Revisiting Institutionalism in Sociology

Putting the "Institution" Back in Institutional Analysis

Seth Abrutyn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415702768
• eBook ISBN: 9781134463565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

There may not be a concept so central to sociology, yet so vaguely defined in its contemporary usages, than institution. In Revisiting Institutionalism in Sociology, Abrutyn takes an in-depth look at what institutions are by returning to some of the insights of classical theorists like Max Weber and Herbert Spencer, the functionalisms of Talcott Parsons and S.N. Eisenstadt, and the more recent evolutionary institutionalisms of Gerhard Lenski and Jonathan Turner. Returning to the idea that various levels of social reality shape societies, Abrutyn argues that institutions are macro-level structural and cultural spheres of action, exchange, and communication. They have emergent properties and dynamics that are not reducible to other levels of social reality. Rather than fall back on old functionalist solutions, Abrutyn offers an original and synthetic theory of institutions like religion or economy; the process by which they become autonomous, or distinct cultural spaces that shape the color and texture of action, exchange, and communication embedded within them; and how they gain or lose autonomy by theorizing about institutional entrepreneurship. Finally, Abrutyn lays bare the inner workings of institutions, including their ecology, the way structure and culture shape lower-levels of social reality, and how they develop unique patterns of stratification and inequality founded on their ecology, structure, and culture. Ultimately, Abrutyn offers a refreshing take on macrosociology that brings functionalist, conflict, and cultural sociologies together, while painting a new picture of how the seemingly invisible macro-world influences the choices humans make and the goals we set.

1	Institutional Autonomy

Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

—Sandra Day O’Conner

Introduction

If institutions were nothing more than some vague cultural forces or taken-for-granted environments in which organizational dynamics took precedent, then a book like this would be unnecessary. Institutions do vary in structure and culture, and it is ultimately their propensity to grow more or less differentiated from each other and to evolve into autonomous sociocultural realities that immediately draws our attention. If institutions are macro-level structural and cultural spheres composed of individual, collective, and clusters of collective actors whose action, exchanges, and communication are facilitated and constrained by their integration into divisions of labor and through the circulation of generalized symbolic media, regulated by the distribution of (material and symbolic) resources and authority, and given a sense of shared meaning through the linkages, pursuit of resources, and the legitimated vision of reality espoused by those actors with the greatest share of the resources, then it is the degree to which their actors are distinct, their divisions of labor and media bounded, their authority and resources restricted, and their meanings relatively provincial that gives us a baseline for a theory of institutions. We would, of course, want to know why institutions gain or lose autonomy, as well as the consequences that autonomy brings with it. But before we can examine these issues more closely, we must start by thoroughly reconceptualizing what institutions are and what it means for them to gain autonomy.

In essence, institutions are the fundamental spheres of social action, exchange, and communication. They are “macro” in the sense that they encompass the whole population of a given society. Thus, one can look at any society and find a kinship sphere alongside, even in preliterate societies, the rudimentary outlines of polity, economy, religion, law, and perhaps education. Functionalists long argued that sociocultural evolution was akin to the growing differentiation in structure and function of these spheres. While differentiation remains a useful concept, a more flexible and coherent comparative-historical institutionalism can be built around the process of institutional autonomy and not differentiation. Assuredly, the assertion is not mere semantics.. Structural differentiation remains quite common (R. Turner 2001; J. Turner 2010a; Blau 1970) in most societies besides hunter-gatherers. As populations grow larger, new tasks are developed, and an interlocking division of functional labor emerges. Chiefs, for instance, are a perfect example of the differentiation of political roles and political structures (Earle 1991). With the emergence of chiefs comes also the differentiation of physical, temporal, social, and symbolic space. In many societies, huts are organized in concentric circles around the chief’s hut, with relative distance from the main hut indicative of relative kinship distance; temporally, chiefs are able to “cut” time up in which political action or goals can be discernible from kinship ones; socially, “chief” becomes a legitimate role differentiated from kinship roles; symbolically, chiefs monopolize prestige or luxury goods that signify social distance and authority.

