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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
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.
References
Abbott, A. (1988). The system of professions: An essay on the division of professional labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Abell, P. (1987). The syntax of social life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bearman, P., & Parigi, P. (2004). Cloning headless frogs and other important matters: Conversation topics and network structure. Social Forces, 83, 535–557.
Bearman, P. S., & Stovel, K. (2000). Becoming a Nazi: A model for narrative networks. Poetics, 27, 69–90.
Becker, H. (1982). Art worlds. Berkeley: University of California.
Boyd, J. P. (1991). Social semigroups: A unified theory of scaling and blockmodeling as applied to social networks. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press.
Breiger, R. L. (1974). The duality of persons and groups. Social Forces, 53, 181–190.
Breiger, R. L. (2000). A tool kit for practice theory. Poetics, 27, 91–115.
Breiger, R. L., & Mohr, J. W. (2004). Institutional logics from the aggregation of organizational networks: Operational procedures for the analysis of counted data. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 10, 17–43.
Breiger, R. L., & Pattison, P. (1986). Cumulated social roles: The duality of persons and their algebras. Social Networks, 8, 215–256.
Burns, T. (1991). Erving Goffman. London: Routledge.
Burt, R. S. (1990). Social contagion and innovation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, consciousness and time. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Chase, I. (1980). Social process and hierarchy formation in small groups: A comparative perspective. American Sociological Review, 45, 905–924.
Cole, J., & Zuckerman, H. (1979). Fair science: Women in the scientific community. New York: Free Press.
Cozzens, S. E. (1989). Social control and multiple discovery in science: The opiate receptor case. Albany NY: State University of New York Press.
Crane, D. (1972). Invisible colleges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
De Soto, C., & Albrecht, F. (1968). Cognition and social orderings. In Abelson, et al. (Ed.), Theories of cognitive consistency: A sourcebook (pp. 531–539). Chicago: Rand McNally.
De Soto, C. B. (1961). The predilection for single ordering. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62, 16–23.
DiMaggio, P. (1987). Classification in art. American Sociological Review, 52, 440–455.
DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48, 147–160.
Dix, G. (1947). The ministry in the early church. In K. E. Kirk (Ed.), The apostolic ministry. New York: Morehouse-Gorham.
Dumont, L. (1986). A south Indian subcaste. M. Moffatt, tr. New York: Oxford University Press.
Duquenne, V. (1995). Models of possessions and lattice analysis. Social Science Information, 34, 253–267.
Duquenne, V. (1996). On lattice approximations: Syntactic aspects. Social Networks, 18, 189–200.
Duquenne, V. (1999). Lattical structures in data analysis. Theoretical Computer Science, 217, 407–436.
Durkheim, E. (1933). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press.
Ennis, P. (1990). The seventh stream: A history and geography of rock ‘n roll to 1970. Middletown,CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Fararo, T. F., & Doreian, P. (1984). Tripartite structural analysis: Generalizing the Breiger-Wilson formalism. Social Networks, 6, 141–175.
Flusser, D. (1988). Judaism and the origins of Christianity. Jerusalem: Magnes.
Freeman, L. C., & White, D. R. (1993). Using Galois lattices to represent network data. Sociological Methodology, 23, 127–146.
Freeman, L. C., White, D. R., & Romney, A. K. (Eds.) (1989). Research methods in social network analysis. Fairfax VA: George Mason University Press.
Frend, W. H. C. (1952). The Donatist church. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Friedland, R., & Alford, R. R. (1991). Bringing society back in: Symbols, practices and institutional contradictions. In W. W. Powell, & P. DiMaggio (Eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (pp. 232–263). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Friedland, R., & Mohr, J. W. (2004). The cultural turn in American sociology. In R. Friedland, & J. W. Mohr (Eds.), Matters of culture: Cultural sociology in practice (pp. 1–68). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fuchs, S. (2001). Against essentialism: A theory of culture and society. Cambridge, Harvard: University Press.
