Institutions in practice

Lecture №12

Theme «Social Institutions: from functions to practices»

Institutions in practice

Sociology makes its most direct contribution to public life in its analysis of social institutions. This is because institutions normally work with public knowledge and support, and in our time draw on such wide expertise. As we saw in our previous lectures, social institutions involve standardised practices. They are widespread activities following norms about how things ought to be done. Norms are rules which are shared among a number of people who make an effort to ensure they are observed, especially through sanctions exerted on each other, these varying from mild disapproval to death. When norms are flouted then sociologists talk of deviance, without conveying their personal approval or disapproval of either norms or deviant acts.

Institutions are observed across collectivities and associations. They are social in that they contribute to collective life and receive widespread support even if it is only a minority of individuals who derive the benefits. Contracts, lotteries, elections, mourning, holidays, taxation are examples of institutions from different spheres of life whose existence depends on their being recognised even by those who are bystanders, or by participants who do not benefit, as well as by those who do.

Institutions may develop around any area of human activity. For the ancient Egyptians health and the body were central concerns. In consequence they had specialist doctors for every part of the body, and specialists for embalming because it was so valued in that culture. The development of institutions to this degree of specialisation is not then a result of modernity, but of any large-scale civilisation.

With most institutions their agents are in the first place concerned with outputs and results, not social relations. For instance healthcare institutions deliver treatment, and practitioners of them are expected to have this as their main concern. All institutions seek to deliver goods or services of one kind or other, valued products in the broadest sense, such as movies, fast food, legal judgements, sporting triumphs, last rites or election victories. This is even true of institutions which know no boundaries and are open to any individual. Think of the benefits expected from sending Christmas cards, though this is an institution in which the maintenance of social relations is a prime concern.

Because of the priority of the product or outcome, the social relations involved in maintaining an institution are often hidden from view. This is true even when institutions are embedded in collectivities like schools, factories or hospitals. Sociology brings them to the surface in a way which is variously called critical, demystifying or trouble-making, depending on your point of view.

Thus if sociologists point out that middle-class people get a better deal from healthcare institutions than poor people, the middle class may feel uncomfortable. But the deliverers of treatment, the medical professions, may be even more upset, for they are dedicated to providing the best practice regardless of the class of the patient. Ultimately, as we infer from our theory chapter, it flouts equality, a principle underlying medical ethics and a measurement standard for sociological research.

Not that the declared purposes of institutions are necessarily the ones which prevail. A frequent sociological finding is that the social relations of those who serve them often operate against the purposes of institutions. Bribery in business, racism within policing, sexism in employment are so widespread in many parts of the world that they also may be seen as institutionalised. This is in spite of the fact that governments as well as the collectivities concerned may try to root them out.

Even then institutions which run counter to state or employer policies and objectives are not necessarily against the public interest. Peter Blau’s research on officials in a tax agency showed that they made a common practice of not reporting the offer of bribes, not because they accepted them but because their refusal of them put the person who made the offer in a false position and bound to be co-operative thereafter. Yet the official was breaking rules in not reporting the offer. The latent function of the officials’ practice was to make the work of the tax agency run more smoothly.

Latency, the features of social relations which hide behind public or official presentation, has always been a central focus for sociological fieldwork. The main contributions sociologists have made to industrial relations have been to show how people in the workplace really work rather than to provide schemes for the ideal organisation. The underlying social relations often used to be called ‘informal organisation’, but this downplays their importance. Norms set by workers may be far stronger influences on output than the paper targets set by management. Indeed the old saying that something may work in theory but not in practice is almost an axiom for sociology.

Not all institutions are for the public benefit, and inequality and cleavage are as evident in institutions as they are in collectivities. It was Sumner, author of the classic comparative study in this field, Folkways, 3 who pointed to the universality of ethnocentrism, the institutional preference for people of your own country. Throughout the world equal opportunities legislation, often backed up by the idea of universal human rights, seeks to rectify this. But there is a deep tension here. The citizenship institutionalised in the modern nation-state is ethnocentric in principle: nationals get preference.

Institutions do not have to be centrally controlled, merely involve standardised expectations of how people will and ought to behave. But the state has a special relation to institutions and serves to shape them through law and coercion. Institutions to regulate gender and ethnic relations and the age of adulthood are obvious areas where the state is involved and seeks to govern the ambiguities and conflicts which arise out of changing social relations.

Even though new global authorities are developing, the nation-state is still the apex of institution building in the world today. But the vast majority of institutionalised practices in social relations are everyday and informally regulated, expressed as manners and etiquette, closely related to status, respect and dignity. In this way morals (like sexual fidelity), manners (like shaking hands), and fads (like body piercing), are weak forms of institution, permitting a great deal of divergence but none the less exerting some pressure on individuals to conform.

