The term, “social institution” is somewhat unclear both inordinary language and in the philosophical literature (see below).However, contemporary sociology is somewhat more consistent in its useof the term. Typically, contemporary sociologists use the term torefer to complex social forms that reproduce themselves such asgovernments, the family, human languages, universities, hospitals,business corporations, and legal systems. A typical definition is thatproffered by Jonathan Turner (1997: 6): “a complex of positions,roles, norms and values lodged in particular types of socialstructures and organising relatively stable patterns of human activitywith respect to fundamental problems in producing life-sustainingresources, in reproducing individuals, and in sustaining viablesocietal structures within a given environment.” Again, AnthonyGiddens (1984: 24) says: “Institutions by definition are themore enduring features of social life.” He (Giddens 1984: 31)goes on to list as institutional orders, modes of discourse, politicalinstitutions, economic institutions and legal institutions. Thecontemporary philosopher of social science, Rom Harre follows thetheoretical sociologists in offering this kind of definition (Harre1979: 98): “An institution was defined as an interlockingdouble-structure of persons-as-role-holders or office-bearers and thelike, and of social practices involving both expressive and practicalaims and outcomes.” He gives as examples (Harre 1979: 97)schools, shops, post offices, police forces, asylums and the Britishmonarchy. In this entry the above-noted contemporary sociologicalusage will be followed. Doing so has the virtue of groundingphilosophical theory in the most salient empirical discipline, namely,sociology.

In the not so recent past it might have been asked why a theory ofsocial institutions has, or ought to have, any philosophical interest;why not simply leave theories of institutions to the theoreticalsociologists? However, in recent years philosophers have addressed avariety of ontological, explanatory, normative and other theoreticalissues concerning social institutions (Searle 1995, 2007 and 2010;Tuomela 2002; Miller 2010; Epstein 2015; Guala 2016; Ludwig 2017;Bratman 2022). Of particular importance is the work of John Searle(1995; 2010). One source of the impetus for this has been recentphilosophical work on social action and social forms more generally(Gilbert 1989; Searle 1990; Tuomela 2007; Schmid 2009; Miller 2001;Bratman 2014; Tollefsen 2015; Ludwig 2016). Another source is therecognition that a good deal of normative work on social justice,political philosophy and the like presupposes an understanding ofsocial institutions. For instance, philosophers, such as John Rawls(1972), have developed elaborate normative theories concerning theprinciples of justice that ought to govern social institutions. Yetthey have done so in the absence of a developed theory of the natureand point of the very entities (social institutions) to which theprinciples of justice in question are supposed to apply. Surely theadequacy of one’s normative account of the justice or otherwiseof any given social institution, or system of social institutions,will depend at least in part on the nature and point of that socialinstitution or system. Thus distributive justice is an importantaspect of most, if not all, social institutions; the role occupants ofmost institutions are the recipients and providers of benefits, e.g.wages, consumer products, and the bearers of burdens, e.g. allocatedtasks and, accordingly, are subject to principles of distributivejustice. Moreover, arguably some institutions, perhaps governments,have as one of their defining ends or functions, to ensure conformityto principles of distributive justice in the wider society. However,distributive justice does not appear to be adefiningfeature, end or function ofall social institutions. By thisI do not mean that some social institutions are unjust and, forinstance, exist in practice to serve narrow economic, political,social or other special interests (Marx 1867; Habermas 1978; Honneth1995; Burman 2022); though clearly many are. Indeed, on some views(more influential in sociology than in philosophy), such as those ofstructural marxists (Althusser 1971) and Foucauldians (Foucault 1978),the principal function of social institutions is to serve as, ineffect, an instrument of power in social environments characterised,even constituted, by relationships of power between individuals,economic classes and/or social groups (see also Asta 2018 and Burman2022). Rather I am referring to the fact that a number of socialinstitutions, such as the so-called Fourth Estate and the university,are arguably notdefined—normatively speaking—interms of justice, but rather by some other moral value(s), e.g. truth(Ostrom 2005; Miller 2010).

