Johan P. Olsen: Statsstyre og institusjonsutforming (with contributions by Morten Egeberg, Per Lægreid and Harald Sætren). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1988, 336 pp.

For more than 15 years now Johan P. Olsen, University of Bergen, has been one of the most productive and creative political scientists in Scandinavia. This book contains 14 articles and some of his most important contributions to the understanding political life in Norway. Except for a short introduction all the articles have previously been published in books or journals from 1972 to 1986.

The book is structured according to the following four headlines:

'Scientific Perspectives'. Here five articles deal with new-institutionalism and some of the 'ever-lasting' problems in political science and organization theory - i.e. the historical constitution and development of political institutions, relations between structure and meaningful actions and possibilities for choice and rationality.

'Processes of Change and Reform': This chapter contains three contributions to the understanding of recent changes in public administration in the Nordic countries. None of the contributions rely on systematic empirical findings, but try to locate topics and describe paths for further research.

'The Institutions of Democracy': In four articles some of the empirical findings from the Norwegian Power Study 1972—82 are used to describe trends in how the government and the public administration in Norway have come to be organized and to function as elements in a system of interest representation and societal coordination.

'Decision processes and the elaboration of meaning': In this chapter two rather different articles are collected. One describes how the Norwegian mass media are organized and function as channels for the formation and articulation of interest. The second describes organizational prerequisites for decision-making and identifies two ideal type models for how decisions are taken within pre-given organizational conditions.

Seen together all the 14 articles bear witness to the wide range of problems dealt with by Olsen and colleagues over the years and to the still current interest in some of the analytical results from The Norwegian Power Study. On the other hand, they also point to some of the problems in Olsen's more recent efforts (together with James G. March) to transcribe these extensive empirical findings and analytical results into a general (although middle-range) theory of institutions and their

transformation. Olsen, in five of the articles, tries to pinpoint stabilized phenomena, while on the other hånd, in the more metatheoretical discussions, he revolves around the problem of change and of how to describe institutions as dynamic orders in flux.

So, how to go beyond simple structural analysis to assess the dynamics of
institutional change, seems to be the major problem springing from this book.