Ghurye, G. S. (1961). Caste and race in India. Bombay: Popular.
Gibson, D. R. (2003). Participation shifts: Order and differentiation in group conversation. Social Forces, 81, 1135–1181.
Gibson, J. J. (1950). The perception of the visual world. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goffman, E. (1955). On face work. Psychiatry, 18, 213–231.
Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in public places. Glencoe IL: Free Press.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual. N.Y.: Pantheon.
Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public. N.Y.: Harper & Row.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis. N. Y.: Harper & Row.
Gottwald, N. K. (1979). The tribes of Jahweh: A sociology of the religion of liberated Israel, 1250–1050 B.C. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis.
Grant, R. M. (1966). Gnosticism and early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Suddaby, R., & Sahlin, K. (2008). Organizational Institutionalism. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Habermas, J. (1975). Legitimation crisis. Boston, MA: Beacon.
Hallett, T., & Ventresca, M. J. (2006). Inhabited institutions: Social interactions and organizational forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory and Society, 35, 213–236.
Hocart, A. M. (1950). Caste: A comparative study. London: Methuen.
Houseman, M., & White, D. R. (1998). Network mediation of exchange structures: Ambilateral sidedness and property flows in Pul Eliya. In T. Schweizer, & D. R. White (Eds.), Kinship, networks and exchange (p. xx). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, M. T. (2005). Behind the one way mirror: Firms and the media in market formation. Poetics, 33, 201–226.
Kuhn, T. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lorrain, F., & White, H. C. (1971). Structural equivalence of individuals in social networks. Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1, 49–80.
March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1976). Ambiguity and choice in organizations. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.
March, J. G. & Olsen, J P. (1989). Rediscovering institutions: The organizational basis of politics. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Marriott, M. (1959). Interactional and attributional theories of caste ranking. Man in India, 39, 92–107.
Marriott, M. (1968). Caste ranking and food transactions, a matrix analysis. In M. Singer, & B. S. Cohn (Eds.), Structure and change in Indian society. Chicago: Aldine.
Mayer, A. C. (1960). Caste and kinship in central India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McAdam, D. (1988). Freedom summer. New York: Oxford University Press.
McLean, P. (1998). A frame analysis of favor seeking in the Renaissance: Agency, networks, and political culture. The American Journal of Sociology, 104, 51–91.
Menard, H. W. (1971). Science: Growth and change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure. NY: Free Press.
Merton, R. K. (1973). The sociology of science: Theoritical and empirical investigations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Meyendorff, J. (1966). Orthodoxy and Catholicity. New York: Sheed and Ward.
Miller, S. (2007). Social institutions. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/social-institutions/.
Mische, A. (2007). Partisan publics: Contention and mediation across Brazilian youth activist networks. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mische, A., & Pattison, P. (2000). Composing a civic arena: Publics, projects, and social settings. Poetics, 27, 163–194.
Mohr, J. W. (1998). Measuring meaning structures. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 345–370.
Mohr, J. W., & Duquenne, V. (1997). The duality of culture and practice: Poverty relief in New York City, 1888–1917. Theory and Society, 26, 305–356.
Mullins, N. (1973). Theories and theory groups in contemporary American sociology. NY: Harper & Row.
Newman, J. H. (1876). The Arians of the fourth century. London: Pickering.
Pattison, P. E., & Breiger, R. L. (2002). Lattices and dimensional representations: Matrix decompositions and ordering structures. Social Networks, 24, 423–444.
Porac, J. F., Thomas, H., Wilson, F., Paton, D., & Kanfer, A. (1995). Rivalry and the industry model of Scottish knitwear producers. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40, 203–229.
Powell, W., & DiMaggio, P. J. (1991). The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ragin, C. (1987). The comparative method: Moving beyond qualitative and quantitative strategies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ragin, C. (2000). Fuzzy-set social science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rawlings, C. M., & Bourgeois, M. D. (2004). The complexity of institutional niches: Credentials and organizational differentiation in a field of U.S. higher education. Poetics, 32, 411–437.
