Current Work: Part 1

This week's writing is my take on what institutions are. I'm finally laying out what I've been thinking about for the past three months. Unfortunately, I feel so much like I'm being an armchair philosopher because it's all theory that I already know and can talk about on the theoretical level. I don't feel the impulse to pull together sources because so many people use the terms I'm talking about in much the same way I'm talking about them....But, I'm not really taking my ideas from them, nor am I necessarily talking about them in the same way they talk about them. When/If you read my paper, this part will probably seem like I'm just making all of this stuff off the top of my head. It does come from somewhere, I just can't cite people because I'm not getting my stuff directly from them. Plus, in describing what institutions are, I'm not being complete. I feel like there are other aspects within what I'm talking about (say, social structure) that I'm just forgetting to include. I want completeness because, in trying to describe something, not incorporating certain aspects can change the understanding what is being described. The bright spot in all of this is that I think the key points I'm trying to make still stand despite what I feel is a haphazard approach. I may not be able to fully justify my points by providing a full description of the situation, but I can't think of alternative situations that contradict the key tenants of my theory. After all of this very general talk about my apprehension, here's something concrete that will hopefully explicate it.

I argue that institutions are the particular arrangements of four components which make up what I call the social context. They are the structure, agents, discourse, and events. Each component is autonomous in that they operate on their own internal logics. But, they also influence one another. An institution is an institution because these components themselves are institutionalized into a distinctive arrangement which defines a particular institution as that institution and not some other one or other practice that is not an institution. To take the first component of the social context as my explicit example, I argue that structure is the organization of power through rules, material, and patterns of interaction. I don't feel like I have to cite any authors for this statement because so many talk about structure in general as a feature of society (hence the structure/agency problem that was my original thesis project). Furthermore, I haven't found anyone (that I'm satisfied with) who has talked about structure as simply rules, material, and patterns of interaction. However, these features seem endemic to talk about what structure is. Anthony Giddens for examples talks about "structuration" whereby social structure is the outcome of what I call "patterns of interaction." Foucault talks about the role of material things in structure (e.g. prisons, panopticism, clinics, etc). Rational choice theorists use "rules" to describe the situation within which actors must choose. In my theory, these are separate things which are all parts of social structure. But, I can't cite such inspirations because these authors simply do not use the terms in the way I'm using them. I think they may end up as footnotes. Also, I am not sure that structure is only composed of rules, material, and patterns of interaction. So, I'm worried that there's some fairly obvious part that I'm missing. Despite this blindness, I still think that I show how structure affects discourse, agents, and events and yet is still operates on its own logic. In this, I can feel that my paper is so far sufficient.