How Institutions Think

by Mary Douglas

First published in 1986, Mary Douglas' theory of institutions uses the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim and Ludwig Fleck to determine not only how institutions think, but also the extent to which thinking itself is dependent upon institutions. Different kinds of institutions allow individuals to think different kinds of thoughts and to respond to different emotions. It is just as difficult to explain how individuals come to share the categories of their thought as to explain how they ever manage to sink their private interests for a common good. Douglas forewarns us that institutions do not think independently, nor do they have purposes, nor do they build themselves. As we construct our institutions, we are squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape in order to prove their legitimacy by sheer numbers. She admonishes us not to take comfort in the thought that primitives may think through institutions, but moderns decide on important issues individually. Our legitimated institutions make major decisions, and these decisions always involve ethical principles.

Genres: Sociology, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Economics

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[John David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever since the time of Descartes, and very probably since the time of the ancient Greeks, we have been deeply enamored with the idea that we – conscious, rational, decision-making beings – control the way that we think and act. While Mary Douglas certainly doesn’t suggest that we are just mindless cogs in a machine, she does offer some interesting insights into how we think about institutions, categories, and rationality that have serious implications for the idea of wholly autonomous human intellectual agency. Douglas, one of the greatest social anthropologists to come out of England in the twentieth century, is known better for her “Purity and Danger,” “Risk and Blame,” and “Implicit Meanings.” “How Institutions Think” is a series of Frank W Abrams Lectures that she delivered at Syracuse University in 1985.

Some scientific ideas enter the world, readily accepted and widely read by an eager scholarly community. Others languish – but not because they are of a lesser quality, and not even because they are incorrect. Ludwig Fleck’s book on the discovery of syphilis titled “The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact” (Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache), was one of the latter. Anticipating a sort of social constructivism, Fleck said that scientific ideas are accepted or rejected into a canon for reasons not because of their inherent worth, but because certain social conditions (Fleck called these “thought-conditions” or “thought collectives”) allow or disallow their admittance. The Denkkollecktiv is a whole matrix of social circumstances, thoughts, and assumptions that envelop the scientific project. If a new idea substantively differs from one some aspect in the Denkkollecktiv, it will be ignored – not consciously by individual scientists, but by the scientific profession as an institution.

This is where Douglas picks up on her anthropological history of the “classificatory enterprise.” How can the phenomenon that Fleck described really happen? What was it about science – or any institution – that shapes social cognition and categories so profoundly? How do these institutions develop, and why? Following Durkheim’s lead, Douglas claims that autonomy (in the sense of radical social individualism and atomization) was in many respects an illusion, and that we are marked by a strong sense of social solidarity through shared “classification, logical operations, and guiding metaphors [that] are given to the individual by society.”

One of Douglas’ implicit arguments is that the difference between sociology (group action) and psychology (action of a single agent) is wrong-headed. Instead, she asserts that for a rule to turn into a legitimate social convention, it needs a parallel cognitive convention to sustain it (46). Social institutions encode information, and then use that information to minimize the entropy, or inherent disorder, in decision-making. The stabilizing principle of institutions – what keeps them from breaking down – is that they “naturalize social classifications.” By naturalizing the social in reason, the institution automatically legitimizes it. After all, one of the first priorities of the institution should be legitimacy, or else it would incur so much doubt that it would eventually be destroyed. Douglas considers the common social analogon of likening the roles of men and women to that of the left and right hand; the logic of complementarity in nature legitimizes the social order, constructing a rationality which seems like it was there before time began. Even the institution of sameness (yes, even sameness – logical similarity – is an institution) is time- and culture-sensitive. Douglas cites the example in Leviticus of the camel, the hare, and the rock badger: they all chew cud, which would lead us to believe that they would all be classified as cud-chewing ungulates. However, since they don’t have cloven hooves, they are excluded. The criterion of difference here, having a cloven hoof, is completely arbitrary – yet it is the sole category that bestows “sameness” on a group of individuals. Douglas makes it clear that categorizations like this are not cool, objective observations into the inner working of nature. They are very telling maps that “model the interactions of the members of the society.”

