SCoR - Section II, Ch. 1, Part B "Origins of Institutionalization"
summary of “The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn’t link to individual posts correctly
I. Repeated actions become habitual/patterned, thus reproducible with less effort; NB this isn't a specifically social phenomenon.
II. Habitualization provides psychological relief of choice limitation, and also frees energy for times when innovation/deliberation is required to respond to a situation.
III. Habitualization also means we don't need to define each response on the fly; prediction becomes possible, even precise.
IV. Habitualization precedes institutionalization, and can take place in isolation, but in practice it takes place in the context of an institution or institutions.
V. institutions are formed when there is a reciprocal/multilateral typification of particular types of actions by particular types of actors ("the president shall address the congress")
VI. Inherent in the institution are: historicity and control. Historicity, because institutional patterns aren't formed instantly ("institutions always have a history, of which they are products"); control, because institutional patterns are typified, therefore limited, even regardless of actual enforcement behaviors or patterns as such that are part of the institutional structure.
VII. Institutionalization is incipient in every social interaction continuing in time.
VIII. That is, even two individuals thrown together without a shared social context WILL start to typify each other's behaviors - the initiation of roles, patterns of action, historicity, etc.
IX. The participants in this process benefit from it in that they end up with more ability to predict the other's actions - less astonishment/fear, more familiarity.
X. Any repetition tends to some degree of habitualization; any observation tends to some degree of typification; but in an ongoing bilateral social situation, certain actions are more likely to be habituated/typified. Which ones?
XI. Generally, that which is relevant to both parties (hereafter, A and B). This obviously varies based on material conditions, however, usually communications come first, followed by labor/sexual/territorial relationships, etc. all of which will be inflected by the prior socialization of A and B.
XII. Then, if A and B have a child ("C"), C will experience the parental patterns as objective historical givens, NOT contingent constructs.
XIII. In other words, prior to C, A and B construct a world that is entirely transparent and accessible to them, fluid and mutable. After C, and to C, this world is objective and opaque - and this also affects A and B since they now need to keep things more consistent for C's sake.
XIV. This is the birth of the social world we are familiar with, i.e. an objective fact received from without - the child takes it all for granted, the signifier IS the signified, etc.
XV. This extends to the world of institutions that we live within - objective, external, incomprehensible except via experience.
XVI. Nevertheless, this is still a human-constructed reality - "Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product." - in an ongoing dialectical interaction.
XVII. Institutional reality also requires legitimation - ways in which it can be explained and justified to those who do not have a direct memory of its creation. These legitimations are learned as part of socialization into a given institutional order.
XVIII. As institutions depart form the original social processes that formed them, there is a corresponding increase in the need for more explicit mechanisms of social control - folks must be "taught to behave" then "kept in line."
XIX. In practice, mutual interactions between people or groups lead to multiple tracks of institutionalization which don't necessarily share a functional or logical integration.
XX. Nevertheless, institutions (which persist) do tend to some level of functional/logical coherence, implying some level of common relevance/shared meaning among participants. Note that role performances can (and must?) be functionally segregated, but MEANINGS tend to a consistency of some sort as people try to understand their experiences as occurring within some kind of framework. There may be a physiological cause for this drive*, but it isn't necessary to assume one to appreciate this habit as a real empirical phenomenon.
XXI. "It follows that great care is required in any statement… about the 'logic' of institutions." The 'logic' is not 'within' the institution, but rather is imposed by our reflections about that institution.
XXII. Language provides the fundamental well of logic which can be drown on to explain the institutional world, and all legitimations are expressed in language. This also connects with the social "knowledge" that the world one inhabits is a consistent and logical whole, since from that fact comes efforts to explain experience in terms of the pre-existing internalized social knowledge.
XXIII. So, institutions are integrated, but this is "not a functional imperative of the social processes that produce them;" rather, it is a byproduct of individual need to see their actions as part of a subjectively meaningful whole.