In most of these cases there are no specialists, but even so the practice supposedly delivers benefits to those who engage in it. However, self-interest is an inadequate explanation on its own for the existence of institutions, precisely because there are pressures to conform, because deviance is widespread, and there are agencies of social control.

Institutional theory

Broadly there are three general theories to account for the emergence and existence of institutions. Unfortunately the first two both get called ‘functionalist’, but at bottom they are very different even though many attempts have been made to combine them. One, which has been associated particularly with Talcott Parsons, argues that institutions serve the continued existence of society because it would fall into chaos without them. The other, effectively expressed by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, says they grow up around and serve human needs. To distinguish them we will call the former the functionalist and the latter the need theory. The third sees them as the outcome of rational choice among people seeking best outcomes in their activities.

The functionalist theory of institutions has lost much credibility since the 1950s when it was in its heyday, mainly because too much was claimed for it. Basically the total array of activities in a society

were thought of as being organised around institutional areas or sectors such as the economy, education, religion, politics, each of which contributed to the survival of society as a whole and in which people had to be motivated to work. Rewards, in terms of income and status, followed performance as a result, and activities which did not contribute to the common good were correspondingly regarded as deviant.

There was a strong reaction against this theory in the 1960s. It was attacked particularly for being an ideological account, which neglected coercion and conflict and overlooked class interests. It saw needs as the product of and serving society, rather than simply developed in and through it. The corollary was the ‘over-socialised conception of man’ we noticed in previous lectures. From a standpoint today the assumptions that culture serves society and that society is to be equated with nation-state society are most questionable. Overall the problem with functionalism is that the theory subordinates human activities to the collectivity instead of seeing them as people’s engagement with reality or the world.

Certainly there are institutions which are key to the survival of particular collectivities. Without money and credit the banking system collapses, without the mass and the Pope the Catholic Church would not survive, and the monarchy may well be indispensable to Britain (though not to Scotland, Wales or England). But the point is that none of these collectivities has any permanent guarantee of existence and society in general would get on without them, but in a different way.

The need theory of institutions makes society exist for them rather than the reverse. It asserts that it is through society that human beings develop institutionalised practices which enhance the development of human powers, creative expression, fulfilment of desire and satisfaction of need. The need theory is right to this extent. Society is the base and vehicle for these, not their goal. Certainly if key institutions concerned with reproduction, nutrition, shelter and security were to collapse then society would too, but this is because society can only exist if the basic needs of the species are met.

The problem with this theory is that it has difficulty in interpreting the cultural diversity of institutions if their origin is traced back to general human needs. It also appears to leave society as entirely open-ended as a solution to needs when we know that there are a restricted number of options and of these some are universal, for instance norms and authority. The need theory’s solution is somewhat lame here, effectively saying society is itself a need, the answer of Aristotle and Marx: human beings are ‘social animals’.

This is where rational choice theory applied to institutions makes a precise intervention to help in explaining their existence. It provides both for trial and error and rational calculation as strategies to deal with the circumstances in which individuals find themselves, and treats collective solutions as one way to reduce uncertainty. It allows for the evolution of the variety of institutions as passing solutions to perennial problems under different environmental conditions.

It may exaggerate calculation compared with drives, desires and force, all contributing to human power, and in particular the power of some over others. But in a form known as ‘neo-institutionalism’ this theory challenges a lot of older sociology. Paradoxically beginning with individual choice it has been more successful in demonstrating the necessity for the existence of society than any theory previously. It does this by showing that if you begin with the unrealistic fiction that only individuals and their purposes exist you finish up with showing the necessity for society, not a war of all against all. Indeed the most important statement of this theory, James S. Coleman’s, argues that a set of individuals pursuing their own purposes will demand norms and realise them in their own actions.

Some might think that there is little point in assuming the opposite of the truth and then proving it wrong. However, the thrust of the old modern theory of society, especially that kind which developed in economics, was to suggest that individuals following their own purposes were likely to destroy the foundations of society, the nightmare of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies where the society of children isolated on an island descends into chaos. The only solution to this in older social theory was that made famous by Thomas Hobbes with his Leviathan, a sovereign power imposing order, or in the modern functionalism of Talcott Parsons which assumes a prior consensus on values. Old social theory oscillated between absolute power or consensus as solutions, neither of which corresponded to the facts of society as sociologists described them.

What Coleman’s argument shows is that there is no reason to fear the break-up of society through ever-increasing individualisation, though he diminishes the effect of his argument by insisting on parental imposition of norms on children. Theoretically, as opposed to Golding, children too will develop norms, and this corresponds to much of their play behaviour. The big problem is to explain the outbreaks of violence which are not to anyone’s benefit. What, however, one can observe about the norms which each generation develops is that they can frequently run counter to those of a previous generation and that in itself accounts for much of the fear of the breakdown of society.

