Problems of institutional design and redesign, structuring and restructuring, acquired particular poignancy through recent developments from eastern Europe to southern Africa. At the same time, scholars in each of several disciplines - political science, economics, sociology, history, and philosophy - have increasingly come to appreciate the important independent role that is, and should be, played by institutional factors in social life. In this volume, disparate theories of institutional design given by specialists in each of those several disciplines are synthesized and their peculiar power illustrated. Drawing upon traditions from Kantian ethics to public choice economics, from organizational sociology to discourse analytics, the contributors emphasize the important interpenetration of normative and empirical analysis in examples ranging from changes in the British welfare state through the reward structure of the modern university to the transition of eastern European societies.