On the Definition of Social Institution

Abstract

It is a well-known fact there has been a variety of defintions of social institution in the conceptual schemes presented by sociologists. When we try to examine these different ones, however, we can assume that most of them are, to a considerable degree, congruous with each other in their implications, against the observations of both J. F. Cuber and F. H. Allport, and from somewhat different point of view with J. O. Hertzler's. On the one hand, social institutions have been defined as “patterns of behabior of collectivities” by G. A. Lunderg and this seems to be accessible to almost all sociologists, since it represents the prevalent understandings of social institutions to which W. G. Sumner gave a classical formulation. On the other hand, some anthropologists tend to conceive social institutions in terms of “culture patterns” and to define them as “cultural configurations”. Whatever terminological differences may exisit among them, however, they are the same or identical, in-so far as social institutions are viewed as “the organization of conceptual and behavior pattern” in the latter, too. But there are some shortcomings in such a definition. Above all, the shortcoming of such definitions is the vagueness of the very term “behavior pattern” and all its derivative implications. To say that social institutions are behavior patterns or cultural configurations is to say little, almost nothing, since there are various kinds of behavior patterns which differ in their important characteristics and therefore cannot be placed in the same category. Hence, it is desirable to distinguish the behavior patterns which have norms which control social relationships in terms of the rights and duties from thos patterns which have other norms. Thus social institution is to be defined as a body of rules which states what sort of behavior may be recognized as legitimate and what not in the social interaction of the members of a group. The concept of “social system” of R. Linton seems, in this connection, to be approximately congruous with the concept of social institutions defined here. He seems to prefer the term “social system” to the term “social institution” in. order to connote almost the same concept. To me, it is similar the situation concerning the group behavior-patterns which used to be called “customs”, “folkways” and “mores” by sociologists and are now called by the very different term “culture patterns” by anthropologists.