Coming Back and Giving Back: Transposition, Institutional Actors, and the Paradox of Peripheral Influence*

We explore transposition—bringing ideas from one context to a distant other context—as a mechanism for institutional change, and we study the conditions under which institutional actors successfully undertake it. Prior work on transposition has emphasized the paradox of embedded agency: actors embedded in a context may struggle to effect change because they lack exposure to fresh ideas. We complement this work by arguing that transposition is...