Institution' is a heavy word, burdened with semantic freight and no little confusion. "Our institutions are at risk," we intone solemnly in vague reference to "The American Way of Life."
When we say, "That poor child will have to be institutionalized," we have in mind a building in which custodial care is provided.
When we say, "This curriculum change will be good for the institution," we are speaking of a particular organization, a school, a college.
Sometimes we use the word to describe people. "No, Miss Brown, Professor Carstairs is not an institution, even though he seems to have been here since the earth cooled."
For the social scientist 'institution' is shorthand for a fairly durable set of rules, forms, and procedures collected over time around a particular human task. It constitutes a guide for behavior, if you will, the ultimate "how to." We cannot see Economy, the institution, in action any more than we can see the Freudian Id (though sometimes we think we ought to, so vivid has the image become). What we do see is the corner grocery store, which came into being by way of institutional models and functions according to institutional rules.
The economic institution, in short, has to do with keeping body and soul together. The striving and thriving part attended the business spin-offs--the creation of manufacturing, banking, and trading as separate institutions. (Marketing is now in the process of institutionalizing on its own.)
The spinoff process is what the specialist might well call "disembedding." But it is by no means peculiar to business. Every modern "how to" had its beginning in another institutional preserve. Education and medicine are the offspring of religion (as almost what is not?). Even when societies are complex and support an array of rules and procedures for many separable tasks, some directives invariably command the rest. Every culture, every age has its dominant institutions, and is given color and purpose by institutional metaphors. Religion and rule have each, in their turn, held sway over the minds of men. But first of all came family.
It was in small groups of relatives that our ancestors of a million and more years ago found their humanity. They doubtless celebrated the sacred in these groups with the eldest males (and sometimes eldest females) presiding over the mysteries--as hunting-and-gathering people do to this day. They brought up their young in the bosom of the family, and all that was to be known of the world and its ways was taught there. Family members sustained life by dividing the work among men and women, young and old. It should come as no surprise that 'economy' itself derives from the Greek words oikos, 'a household,' and nem, 'regulate, organize.' In other words, survival was in the beginning, and has been for most of human time afterward, a family business.
Even today, when household norms locate mother in one job, father in another, children in school, and nary a common task unless it be play, some family businesses remain. You can see them in the bigger cities of America; the Korean grocery stores; the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Greek restaurants where father cooks, mother
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