Journal Files A.A.S
How Institutions Think.
Mary Douglas
Syracuse Univ. Press, 1986. GN 479 .68 1986
Mary Douglas makes the argument that institutions think. They provide the categories of thought which serve to define what things (patterns) are similar or not. She observes in anthropological research that humans often find a metaphor from experience (often from nature) that seems to provide a rationale for why things are similar and this becomes the basis for individual behavior/choice. There seems to be a competition among possible metaphors which bring resolution of complex issues for our minds. How does this actually proceed in the minds of interacting individuals?
Consider how we think about relationships among people of different races. During the 50's, E. Lansing had a new civil rights commission proposing a housing ordinance to prevent discrimination in the sale and renting of housing. What generalizations are available for grounding this decision? At a public hearing a woman who opposed the ordinance gave this observation. She said that she observed that the different species of birds in her back yard had little to do with each other. The blue jays didn't mix with the robins. So the creator must not have intended the races to mix either. As we are challenged on these things we may become less willing to discuss them in public forums but that doesn't mean that they are not operative and that we don't form them in interaction with others.
From this contemporary observation I can imagine our ancestors around the camp fire searching for ways to make sense out of the world. Different individuals might suggest different analogies between the natural world, the spiritual world and the social. A type of rationality and individual choice is involved. People find a suggestion satisfying or not. The social process of amplification and spread is complex. But at some point the metaphors and myths get solidified and accepted and reinforced by most in the community. At that point it is hard for any individual to escape the patterns and categories of thought defined by these institutions. This is the sense of Douglas's assertion that institutions think. Within these categories and agendas, individuals may even make rational benefit cost calculations amongst alternatives without considering the categories themselves.
Certain rationales seem natural and therefore unquestioned. This applies to acceptance of notions of genealogy justifying who rules and to the natural inferiority of certain races justifying slavery. This process continues today. Economists emulated physics and saw the economy in terms of hydraulics, equilibrium, and mechanism. When we say that you can't fight the law of supply and demand we are referring to an asserted natural order. Justification of factor shares my MVP is another example. (See Helen Boss, Theories of Surplus and Transfer) Consider how analogies to computers enters today's conversation. The debate over abortion focuses on just when an embryo is living, as if that were the only basis for the legality of abortion. Note that again the appeal is to what is natural and therefore good. If that tie can be made in a satisfactory way, the party using it can dominate other interests who are left with just their naked preferences rather than being cloaked in the natural order or other comfortable analogies with the familiar.
Association of policy with what can be conceived of as natural is a powerful influence in our minds. Our patron saint Adam Smith put great stock in the "natural order." Thomas K. McGraw, "The Trouble with Adam Smith," American Scholar, Summer 1992, observes that Smith was "acutely offended when 'institutions' distort the 'natural order of things'." p. 364 This led Smith to a preference for agriculture over industry. He believed that individuals and markets were natural but institutions and organizational hierarchies were not.
Myths are formed out of the blood and guts of everyday experience, as Marvin Harris observes. The sacred cow myth might have gone like this: Several leaders note that in the last drought they ate most of the cows and almost none remained for restocking. "Since cows are so important they are probably sacred. Remember the last time we butchered one? Gog became sick soon after and nearly died. Obviously, the gods were unhappy with us. Let's have a celebration and bless the cows and let's not kill them any more no matter what." Years later few remember the instrumental role of the sacred myth and now regard honoring cows as quite natural in and of itself and keep doing it after droughts are irrelevant because of irrigation and most live in the city, and cows appear as real pests to those in other cultures. At this point individuals can be described as acting without thinking about instrumental connections. The reinforcers have shifted to such things as community applause to those who put garlands on cows and bring feed to them in old age.
Such institutionalizations have human survival value. Genes (people) which find pleasure in eating and sex survive better than those who must be reminded of sun position and seasons to do these things after continuing periodic calculation about their instrumental value. (This thought is due Johnathon Miller.) Thus selection and biological evolution occur. The same is true of sacred cow myths. It is useful to have breeding stock kept through droughts without individuals making a current benefit-cost analysis. And there I go myself demonstrating the use of social analogies borrowed from nature to give understanding and order to complex phenomena. It just feels so natural!
Douglas's conception fits nicely with March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions. "Politics is organized by a logic of appropriateness. Political institutions are collections of interrelated rules and routines that define appropriate action in terms of relations between roles and situations. The process involves determining what the situation is, what role is being fulfilled, and what the obligations of that role in the situation are" (p.60)
Has Douglas given us a satisfactory explanation of how "institutions think" at the same time providing an explanation of how interacting individuals think about institutions, resulting in their evolution?
If you have any questions or comments, please email schmid@pilot.msu.edu
