...Duglas on How Institutions Decide Life and Death...

Douglas, Mary.  How institutions think. — Syracuse (N. Y.): Syracuse univ. press, 1986. — 146 с.

Institutions Cannot Have Minds of Their Own

• The book is about how thinking depends on institutions.  Started with the fictions example of trial on the 4 survivors from a rock that survived because ate one victim.  5 judges pronounced different decisions.
• There is tendency to dismiss Durkheim and Fleck because they seem to state that the institutions have minds of their own.  There is no minds of institutions.  But it is important to understand why these authors intended.
• If it is obvious that social institutions cannot think or "behave", it is implicitly denied by many (e.g. Marx or democratic theory based on the collective will).
• For both there is basic condition of individual thinking, that is socially accepted framework.  In Fleck's terms "thought collective".  At Durkheim it is "group mind".  Rejection of these ideas is based on the protection of thinking and feeling in the realm of person rather than group.
• Two main objection against this ideas: 1) both have functional explanation for existing such frameworks which is sustaining the group in question — and functionalism may be resolved in better way; 2) is there self-sacrifice of individual in this functional logic, do individuals sacrifice there selfish interests — such commitment should be explained.  Answer for 1st is that an individual demands for order and coherence to control uncertainty.  For 2nd — cost-benefit calculation prioritise collective thinking.  The book is about the first trend.

Smallness of Scale Discounted

• Follow Olson's theory of rational choice for collective actions (his theory of public goods).  Dismiss exclusion form the scope the so-called small communities — there the rational choice for contributing to society also works.  But the theory of rational choice does not capture fully the political behaviour — it in fact promotes withdrawal from contribution to community.  "Something is going on in the civic affairs that the theory of rational choice does not capture" (30). for Drkh and Fleck  the mistake is to ignore epistemological problem.  Not only the knowledge does not spring naturally.  They extend scepticism in regard to the collective action to the possibility of shared knowledge and shared beliefs.

Institutions Are Founded on Analogy

• "How a system of knowledge gets off ground is the same as the problem of how any collective good is created" (45).  For Drkhm first goes question of the social foundation of the knowledge.  And social bonds appears after an individuals entrench in mind a model of social order.  => entrenching an institution is as intellectual process as economic and political one.  Legitimacy of an institution since the primitive societies implies — it does not exist in balancing individual interests — a rightness in reason and in nature.
• Basic line for institution is convention.  But self-policed convention often disturbed.  "For a convention to turn into a legitimate social institution it needs a parallel cognitive conversion to sustain it… most established institutions, if challenged, are able to rest their claims to legitimacy on their fit with the nature of the universe" (46).
• Example of institutions that assure devision of labor.  And show how the division is thought on the organic manner and thus implies all the hierarchies from organismic metaphor — male/female, right/left, had/hand.  In Morden society distinction of had and hand justifies class structure, inequality of education, hierarchy of manual and intellectual workers.  This shared analogy is a device for legitimising a set of fragile institutions.
• In this logic, religious belief is more efficient than solidarity to legitimise a convention because ancestors operating from beyond the life provide "naturalising analogy that seals the social convention.  The focus should be not on how they symbolise the structure of society, but how they intervene in it" (50).
• Also identification of syphilis and cure were more demanded than cure of tuberculosis (that was far more dangerous.  It is ex. of Fleck who insisted that "development of knowledge is expected to intervene in practical life.  Thinking is more to do with intervening than with representing" (50).
• Ancestors' intervention follow certain logic — it is part of system that confirms local inheritance laws.  It has preferable ares (property, corporate).  And it implies pain on those who violate.  Legitimation happens by way of naturalisation, referring to natural way of things.
• "Thus institutions survive the stage of being fragile conventions: they are founded in nature and therefore, in reason" (52).  Ex. Of grounding the state in the relation of mother and father, female and male.  Ex. of foundation of lineage, heritage on analogy of genitor and offspring.

Institutions Confer Identity

• Similarity of institution to the nature is established by the institution itself.  Putting more generally, the idea of similarity and resemblance depends on social interactions.  Sameness is a problem of classification.  And the latter is a product of social order (ref. to anthropological studies).  "Archaic religious classification and many other contemporary ones known to anthropologists owe their devision much more to their capacity to model the interactions of the members of society than to to a disinterested curiosity about workings of nature" (59).  Scientific classification is important shift for author in this regard.  The socially motivated classifications do not develop in scientist ones "by pressing deeper and deeper beneath the surface of things in the quest of knowledge, because the quest of knowledge is not one of its objectives".
• Institutions perform the same tasks as theories — they also confer the sameness, and this identity.
• Introduces bricolage in establishing analogies, trying to test boundaries between symbolic anthropology and theory of rational choice.

Institutions Remember and Forget

• Expose studies in Nuer remembering certain — very precise — ancestry, exact number of ancestors.  It is linked to organisation of social structure, based on the calculating of cattle given on marriage and then discriminating male v. female lineage.  The structure and social requirement to remember ancestors is closely linked with the practice of everyday life.  "A theory about how world should be run will survive competition if it is more than a theory, for example, if it can intervene to support individual strategies to create a collective good.  The Nuer theory of patrilineal descent does this service" (73).  "It is not merely that there is no special reason for remembering certain names, there is even strong pressure agains to…  Sheer consistency of use endows it with might, and it swallow up competition".  It also fits egalitarian character of Nuers — they therefor remember as many ancestors as to keep everyone equal, "royalty needs longer lineage to vindicate dynastic claims" (74).
• Same for Merton's study of forgetting in scientific discovering, reluctance to recognise that the discovery has been already done.  He displays "the control with socially reinforced motivations have upon individual visions" (75).
• Once a social system has been founded in eras and nature, we can see how cognitive energy "is saved" by tracing the creek os a successful theory (76).
• Forgetting is stipulated by dispositive, "the pattern of their failure is not random" (77).
• Nuer case is more precise in term of how institutionalised memory works.  It illustrates the point about political sensitivity as well as dependence on accepted technics of validation" (77).
• Competition is insensitive to forget.  Also ref. to Merton.

A Case of Institutional Forgetting

• Coherence and metaphors often regulate forgetting.

Institutions Do the Classifying

• Also creating new institutions form minor cases

Institutions Make Life and Death Decisions

• Against assumption that institutions male routine, moonier decisions whereas difficult tasks lay on individual's shoulders.  In the contrary, "individual tends to leave the important decisions to his institutions while busying himself with tactics and details" (111).based on the previous analysis also restate the point that institutions are unlikely to emerge from consensus and converging interests, and are in fact "mixture of coercion and convention". For institution to get stability is a rare case.  And describe the process with terms like energy (112).
• And then legitimacy is gained "by distinctive grounding in nature and reason".  Then giving ground for repeating, institution starts to control the memory of its members, fix their identities.  Then it is not enough, institution must secure the social edifice by sacralising the principle of justice.
• And starting from recurring to justice, institutions' control starts to be visible (before — not).  Still very much mystified and unclear idea.  And link it also to degradation of the property principle: where the property is dispersed among shareholders, justice became the core (115).  And it is the issue of death.
• Establishes consequences of this shift, including from narrowing big dilemmas to individual minds.