I suggest that we should stop trying to talk about culture and institutions as if they were separate. Instead, I propose that we think of culture as having two components: informal culture, which we can call folkways; and formal culture, which we can call institutions. In this framework, institutions are subsumed under culture, as an aspect of culture, a subset of culture, or a manifestation of culture.
f many people walking between two particular places take the same route, their trampling will eventually mark a path. That is a folkway. If the town paves the path with a sidewalk, that is an institution.
I think the difference between formal and informal patterns is an interesting topic but the way I internally think of institutions differs from Arnold’s.
I think of an institution as a special form of organization that is defined by roles rather than specific individuals. It is the difference between a business (a formal organization) and a corporation (a formal institution). A business is tightly coupled with the biological life-cycle of the owner(s). A corporation is long-lived and independent of the individual owners, executives, and employees.
The Beatles were a band made up of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The New York Philharmonic is an institution.
The formality/informality is a different factor in my mind. It feels weird to think of The Hustle as an institution but its easy to think of marriage as an institution with varying degrees of formality in different cultures.
I wonder how/why/when my internal definition of “institution” became this specific.
How many hit songs did the New York Philharmonic write?
When you get formula reasonably right, you formalize it, cement it, institutionalize it, fossilize it. It actively resists alteration, because it is presumed to be proven – an argument that is over and settled. The creative, exploratory phase is done.
But the world is cruel, and outside forces can destroy an old, brittle institution. But the whole point was to be permanent. If it can be destroyed, it wasn’t worth keeping around anymore.
As long as there is creativity, culture can adapt to new circumstances and go on. An institution must justify its own existence in the long run. Not to its constituents or clients. To the universe.
Radicals don’t understand why institutions exist. Conservatives don’t grasp the full implications of why they exist. Darwinists understand fully.
Interesting. It sounds like my writing could be vastly improved by a NLP (natural language processing) service that checks for unintentional use of idioms.
I should NOT have said “The New York Philharmonic is an institution”. It is easily misinterpreted as the well known *-is-an-institution idiom that implies that “*” is something wonderful/important. I should have said something like “The New York Philharmonic, according to my narrow definition, is an institution”.
My bad. That’ll learn me for attempting to clarify with examples.
FURTHER CLARIFICATIONS:
1. I really, really like the Beatles
2. I really, really wasn’t trying to rank music genres
3. I really, really wasn’t declaring my love for institutions
4. I really, really wasn’t declaring the superiority of formal over informal culture
5. I don’t believe “All You Need Is Love” but I really, really like the song 🙂
For the record, I am declaring my belief that superior patterns, at any given point of time, determine the differential success of societies. Sometimes these patterns are due to culture (David C. Rose), genes (e.g. adult lactose tolerance), bio-geography (Jared Diamond), institutions (Daron Acemoglu), policies (Adam Smith), or leadership (all Great-Man theories) but its not the category itself that is important, only the relative value of each new/widespread pattern.
I was trying to point out that the default definition of “institution” in my head is NOT synonymous with “formal”. Institutions, like cultures, can be both formal and informal, in my mind.
I like Arnold’s attempt at clarification but his “Culture = institutions + folkways” formula doesn’t feel natural to me because of a narrow definition of “institution” that has become cemented/fossilized in my mind. It is probably just me but I thought it was worth noting.
By the way, I think the post by Handle makes the same point that Institution != Formal (even though Institutionalized == Formalized). Language is a fickle mistress.
Re: “many people walking between two particular places take the same route, their trampling will eventually mark a path. That is a folkway.”
Presumably, in this example, individuals take this route because it is convenient in some topographical sense. Each individual prefers the route regardless of what other individuals prefer. The separate behaviors of individuals cumulatively make the route even more convenient, by wearing down a path. Culture doesn’t shape the process.
By contrast, culture shapes conventions, which involve social expectations and informal sanctions. Conventions are an important class of genuine folkways. In a classic essay, Robert Sugden gives a neat example:
“In a fishing village on the Yorkshire coast there used to be an unwritten rule about
the gathering of driftwood after a storm. Whoever was first onto a stretch of the
shore after high tide was allowed to take whatever he wished, without interference
from later arrivals, and to gather it into piles above the high-tide line. Provided he
placed two stones on the top of each pile, the wood was regarded as his property, for
him to carry away when he chose. If, however, a pile had not been removed after two
more high tides, this ownership right lapsed (Walmsley, 1932, pp. 70–71). The writer
who describes this ‘first-on’ rule does not tell us how it came into existence. Probably
its origins had been long forgotten. Nor does he tell us why people obeyed it: only that
they did. But we can be sure that the inhabitants of a fishing village would not have
appealed to law courts or police to enforce a custom about driftwood. Somehow this
rule was self-enforcing. “—Robert Sugden, “Spontaneous Order,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 3:4 (1989) 85-97
Available online: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.3.4.85
“Our instincts to resent others’ success and to fear interaction with strangers need to be overcome if we are to enjoy the benefits of specialization and innovation. Economics teachers have a duty to get this across to students.”