The entry has six sections. In the first section an overview ofvarious salient accounts of social institutions and some of their mainpoints of theoretical difference is provided. Accounts emanating fromsociological theory as well as philosophy are mentioned. Here, aselsewhere, the boundaries between philosophy and non-philosophicaltheorising in relation to an empirical science are vague. Hence, it isimportant to mention theories such as those of Emile Durkheim andTalcott Parsons, as well as those of John Searle and David Lewis.Moreover, it is also important to highlight some of the theoreticaldifferences, notably those of an ontological character.

In the second section individualist theories of social institutionsbased on rational choice theory and, in particular, on notions ofcoordination equilibria are discussed (Lewis 1969; Guala 2016).

In the third section collective acceptance theories of socialinstitutions are discussed (Searle 1995 and 2010; Tuomela 2002 and2007; Ludwig 2017).

In the fourth section the teleological account of social institutionsis presented (Miller 2010).

In the fifth section the procedural social rule model is presented(Bratman 2022).

In the sixth section, issues of agency and, relatedly, of social powerare discussed. In what sense, if any, are institutions agents (French1984; List and Pettit (2011); Tollefsen 2015; Epstein 2015; Bratman2022)? Is there an inconsistency between the autonomy (or allegedautonomy) of individual human agents, on the one hand, and theubiquity and pervasive influence of institutions on individualcharacter and behaviour, on the other (Giddens 1984; Bhaskar 1979;Burman 2022)?

• 1. Social Institutions: An Overview
• 2. Social Institutions and Coordination Equilibria
• 3. Collective Acceptance Theory of Institutions
• 4. The Teleological Account of Institutions
• 5. The Procedural Social Rule Model
• 6. Institutions and Agency
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Social Institutions: An Overview

Any account of social institutions must begin by informally markingoff social institutions from other social forms. Unfortunately, asnoted above, in ordinary language the terms “institutions”and “social institutions” are used to refer to amiscellany of social forms, including conventions, rules, rituals,organisations, and systems of organisations. Moreover, there are avariety of theoretical accounts of institutions, includingsociological as well as philosophical ones. Indeed, many of theseaccounts of what are referred to as institutions are not accounts ofthe same phenomena; they are at best accounts of overlapping fields ofsocial phenomena. Nevertheless, it is possible, firstly, to mark off arange of related social forms that would be regarded by most theoristsas being properly describable as social institutions; and, secondly,to compare and contrast some of the competing theoretical accounts ofthe “social institutions” in question.

Social institutions in the sense in use in this entry need to bedistinguished from less complex social forms such as conventions,rules, social norms, roles and rituals. The latter are among theconstitutive elements of institutions.

Social institutions also need to be distinguished from more complexand more complete social entities, such as societies or cultures, ofwhich any given institution is typically a constitutive element. Asociety, for example, is more complete than an institution since asociety—at least as traditionally understood—is more orless self-sufficient in terms of human resources, whereas aninstitution is not. Thus, arguably, for an entity to be a society itmust sexually reproduce its membership, have its own language andeducational system, provide for itself economically and—at leastin principle—be politically independent.

Social institutions are often organisations (Scott 2001). Moreover,many institutions aresystems of organisations grounded ineconomic, political etc. spheres of activity (Walzer 1983). Forexample, capitalism is a particular kind of economic institution, andin modern times capitalism consists in large part in specificorganisational forms—including multi-nationalcorporations—organised into a system. Further, some institutionsaremeta-institutions; they are institutions (organisations)that organise other institutions (including systems of organisations).For example, governments are meta-institutions. The institutional endor function of a government consists in large part in organising otherinstitutions (both individually and collectively); thus governmentsregulate and coordinate economic systems, educational institutions,police and military organisations and so on largely by way of(enforceable) legislation.