Rawls, A. W. (1989). An ethnomethodological perspective on social theory. In D. Helm, et al. (Ed.), Interactional order. New York: Irvington.
Robinson, T. A. (1988). The Bauer thesis examined: The geography of heresy in the early Christian church. NY: Edwin Mellen.
Ruef, M. (1999). Social ontology and the dynamics of organizational forms: Creating market actors in the healthcare field, 1966–1994. Social Forces, 77, 1403–1432.
Saussure, F. (1959). Course in general linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Schoeps, H. (1969). Jewish Christianity: Factional disputes in the early church, D.R.A. Hare, tr. Philadelphia: Fortress.
Schweizer, T. (1993). The dual ordering of people and possessions. Current Anthropology, 34, 469–483.
Scott, W. R., & Meyer, J. W. (1983). The organization of societal sectors. In J. Meyer, & W. R. Scott (Eds.), Organizational environments: Ritual and rationality (pp. 129–153). Beverly Hills: Sage.
Segal, A. F. (1986). Rebecca's children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman world. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Shepard, R. N. (1984). Ecological constraints on internal representation: Resonant kinematics of perceiving, imagining, thinking, and dreaming. Psychological Review, 91, 417–447.
Simmel, G. (1955). Conflict and the web of group-affiliations. New York: Free Press.
Smith, T. (2007). Narrative boundaries and the dynamics of ethnic conflict and conciliation. Poetics, 35, 22–46.
Sonnett, J. (2004). Musical boundaries: Intersections of form and content. Poetics, 32, 247–264.
Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action: Symbols and strategies. American Sociological Review, 51, 273–286.
Tilly, C. (1997). Parliamentarization of popular contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Theory and Society, 26, 245–273.
Ventresca, M., & Mohr, J. W. (2002). Archival research methods. In J. A. C. Baum (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to organizations (pp. 805–828). Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.
Watts, D. J. (2003). Six degrees: The science of a connected age. New York: Norton.
Wellman, B., & Berkowitz, S. D. (Eds.) (1988). Social structures: A network approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.
White, H. C. (1963a). An anatomy of kinship: Mathematical models for structures of cumulated roles. Englewood Cliff, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
White, H. C. (1963b). Uses of mathematics in sociology. In J. C. Charlesworth (Ed.), Mathematics and the social sciences (pp. 76–94). Philadelphia, PA: American Academy of Political and Social Science.
White, H. C. (1970). Chains of opportunity: System models of mobility in organizations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
White, H. C. (1981). Where do markets come from. American Journal of Sociology, 87, 517–547.
White, H. C. (1985). Agency as control. In J. W. Pratt, & R. Zeckhauser (Eds.), Principals and agents: The structure of business. Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration Press.
White, H. C. (1991). Values come in styles, which mate to change. In M. Hechter, L. Nadel, & R. E. Michod (Eds.), Toward a scientific analysis of values. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
White, H. C. (1992). Identity and control: A structural theory of social action. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
White, H. C. (1995). Network switchings and Bayesian forks: Reconstructing the social and behavioral sciences. Social Research, 62, 1035–1063.
White, H. C. (1997). Can mathematics be social? Flexible representations for interaction process and its socio-cultural constructions. Sociological Forum, 12, 53–71.
White, H. C. (2000). Modeling discourse in and around markets. Poetics, 27, 117–135.
White, H. C. (2002). Markets from networks: Socioeconomic models of production. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
White, H. C. (2008). Identity and control: How social formations emerge. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
White, H. C., & White, C. A. (1993). Canvases and careers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Willis, G. G. (1950). Saint Augustine and the Donatist controversy. London: SPCK.
Wilson, T. P. (1982). Relational networks: An extension of sociometric concepts. Social Networks, 4, 105–16.
Yeung, K. (2005). What does love mean? Exploring network culture in two network settings. Social Forces, 84, 391–420.
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.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
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
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-008-9066-0