Definitions Please: Field, Culture, Institution, Norms, Culture, etc.

[gilbertrollins]

Alright yawl -- I've been going through the history of thought and theory here. I do not understand how the taxonomy of "social objects" works. Here are some objects I see used sometimes interchangeably, sometimes not.

Norms = Conventions. But then not.

Institutions = Fields? Surely not. Institutions are a subset of fields - i.e. institutions make up fields?

Culture differs from fields how?

Networks fit into this taxonomy how?

I understand that the boundaries are loose here on purpose - action is dynamic, ends become means, change is constant, embeddedness laid upon embeddedness, and all that. But there can't seriously be no delineation among these concepts.

Edited December 21, 2012 by econosocio

[jacib]

I'm not a big social theorist, and some of these are definitely used interchangeably by some people but mean totally different things for other people.

Norms--I mainly know norms from International Relations stuff, and I feel like I'm not the best person to get into those. I think these are used (very roughly) as they'd be used in economics.

Institutions--ditto, except from Comparative Politics not IR. Still not sociology. I don't think you'd be in horrible shape if you understood them like, say, Acemoglu does.

Fields--this comes from Bourdieu, check out wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_%28Bourdieu%29 and http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/bourdieus-field.html. Lately, Fligstein has been trying to build on it. There's a recent article in sociological theory about this. There's also been a lot of discussion on Org Theory about this, which will be useful for understanding the debates.

Culture--culture is hard, or it's far too easy. It's the category of all the norms, traditions, traditional roles, rituals, etc. plus a lot of other "cultural junk" put together. At it's worst, culture is the residual category. When you explain away all the conditions like race, class, education, gender, whatever, what's left over is "culture". **That is the worst definition** but it helps me understand what the cultural sociologists are trying to get at. Read Jeffery Alexander's article about the Strong Programme in cultural sociology, that's probably the best introduction to different ways about thinking about "culture".

Institutions are what enforce norms. Fields are spaces where action takes place (the setting, as it were). I found Melissa Wilde (et al.'s) article "Religious Economy or Organizational Field? Predicting Bishops' votes at the Second Vatican Council" useful as a place wehre I've seen field applied and I "got it". It's sociology of religion. Steinmetz has a famous article about the colonial state as a field, as well, that some people also love. Culture is kind of "what we do", the accrued junk. Culture is somehwat controversial--I think you read org theory so you know Fabio Rojas recently was like, "Is cultural sociology just some weird luxury?"

Anyway, I hope that's a start.

[gilbertrollins]

Thanks for coming through Jacib -- if anyone else can help, that'd be great.

Norms and conventions are derived almost precisely the same way in economics -- as what you call "coordinated equilibria." Basically, if any of you have ever seen the basic prisoner's dilemma payoff matrix - imagine that but with the deck stacked so that *both* strategies get *both* parties the equivalent payoff. The classic example is two people meeting on a narrow road with no established drive-on-right-side norm. In some of these games a third-party "judge" enforces a rule of behavior. In some of them an equilibrium can involved without third party enforcement (particularly attractive reasoning for the anarchists, emergent-institutions, and social movements theorists among us).

None of these games (theories) satisfy me. At all. I see absolutely no reason to demand that norms and conventions be derived from strict rational action. It's important to note that an economist's conception of a norm, convention, or institution is extraordinarily different than a sociologists -- these are mere "constraints" to economists. To a sociologist, people "adopt" norms and conventions, right? Incorporate them into their "portfolio of preferences" or their identity, or social script. They're recommendations and encouragements as much as they are constraints. The economic view of them is profoundly immature, because it denies that social location within frameworks of norms and institutions actually influence the agent, affecting her tastes and desires. Norms and conventions and institutions are to an economist the same thing as a price -- something that delimits behavior -- still holding desires and goals constant and irrelevant (well, it's not that they think tastes and desires are irrelevant - it's just that under standard assumptions people will reveal their desires through their choices - so the researcher need not look at their desires directly [by say, asking them how they feel, or observing their dialogue]).

I read the Bordeiu wiki, and Fligstein's '98 paper (earlier?).

Here's what I've picked up so far:

Whether you derive them from utility maximization or not, norms, conventions, and "rules" are just social instructions "do X when Y." So in the sociological lingo, you've got a collection of them providing a "script" for a Goffmanian "actor," and in the economic lingo you've got a "decision rule" guiding an "agent."

Now, how do institutions, culture, and fields factor in? I'm thinking these are made-up of norms, conventions, and rules. Culture, institutions, and fields are the house; norms, conventions, and rules are the 2X4s.

Building from micro to macro - it seems like we might start, at the agent level, with a portfolio of preferences, or an identity, which is made up of norms, conventions, and rules, which are dictated by fields, institutions and culture.

Usually when we talk about a convention or norm, we're talking about a rather specific and local behavioral guide. So these seem "smaller" than institutions. When we talk about an institution, we're usually talking about a mental hospital, or a "set" of norms/expectations like a marriage. Fields seem bigger yet - sets of institutions. And culture people usually assign to diffuse and enormous things like huge regions, ethnicities, very-long-run traditions, etc.

As far as I can tell, then, "networks," have come out of the attempt to physically measure social structures *materially,* in terms of actual reported connections between people. So we can use network theory to measure any level of the "russian dolls" sets of social structure -- frameworks of norms, local institutions / organizations like a little league, national or international religious cultures.

I really think a strong-form taxonomy is necessary for subfields to talk to one another. I'm not arguing a strict division of labor. I'm saying there will be gains from trade if people are speaking the same language. Some of these papers I'm reading are impossibly obtuse.

[magicunicorn]

This is a really complicated question/post, and one of the major reasons is that the exact definitions of each one aren't clearly defined in sociology.  Or more specifically, they are not fully agreed upon by the major players in sociology itself (a lot of time is spent debating and theorizing on exactly what the definitions are).

 

Case in point, in my econ soc class this past semester, I asked what the definition of "fields" were -- and a fellow student gave a specific answer and was rebuffed quickly by the prof. that this was just one account of "fields" and that the exact definition was not yet fully determined.  This also seemed to be the case with many of the above issues you bring up - and that its not so important to know the "one definition", but the various interpretations of possible definitions so you know what audience you are speaking to and how to appropriately use it in your own work.

Edited December 25, 2012 by magicunicorn

[gilbertrollins]

^Fair enough. Is there any push to get some uniformity of definitions among theorists?