This paper is set in the context of China's recent decades of growth. It advocates the relevance for the analysis of ‘institutional logics’. These are seen as key to the understanding of societal change. In making this proposition, it builds on a large prior literature addressing the connections between (a) systems of cultural elements such as values, beliefs, and normative expectations, and (b) the sense-making that underpins the evolving structures of order used to frame the workings of socio-economic processes, including especially the forms of authority and of cooperation. These forms of order and their determinants are the subject of the paper. The experience of China is taken to illustrate the fact that culture shapes institutions and that they in turn shape economic responses.

Building on such classics as Berger and Luckmann's (Reference Berger and Luckmann1966) social construction of reality, the established sociology literature on such an approach is deep and wide, and the paper reviews it comprehensively and faultlessly. In this review, it also identifies a number of key questions that arise such as the effect in China of new market logics on traditional ideals such as guanxi as the basis of relationships. So too do they acknowledge the building up of tension between state and market logics. The paper argues that ‘future research should take into consideration the fact that the Chinese state is “hierarchical” and in tandem “developmental”’. They make useful suggestions about including in the account: the role of family; the state-embeddedness of law; and the reciprocities that go with the remaining Confucianism.

There is, however, something missing in this paper. That is an overall and implicitly normative theory of societal progress. Only with such a theory can research move its epistemology from the level of ideographic description of events and structures to the nomothetic level of explaining the pattern of determinacy at work to ensure societal progress towards betterment. This can then act as a framework for further formulation of propositions and their subsequent empirical refutation or acceptance. As an example of this, few attempts are better respected than that of Mokyr (Reference Mokyr2009: 487) on the origins of the modern economy, in which he saw an explanatory challenge for scholars as ‘the 600-pound gorilla in the room’. More specifically, he noted that the determinants of the first Industrial Revolution were remarkable enough to bring a sense of amazement that it occurred at all. Attributing most influence to The Enlightenment, he saw it subsequently producing an ‘enlightened age’. And ‘What matters for economic history…is that the enlightened age differed from the age of mercantilism in the way it accumulated, disseminated, and employed useful knowledge, and, in the way its economic institutions operated to create rather than redistribute wealth’. This in turn raises the question of societal processes as research focuses equal in explanatory relevance to that of institutions (Redding, Reference Redding2023).

Such thinking then introduces an additional and crucial factor: a society's capacity to transform itself. This lies at the center of Eisenstadt's (Reference Eisenstadt1965) theory of progress depending on societal transformative capacity. Three historical examples of this force at work are (1) the Meiji restoration in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, based on the globally active study of how other societies had achieved such advanced prosperity, and the application of those lessons in ways that retained Japan's identity and core traditions; (2) the period from 1895 to 2014 in Britain when – after the first industrial revolution had led to imbalances in wealth and influence – a series of radical societal innovations brought about a dismantling of the traditional hierarchy, a re-focussing on widely legitimized authority in Parliament, and the beginnings of a welfare state (Bogdanor, Reference Bogdanor2022); and (3) in China the three decades of change after 1980 brought about by Deng Xioaping through the introduction of market forces, the return of the private sector, and the opening of the economy to global business.

In this broader sense of theorizing, Neuhouser (Reference Neuhouser2023) has now proposed that research has the duty to pursue the notion of ‘social pathology’. Societies can be more or less ‘fit’ for progress. This stems from the widely adopted concept of a society as a complex socio-economic system in a constant state of adjustment both internally and with its surroundings. As he argues the ontology (p. 350) of such systems:

Given that the societies that have so far led the world have combined economic productivity with widespread societal empowerment, it follows that research comparing societies should now go beyond demonstrating a connection between culture and institutions and engage with demonstrating how and why their combined effects can foster societal progress towards not only wealth but also motivated engagement and commitment of the kind that subsequently influences change towards societal progress of the kind visible in the unobtrusive measure of migration patterns.

Much new thinking is working on this agenda and might provide the incentive to widen the paper's theme. Some selected examples are: Mokyr (Reference Mokyr2017) on the origins of the modern economy, Acemoglu and Robinson (Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2012) on why nations fail, Bejan (Reference Bejan2020) on freedom and evolution, Inglehart (Reference Inglehart2018) on cultural evolution, Libman and Obydenkova (Reference Libman and Obydenkova2021) on the legacies of Communism, Mazzucato (Reference Mazzucato2021) on changing capitalism, McCloskey (Reference McCloskey2006, Reference McCloskey2010, Reference McCloskey2016) on the role of bourgeois ethics, Pinker (Reference Pinker2021) on the role of rationality, Redding (Reference Redding2023) on societal process analysis, and Shambaugh (Reference Shambaugh2013) on what China lacks.