. But although I thought that the rational-choice approach offered a key to the relationship between action and structure, I was unwilling to accept what I thought to be the narrow (and wrongheaded) emphasis on collective benefits. This emphasis failed to capture many of the reasons that I thought institutions mattered. It ignored the politics inherent in social life and it limited the ways in which institutional development and change could be explained.