The Concept of Institution: A Review, Evaluation, and Suggested Research Procedure

On the premise that a concept should imply a procedure that facilitates the collection and analysis of a class of data, the concept of institution is re-evaluated. Three types of traditional definitions are found wanting. The restated concept centers around the idea of a complex of stable status-role relationships that is concerned with a particular area of activity. This concept implies a procedure for the delineation and description of institutions involving the delimitation of the population or system to be analyzed, the isolation of all the statuses within the system, the delineation of the institutions or complexes of statuses, the definition of the statuses, and the description of the relationships between the institutions. A NY CONCEPT is understood here to be a word, or group of words, that brings together within a single class all phenomena that have certain qualities in common. Thus, the definition of the concept, that is an enumeration of qualities and a statement of the mode of relationship among these qualities, must of necessity orient an investigator to a particular class of objects. Since only propositions or statements of relationships between concepts, and not concepts per se, may have the quality of being true or false, some other criterion must be employed to evaluate a given concept. The criterion that is suggested is the utility of the concept in relating data to each other and in orienting the researcher to a profitable mode of procedure in gathering and analyzing the data. It is the position of the author that most of the traditional treatments of the concept of institution have led to generally inefficient and unprofitable research in the delineation and description of institutions both within a particular social system and, for purposes of comparison, in social systems of different times and places. If this position is valid, only part of the fault may be placed in the inability of the investigators to employ comparable concepts. Indeed, as we shall see, the traditional concepts have a good deal in common. Rather, the greater part of the difficulty in this type of research lies in the nature of the definition of the concept of institution. Our purpose here is to consider and evaluate widely held views of this subject with a view to restating the concept in such a way that a procedural sequence is specified and empirical investigation is facilitated. Discussions of this concept tend to fall within one of three groups.' The first group of definitions is most often recognized as the traditional concept of institution. This group shares two ideas in common: the nature of the unit; and, the focus around which the units are organized. The units are variously named "forms of prescribed behavior,"2 "rules,"3 "attitudes and behaviors of the members of a group,"4 "culture patterns,"5 or "several folkways and mores (and most often, but not necessarily, laws)." 6 These cultural-normative patterns are focused around "a number of social functions"7 or "about certain fundamental human needs that occur in all societies and are necessary to ordered social life."8 Such definitions indeed imply a mode of pro-