Not just economics teachers, but the education system generally. Before a student ever sits down in an economics class, ideally they should have read The Iliad and understand the concept of xenia, how jealousy can destroy a man like Achilles, and Oenone’s refusal to heal Paris.
It is curious how little play the concept of “transaction costs” seems to get in microeconomics text books. Not sure the Mankiw textbook covers it directly, the Timothy Taylor textbook only in passing, and at Marginal Revolution University it primarily seems to appear as part of a discussion of the Coase Theory (and kudos to them for including the Coase theorem at all – I get the impression it is ignored in some economics textbooks – but nevertheless when I searched MRU for “Transaction Cost” you don’t get anything specific). The Foundation for Teaching Economics, interestingly and laudably, includes the concept in a discussion of the trouble with enforced central planning. But here again as an aside and not a fully developed topic. With the profound wisdom for which he is so widely respected, Dr. Kling appears to have identified an important lacuna in economics teaching.
Always delighted to see Hernando de Soto and The Mystery of Capital get a shout out.
Definitely worthy of status raising. The concept of property rights seems to be generally neglected in economics textbooks as well. Perhaps because textbook writers want to sell books and including a discussion of property rights would lower sales among a target market of professors who are disproportionately far left extremists? At any rate the topic of the challenge of public policy with respect to dwellings not secured with recognized property rights appears to be understudied and undertaught. I’ve been disappointed by how little work I’ve been able to find with respect to the relatively long history of Brazilian urban planning and favela policies.
Scott Alexander recently reviewed The Secret of Our Success which also highlights the importance of culture, institutions and folkways. The review notes how some aspects of culture that superficially appear irrational upon deeper examination are highly adaptive. Perhaps useful to consider in Three Languages of Politics terms when attempting to understand conservative aversion to barbarism as something other than bigotry.
Yet one wonders how a more refined understanding of institutions and folkways could come to be abused. It certainly sounds like something the nudgers would latch on to. And JoNova offers a striking example this morning on her blog of a new climate change model includes “social processes” to predict the climate.
Poetry may offer the sort of nuanced approach these inquiries demand. A discussion of Blake’s Auguries of Innocence might be a worthy addition to any economics textbook. One passage in particular seems apropos:
He who mocks the Infants Faith
Shall be mockd in Age & Death
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
The rotting Grave shall neer get out
He who respects the Infants faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death
The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons
Are the Fruits of the Two seasons
The Questioner who sits so sly
Shall never know how to Reply
He who replies to words of Doubt
Doth put the Light of Knowledge out
The Strongest Poison ever known
Came from Caesars Laurel Crown
Nought can Deform the Human Race
Like to the Armours iron brace
When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow
To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow
I agree with the blending of culture and institutions. If you read the various historians, economists, and sociologists on the topic of economic progress you see constant bickering and confusion on the topic.
McCloskey, for example, focuses on on “rhetoric” which she defines as the way we talk about and value certain cultural behaviors. But she is somewhat dismissive of formal institutional explanations. (Personally, I dislike the term rhetoric)
North, Acemoglu and Mokyr, otoh, focus much more on institutions (which some of them specifically enlarge to include “informal institutions” and culture.)
I see the two as totally interlinked. My term to bridge them all together is Protocols, Rewards, Institutions and Shared Mindsets. Or PRISMs, for short. I am convinced that most institutions are dependent upon shared mindsets, Schelling points and cultural beliefs. Exporting an institution to a place with different shared mindsets and cultural beliefs and habits is in effect likely to result in a totally different institutional outcome. Constitutional democracy in Iraq will likely differ dramatically from how it works in Canada. *
Similarly, importing cultural beliefs (for example via immigration of large numbers of people with shared culture) risks changing the way formal institutions work in the receiving country as well.
In summary, it isn’t institutions or culture, it is the interplay of both which determines how a society functions.
* This also helps explain how lead and catchup economies work and why some states have trouble catching up. It is easier for Western European states with thousands of years of shared PRISMs to draft off of each other than places with a distinctly different institutional and cultural history.
Institutions should be sparse relative to folk pathways. Folk pathways do the ’rounding off’ when institutions suddenly change. They are work arounds.
It’s a good essay. One addition worth pointing out is that self-reportedly formalized institutions don’t often actually operate in a manner consistent and reasonably predictable from the formal rules of operation, and instead have their own internal and frequently tacit folkways (and both closed and open-secret versions) – and informal ‘corporate’ culture – that often dominate the social dynamics of the organization, sometimes completely inconsistent and at odds with the explicit and formalized articulations of institutional mechanisms.
We usually see anyone who takes the formal and public rules completely seriously and at face value as being very naive, and it is usually good advice to tell any new member of an organization to pay close attention and be very socially observant in looking for these sorts of inside-joke deviations from the black-letter law, to acquire an understanding of “how things really work around here, regardless of what the texts say,” and not to react with outrage or take those instances too personally.