Institutional Failure Modes: A Configurational Theory of Institutional Reproduction and Fragility

Why do some institutional changes become durable while others remain fragile and reversible? Existing theories explain institutional persistence primarily through single mechanisms-path dependence, legitimacy, or incentive alignment. This article argues that such accounts misidentify the unit of analysis: durability is not a property of mechanisms individually but of their configuration. An institutional arrangement becomes self-reproducing when three mechanisms sustain one another in a relation of constitutive interdependence-incentive alignment, normative stabilization, and organizational embedding. The article's central contribution is not the identification of these mechanisms, which are each well established in the literature, but the demonstration that configurations lacking any one of them generate a specific and predictable failure mode: technocratic stability (vulnerable to legitimacy crises), normative persistence (vulnerable to resource erosion), or fragile legitimacy 2 (vulnerable to organizational drift). Identifying these failure modes and their structural logic is the analytical core of the paper. The framework is grounded in the sociological tradition of reproduction theory-Bourdieu, Giddens, and Sewell-and positions the concept of constitutive interdependence explicitly in relation to Luhmann's autopoietic account, from which it departs in treating self-reproduction as a continuous and configurational variable and in retaining a constitutive role for actors, agency, and conflict. The argument is developed through a conceptual framework, a dedicated section on the politics of institutional reproduction, three analytical sketches, and a stylized formal model confined to an appendix.