Abstract
In the preceding paper, I deferred consideration of problems of institutional analysis, and it is these I shall concentrate upon in the sections which follow. I distinguish ‘institution’ from ‘social system’ or ‘collectivity’. Institutions, to quote Radcliffe-Brown, may be regarded as ‘standardised modes of behaviour’1 which play a basic part in the time-space constitution of social systems. The standardisation of behaviour in time-space, as I have emphasised in the foregoing discussion, involves its chronic reconstitution in contingent contexts of day-to-day social activity. Temporality enters into the reproduction of social systems in a threefold way:
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1.
In the immediate nexus of interaction, as contingently accomplished or ‘brought off’ by actors, social reproduction in its most elemental sense.
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In the reproduction of the personnel of social systems, as beings with a finite life-span, Sein zum Tode, anchored of course in biological reproduction.
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3.
In the reproduction of institutions, sedimented in the longue durée of historical time.
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Notes and References
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On social structure’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 70 (1940) p. 9.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977) pp.38ff.
Cf. the interesting and important discussion in Edmond Wright, ‘Sociology and the irony model’, Sociology, vol. 12 (1978) pp. 528ff.
Cf. Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication (Cambridge University Press, 1976) pp. 52ff.
Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford University Press, 1958).
Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales, Family, Socialisation and Interaction Process (New York: Free Press, 1955) p. 54.
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Existence and hermeneutics’, in The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974) pp. 12–13. See also subsequent emendations of his position in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning.
Cf. Jung: ‘a symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional obvious meaning’. Carl G. Jung et al., Man and His Symbols (London: Pan, 1978) p. 3.
Cf. Donald A. Schon, Displacement of Concepts (London: Tavistock, 1963).
Cf. Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2 (New York: Bedminster, 1968) pp. 901–10.
Alan Wells, Social Institutions (London: Heinemann, 1970) p. 133.
Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973) p. 44. For a critical discussion of functionalism in recent Marxist literature, see R. W. Connell, ‘Complexities of furies leave … a critique of the Althusserian approach to class’, Macquarie University Paper (June 1978).
See, for example, Manuel Castells, The Urban Question (London: Arnold, 1977) especially pp. 461ff.
Cf. Pierre Bourdieu and J. C. Passerron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977).
Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1967) p. 11.
For German discussions, mainly revolving around Dahrendorf’s Homo Sociologicus, see for example, Friedrich H. Tenbruck, ‘Zur Deutschen Reception der Rollenanalyse’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, vol. 1 (1961); in English, Margaret A. Coulson, ‘Role: a redundant concept in sociology?’, in J. A. Jackson, Role (Cambridge University Press, 1972).
Erving Goffman, Where the Action Is (London: Allen Lane, 1969) p.41.
Cf. Stanford Lyman and B. M. Scott, The Drama of Social Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1977) p. 43.
‘The agency of the letter in the unconscious’, Écrits. Cf. also Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 1977);
Anthony Wilden, The Language of the Self (NewYork: Dell, 1975).
S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (London: Hogarth Press, 1959).
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (London, 1925) p. 7. Le Bon however held that the unconscious is composed primarily of an ‘archaic heritage’ of a racial character.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960).
William Sargant, Battle for the Mind (London: Pan, 1959).
Cf. Jerome S. Bruner, ‘The organisation of early skilled action’, in Martin P. Richards, The Integration of a Child into a Social World (Cambridge University Press, 1974).
Daniel Bertaux, Destins personnels et structure de classe (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1977), in which the author argues for a version of class theory incorporating ‘social trajectories’.
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© 1979 Anthony Giddens
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Giddens, A. (1979). Institutions, Reproduction, Socialisation. In: Central Problems in Social Theory. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16161-4_4
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