None of the three theories is adequate on its own to explain the nature, standardisation and variety of institutions. Rational choice theory explains both the variety and standardisation of institutions but not the nature of the needs they fulfil; needs theory cannot explain either variety or standardisation; and functionalist theory explains standardisation but not variety. On the face of it a merger of the three would provide an all-round view.

In fact this does not occur because the answers we give to the questions of how institutions fulfil needs, how they are standardised and how their variety arises are different when considered separately than they would be taken together. We are born into an ongoing society, in which human needs are evolving all the time and where standardisation is constantly being reconstituted on new bases. The interaction effects result in a constant dynamic, a cycle of change and retrenchment, on which there have been reflections throughout history.

The theory of institutions cannot be adequate to this change so long as it treats education, law, religion, etc. as institutions only; that is, standardised practices. But education is more than a standardised practice. It is an individual and shared experience of the world, an activity which always transcends and challenges norms. The theory of practice and institutions can be misleadingly conservative if it does not allow for development of experience and the acquisition of new powers and understandings.

So long as basic human needs are met, the limits to the kinds of institution which may develop are human capacities, material resources, culture, technical development and social relations. But this

permits a vast range. Journalism and computing for instance belong to the modern (and postmodern) world, embalming and body piercing on the other hand are widely dispersed historically, but infrequently occurring. Cooking and poetry are universal. But the development of the powers and potential of human beings always takes us beyond the confines of society.

The sociology of institutions is an important point of intersection between sociology and all the disciplines which deal with specialised skills and capacities. Medicine, sport, education, law, art, social work look to sociology for an understanding of society. But while the sociology of each of these is rewarding and has a large literature and fund of research, we would need something encyclopaedic to cover them.

Instead we will consider five sectors of experience which pervade every institution and collectivity. They challenge every society because they are life-spheres for us all. They are areas of activity within which institutions grow but where we also confront standardised practices through our active engagement in the world and in the development of our own unique capacities. They are state, work, environment, culture and the person.

In each case I will stress the challenge which current changes in these life-spheres pose to old conceptions of their functions for society. At the end we will consider the question of whether there is a distinct sphere for society or whether it is simply the basis for any and all life-spheres.

Changes in the life -spheres

Beyond state societies

We begin with the sphere which dominates institutions in modern societies and at the same time has the most fraught relations with society. Gains for the state appear often as loss to society, and scholars and radicals of all kinds have speculated on the possibilities of society without the state, or at least with only a minimal state.

From the viewpoint of institutional leaders and practitioners, however, their prime interest in society is that it should be predictable.

They want to ensure steady flows of recruits, respect for their work and status in society. Their interest in culture, too, is in guarantees for their rights to practice in and control their sector and assert its claims for public attention against others. For all of these things they look to the state. It is the autonomy of social relations which makes social control a generic issue for all institutional work. It is the autonomy of culture which leads practitioners to enlist the state’s help in asserting professional monopoly.

There is then a common interest among those who run institutions in enhancing the predictability of society. They exercise ‘hegemony’—as the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci developed the idea, borrowing from both Marx and Weber—as power operating through ideas and everyday practices. They work with the state for ways of enforcing compliance with their own requirements. The very name ‘state’ conveys its character as the institution to secure institutions, to give them a fixed and settled base. To do this the state engages in the regulation and control of social relations, and because these are inherently fluid we encounter the fraught issue of the relations of state and society.

There is an oppositional ideology as counterpart to dominant ideology, namely the conviction that institutions can be made to serve those who work in them. This is the inspiration of workers’ collectives. But this only repeats the basic error of those leaders who seek to make institutions work for their own advantage. Factories don’t exist to serve the needs of those who work in them, and there never would have been factories if that was their function. They don’t even in the first instance exist to serve their owners and managers. They produce for the needs of customers.

As we discussed earlier in our account of human collectivities, the social relations of the factory are the core of a set of practices, technology, plant, buildings, finance. Their output supplies goods for people through the mechanism of the market, not for society, even less for the state (unless it happens also to be the customer). For this reason Karl Marx would have nothing to do with socialist schemes of workers’ control. Instead he looked forward to a time when the disappearance of class division would mean that institutions could serve general human needs.

Both in the United States and Britain attempts have been made in the last two decades to take the heat out of the issue of the control of institutions with the notion of the stakeholder, recognising the wide diversity of sectional interests involved in any institution and therefore of claims on its outputs. This recognises a wider constellation of social relations than even owners, workers and customers, and can provide a forum for the innocent bystander—the victim of environmental degradation for instance.

Stakeholding is not a panacea. There is a danger that handing over institutions to an identified set of stakeholders will damage open-ended provision of needs. But environmental damage appears a clear-cut case of market failure. Fulfilment of the needs of some can damage the interests of the many and some other mechanism is needed for institutional control. At the moment the central state remains as the only effective arbiter, lobbied by watchdog groups of all kinds.

