What Institutions Are

An ambitious title I know...and a bit of a lie. Some of you have wondered what I consider an institution. This post is for you.

It's been the most frustrating thing so far to find that what exactly an institution is by definition is not agreed on. Despite the fact that there are roughly 6 subfields studying institutions, none of them have really come to a general consensus about what institutions really are. It seems that most are content taking the normative use of the term - i.e. whatever I say it is. My big project right now is trying to pick out the agreements and disagreements among the various conceptions of institutions. Currently, there are two essential debates: ontology and extension.

The ontological debate centers on the question of how institutions exist. The best conception I've heard so far is that it is a property. A certain practice, rule, norm, or convention is more or less institutionalized - by virtue of have certain properties such as being taken-for-granted, done with intervention, etc. Some say that institutions are formal organizations. Even marriage can be taken to be formally organized in the sense that there are explicit rules, expectations, structures, etc. which structure and support the actual practice of marriage. Still others say that institutions are social domains or social controls - circumscribed cultural fields wherein what is expected and occurs is determined by behavior, ideas, rituals, myths, etc which enforce or support normativity. In this case, institutions are fields. In the previous case, they are organizations. In the first, they things having a certain property. There are about 4 other theories as well.

The extension debate asks what types of things does the word institutions cover. What types of things can we point to and knowingly say "that's an institution." The weirdest one I've found so far is that institutions are "congealed tastes" (from an economist), whatever people have developed a liking for is an institution. Other extension-claims include institutions as regularities in repetitive interactions, government structures, and norms/procedures/rules/conventions embedded in social structure.

Both of these debates really depend on one another. What types of things we want to call institutions depends on what kind of existence these things must have (formally organized, possessing some property, etc.) and vice versa. I take the side of the property argument, but I'm developing my own stance on extension. I intend to argue that institutions are a collection of things with the institutional property, arranged in a way to co-reproduce their defining elements. Institutions are composed of institutionalized structures, discourses, agents, and events which help bring one another into reality.

I'll take domestic (as opposed to say rape in the context of war) rape as an institution to exemplify my theory. The institutionalized structure includes the rapist/victim role, physical and psychological power inequalities, and sequestered (hidden) setting. The institutionalized discourse includes the ideas that women are vulnerable, sexual objects, and a low-level threat ; men are sexually uncontrollable, dominant, and forceful; etc. Institutional agents are particularly those men trained in the role of rapist - to treat women as objects, to be forceful/dominant/uncontrolled, and to ignore or be oblivious to the gravity of rape. The institutional woman is one who is trained as a women to be feminine (sexual), currently, aware of their vulnerability and potentially proactive about it. The institutional event is really a sequence of events in this case which include something like confrontation, play, threat, conflict, genital accessing, and rape. All of these components are, arguably, taken-for-granted parts of domestic rape which require one another to bring about what we consider domestic rape.