On-Line Papers – Copyright This online paper may be cited or briefly quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. You may also download them for your own personal use. This paper must not be published elsewhere (e.g. to mailing lists, bulletin boards etc.) without the author's explicit permission. Please note that if you copy this paper you must: • include this copyright note • not use the paper for commercial purposes or gain in any way • you should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form: Bob Jessop, ‘Institutional (Re)Turns and the Strategic-Relational Approach’, published by

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR Founded in 1642, Montréal has been a city of immigrants for four centuries. The only French-speaking city in North America where its population of more than 1,500,000 is predominantly bilingual and many of its citizens speak a third language, Montréal comprises representatives the Frenchlanguage and English-language communities, augmented by some 150 other communities of diverse origin making up 34 % of its population. l A modern metropolis that burst onto the international stage with the Expo ’67 World’s Fair, Montréal is now a knowledge city and Canada’s leading investor in university research. It is home to two French-language and two English-language universities, representing a total of 11 university institutions, along with approximately 50 Canada Research Chairs involved in developing a multitude of international networks. l Montréal has a healthy economy, and optimism is the name of the game for the 2007–2010 period with an average expected annual economic growth of 2.9%. Montréal’s

2 Collaborative policy-making seems to have become the rule, including in majoritarian political systems such as the United Kingdom or in statist polities like France. As a result " (multi-level) governance " instead of government appears as the typical mode of

Policy ‘framing ’ and evidence-based planning: ‘epistemic communities ’ in the multi-jurisdictional environment of an

and the post-academic condition

Abstract not found

Regional integration and local governance. The dynamic of knowledge and institutions

The ascendance of “institutional theory ” is a continuation and extension of open systems conceptions into the study of organizations (Scott 2001). In addition to the technical environment, i.e., resources and task-related information, open systems theory places organizational activity into a wider social and cultural context, i.e., the

A transition to a new technological regime is complete (and stable) when accompanied with a co-stabilization between the mode of regulation and the regime of accumulation. Key to understanding the dynamics of transitions are the factors, including institutions, that “regulate ” and stabilize the regime of accumulation over time. However, the available frameworks for institutional analysis employ arbitrary and narrow definition of institutions, focus mainly on the policy domain, and do not pay sufficient attention to the evolutionary characteristics of change as manifested in emergence of numerous institutions that underlie transitions. This paper consists of three parts. The first part critically reviews and synthesizes some of the main approaches for conducting institutional analysis. The second part rearticulates the concept of “transitions”, or technological regime shifts, from a systems perspective to make a case for investigating transitions as multi-level, multi-scale, and multi-system phenomena best understood in their institutional contexts. The third part proposes a framework for examining institutional change and demonstrates how this framework

This is a draft in need of further work. Please do not quote without permission. Comments welcomed.