How Institutions Think

Society and Business Review

ISSN: 1746-5680

Article publication date: 5 October 2010

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Keywords

Citation

Magne, L. (2010), "How Institutions Think", Society and Business Review, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 309-314. https://doi.org/10.1108/sbr.2010.5.3.309.3

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Mary Douglas intention in this book is to “encourage more probing into the relation between minds and institutions” (p. 7), and then, she intends to “present a coherent argument about the social control of cognition” (p. ix), which is incidentally an interesting exploration of the very nature of what Durkheim called “the social bond”. But what is institution?

Institution is an anthropological concept, quite distinct from the common use of the word “institution”, and the concept roughly implies that some set of references (or culture) will govern unnoticeably our perceptions and even our thoughts. “The very idea of a suprapersonal cognitive system stirs a deep sense of outrage” (p. x), especially since we believe ourselves to be totally free and sovereign individuals, making rational decisions: we are no puppets; this collective ghost haunting our minds may just be one more fancy ideology!

Nonetheless, can we completely deny “the hold that institutions have on the processes of classifying and recognizing” (p. 3)? Can we really claim that our individual decisions are not at all influenced by the social world surrounding us, that there is no social basis of cognition? The answer to such a question will definitely orient the perspective we may have on social life and organisations, on both society and business. Among others, this is a good reason to reread this classic today, 25 years afterwards, for it might change our views and understanding on the (global) social world, especially at a corporate and political level.

The very idea of risk and the public concern for dangers, conflicting expertise, passionate and enduring public debate, is a hint that something else is at play, other than a pure individual rational decision‐making process. Choosing one course of action (for instance, running the risk to make use of nuclear medicine and save some people, but exposing the population to “low doses” of radiations) is done at the expense of another course of action and revolves to choosing whom we are willing or not to sacrifice in our society. In order to introduce her subject, Douglas uses the fictive case of “Speluncean explorers”, trapped in a cave, out of food and facing the choice of collectively surviving by eating one of them (anthropophagi) or die, for the rescue team will need some time to get to them. When rescued, one of them is missing, and after trial the tribunal has condemn them and the supreme court of this fictive country must confirm or invalidate the first judgement. This matter of life and death points at three main types of cultures or institutional commitment (hierarchist, individualist and enclavist) among the five different judges and it illustrates their inability to make a collective decision for they have different and incompatible “shared basis of knowledge and moral standards” (p. 4). These different institutional commitments will lead to typical “selective deafness” (p. 3). But each of them, individually, had to resort to an institutional commitment in order to make their own decision: only institutions can settle life and death matters. The concept of institution is all the more difficult to discard than the individual rational choice theory cannot account for such an important and dramatic case.

One of the ways to discard the idea of a “social control of cognition” (institution) is to pretend that Durkheimian concepts are obscure or totalitarian and they express the fact that institutions are a collective entity, thinking by itself and having a life of its own (what Douglas title, “how institutions think”, may actually lead us in thinking). But of course, institutions do not think, “they cannot have minds of their own” (p. 9). And yet thoughts are depending on them and conversely. For a society to exist, it needs its member to have “some thinking and feeling alike among its members” (p. 9), which implies some sort of collective behaviour. Something difficult for individual rational choice theory to account for, and especially for economics and its utilitarian theory (and today finance […]). If people are purely selfish, what do they share in common, except few potential common interests? Hence solidarity is doomed to be weak and probably do not exist at all. Do the individuals “ever make sacrifices in name of the group” (p. 18)? Fortunately, against economics reductionism, the answer is yes. Durkheim explained solidarity and cooperation in society through collective representations, while Fleck used a similar concept which he named “though style”. It “sets the preconditions of any cognition, and it determines what can be counted as a reasonable question and a true or false answer”, (p. 13). The “thought style” is closely associated with a specific social group, the “thought collective” which really embodies the “thought style” they have in common.

Individualistic reductionism also discard “altruism” (making personal sacrifices in the benefit of somebody else or of the entire group) pretending that “smallness of scale gives scope to interpersonal effects” (p. 21) and their lot of irrationalities. Let us consider Mancur Olson's theory of collective action:

[…] an individual behaving according to rational self‐interest will not contribute to the collective good more than will produce the benefit that he wants in is own interest […] As he can expect that the absence of his own mite will make no difference, he can hope to take a free ride on the contributions of the others. “Let George do it” (p. 22).