Polity, however, is not autonomous in these societies (Eisenstadt 1963; Adams 1966; Flannery 1972; Johnson and Earle 2000; Abrutyn 2013b), because political action, exchange, and communication are not discrete in meaningful ways. Put another way, polity has not become a social sphere distinct from kinship, but rather the two are deeply embedded in complex ways. To be sure, there are characteristics of autonomy found in these societies, but it is not until the first states formed 5,000 years ago that political autonomy is even conceivable. Thus, differentiation is a necessary condition for autonomy, but not sufficient; and institutions can be differentiated, but not autonomous.

Again, differentiation remains important, but the process of autonomy is relatively undertheorized and, thus, is a blank canvas upon which we can paint a better theoretical framework. Differentiation, unfortunately, is a loaded concept rife with sociologists’ biases for or against functionalism. Shifting to a more “hollow” concept allows us to rehabilitate functionalism in light of cultural and conflict sociologies. That is, it gives us an opportunity to build a more inclusive and empirically satisfying theory. Institutional autonomy cannot be divorced from cultural considerations, and hence, the insights of other institutionalisms and the strategic action field theory, and even Bourdieu, will help shape the contours of the theory. But staying rooted in functionalism and Weberian institutionalism (Weber 1968; Eisenstadt 1971) will reintroduce a structural sociology with muscle—one that complements and not contradicts the cultural traditions. Furthermore, it is through the hollowness of autonomy that this book seeks a balance between structure-agency, material-symbolic, and other false dichotomies. By bringing macrostructural theory into dialogue with Weberian institutionalism, a sense of agency through entrepreneurship can be synthesized with a sense of the preset rules entrepreneurs must contend with.

This balance, however, is a two-way street. That is, institutions cannot exist without the people in them, yet it is about time mainstream sociology remembered that there are levels of social reality irreducible to each other; that these levels do constrain humans and are external and sui generis; and that revering the classical theorists should not just be a pastime but also one in which we take seriously their macrosociology. It will become apparent throughout that studying identity or bureaucracy requires considering how autonomous an institution is relative to other institutions, especially those that come to dominate a given society’s institutional complex—or the arrangement of each institution relative to each other in a society Once one has discerned the autonomy of an institution vis-à-vis its counterparts, one must also consider the position of the unit of interest—for example, identity, encounter, organization. How can one speak of identity verification (Burke 1991) without considering a person’s location in the institutional complex? Or, how can one build a general theory of organizational dynamics based principally on economic firms in post–World War II America (Meyer and Rowan 1977)? The point should not be taken as polemical, but rather as a reminder that levels of social reality are embedded within each other and divorcing one from the others cannot provide a robust enough analysis.

A Sociology of Institutional Autonomy

Consider, for a moment, living among a small group of 25 people; all 25 people are family, extended family, or fictive kin. Every day of every month of every year of your life is defined by the familial relationships your daily interactions occur within. Every building in your environment is defined only by the kinship activities that occur or have occurred; every sacred day is an affirmation of one’s place in their family and their family’s place in the universe; and the vocabulary one has access to is defined by kinship terminology. There are no “producer-consumer” roles, no subject, citizen, ruler, politician roles, or, for that matter, congregant, priest, or other religious roles clearly distinguishable in mind or in body from kinship organization and culture. No matter how hard the reader tries, it is probably impossible to grasp the phenomenological significance of what it would be like to be a hunter-gatherer as it is so far from the reality we are all socialized within. In hunter-gatherer societies,, kinship, in the terminology developed herein, is the sole autonomous institution, and though all other domains, including polity and religion, economy and law are extant, they remain deeply embedded in the logic of kinship organization and action. Autonomy, of course, is not a state but a process, and thus those other institutions have some (but very little) autonomy. In essence, then, institutional autonomy is the process by which macro-level structural and cultural spheres become constituted by distinct actors, divisions of labor, generalized media, systems of authority governed by a relatively discrete and bounded cultural system. Autonomy, of course, does not unfold on its own, but is a function of the efforts and struggles of entrepreneurs pursuing some independence and mobility. The more autonomous an institution, the more discrete its cultural system is. Although an institution can never be totally autonomous, it would not be incorrect to assert that autonomous institutions seem legitimately different from their counterparts. Thus, in the example above, kinship autonomy dominates reality such that purely political action, economic exchanges, or legal communication is nearly unimaginable outside of the kinship framework that they occur within.