In this entry the concern is principally with social institutions(including meta-institutions) that are also organisations or systemsof organisations. However, it should be noted that institutions oflanguage, such as the English language, are often regarded not simplyas institutions but as more fundamental than many other kinds ofinstitution by virtue of being presupposed by, or in part constitutiveof, other institutions. Searle, for example, holds to the latter view(Searle 1995: 37; Searle 2008). A case might also be made that thefamily is a more fundamental institution than others for relatedreasons, e.g. it is the site of sexual reproduction and initialsocialisation (Schoeman 1980; Lamanna 2002).

Note also that uses of the term “institution” in suchexpressions as “the institution of government”, are oftenambiguous. Sometimes what is meant is a particular token, e.g. thecurrent government in Australia, sometimes a type, i.e. the set ofproperties instantiated in any actual government, and sometimes a setof tokens, i.e. all governments. Restricting the notion of aninstitution to organisations is helpful in this regard; the term“organisation” almost always refers to a particular token.On the other hand, the term “institution” connotes acertain gravity not connoted by the term “organisation”;so arguably those institutions that are organisations areorganisations that have a central and important role to play in or fora society. Being central and important to a society, such roles areusually long lasting ones; hence institutions are typicallytrans-generational.

Having informally marked off social institutions from other socialforms, let us turn to a consideration of some general properties ofsocial institutions. Here there are at least five salient properties,namely, structure, function, culture, power and (relatedly)sanctions.

Roughly speaking, an institution that is an organisation or system oforganisations consists (at least) of an embodied (occupied by humanpersons) structure of differentiated roles (Miller 2010; Ludwig 2017).(Naturally, many institutions have additional non-human components,e.g. buildings, raw materials.) These roles are defined in terms oftasks, and rules regulating the performance of those tasks. Moreover,there is a degree of interdependence among these roles, such that theperformance of the constitutive tasks of one role cannot beundertaken, or cannot be undertaken except with great difficulty,unless the tasks constitutive of some other role or roles in thestructure have been undertaken or are being undertaken. Further, theseroles are often related to one another hierarchically, and henceinvolve different levels of status, degrees of authority and,therefore, various power relationships. Moreover, social powerrelationships, e.g., between socio-economic classes, that are externalto a given institution may permeate or otherwise influence thatinstitution. Finally, on teleological and functional accounts, theseroles are related to one another in part in virtue of theircontribution to (respectively) theend(s) orfunction(s) of the institution; and the realisation of theseends or function normally involves interaction among the institutionalactors in question and external non-institutional actors. (Theassumption here is that the concept of an end and of a function aredistinct concepts. On some accounts, function is a quasi-causal notion(Cohen 1978 Chapter IX), on others it is a teleological notion, albeitone that does not necessarily involve the existence of any mentalstates (Ryan 1970 Chapter 8)). The constitutive roles of aninstitution and their relations to one another can be referred to asthestructure of the institution.

I note that the common-sense view that an institution consists(essentially) of an embodied structure of roles has been thought bysome to be undermined by the consideration that actions are ascribedto institutions per se (as opposed to their members), e.g. in thesentence, ‘The Supreme Court of the United States ruled thatsegregation is unconstitutional’, and the fact that aninstitution could have had different members than the ones it actuallyhad, e.g. someone other than Brett Kavanaugh might have been nominatedby President Trump to sit on the Supreme Court and confirmed by the USSenate. In response to this kind of argument Ludwig has, in effect,defended the common-sense view by proffering his time-indexed,reductive individualist view according to which not only is theSupreme Court the group that consists of everyone who is at any time amember of the Supreme Court, but what the Supreme Court does at anytime is what the those justices at that time do (Ludwig 2017: 66).Importantly, Ludwig points out that the term, “the Supreme Courtof the US” functions as a definite description and not a name.As is the case with all definite descriptions, e.g. “thePresident of the US”, the individuals picked out by “theSupreme Court of the US” could have been different (Ludwig 2017:68).

An important distinction relevant to the understanding ofinstitutional structure can be made between what is constitutive of aninstitution, e.g. the judges of the Supreme Court, and what isrequired to maintain it in existence, e.g. acceptance of the authorityof the Supreme Court by the US citizenry. (See sections 3 and 5below.)