XXIV. Given this, it follows that analyzing social phenomena/institutional order would primarily depend on analyzing the understanding of the social knowledge of the people composing these institutions, of which complex theoretical legitimations are a part but by no means the whole. In fact, "the primary knowledge about the institutional order is knowledge on the pre-theoretical level," the sum total of "what everybody knows" about that order.
XXV. Since this knowledge is socially objectivated AS knowledge, deviations from it ("depravity", "insanity", "ignorance") occupy an inferior cognitive status; because this social knowledge is coextensive with "what is knowable," deviations are seen as deviations from reality itself. "Knowledge in this sense is at the heart of the fundamental dialectic of society… [it is] a 'realization' in the double sense… of apprehending the objectivated social reality, AND in the sense of … producing this reality."
XXVI. For example, in the course of division of labor, an area-specific body of knowledge is developed, crystallized in language, and transmitted to particular actors; the knowledge thus transmitted becomes an objectivation that serves to structure and channel further actions of its type.
XXVII. Then, this body of knowledge is available to the next generation as an objective truth which has the power to shape an individual into an instance of that actor, which definition only has meaning inside the social world that hosts this knowledge. With variation, this same process applies in ANY area of institutionalized conduct.
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Notes:
re. V - The word "institutionalization" was used in the book where is used "formed"; "institutionalization" is overloaded to also mean "molding a human as an institutional actor" IMO (ref Brooksy from Shawshank Redemption)
re. XII - Unlearning the "objectivity" of parental dictates is probably a universal developmental phase? Or not - but maybe recognizing it is?
re. XVII - I can imagine an institution so totalizing that no legitimation is required - "force of nature" - conflict/discrepancies generate questions that must be answered, but if no discrepancies, no questions? Also implies that such institutions may already exist but we wouldn't know - because we don't question them or they are so universally taken for granted (i.e. the concept of death itself, see The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant)
re. XX -
* I added the caveat about persistence - might be gratuitous, but seems relevant given my interest in institutional life cycles i.e. they CAN die or degrade or change, so how? Dis-integration of belief seems related, but is it symptom or cause? Or both?
** I think Energy Minimization IS this physiological (or even pre-physiological/physical) cause(? need? drive?)
re. XXI - Found this paragraph extremely surprising statement at first, but then less so - interpreted as another instance of "The institution is in our minds" - but might be wrong about this!
re. XXIII - So what happens if folks no longer feel the need or have the ability to do this integration of experience into a "meaningful whole?"
If institutional strength is in the minds of its members, then institutional weakness would result from folks not feeling a need to integrate their experiences into the institutional patterns
"all is vanity" - "integration is pointless" (cynicism?) as a concept is a degenerate simplicity, saving much effort - folks don't have to think hard about things or meaningfully engage with the world they inhabit, because all effort is proactively deemed a waste of time
and in a complex technical society such as ours, which is relatively productive and protective of its members, a given individual member doesn't NEED to engage with many of its structures in order to survive (vs. eg the medieval peasant of my imagining)
leads to a dislocation/disconnection/differentiation between 'social integrators' eg. folks who commit to institutional logics and embody them, pulling together and strengthening them, vs. 'social neutrinos' - folks existing without integrating or participating much ("consumers", maybe!)
hypothesis: industrial productivity gains not put into "shorter workdays" (i.e. fewer hours assigned to materially-productive labor) but rather in giving less of a shit about the world we find ourselves in; anomie/ennui
drivers(?)
existentialism/scientific revolutions driving human "place in universe" farther and farther out of center (Thomas Kuhn, Eric Hobsbawm)
nb existential philosophy seems to develop roughly parallel to industrial revolution, initially dislocated (kierkegaard?) provide language for those who follow
american "rugged individualism"
contra "network", individual DOES matter, but lives in a matrix (hah) of institutions that he believes he cannot influence - which makes it so
institutional immune systems - change-from-within resistance (Le Chatelier's Principle again?)
institutions also try to change their environment to be more hospitable (Legibility)
re. XXV - See also XVI for the cycle being described in more words here