In a latent group there are so many members that neither the action nor inaction of any particular member would help provide the collective good. The only set of incentives, if they ever appear, is economic in form and is rarely enough to motivate collective action. Latent groups would thus neither last, nor thrive, contrary to small groups where, allegedly, “smallness of scale fosters mutual trust” (p. 25). This idealised version of the community is simply at odds with most of the findings of anthropology, which show the “formidable problems faced by a small community trying to stay in being” (p. 24) and “being built continuously by a process of rational bargaining and negotiating” (p. 29). Not to mention the functioning of the scientific community itself that, too, is a blatant denial. Actually, things turn out to be more as if proponents of the rational choice theory tried to conceal acute difficulties of their theory by resorting to ad hoc arguments like scale, religious, emotional or irrational factors, treated as exceptions.

How do latent groups survive? If we want to give a proper explanation of this “theoretical aberration” (i.e. theoretical flaw), we may emphasise the role of intentional action. Rather, correct functionalist reasoning his worth considering. Correct reasoning means dropping “bad and incomplete argument about hidden self‐sustaining mechanisms” (p. 35) and “explaining how individual thinkers combine to create a collective good” (p. 37). Let us examine the case of (a relatively small scale) community of free people deciding to join together at the periphery of society, like a religious sect or a commune. These are latent groups and, by definition, its members “have not got any strong personal interest in remaining in it” (p. 38). According to Olson, the main individual problem for this latent group is the free rider, and the group should institute individual selective benefits to endure. The problem is here that, because the group stands at the periphery, “entrepreneurship just cannot be well rewarded” (p. 38), leaving intact the free rider issue. Fortunately, you can have some control over free riding behaviour by the threat of withdrawal, inducing an equality rule and 100 per cent participation for all. In its turn, this implies that the boundaries around the group are well defined, thus consolidating membership (and controlling the withdrawal threat even more). The result is a self‐policing rule of equality and 100 per cent participation! This progressively incurs the existence of a real entry cost but also of a real exit cost […] especially if you believe in a possible evil conspiracy (others are potential cheaters) which would buttress the use of the equality and 100 per cent participation principle and then close the system: the many danger pointed at by the community are a way to deal with the wavering commitment of the members, strengthening the borders of the group, which is “built up and collectively maintained by the intentional sacrifices of its individual members” (p. 41):

This particular type of social group thinks along certain grooves; it has a mind of its own. […] They start to move together along a path that ends in their joint construction of a thought style (p. 40‐1),

and this thought style maintains the whole system. The epistemological problem with the totally separate and free and rational individual is that it considers paradoxically the individual as a “passive perceiver”, forgetting his “actively organizing mind” (p. 43).

For regulation purpose, societies need common rules to insure coordination. Conventions have interesting self‐policing properties but “for a convention to turn into a legitimate social institution it needs a parallel cognitive convention to sustain it” (p. 46). Institutions are about systems of knowledge and this involves cognitive processes that in fact are at the foundation of the social order and institutions influence our most elementary cognitive processes through powerful and founding analogies, resulting in shared classifications. “To acquire legitimacy, every kind of institution needs a formula that found its rightness in reason and in nature” (p. 45), which explains why institutions may appear “invisible” (unnoticeable) for they are by nature “taken for granted”.

The first elementary cognitive process Douglas studies to support her claim is “resemblance”. Resemblance does not exist by itself: sameness and similarity are always agreed upon, not naturally imposed. “These lead into many taxonomic levels and ultimately to judgements of a moral and political nature” (p. 58). This is even at the very basis of scientific research:

Institutions perform the same tasks as theory. They also confer sameness. Once a theoretical scheme has been developed, elements that in the pre‐theoretical stage were of dubious standing lose their ambiguity. They acquire definition when their regular functioning within the system is demonstrated (p. 59).

Bricolage is one of the interesting form of institutional thinking and the founding oppositions (like culture/nature, human/animal, male/female […]), a real bric‐a‐brac, confer identity to both things and living beings.

The second elementary cognitive process Douglas studies is “remembering”. “Certain things need to be forgotten for any cognitive system to work. There is no way of paying attention to everything” (p. 76). The Nuer case, with their exchange (gift/heritage) system studied by Evans Pritchard and the constant numbers of ancestors taken into account (swallowing generation after generation through a “disappearing ancestor trick”, p. 74) is in this respect illuminating. So is Condorcet's paradox through its forgetting and rediscovery, according to the mere necessity of its time vs ours (revolution and the will for democracy vs problem with democratic procedures). We all have selective deafness and selective hearing or remembering, but this is never random; our remembering filter helps us make collective social life easier:

In so far as there is pressure toward coherent principles of organizations, so will the justificatory stories of the past be amalgamated and rationalized as part of the social process. Coherence and complexity in public memory will tend to correspond to coherence and complexity at the social level. […] The competitive society celebrates its heroes, the hierarchy celebrates its patriarchs, and the sects, its martyrs (p. 80).

