To a degree insufficiently captured by the term, governance, the present age is one of institutional complexity. China is a case in point. An amalgam of socialist, capitalist, corporatist, and pluralist characteristics, China's complex institutional make-up has confounded scholars wishing to formally categorize it. For example, description of its economy go no further than labeling it ambiguously as a "mixed socialist-capitalist system". China's systems of governance defy classification using extant categories in the institutionalist literature. A Phenomenology of Institutions begins with the problem of describing emergent institutional phenomena using classic modes of classification. Constructing a new descriptive framework for rendering new, hybrid, and flexible institutional designs, Raul Lejano, Jia Guo, Hongping Lian and Bo Yin propose new modes of description, dealing with properties of autopoeisis, textuality, relationality, and morphology, that might better describe new and emergent models for governance.
The authors illustrates the utility of this framework with a number of select case studies, each dealing wth a different aspect of Chinese legal and civic institutions and comparing these with 'western' models. This book provides invaluable insights and is a resource for all those institutional scholars, found in the fields of public policy, political science, and public administration, studying new and emergent forms of governance. The employment of a phenomenological approach to institutional analysis is uncommon and, perhaps, holds promise for innovative research in the future.