Institutions According To Hodgson
According to Hodgson, institutions are the stuff of social life. He defines them in a 2006 article by saying that institutions are “the systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interaction”. Examples of institutions may be language, money, law, systems of weights and measures, table manners and organizations (for example firms). Conventions, that may be included in law, can be regarded to be institutions as well (Hodgson, 2006, p. 2).
What Hodgson considers important about institutions is the way that they structure social life and frame our perceptions and preferences. They also create stable expectations. He argues that: “Generally, institutions enable ordered thought, expectation, and action by imposing form and consistency on human activities.” Consequently, institutions enable as well as constrain action.
Hodgson regards institutions as systems of rules. Broadly understood a rule is “a socially transmitted and customary normative injunction or immanently normative disposition, that in circumstances X do Y" (Hodgson, 2006, p. 3). This means that to be effective a rule has to be embedded in dispositions or habits. Mere decrees are not necessarily rules in this sense. Habits and customs help to give a normative status to a legal rule that can help a new law to become effective. In the process of social interaction norms are constantly changed (Hodgson, 2006, pp. 3–4)
Read more about this topic: Geoffrey Hodgson
Famous quotes containing the words institutions and/or hodgson:
“With the breakdown of the traditional institutions which convey values, more of the burdens and responsibility for transmitting values fall upon parental shoulders, and it is getting harder all the time both to embody the virtues we hope to teach our children and to find for ourselves the ideals and values that will give our own lives purpose and direction.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“Turns to meet the loathly birds
Flocking round him from the skies,
Waiting for the flesh that dies.”
—Ralph Hodgson (c. 1871–1962)