Abstract
Institutions are linkage mechanisms that bridge across three kinds of social divides—they link micro systems of social interaction to meso (and macro) levels of organization, they connect the symbolic with the material, and the agentic with the structural. Two key analytic principles are identified for empirical research, relationality and duality. These are linked to new research strategies for the study of institutions that draw on network analytic techniques. Two hypotheses are suggested. (1) Institutional resilience is directly correlated to the overall degree of structural linkages that bridge across domains of level, meaning, and agency. (2) Institutional change is related to over-bridging, defined as the sustained juxtaposition of multiple styles within the same institutional site. Case examples are used to test these contentions. Institutional stability is examined in the case of Indian caste systems and American academic science. Institutional change is explored in the case of the rise of the early Christian church and in the origins of rock and roll music.
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Notes
Just as an example, early work by the second author (White 1963a) focused on the logic of kinship systems, building on long traditions of analysis in anthropology, and demonstrated that the institutions of kinship were derivable through an empirical analysis of the structure of kin ties. In another early publication on the “Uses of Mathematics in Sociology” the institutional ambitions were expressed clearly, “What point is there to sociology except as it is able to find and interrelate core properties of, say, a trio like feudalism (in England in 1200), decentralization in the TVA (today), and political pluralism in France (nineteenth century)?” (White 1963b, p. 79). Later studies by White carried through on these concerns by focusing on the changing institutional logic of art worlds, job systems and economic markets (White and White 1993; White 1970; White 2002).
We focus here on just one style of institutional analysis. It should be said that there are several other contemporary research projects that are also developing approaches to using formal models to analyze institutions. The “New Institutionalists” in organizational science is one example (see Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Greenwood et al. 2008). The use of Boolean algebra and fuzzy set mathematics by Charles Ragin (1987, 2000) is another important effort.
The article began as a solo piece by White for the UC-SB conference. Mohr brought a fresh perspective and kept the focus on institutions, as well as introducing new constructs and a great many fresh examples.
This conceptualization of duality and its relationship to research coming from formal network analysis traditions is analogous (both theoretically and methodologically) to several other sociological projects, most obviously with Pierre Bourdieu’s efforts to use correspondence analysis as a way to measure the duality of social and cultural structures. See Breiger (2000) for an especially useful discussion.
Many of these perceptions and enactments within the population occur in verbal discourse, and in a follow-on paper White specifies some interrelation between style and micro-dynamics of language.
It is clear that many other individuals and organizations and scientific interest groups also push claims of—and upon—particular research groups like these.
For a cogent overview of the phenomenological position, which situates Goffman with Sachs and Garfinkel, see Rawls (1989). For incisive appreciation and critique of Goffman see Burns 1991. Hallett and Ventresca (2006) provide a thoughtful discussion of how to reconcile these types of symbolic interaction approaches with a contemporary understanding of institutions.
Indeed, Miller argues that it is a mistake to equate social conventions (such as the handshake) with institutions. “Social institutions need to be distinguished from less complex social forms such as conventions, social norms, roles and rituals. The latter are among the constitutive elements of institutions. Social institutions also need to be distinguished from more complex and more complete social entities such as societies or cultures, of which any given institution is typically a constitutive element” (2007, p. 4).
It may be that the dissection below carries through as well to the humanities, with whose organization we are less familiar. Better analogues to the humanities, as well as to professional schools and the like, may be the ethnic enclaves that crosscut villages and castes in a region like Mayer’s.
This pecking order varies a little among universities. Sociology, for example, is higher at public universities than in Ivy League schools.
Consider, for example, the Feast of Grades meetings annual in Arts and Sciences Faculties, at which higher honors for graduating students are negotiated and solemnized. One might speculate that in the university, as in the village, these local ceremonials absorb energies and distract attention from flows of main action and resources through corporative networks.
Even the numbers are quite comparable, for sizes of units and subunits and spread of networks.
In this respect, it is interesting to recall that Durkheim (1933) saw professions as important in modern societies precisely because they provided a mechanism for re-inscribing the kind of moral sensibility that had traditionally been viable in the local community but at a higher level of social organization.
Ironically, invisible colleges do provide a way, about the only way, to change local styles of departments, which tend toward an extraordinary degree of ossification when there are no active subdisciplines within to shake them up.
A reader, Paul DiMaggio, comments: “Interesting…. What about centralized efforts to use universities rather then departments or networks to implement change by seeding subcaste members in many different departments. I'm thinking of the Ford Foundation's support for behavioral political science in the 1950s. It's relatively easy for a centralized agency to convince a university administration that they should take chair money for a new type of person; and because the subdisciplines are spread out, the cost to any department of admitting one new member of a previously unrepresented tribe is low, and easy for the university administration to leverage. Insofar as the networks control the central agency (e.g., NSF), this won't work, so it may be a special case.”
And of course each would require sustained inquiry with careful definition and measurement.
Abbott (1988) makes a similar argument about the genesis of new professional groups.
Note that in this view fashion is part of style rather than innovation in style.
Formally, the argument takes the familiar philosophic form of the dialectic: synthesis emerging from thesis and antithesis.
For a systematic parsing of production systems of art, see Becker (1982).
Until the late1940s, Tin Pan Alley had monopolized this stream
Until Tin Pan Alley got the jockeys’ independence suppressed through manipulation of Congressional investigating committees and through abusive use of delays in a Federal court case: the complex story of the rise and fall of disc-jockeys is also told by Ennis (1990).
In Rock’n Roll a main point is not to deviate from your pre-teen kin, to hold onto the common style whose detailed balance among values may gyrate blatantly over time, at least as seen through adult critics’ eyes.
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Acknowledgments
A version of some portions of this article originally appeared in a chapter by White in The Origin of Values (Michael Hechter, Lynn Nadel, and Richard E. Michod, editors, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993). For helpful comments on that work and on subsequent revisions, we are indebted to Ron Breiger, Michael Bourgeois, Lynn Cooper, Paul DiMaggio, Priscilla Ferguson, Roger Friedland, Debra Friedman, Frederic Godart, Shin-Kap Han, Michael Hechter, Sheila Jasanoff, Eric Leifer, Richard Lachmann, Doug McAdam, Philip McCarty, Walter Powell, Craig Rawlings, Jae-soon Rhee, Ilan Talmud, Josep Rodriguez, Ronan Van Rossem, Yuki Yasuda, Marc Ventresca, and Viviana Zelizer. This material is based [in part] upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 0531184. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Mohr, J.W., White, H.C. How to model an institution. Theor Soc 37, 485–512 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-008-9066-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-008-9066-0