Remembering and forgetting are closely linked and are under heavy institutional influence. Not without humour, Douglas notices that individual psychology has forgotten its social basis, in the name of individual free will. However, classical authors like Rivers:

[…] described how in primitive society conflict is averted by instituted separation – a pregnant idea – and how curiosity is brought under institutional control. One reason why this interest in institutional control on thinking never became more than a speculation lies undoubtedly in certain current evolutionary assumptions (p. 86).

Another one, Barlett, demonstrated “conclusively the active organizing of perception by the perceiver” (p. 88), opening the way for probing the relation between this active organising (mind) and institutions.

It is easy to let institutions speak through us and to see the world through their lenses without questioning it. They will unsurprisingly “recruit us into joining their narcissistic contemplation” (p. 92). Douglas stigmatises Weber for having done so about religious belief (a form of ethnocentrism) and favours Durkheim who tried to escape it by considering exotic people without writing systems in order to explore their collective representations. He studied the sacred, the visible form of the institution, and showed that “it is based upon the classifications pertaining to the division of labour” (p. 97). His studies are hence valid for our modern societies. Besides, institutions are linked to some sort of self‐fulfilling prophecy (performativity) and to change categories or classification means adjusting social labels and practices, as the example of the French vs Californian wine classification suggest. We now have an answer to the title of the book. Institutions think in that institutions do the classifying:

[…] in marking its own boundaries, it affects all lower level thinking, so that persons realise their own identities and classify each other through community affiliation. Since it uses the division of labour as a source of metaphors to affirm itself, the community self‐knowledge and knowledge of the world must undergo change when the organisation of work changes. […] But individual persons do not control the classifying. […] Individuals persons make choices within the classification (p. 102).

The concept of justice is linked to the social order underpinned by institutions and reflects such choices. Some authors like Gewirth tried to show how unfair equality was. This may seem all the most surprising in an individualistic society. Justice has no universal validity; it is valid only within the limit of a specific thought collective. Behaviours depend on the justice system that has been internalized. During crisis times, doomed victims usually accept their fate even when it means that they will be sacrificed. “Once it were conceded that legitimated institutions make the big decision, much else would be changed” (p. 126):

For better or worse, individuals do share their thoughts and they do to some extent harmonize their preferences, and they have no other way to make the big decisions except within the scope of institutions they build (p. 128).

Douglas has presented an interesting and compelling argument, trying to connect and conceptualise on what is usually scattered among the different social sciences and psychology. The anthropological concept of institution is powerful, for it integrates different separate but converging traditions and rests upon the findings of the founders of the social sciences. Surprisingly, her argumentation goes ahead of the stream of neo‐institutionalist research, mostly ignoring her though developed a quarter of a century ago. In her own perspective, only an individualistic institution could explain such a regrettable forgetting. Though her theory may seem static and unable to account for social or institutional change, she actually pave the way for such a dynamic perspective, if one wants to study the evolutions of specific classifications that are truly collective representations. Unfortunately, her theory does not make explicit connections with the concept of time. One can, however, argue that time is actually a timetable and is just one more classification, even if it is a more general one.

Yet, her theory for the social bond seems to be overly intellectual, forgetting in part the material dimension of life (with its artefacts and their constant effects on social life) but also the emotional and affective dimensions. But Douglas' theory only tells us what we have in common, not what is specific or even unique to us. The shortcoming of the theory is to be condemned to general statements, while providing an integrated framework for understanding the social world at large. Nonetheless, the connection between institutions and practices is largely out of the scope of this book and need further investigation. This is a promising track to renew the question of the classifying at play, for example on lower (organisational) level, so as to consider the way it shapes practices and the way practices shape the classifications.

One of the main benefits of reading Douglas today is to tear apart the illusion of a separate and instrumentally rational individual, only governed by interest. Paradoxically, while institutions look somehow like a sort of subjugation, they are also what we share deeply in ourselves in common, a social bondage we are so prone to dismissing. Institutions are complex data processors aimed at curbing uncertainty and cognition plays a major role in the formation of social order. Crafting social links and crafting knowledge is done in the same operation: if we get to know each other, we will be linked somehow. By pointing at different institutions, we may now have a chance to understand the others better. And we may choose to change our classifications when we are conscious of them, even to the point of trying to organise some social or political movement. Because we know our institutional conditioning, we have room for choosing and changing it. But we will never be stupid anymore as to believe that our ideas are ours alone and that we, alone, produced them. At the very basis of institution is indeed political debate and action which may be forgotten in a society where management thinking is so widespread and shared. So, rediscovering institutions is paradoxically a call for freedom of thought and being critical to classifications, including our own, but also to practices resting on them and vice versa.

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