INSTITUTIONAL NORMS

Institutional Norms

Institutional Norms

Introductin

In ordinary language, institution norms signify core concepts of governance, such as the executive, parliament, and judiciary. In current political science, institutions take a broader meaning. They are formal rules (including constitutions), informal norms, and shared understandings that constrain and prescribe political actors' interactions with one another. Institutions are generated and enforced by both state and nonstate actors (such as professional and accreditation bodies). Within institutional frameworks, actors may have more or less freedom to pursue and develop their individual preferences and tastes (Whitley, 2002).

Institution norms have always been a major subject of social science research, particularly in political science and sociology. Their importance has been reinforced, since the 1980s, with the emergence of new institutionalism and its intellectual streams—rational choice, historical, normative, and sociological institutional theories (Selznick, 2006).

Dsicussion

Why do actors adhere to institutions? From a rational choice institutional perspective, with its instrumentalist logic, people follow norms because they want to avoid sanctions and maximize rewards. For instance, members of parliament, in a parliamentary regime with closed-list elections, are more likely to adhere to norms of party discipline, in hopes of being remunerated with a future executive position, than are members of the U.S. Congress, who are less dependent on the president for their future political career (Scott, 2006).

The aim of institutional norms is to explain the stability and persistence of social (inter)action in specific socially constructed contexts (ranging from the world system to the intraorganizational realm). Besides regularities emerging from the encounter of competitive processes with the bounded rationality of individuals, it is the presence of institutions, salient in the specific action context, that largely explains stability in (inter)action patterns among socially constructed actors (ranging from individuals to organizations, communities, or states). Institutions exist in the standardized behaviors of individuals and in the isomorphic displays of organizations and of nation states. They are settled habits of thought and of action, imperfect and pragmatic solutions used to work out past problems and to reconcile past conflicts (Powell, 2002).

Institutions, shaped by a set of cultural and historical forces, are considered as multifaceted, relatively self-activating social reproductive processes, made up of symbolic elements. According to Philip Selznick, to institutionalize is to infuse with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand. Institutions emerge when some symbolic element has attained a state of legitimacy; i.e., social acceptability and credibility. Legitimacy derives from the connections of social elements, such as goals, structures, artifacts, or actors' identities, to values, meanings, or rules that are wider and of a higher order than the action context under consideration (Meyer, 2007).

Cognitive-cultural elements of institutions are taken-for-granted components of social reality grounded either in the stability of interpretation and of cognitive frames or in specific systems of cultural beliefs considered as constitutive rules. Constitutive rules define the very nature of social reality and of the actors legitimated to act in it. They are taken for granted because they emerge in a process, which Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann defined as the suc-cession of externalization, ...