Note that on the conception of institutions asembodiedstructures of roles and associated rules, the nature of anyinstitution at a given time will to some extent reflect the personalcharacter of different role occupants, especially influential roleoccupants, e.g. the British Government during the Second World Warreflected to some extent Winston Churchill’s character.Moreover, institutions in this sense are dynamic, evolving entities;as such, they have a history, the diachronic structure of a narrativeand (usually) a partially open-ended future.

Aside from the formal and usually explicitly stated, or defined, tasksand rules, there is an important implicit and informal dimension of aninstitution roughly describable as institutionalculture.This notion comprises the informal attitudes, values, norms, and theethos or “spirit” which pervades an institution. As such,it is to be distinguished from the wider notions of culture frequentlyin use among anthropologists. Culture in the wide sense embraces notonly informal but also formal elements of institutions, e.g. rules andother components of structure (Tylor 1871; Munch and Smelser 1993)).Culture in the narrow sense influences much of the activity of themembers of that institution, or at least the manner in which thatactivity is undertaken (including in part by virtue of external socialpower relationships as mentioned above). So while the explicitlydetermined rules and tasks might say nothing about being secretive or“sticking by one’s mates come what may” or having ahostile or negative attitude to particular social groups, theseattitudes and practices might in fact be pervasive; they might be partof the culture (Skolnick 2008).

It is sometimes claimed that in addition to structure, function, powerand culture, social institutions necessarily involve sanctions. It isuncontroversial that social institutions involve informal sanctions,such as moral disapproval following on non-conformity to institutionalnorms or to wider social norms (that are, at least in some cases,manifestations of social power relationships). However, sometheorists, e.g. Jon Elster (1989: Chapter XV), argue that formalsanctions, such as punishment, are a necessary feature ofinstitutions. Formal sanctions are certainly a feature of most, if notall, of those institutions that operate within a legal system.However, they do not appear to be a feature of all institutions.Consider, for example, an elaborate and longstanding system ofinformal economic exchange among members of different societies thathave no common system of laws or enforced rules.

Thus far we have informally marked off social institutions from othersocial forms, and we have identified a number of general properties ofsocial institutions. It is now time to introduce and taxonomize someof the main theoretical accounts of social institutions, includinghistorically important ones. In sections 2, 3, 4 and 5 recentinfluential theories of social institutions will be discussed in moredetail.

Notwithstanding our understanding of social institutions as complexsocial forms, some theoretical accounts of institutions identifyinstitutions with relatively simple social forms—especiallyconventions, social norms or rules. At one level this is merely averbal dispute; contra our procedure here, such simpler forms couldsimply be termed “institutions”. However, at another levelthe dispute is not merely verbal, since what we are calling“institutions” would on such a view consist simply of setsof conventions, social norms or rules. Let us refer to such accountsasatomistic theories of institutions (Taylor 1985: Chapter7). Schotter is a case in point (Schotter 1981) as is North (1990).The best known contemporary form of atomism is rational choice theoryand it has been widely accepted in, indeed it is in part constitutiveof, modern economics. The most influential philosophical theory withina broadly rational choice framework is David Lewis’ theory ofconventions (Lewis 1969). According to Lewis, conventions areregularities in action that solve coordination problems confronted byindividual agents.

The “atoms” within atomistic accounts themselves typicallyconsist of the actions of individual human persons, e.g. conventionsas regularities in action. The individual agents are not themselvesdefined in terms of institutional forms, such as institutional roles.Hence atomistic theories of institutions tend to go hand in glove withatomistic theories of all collective entities, e.g. a society consistsof an aggregate of individual human persons. Moreover, atomistictheories tend to identify the individual agent as the locus of moralvalue. On this kind of view, social forms, including socialinstitutions, have moral value only derivatively, i.e. only in so faras they contribute to the prior needs, desires or other requirementsof individual human agents.

