The Rhetoric of Institutional Theory

INSTITUTIONS ARE a collective device by which we gather up the many loaves and fishes of the facts of social living into the miracle basket of conceptualization. More than that, institution is a word with strongly externalistic connotations which belie the largely internalistic character of the phenomenon. The concept, institutional behavior, refers to shared and public aspects of an incredibly diversified subjectivity; it is, at bottom and throughout, a personal experience word-but a word which nonetheless describes the public behavior of individuals. In this discussion institutions will be considered-after the manner of Cooley, Bernard, Arnold, among others-as a behavioral complex of people, roles, effort, norms, equipment and symbols. These components of the complex will be regarded as a corresponding set of analytical dimensions-associative, dramatistic, economic, normative, instrumental and communicative-each of which will be briefly discussed in turn

Economics · Epistemology · Linguistics · Political science · Positive economics · Rhetoric · Sociology · European Union Policy and Governance · Management and Organizational Studies · Philosophy