How to model an institution

Institutions are linkage mechanisms that bridge across three kinds of social divides—they link micro systems of social interaction to meso (and macro) levels of organization, they connect the symbolic with the material, and the agentic with the structural. Two key analytic principles are identified for empirical research, relationality and duality. These are linked to new research strategies for the study of institutions that draw on network analytic techniques. Two hypotheses are suggested. (1) Institutional resilience is directly correlated to the overall degree of structural linkages that bridge across domains of level, meaning, and agency. (2) Institutional change is related to over-bridging, defined as the sustained juxtaposition of multiple styles within the same institutional site. Case examples are used to test these contentions. Institutional stability is examined in the case of Indian caste systems and American academic science. Institutional change is explored in the case of the rise of the early Christian church and in the origins of rock and roll music. One of the most striking developments in recent research on institutions has been the appearance of a spate of new work by scholars who are using relational modeling techniques originally developed for the study of social networks to disentangle the complex logic of institutional processes. Of course, one can argue Theor Soc DOI 10.1007/s11186-008-9066-0 J. W. Mohr (*) Sociology Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA e-mail: [email protected] H. C. White Sociology Department, 413 Fayerweather Hall, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA e-mail: [email protected] that social network analysis has always been about the study of social institutions and in a certain sense that is surely true. But it is also true that there has been a significant shift over the last decade or so by a number of researchers who have moved away from a more traditional focus on interactional (e.g., social) networks towards a modeling strategy of a broader scope that directly tackles the structural character of institutions by recognizing that what makes an institution work is that it interpenetrates the social with the cultural. Thus an institution links together different orders and realms of social life, notably the agentic with the structural, the symbolic with the material, and the micro with the meso and the macro structures of social organization. Indeed we argue that it is precisely this—the articulation of relational sub-systems into a structured whole—that constitutes the very essence of an institution. In some cases the distinctive feature of this new research is the application of network analytic tools to take the measure of cultural systems that underlie broader institutional processes. Using autobiographical texts as their data, Bearman and Stovel (2000) map out the network structure of life story narratives as told by members of the German Nazi party during the 1930s. Smith (2007) uses a similar model to compare the contested historical narratives of two different ethnic communities along the Yugoslovian/Italian border. McLean (1998) applies relational modeling strategies to unpack the cultural logic underlying the presentation of self in fourteenth and fifteenth century Florentine patronage letters while Sonnett (2004) uses relational methods to map out the boundaries of musical taste communities in American society. In other work, network tools have been deployed to demonstrate the structural mappings that link cultural forms with institutional actions. Tilly (1997) used a block model analysis to show the linkages between the institutional claims various types of collective actors made upon one another during a series of some 8,000 contentious gatherings occurring in England from 1758–1834. Breiger and Mohr (2004) relate the ‘structural equivalence’ concept to logics of institutional practice, and they use a dual clustering algorithm to map out the relations between cultural identity categories and types of outreach programs employed by the University of California in response to an externally imposed prohibition on affirmative action policies in the 1 Just as an example, early work by the second author (White 1963a) focused on the logic of kinship systems, building on long traditions of analysis in anthropology, and demonstrated that the institutions of kinship were derivable through an empirical analysis of the structure of kin ties. In another early publication on the “Uses of Mathematics in Sociology” the institutional ambitions were expressed clearly, “What point is there to sociology except as it is able to find and interrelate core properties of, say, a trio like feudalism (in England in 1200), decentralization in the TVA (today), and political pluralism in France (nineteenth century)?” (White 1963b, p. 79). Later studies by White carried through on these concerns by focusing on the changing institutional logic of art worlds, job systems and economic markets (White and White 1993; White 1970; White 2002). 2 We focus here on just one style of institutional analysis. It should be said that there are several other contemporary research projects that are also developing approaches to using formal models to analyze institutions. The “New Institutionalists” in organizational science is one example (see Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Greenwood et al. 2008). The use of Boolean algebra and fuzzy set mathematics by Charles Ragin (1987, 2000) is another important effort. Theor Soc