Beyond institutionalism

We are finally in a position to return to the question we set at the beginning of the chapter: is there a distinct sphere for society or is it the basis for any life-sphere whatsoever? In one respect all institutions are social. The diffusion of skilled practices over which there is some common control and which are widespread is not possible without their being underpinned by society, complex webs of social relations. In this sense we hardly need to talk of ‘social’ institutions if they are all social.

At the same time, as we have stressed, the practices themselves and the skills of the practitioners develop or wither through people’s active engagement with a world which they either have not made or, in so far as they have, they can never fully control or understand. This is true for the economy, for sea transport or space travel, sport or medicine, education, religion or law.

State, work, environment, culture and the person itself are life-spheres where institutions develop as human beings engage with reality. Social relations are a base for all these engagements. But this book has insisted throughout that society is not equatable with any other sphere and is equally part of reality. In this case there must also be institutions for society just as there are for the state and the other life-spheres.

There are, then, institutions for social relations specifically. The most obvious is the family, found everywhere, past and present but in a vast variety of shapes and forms. It clearly predates the nation-state. In the contemporary world states seek to shape it through marriage law, but increasingly people develop their own parallel understandings of how marriage should work and of partnerships outside marriage. The state has to catch up with social change.

In the case of marriage law it is clear that the state seeks to frame what in any case emerges out of human social relations. Not all social relations do take shape through law. Friendship is a ubiquitous institution which finds no regulation in law in modern societies. On the other hand friends may make a contract with each other which the law will recognise. This recognition of the basis of institutions in the facts of social relations is not confined to first-order social relations. Even nationality, which the nation-state seeks to make the basis of its membership, arises out of a bond between person and nation which in the last resort is the ‘effective link’, which the law recognises. Equally the right to nationality is for the United Nations a human right, something the law recognises rather than creates. Human rights are a type of relation we have to human beings in general; third-order social relations in other words.

The stabilisation of social relations through institutions is a universal feature of society. But a doctrine which asserts that the purpose of institutions is to stabilise society mistakes means for ends. The order that arises out of institutionalised practices secures an active collective engagement with the world.

Institutionalist theories which emphasise the stabilisation functions of rules for society plainly are in the interests of those who control institutions. But then institutional stability is useful for anyone who wants to get on with their job. To this extent the new institutionalism in economics is an advance because it stresses the enabling functions of institutions.

At the same time unless we recognise that getting on with the job always means exploring beyond the standard and routine, in other words activity in the world not just practice, then we are unprepared to face the ever-renewed challenge to institutions which honest human endeavour represents. The economist Oliver Williamson has shown how differing institutional arrangements have important consequences for the working of organisations. Those arrangements are the adaptive repertoire which society has available as the balance between individual and collective activity changes.

However, there is more than economic benefit at stake with human activity. The institutions which frame the social relations of work are, as Marx asserted, vulnerable to the productive forces they release, but there is no reason to think that they will be reshaped simply with economic ends in view. Indeed there is every reason to think that culture and the environment, the spheres where today social relations are least fettered by the state, will become increasingly powerful forces in shaping the institutions of the next century.

Finally the guardians of institutions have to realise that those divisions between sectors of activity which they then call institutions like education, medicine, sport, business, technology, science, and so on are purely the current outcomes of human adaptation to a world and environment we have in part made. Their boundaries are always shifting and areas come and go. For instance, information technology is a new area, crossing others and involving widespread institutional change. The changes which are the most painful are not the acceptance of new machines nor the acquisition of new skills. It is the recrafting of social relations, and this is where we need to draw not only on our ideals but also on our knowledge of how far it is possible to realise them. We need the science of institutions as well as ideals for them and science in them.

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