Introduction

Earlier chapters of this book explored how individuals and society are bound together. Each of us occupies a place in society and carries a status along with one or more roles -- but these are not roles we simply pick, the way an actor might choose whether to accept a part. Social institutions surround us with rules that constrain some choices and open up others, that punish certain actions and reward others. Some of these institutions are 'macro', operating at the scale of the whole society, such as the state; others are 'micro', close to our everyday lives, such as the family. This chapter introduces five major arenas in which social institutions are located: family, marriage and kinship; work and the economy; politics; religion; and education.

In its broadest sense, an institution is a pattern of activity that operates according to rules -- rules established, or at least recognised, by law or by custom -- and whose regular, continuous functioning cannot be understood without reference to those rules. Institutions place constraints on individuals, but they also create opportunities for them. Some people even treat an institution such as the family, religion, the state or education as an end in itself, valuable independent of any other purpose it might serve.

As earlier chapters showed, sociology often holds more than one understanding of the same idea, and the functionalist and conflict perspectives frequently interpret a single social phenomenon -- such as stratification or social control -- quite differently. The same is true of social institutions. The functionalist view treats a social institution as a complex set of norms, beliefs, values and role-relationships that has developed in response to a society's needs; institutions exist because they satisfy those needs, whether formally (as with law or formal education) or informally (as with family or religion). The conflict view, by contrast, argues that individuals are not equally placed in any society, and that every social institution -- familial, religious, political, economic, legal or educational -- tends to operate in the interest of society's dominant sections, whether defined by class, caste, tribe or gender. On this view, the dominant section not only controls political and economic institutions but also manages to make its own ideas appear as the common-sense ideas of the whole society. This is a very different starting point from the idea that institutions simply answer to society's general needs.

As you work through this chapter, it is worth asking, for each institution, how it constrains people and how it offers them opportunities, and whether it affects different sections of society -- men and women, the privileged and the dispossessed -- unequally.