This Institutionalism Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.
Institutions are persistent social facts that regulate social behavior. Most targets of sociological study are institutions. At a minimum, organizations, the state, social norms, laws, cultural values and socially constructed knowledge are, or are enlivened by, institutions. Indeed, Durkheim (1982: 59) defined sociology as ”the science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning.
Two dimensions can be used to categorize institutions. A public/private dimension identifies the subjects of the institution. Public institutions apply to all members of a nation, culture or general sphere of interaction such as an industry, whereas private institutions apply to members of an exclusive social structure, such as a group or an organization. A centralized/decentralized dimension refers to the source of institutional authority. Centralized institutions are those created and enforced by some designated agent, whereas decentralized institutions are emergent, and responsibility for their enforcement is diffuse. Archetypes of the four institutional forms identified by these two dimensions are laws (public-centralized), cultural values (public-decentralized), organizational rules (private-centralized) and social norms (private-decentralized). The social structures that house these institutional forms are, respectively, states, civil society, organizations and networks.
Different schools of institutionalism focus on the influence of different institutional forms and often slight the relevance of other institutional forms. Nevertheless, some of the most exciting institutional arguments highlight that the functioning of one institutional form, such as state regulation, depends on other institutions, such as norms derived from social cohesion.
The most pressing challenge for institutionalism is to explain the origin and change of institutions. As institutions stabilize social structure and constrain behavior, it is unsurprising that theories say more about the persistence of institutions than their change, and that theories of institutional change emphasize incremental change processes. New theories of institutional change draw from social movement theory and argue that institutional entrepreneurs may affect more radical institutional change by brokering between social sites and institutional ideas and framing potential institutions in ways that appeal to pre-existing institutions.
Bibliography:
- Durkheim, E. (1982) The Rules of Sociological Method. Free Press, New York.
See also:
ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER
Always on-time
Plagiarism-Free
100% Confidentiality
Special offer!
