The Ecological Aspect of Institutions

HE ONLY idea common to all usages of the term institution is that of some sort of establishment or relative permanence of a distinctly social sort. On this point even those agree who, like Allport, admit the reality of institutions only long enough to find individuals to study who are behaving institutionally.' Some let this idea stand as a sufficient definition, thus allowing the simplest folkways and the most elaborate culture-complexes to fall under the category. Psychologists incline toward such inclusive usage as would make institutions merely the social aspect of the behavior which they describe. Sociologists are more likely to restrict usage of the term, by distinguishing institutions from simpler units of socially established behavior. Sumner, for instance, puts them over against the folkways and mores.2 Another idea fundamental to the study of human life, that of collective behavior, grows out of the fact that human beings so obviously behave in response to the behavior of each other that what the individual does can be understood only by using the collectivity as a point of reference. Institutions are sometimes defined by distinguishing them from such elementary forms of collective behavior as the crowd and the primary group, whose peculiar feature is social interaction not mediated by established forms.3 There is an order of social phenomena in which the feature of establishment and that of collective behavior meet in a particular way: namely, so that the very form taken by the collective behavior is something socially established. Phenomena of this order are called institutions in this paper.