In addition, we have no choice but to conclude that institutions are real things. In our hunter-gatherer example, we can identify four dimensions of space that provide us with the outlines of these macro-level milieus: physical, temporal, social, and symbolic (Abrutyn 2009a, 2012). In preliterate societies, nearly all space is monopolized by kinship as societies are migratory, and thus few buildings or symbols emerge apart from the daily rounds of subsistence (Levi-Strauss 1969; Service 1971; Turner 2003; Nolan and Lenski 2009; Turner and Maryanski 2009). Again, this is not to say there is no polity or law. Just the opposite seems to be true: among the Trobriander Islanders—a preliterate fishing society in Papua New Guinea—“civil law … [was] extremely well developed, and that it rules all aspects of social organization. We also found that it is clearly distinguishable, and distinguished by natives, from the other types of norm, whether moral or manners, rules of art or commands of religion” (Malinowski 1959:73–4). That is, law is differentiated from kinship and religious mechanisms of control like customs or norms. It lacks, however, autonomy as law “represents … an aspect of their tribal life, one side of their structure, [rather] than any independent, self-contained social arrangements” (ibid. 59; cf. Redfield 1967; Hoebel 1973). In many ways, the four dimensions of legal space are only discernible in certain ephemeral moments, and they require cognitive work as they must temporarily “transform” kinship spaces into legal spaces. Even in societies where the same person is called on as a third-party arbiter, most of his daily life is spent not as a legal actor, but as a kinship actor (for a concrete example, see Barton 1919); his decisions are not made at a courthouse during legal hours, but rather in his own domicile during typical kinship hours, which are temporarily suspended. The world is kin based, because the other institutions lack autonomy. Now, contrast this example with your own life. In the U.S. economy and polity are highly autonomous, but so are law, religion, science, and, to a lesser extent, sport, art, medicine, and parts of education. We often take this for granted, as many humans are adept at compartmentalizing and because the physical-temporal-social spaces are drenched in symbolic cues meant to reduce the complexity of role-status shifts. Yet, this taken for grantedness should not belie the fact that the macro-level of social reality shapes the meso-level (or the diversity and number of collectivities one can be a member of and the number of categories in which a person may fall that distinguishes her from others) and micro-level (or the types of roles available for people to play, the resources that define the status positions of these roles, and the symbolic medium or media of exchange and communication). As a rule, we can conclude that the greater the autonomy of an institution, the greater the degree to which some goals, preferential arrangement of these goals, means/strategies to pursuing these goals, and value-orientations, ideologies, and norms making sense of action, exchange, and communication become institutionally specific. And the more autonomous institutions a society holds, the greater the diversity in (1) types of goals people believe are worth pursuing; (2) the preferential arrangement of these goals; (3) the type, and preferential arrangement, of means to pursuing these goals; and (4) the value-orientations, ideologies, and norms shaping the relationships between means and ends (e.g., both visions of reality (Bourdieu 1977) and strategies of action (Swidler 1986). There are no rules saying that one institution’s content must complement another, or that persons located in two or more institutions easily reconcile conflicts in goals or preferences. Quite the opposite is generally true, as institutional domains become realms with competing interests and views (Weber 1946b). The picture is even more complex than this discussion lets on, because conflicts arise not only due to the fact that two institutional cultural systems may contradict each other, but differences in levels of autonomy shape societal beliefs about the relative importance and weight of one institution’s reality vis-à-vis another’s.

