Microfoundations of Institutions: A Matter of Structure Versus Agency or Level of Analysis?

In his January 2018 article, Cardinale seeks to advance new microfoundations for institutional theory by reformulating two assumptions underlying the structure versus agency debate - that structure constrains and enables action and that agency is mostly associated with reflexivity - which, he argues, have hindered the field's ability to make substantive theoretical progress. While an intriguing proposition, we argue that equating the microfoundations of institutions with the structure versus agency dichotomy produces two problems that limit our advancement of this stream of work.