Summary
Summary of all the readings of week 2 (Scott, Esping-Andersen, De Swaan)
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- Institution
Summary of all the readings of week 2 from the first year sociology course 'Sociology of Institutions'.
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Sociology of institutions week 2Scott – Crafting an Analytic Framework 1: Three Pillars of Institutions
Hence, my own approach to bringing some order into the discussion is to propose a broad definition
of institutions that can encompass a variety of arguments, and then attempt to identify the key
analytic elements that give rise to the most important differences observed and debates
encountered.
Institutions comprise regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements that, together with
associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life.
Institutions are multifaceted, durable social structures, made up of symbolic elements, social
activities, and material resources. They are relatively resistant to change.
Institutions provide stimulus, guidelines, and resources for acting as well al prohibitions and
constraints on action. Our subject must include not only institutions as property or state of an
existing social order, but also institutions as process, including the processes of institutionalization
and deinstitutionalization.
The three pillars of institutions:
1. The regulative pillar
- Institutions constrain and regularize behavior
- These scholars are distinguished by the prominence they give to explicit regulatory
processes, like rule-setting, monitoring, and sanctioning activities
- Sactioning through diffuse, informal mechanisms, involving folkways such as shaming or
shunning activities, or may be highly formalized and assigned to specialized actors such
as the police and courts
- By economists.
- Enable and empower social actors and action, conferring licenses, special powers, and
benefits to some types of actors
- Force, sanctions, and expedient responses are central ingredients of the regulatory pillar,
but they are often tempered by the existence of rules that justify the use of force
- The institutional logic underlying the regulative pillar is an instrumental one: individuals
craft laws and rules that they believe will advance their interests, and individuals
conform to laws and rules because they seek the attendant rewards or wish to avoid
sanctions.
- Empirical indicators: expansion of constitutions, laws, codes, rules, directives,
regulations, and formal structures of control
- Affect: emotions operate to motivate actors to change institutions in which they have
become disinvested or to defend institutions to which they are attached
Summary:
Rules must be interpreted and disputes resolved; incentives and sanctions must be designed and will
have unintended effects; surveillance mechanisms are required but are expensive and will prove to
be fallible; and conformity is only one of many possible responses by those subject to regulative
institutions. A stable system of rules, whether formal or informal, backed by surveillance and
sanctioning power affecting actors; interests that is accompanied by feelings of guilt or innocence
constitutes one prevailing view of institutions
2. The normative pillar
, - Normative systems include both values and norms. Normative systems define goals or
objectives but also designate appropriate ways to pursue them. (Values are conceptions
of the preferred or the desirable together with the construction of standards to which
existing structures or behaviors can be compared and assessed. Norms specify how
things should be done; they define legitimate means to pursue valued ends.)
- Roles: conceptions of appropriate goals and activities for particular individuals or
specified social positions.
- Normative systems are typically viewed as imposing constraints on social behavior. At
the same time, they empower and enable social action.
- By (early) sociologists and political scientists on organizations.
- Scholars associated with the normative pillar stress the importance of a logic of
‘appropriateness’ and a logic of ‘instrumentality’.
- Empirical indicators: accreditations and certifications by standard setting bodies such as
professional associations.
- As with regulative systems, confronting normative systems can also evoke strong
feelings, but these are somewhat different from those that accompany the violation of
rules and laws. Feelings associated with the trespassing of norms include principally a
sense of shame or disgrace, or for those who exhibit exemplary behavior, feelings of
respect and honor.
- Theorists embracing a normative conception of institutions emphasize the stabilizing
influence of social beliefs and norms that are both internalized and imposed by others.
3. The cultural-cognitive pillar
- The shared conceptions that constitute the nature of social reality and create the framed
through which meaning is made.
- By anthropologists
- These institutionalists take seriously the cognitive dimensions of human existence:
mediating between the external world of stimuli and the response of the individual
organism is a collection of internalized symbolic representations of the world.
- The new cultural perspective focuses on the semiotic facets of culture, treating them not
simply as subjective beliefs but also as symbolic systems viewed as objective and external
to individual actors.
- Cultural systems operate at multiple levels, from the shared definition of local situations,
to the common frames and patterns of belief that comprise an organization’s culture, to
the organizing logics that structure organization fields, to the shared assumptions and
ideologies that define preferred political and economic systems at national and
transnational levels.
- When we talk about cognitive-cultural elements of institutions, we are calling attention
to these more embedded cultural forms: culture congealed in forms that require less by
way of maintenance, ritual reinforcement, and symbolic elaboration than the softer
realms we usually thing of as cultural.
- Social rules are given a somewhat different interpretation by cultural than by normative
theorists. Rather than stressing the force of mutually reinforcing obligations, cultural-
cognitive theorists point to the power of templated for particular types of actors and
scripts for action.
- Affect: feelings from the positive affect of certitude and confidence on the one hand
versus the negative feelings of confusion or disorientation on the other.
- A cultural-cognitive conception of institutions stresses the central role played by the
socially mediated construction of a common framework of meanings
Gronow suggests a fourth pillar: habitual dispositions. Habitual dispositions are related to actions
that have been repeated in stable contexts and therefore require only a minimal amount of
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