Institutions and Paradigms

Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, famously recognized a scientific revolution as requiring a paradigm shift. He recognized that shift as involving not only theory and research priorities, but also people, noting that an older generation of scientists would continue to hold to the older paradigm and it was a new generation that would internalize and implement the new paradigm.

I wonder whether Kuhn adequately recognized the institutional shifts involved in a paradigm shift. For example, scientific journals which depend on peer review have to accept the new scientific paradigm or be replaced by new journals, and the journals have to find an audience to pay their costs. Research intensive universities that train the new generations of scientists have not only to train the first generation accepting the new paradigm, but they have to create curricula to do so, recruit faculty to do so, and develop the texts and other teaching aids to do so. The agencies that fund research, most of which depend on peer review, must develop new cadres of reviewers who accept the new paradigm, if necessary create new areas of research support, and convince their senior authorities that the new area merits support and that the resources must be obtained -- perhaps withdrawn from other areas -- to provide that support. Indeed, the informal networks of communications among the scientists in the new paradigm must be institutionalized.

I suppose one might extend Kuhn's use of the concept of change of paradigm to broader phenomena such as the fall of Communism or the changes that appear to be taking place in the Arab world.  The complexity of changing an economic system, such as took place with the emancipation of slaves in the United States at the time of the Civil War or the introduction of Capitalism to replace Communism in the last couple of decades required decades of institutional change (destruction and reconstruction).