 Popper and his students put forward a hybrid methodology for social science, which favors individualistic explanations in a local context or “situation”, but takes institutions as background conditions that are treated as exogenous. This methodology is often known as “institutional individualism” (Agassi 1975, J.S. Coleman 1990, Jarvie 1998, Udehn 2001). This, however, is an approach to methodology, not a claim about the nature of the social. These models do not generally commit themselves to ontological claims either about the nature of these entities or about which social entities the various components constitute. Popper, for one, argues for the indispensability of institutions in social explanation, but has a psychologistic ontology of institutions (and all social entities).