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Explaining the emergence of the European Union's Single Market Program requires making sense of how that institutional project came on to the political agenda. This article uses insights from historical and organizational institutional theories to supplement intergovernmentalist and neofunctionalist accounts of the Single Market Program. The European Union was facing a political crisis in the early 1980s caused by an inability of states to find a set of institutional arrangements that were in their collective interest. This crisis enabled the European Commission to act as an institutional entrepreneur in several ways. They produced the Single Market Program as a project, helped build a political coalition to support its basic tenets, and ultimately reorganized the preferences of state actors. The power of the cultural frame approach is that it helps explain how institutional reform and monetary union - projects that were rejected by the states in 1983 - came to be accepted over the decade of the 1980s.
Neil Fligstein (Sat,) studied this question.