When sociologists study any institutional area they look to the social origins, status and class position of its agents, the kinds of people it serves and how its services are distributed among them, to social relations involved in institutional practices, and the consequences of the institution for the structuration of the wider society. As we have stressed all this is fluid and the participants look to the state to deliver control. But the state as this controller of institutions is in turn subject to the same range of influences from society. This, then, is the old question of ‘Who guards the guardians?’

The regulation of society by the state has become a highly technical matter, involving the employment of specialised officials and professionals from many fields, from law to public health, weapons technology to computing, social work to education. For the modern world this technical apparatus of the state, summed up in the word ‘bureaucracy’, has come to be central to it.

But before modern bureaucracy, going back to Aristotle, the issue of who ruled and how rulers were selected was always regarded as fundamental. This was the basis of the classic theory of the differences between democracy, oligarchy and monarchy. The quality of the rulers determined the character of the state. The modern state’s peculiarity was that it generated a new social class, the bureaucrats, its servants who became its rulers. In the modern nation-state the state begins to generate its own kind of control society and ceases to be simply a mechanism for ruling society.

These contrasts over time between different kinds of state mean we have to be careful to find a concept of state which has the widest possible relevance. The traditional classification of types of state set them in the wider context of society. Therefore the state exists in a special kind of relation to social relations, sometimes as a restriction on them, sometimes as an extension of their possibilities. Your evening social party is not a state event, but the state may intervene if your sound system is too loud. Your political party activity, however, is only possible because the state exists.

So what is the state? The state exists—and here follows a definition—in the organisation of practices of enforcement of a public interest or good by some people on others. This is enormously broad. But note it is a lot narrower than our idea of society, which also includes social relations in private, unorganised, unenforced and just plain matters of taste and preference.

But our definition also brings to view the tensions between state and society. Just how far can the state extend its interest in private activities? Does it extend to the consenting activities of sadomasochistic adults in private? A recent judgement of the European Court of Justice declared that it did when it rejected an appeal against the verdict of a British court which had declared it was illegal for a man to agree to his penis being pierced.

In other words the boundaries between those social activities which are required, forbidden or simply permitted by the state are always being tested in practice and are never firm. They vary between one nation-state and another and sometimes the practices of states in general will undermine those of a particular state. After holding out for a long time Ireland has finally come into line with other nation-states in making divorce legal. Both of these examples raise the question of which state: Britain or Europe; Ireland or the state in general? Our definition leaves this open, as it has to, because the success of the claim to be a state is one which will depend on power and historic rights which are always contestable. Being a state depends on the power to assert rights and to be recognised as a state by other states. This is where the nation-state has come to be regarded as the only real state and the test of statehood has been recognition by other nation-states.

But if we go back to our definition we can see it says nothing about nation. It allows for the fact that statehood exists both at local and international levels. The nation-state claims to be the source of the power at both those levels. But even that is open to contest. We have talked about rights and their assertion. People, movements and organisations are not always prepared to allow nation-states to be the sole arbiter of these. They resist tyrannical states, and since 1945 a complex law of human rights has been established on a global scale.

On our definition the state may exist both below the nation-state level in citizen initiatives and in the activities of transnational non-governmental organisations which seek to save the planet or end state torture. Older sociological definitions of the state effectively represented the claims of the nation-state of the day. The classic definition of the nation-state by Max Weber was of an organisation which laid successful claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical force in a territorial area. His formulation captured the essence of the state in the period of the imperialistic nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the world has changed.

We can see that the routine administration of the state in the late twentieth century is based on more than the monopoly of legitimate violence. Now, it depends equally on technical systems and a sense of justice, which limit the adequacy, scope and legitimacy of violence in the service of the state. The claim to monopoly of violence was another way of expressing the idea of sovereignty, that no other body could claim jurisdiction. In reality that was never completely realised and in today’s world of federal and overlapping authorities it is not always clear who can detain whom or confiscate which property in which area. The pursuit of war criminals outside their own nation-state is a prime example of a state beyond the nation-state.

A sociological definition of the state is bound to take account of shifting new realities and the inherent tension which results between society and the state. It is crucial to understand that the state does not create society. It is not even the only source of regularity and predictability in human affairs. A huge amount of this is the product of manners and customs without a coercive apparatus. Relations in private can be just as ordered as public ones. Interpersonal relations even between strangers may proceed smoothly without state intervention. But there will always be an argument about what would happen if the state were not there as some guarantee.

This is true of all those institutions where the main concern is not with the regulation of social relations but with outputs in the wider world, with the production both of material and ideal objects. Work is central to all of them and if we attend to the sociology of work we have a lead on the preconditions for the survival of any institution.

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