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Scott, R. (2001). Institutions and OrganizationsInstitutions:
- Social structures that have attained a high degree of resilience
- Composed of cultured-cognitive, normative, and regulative elements that together with
associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life.
- Transmitted by various types of carriers, including symbolic systems, relational systems routines
and artifacts.
- Connote stability by definition but are subject to change processes both incremental and
discontinuous.
Regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements are the building blocks of institutional structures,
providing the elastic fibers that resist change.
The three pillars of institutions
Regulative systems, normative and cultural-cognitive systems, are the vital ingredients of institutions.
Overdetermined systems: overdetermined in the sense that social sanctions plus pressure for
conformity plus intrinsic direct reward, plus values, are all likely to act together to give a particular
meaning system its directive force.
More progress will be made at this juncture by distinguishing among the several component elements
and identifying their different underlying assumptions, mechanisms and indicators.
The regulative pillar
Institutions constrain and regularize behavior.
Institutions are perfectly analogous to the rules of the game in a competitive team sport. An essential
part of the functioning of institutions is the costliness of ascertaining violations and the severity of
punishment.
Economists view individuals and organizations that conform to rules as pursuing their self-interests, as
behaving instrumentally and expediently. The primary mechanism of control is coercion.
,Although in some situations agreements can be monitored and mutually enforced by the parties
involved, in many circumstances it is necessary to vest the enforcement machinery in a third party
expected to behave in a neutral fashion. Economic historians view this as an important function of the
state.
possible problem: enforcement is undertaken by agents whose own utility functions influence outcomes
(third parties who are not neutral f.e.). The state develops its own interests and operates somewhat
autonomously from the other societal actors. Attention to the regulative aspects of institutions creates
renewed interest in the role of the state as rule maker, referee and enforcer.
Many laws are sufficiently controversial or ambiguous that they do not provide clear prescriptions for
conduct. In such cases, law is better conceived as an occasion for sense making and collective
interpretation, relying more on cultural-cognitive and normative than coercive elements for its effects.
Laws do not spring from the head of Zeus, rules must be interpreted and disputes resolved. Surveillance
mechanisms are required but will prove to be fallible, and conformity is only one of many possible
responses by those subject to regulative institutions.
The normative pillar
Emphasis is on normative rules that introduce a prescriptive, evaluative and obligatory dimension into
social life. They include both values and norms.
Values are conceptions of the preferred or the desirable together with the construction of standards to
which existing structures or behavior can be compared and assessed.
Norms specify how things should be done, they define legitimate means to pursue valued ends. They
define goals or objectives.
Some are applicable to all members of the collectivity, other only to selected types of actors or
positions. This give rise to roles: conceptions of appropriate goals and activities for particular individuals
or specified social positions.
Normative systems impose constraints on behavior but also they empower and enable social action.
They confer rights as well as responsibilities, privileges as well as duties, licenses as well as mandates.
The normative conception of institutions was embraced because sociologists tended to focus attention
on those types of institutions such social classes and religious systems, where common belief and values
are more likely to exist.
Much of the behavior we observe in political institutions reflects the routine way in which people do
what they are supposed to do. Within organization, analysts have examined changing goals, values and
interpersonal constraints on behavior.
The cultural-cognitive pillar
This pillar stresses the centrality of cultural-cognitive elements of institutions: the shared conceptions
that constitute the nature of social reality and the frame through which meaning is made.
Attention to this pillar is the major distinguishing feature of neo institutionalism within sociology.
,In the cognitive paradigm, what a creature does is, in large part, a function of the creature’s internal
representation of its environment. Symbols, words, signs, gestures have their effect by shaping the
meanings we attribute to objects and activities.
Meanings arise in interaction and are maintained and transformed as they are employed to make sense
of the ongoing stream of happenings.
Every human institutions is a crystallization of meanings in objective form. Cultural categories should be
treated as the cognitive containers in which social interests are defined and classified argued, negotiated
and fought out.
Compliance occurs in many circumstances because other types of behavior are inconceivable, routines
are followed because they are taken for granted. Roles arise as common understandings develop that
particular actions are associated with particular actors.
The three pillars and legitimacy
Organizations require more than material resources and technical information if they are to survive and
thrive in their social environments. They also need social acceptability and credibility.
Legitimacy is a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of en entity are desirable, proper
or appropriate within some socially constructed systems or norms values beliefs and definitions.
Legitimacy is a generalized rather than an event specific evaluation and is possessed objectively yet
created subjectively.
Legitimacy is not a commodity to be possessed or exchanged but a condition reflecting perceived
consonance with relevant rules and laws, normative support or alignment with cultural-cognitive
frameworks.
In their early stages institutionalized activities develop as repeated patterns of behavior that evoke
shared meanings among the participants. The legitimation of this order involves connecting it to wide
cultural frames, norms or rules.
- The regulatory emphasis is on conformity to rules: legitimate organizations are those
established by and operating in accordance with relevant legal or quasi-legal requirements.
- A normative conception stresses a deeper, moral base for assessing legitimacy. Much more
likely to be internalized than are regulative controls.
- A cultural-cognitive view stresses the legitimacy that comes from adopting a common frame of
reference or definition of the situation. The deepest level because it rests on preconscious,
taken-for-granted understandings.
Basic assumptions
- Truth and reality
- Social reality
In general, scholars embracing the regulative view of institutions focus primary attention on regulative
rules, cultural-cognitive scholars focus the importance of constitutive rules. They differ in their
ontological assumptions. Constitutive rules operate at a deeper level of reality creation, involving the
devising of categories and the construction of typification.
, Cultural-cognitive theorists amend and augment the portrait of institutions crafted by regulative
theorists. They insists that games involve more than rules and enforcement mechanisms: they consists
of socially constructed players endowed with differing capacities for action and parts to play.
Constitutive rules construct the social objects and events to which regulative rules are applied.
The stereotypic economic man, is not a reflection of human nature but a social construct that arose
under specific historical circumstances and is maintained by particular institutional logics associated
with the rise of capitalism.
Rational and reasonable behavior
Rather than positing a lone individual decision maker the sociological version embraces an organicist
rather than an atomist view such that the essential characteristics of any element are seen as outcomes
of relations with other entities.
Zweckrationalitat: action that is rational in the instrumental, calculative sense.
Wertrationalitat: action that is inspired by and directed toward the realization of substantive values.
A theory of practical action: this conception departs from a preoccupation with the rational, calculative
aspect of cognition to focus on preconscious processes and schema as they enter into routine, taken-for-
granted behavior.
Intendedly rational actor model: needs to be supplemented by a model of the actor’s situation that
includes relevant social institutions.
Common conceptions enable the routine accomplishment of highly complex and interdependent tasks,
often with a minimum of conscious deliberation or decision making. Analysts are enjoyed to pay
attention to the existence or social institutions of various kinds as bounds to and definitions of the
agent’s situation.
Contemporary theorists not only select different pillars to support their versions of institutional
structure, but these pillars themselves are constructed from varying of ontological rules and make
different assumptions about how best to account for social behavior.
Conclusion
The proposed models are differentiated such that each identifies a distinctive basis of compliance,
mechanism of diffusion, type of logic, cluster of indicators, and foundation for legitimacy claims.
Two sources of continuing controversy:
1. Analysts disagree to whether to attend primarily to regulative rules as formative of institutions
or instead to give primacy to constitutive rules, which create distinctive types of actors and
related modes of action.
2. Institutions have become an important combat zone in the disputation within the social sciences
centering on the utility of rational choice theory for explaining human behavior.
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