Institutions do more than order categorical knowledge. They also filter information in such a way that they can be said to remember and forget. Fleck’s book recounts a classic case of institutional forgetting. The failure of a legitimate scientific idea to be accepted into the prevailing canon of knowledge is usually the result of a lack of “formulaic interlocking with normal procedures of validation.” For an idea to gain acceptance, it sometimes has to exploit “the major analogies on which the socio-cognitive system rests.” Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Nuer focuses on institution remembering, according to Douglas, discovering “an explicit demonstration of how institutions direct and control memory” (72). He showed how economic interactions, including weddings and cattle distribution, order the memory of ancestors.

The one thing I was curious about while reading the book was that Douglas never mentioned Berger’s “Social Construction of Reality,” which covers much of the same territory. Of course, not being an anthropologist, Berger has a somewhat different take on matters. “How Instutitions Think” should definitely be read alongside the Berger, and I think the reader will find that they shed light on one another. Highly recommended.

[AimanFasil · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was lured into reading the book by its apparently bold title. Unfortunately, the book is a standard Mary Douglas trying to convince you that how we think and what we do is socially conditioned. I do not think that this is the best book so far (or the best by Mary Douglas) which argues for the case of social conditioning. I find the narrative incoherent and occasionally confusing. The book might be a source of inspiration, but you won’t miss much if you skip it.

[Богдан Галь · Rating 3 out of 5]

Если оставить в стороне объемные отступления, то остается история подходов (Дюркгейм, Флек, Мертон) к изучению проблемы ("как стабилизируются и приобретают легитимность институты") и пара интересных идей в ее развитие. Для книги этого мало, но могла бы получиться хорошая постановочная статья.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if she answered her question on how institutions are formed, though she does a great job showing that prevailing theories are tautological - that the institution/community must already be in existence to be able to coerce individuals to create a community.

She also shows why 'rational choice' is not sufficient to create communities or institutions.

In the end she seems to depend on 'natural' metaphors and something called 'justice' as necessary and sufficient to the task. I didn't quite get that, but her critiques of other theories were enlightening.

If anyone knows of a good book on how communities and institutions (and with it behaviours like altruism) are formed and fostered, I would appreciate it.

[Jon Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

While not dull or incomprehensible, this book did not advance a thesis beyond the seeming truism that institutions structure human cognition. The last chapter wraps up the argument very well, but to the point where I found the rest unnecessary.

[Ariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed the way I think about everything. Best book I've ever been assigned in a class.

[Jon Mehlhaus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful short read that incisively exposes the problems with modern rational choice theory. I swear, once you've realized the world isn't composed of rational, self-serving agents, you're ready to do critical analysis of a whole host of institutions. Douglas exposes many of the disparities and inequalities of academia, showing how much of social science is based on theories of the self that are coherent in the logic of academic institutions (i.e. fields of study) but fail to stand up to basic psychology and sociology. In this book economics and political economy mostly come under scrutiny.

What is especially helpful for the twenty-first century reader is Douglas's reinterpretation of Durkheim's notion of the sacred. In Durkheim's functionalist system, the sacred is that which is beyond reproach or question in a society and is not allowed to be profaned. This gives certain ideas, rules, and/or people justification for existence. Looking at institutions, Douglas understand's modernity as a project to bestow on individual experience Durkheimian sacral power but at the same time having institutions that are very much not based on individuals' wants and needs. The classic example is the problem of slavery in a country like the United States supposedly founded on universal notions of equality. Douglas would argue the institutions available to those early Americans did not support the kinds of justice thought up in the Declaration of Independence. This points to the need for critical engagement with institutions.

I don't know, in times like these where everything seems so hyper individualized, it is a godsend to have an invitation to think big picture. I know the problems inherent to structuralist thinking, but I applaud Douglas's efforts to shift the conversation from individual behavior to the nature and logic of institutions.

[Daniel Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Esoteric. Might have to read this again to fully grasp it. I come away with the idea that institutions matter because they have a strong hold on how people relate to one another - making me wonder how strong an impact they have, as in... can they be strong enough to help successfully guide a society based on the private property ethic (or is man too depraved like I'm always told?).

This book seems to think, as Hume argues, that the concept of justice is more or less not immutable but rather it's simply a cognitive instrument to get people to buy into the ideas underlying the particular society's institutions. In other words, "believe in our institutions because they are grounded in justice."

I prefer Hoppe's theory of justice 'the a priori of argumentation', which seems to me to be the rational and irrefutable answer to the question of what justice is.

P.s. The book is horribly written.

[Liza · Rating 2 out of 5]

люди создают институты, чтобы институты создавали людей. готово, вы прочитали книгу.

