The Formation of the “Bloomington School”: Methodological Opportunities and Perspectives of Contemporary New Institutionalism Development

Abstract

The article analyzes the institutional processes of Bloomington school formation. Such processes are closely connected to the conceptual and methodological heritage of Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues and students. The author underlies the importance of neo-institutional methodology in the contemporary sociological thought, in studies of social dilemmas, common-pool resources, collective actions and identity. The author argues that by using neo-institutional methodology, researchers of the Bloomington school have tried to find a solution to the problem of stable social-economic development of traditional societies. In author’s opinion, the further development of the Bloomington school is connected with further defining social dilemmas and common-pool resources, studies of institutional stability and institutional disintegration and transformations of institutions from dynamic equilibrium with positive nested externalities to dynamic non-equilibrium.