Describing Institutions

Thus far we have established the fact that institutions are real things in that they differentiate four dimensions of space that become qualitatively meaningful as the institution becomes more or less autonomous. Institutions are constituted by several things that are also affected by the process of autonomy. Institution-specific roles, collectives, and clusters of collectives grow more differentiated in function and culture concomitant to institutional autonomy. In a hunter-gatherer society, the family was also the basic economic unit, but today one would be hard-pressed to conflate a family with an economic firm. They share neither the same function or structure, nor the same underlying institutional logic (Thornton et al. 2012:52–7)— e.g., kinship exchanges rest of very different assumptions and motives, in most cases, than economic exchanges. Additionally, the divisions of labor that link one family to all other families in a community are very different from the divisions of labor that link businesses to each other; likewise, the divisions of labor within a family are different from that of a corporate hierarchy—that is, different in structure and in meaning. The physical distinctions are palpable, as are the socioemotional, psychological, and symbolic. To be sure, it is possible that a family becomes a business, or a business takes on qualities of a family. But, in writing that sentence, I had to use language that indicated a distinction between the two realms that is collapsed only in exceptions to the rule. The macro-level is what gives color and texture to these differences.

Institutions are not just real on the cultural-cognitive level of reality, as as the institutional logics perspective implicitly argues (Friedland and Alford 1991; Thornton and Ocasio 2008).Because the macro-level is difficult to discern with our eyes, it has been common to believe the difference between the macro and the micro is analogous to the difference between the cultural and the material.. Yet, institutions are constellations of actors held together by functional and social divisions of labor that are real. They are material constraints on reality. To be sure, they serve as conduits or paths along which cultural travels and also affect reality. But families do not just reproduce the macro-level structure; they are embedded within the macro-level structure. Moral density, as Durkheim would call it, is a real, pulsing, bodily force. Organizations, then, cannot be institutions because they are merely slivers of the larger reality that they find themselves controlled by. Even expanding analyses to clusters of organizations, a familiar practice of the new institutionalisms, leads to fallacies of conflation. You can pump organizations full of intellectual steroids to make them institutions, but at best all you end up doing is studying a sets of organizations as opposed to the broader material and cultural conditions. Economies, then, are not merely corporations, markets, networks, or sectors, just as polities are not limited to governments. Institutions comprise actors and linkages like domination or exchange (Abrutyn and Turner 2011; Turner 2011), as well as structured patterns, values, ideologies, and norms. Furthermore, organizations orient themselves toward real goals, whereas institutions are organized by and around universal human concerns.

Although debates remain, consensus induced from the historical, archaeological, and ethnographic record point to five or six universal institutions: kinship, polity, economy, religion, law, and education (Turner 2003; Nolan and Lenski 2009). Keep in mind, they are ubiquitous insofar as they deal with universal concerns potentially salient in all societies, but whether or not they appear in temporal or social space depends on specific conditions. For instance, the potential for conflict resolution to be a salient problem exists everywhere and at anytime. However, conflicts actually have to occur or be perceived as needing resolution in order for law to be an active organizing sphere of action, exchange, and communication. In addition to this list, at least five “secondary” or newly autonomous institutions have been identified as present in modernity (Abrutyn 2009b): science, medicine, art, media, and sport. Far less attention has been paid these institutions, in part, because most functionalists have ignored their importance and also because autonomy has not always been a process of interest. But their emergence is fascinating as it points to new research questions: when and why did universal concerns previously unproblematic or assumed to be handled well by existing insti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Institutional Autonomy
• 2. Building Autonomous Institutions from The “Inside-Out”
• 3. The Ecological Dynamics of Institutions
• 4. The Invisible Framework: Intra-Institutional Structure
• 5. The Roots of Intra-Institutional Culture: The Circulation of Generalized Symbolic Media
• 6. Intra-Institutional Stratification: The Uneven Distribution of Media and Other Resources
• 7. Considering the Consequences of a New Theory of Institutions
• Notes
• References
• Index