п.с. смешно, что даже переводчик в послесловии отмечает, как тяжело читать дуглас, потому что она постоянно прыгает с темы на тему и тащит к себе аргументы из всех областей сразу.

[Jennifer Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting reading for these times, esp. if you work in a big, over-articulated hierarchical institution!

[Ana Krijpen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for a class, but it's shaped my thinking since. Highly recommended.

[Drew Chapados · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really excellent work. I particularly liked the critique of Weber and Durkheim.

[Brett Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this brief, accessible and clearly written book, Douglas exposes readers who are interested in human development to some of its central social aspects. It is a very powerful exploration, covering the impact of sociality on individual thought, on identity, on ways in which we construct meaning, and the ways in which we collectively make life-and-death decisions. An anthropologist, Douglas ranges freely across sociology, history and economics, as well as anthropology, for her narrative and argument. Our Western culture tends to view social studies as less consequential than economic or political ones. Yet as her examples - which carefully steer clear of both economic and political issues – make apparent, this view is not only myopic, it risks missing many insights that are essential to solving not just social problems, but economic and political ones as well.

The great strength of this book is that it interleaves the erudite land of theory and abstraction with more concrete and understandable stories about scientists and their empirical observations. Douglas builds a series of empirical insights, drawn mostly from anthropology and sociology (but with liberal dollops of economics and philosophy thrown in), about what problems human institutions solve and how institutions emerge and sustain themselves in the arenas of society and history. As she adds another key insight in each chapter she zooms into the life’s work of another social scientist or group of social scientists, narrating a particular challenge they faced that exemplifies the significance of the epistemological challenge that led to the insight and the impact of the insight on the science of institutions.

While I don’t agree with Douglas’ claim that our thinking is entirely incapable of deviating from the courses charted by the institutions that surround us (she would claim that our skepticism is a product of this conditioning) she offers good evidence for a less compelling form of this thesis. And she has opened my eyes to the claim of Durkheim that the way a culture classify things shapes the meaning that people in that culture are able to see. I am now very interested in finding other research on how the language of classifications evolves over time in different societies, and how differing classifications shape world-views across cultures today.

[owlette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are strong. I got kind of lost around chapters 5-8 and chapter 9 felt weak.

The most eye-opening thing I learned from Douglas's book was the validity of functionalist argument. During my political science studies, I've often seen the word "functionalist" as a pejorative comment on a political development theory. I understood that functionalist theories (explaining the origin of an institution through the function it serves to a group) were by nature tautological and therefore assumed that they were poorly constructed arguments all across the board even if they made sense (e.g. natural selection). But Douglas says that a functionalist theory--when it is executed tightly--can be a valid sociological tool for explaining our world rather than a self-complacent sophistry. I wish I had learned this earlier because, as Douglas says, it's hard to study human collective behavior without functionalist arguments.

[Zeynep · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lisans eğitimini tamamlamamış öğrencilere ağır gelen bir kitap. Çeviriden kaynaklı olarak bir anlam karmaşası var kitapta. Paragrafın içinde bir anda farklı bir konuya geçiliyor ve bu da iyice zorlaştırıyor kitabın okunmasını.

Kitabın bölümlerinin adı ile içeriğinin çok da uyduğunu düşünmüyorum. Kurumlar hatırlar diye başlık atıp bunu 1 cümle ile açıkladıktan sonra geri kalan 10 sayfa antropolojiden bahsediyor yazar. (Kendisi bir antroplog)

Orneklerde özellikle "döngü" kısmında sorunlar var. Birbirinden farklı olduğunu iddia ettiği şeyleri karşılaştırırken aynı birimi kullanmiyor.

Ben sevemedim bu kitabı. Lisansüstünde okusaydim belki farklı düşünürdüm.

[Nikhil Mahadea · Rating 1 out of 5]

Great title, thought I'd get some real deep insights on how institutions thinks. Buttt, not really. It's very dry. On top of that, this is super old (35 years+) even if this book gives you a framework on how institutions think, it's too old. Things have changed a lot.

[Von · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compilation of lectures by Mary Douglas, near the end of her renowned career as an anthropologist. She describes how our cognition is shaped by social classifications and institutions.

[Simon Akam]

The British historian Peter Hennessy - author of The Secret State etc - suggested I read this book as part of research for my book on the British Army.

[Vern Glaser · Rating 5 out of 5]

great book. really insightful!