The regularities in action (or rules or norms) made use of in suchatomistic accounts of institutions cannot simply be a singleperson’s regularities in action (or a single person’srules or norms prescribing his or her individual action alone); ratherthere must be interdependence of action such that, for example, agentA only performs actionx, if other agents,B andC do likewise. Moreover, some account of theinterdependence of action in question is called for, e.g. that it isnot the sort of interdependence of action involved in conflictsituations (although it might arise as a solution to a prior conflictsituation).

Assume that the conventions, norms or rules in question are social inthe sense that they involve the required interdependence of action,e.g. the parties to any given convention, or the adherent to any suchnorm or rule, conform to (respectively) the convention, norm or ruleon the condition that others do. Nevertheless, such interdependence ofaction is not sufficient for a convention, norm or rule, or even a setof conventions, norms or rules, to be an institution. Governments,universities, corporations etc. are structured, unitary entities.Accordingly, a mereset of conventions (or norms or rules)does not constitute an institution. For example, the set ofconventions comprising the convention to drive on the left, theconvention to utter, “Australia”, to refer to Australia,and the convention to use chopsticks does not constitute aninstitution. Accordingly, a problem for atomistic accounts of socialinstitutions is the need to provide an account of the structure andunity of social institutions, and an account that is faithful toatomism, e.g. that the structure is essentially aggregative in nature.On the other hand, ‘atomists’ can obviously helpthemselves to some notion of a bundle of related conventions or rules.Consider for instance a set of traffic rules, e.g. ‘drive on theleft’, ‘do not exceed 35 miles per hour in built upareas’ and so on. Moreover, the ‘bundle’ mightinclude a variety of types of atomistic social forms, e.g.conventions, norms and rules. Guala’s account of institutions(Guala 2016) is a case in point, as we shall see in section 2below.

By contrast with atomistic accounts of social institutions,holistic—includingstructuralist-functionalist—accounts stress theinter-relationships of institutions (structure) and their contributionto larger and more complete social complexes, especially societies(function). Thus according to Barry Barnes (1995: 37):“Functionalist theories in the social sciences seek to describe,to understand and in most cases to explain the orderliness andstability of entire social systems. In so far as they treatindividuals, the treatment comes after and emerges from analysis ofthe system as a whole. Functionalist theories move from anunderstanding of the whole to an understanding of the parts of thatwhole, whereas individualism proceeds in the oppositedirection”. Moreover, (Barnes 1995: 41), “such accountslist the ”functions“ of the various institutions. Theydescribe the function of the economy as the production of goods andservices essential to the operation of the other institutions andhence the system as a whole.” Such theorists include Durkheim(1964), Radcliffe-Brown (1958) and Parsons (1968; 1982). Of particularconcern to these theorists was the moral decay consequent (in theirview) upon the demise of strong, mutually supportive socialinstitutions. Durkheim, for example, advocated powerful professionalassociations. He said (1957 p.6):

A system of morals is always the affair of a group and can operateonly if the group protects them by its authority. It is made up ofrules which govern individuals, which compel them to act in such andsuch a way, and which impose limits to their inclinations and forbidthem to go beyond. Now there is only one moral power—moral, andhence common to all—which stands above the individual and whichcan legitimately make laws for him, and that is collective power. Tothe extent the individual is left to his own devices and freed fromall social constraint, he is unfettered by all moral constraint. It isnot possible for professional ethics to escape this fundamentalcondition of any system of morals. Since, then, the society as a wholefeels no concern in professional ethics, it is imperative that therebe special groups in the society, within which these morals may beevolved, and whose business it is to see that they are observed.

Moreover, here the meta-institution of government obviously has apivotal directive and integrative role in relation to otherinstitutions and their inter-relationships, even though government isitself simply one institution within the larger society. Further,holistic accounts of institutions lay great stress on institutionalroles defined in large part by social norms; institutional roles aresupposedly largely, or even wholly, constitutive of the identity ofthe individual human agents who occupy these roles. (Individualsparticipate in a number of institutions and hence occupy a number ofinstitutional roles; hence the alleged possibility of their identitybeing constituted by a number of different institutional roles.)

Many such holistic accounts deploy and depend on the model, or atleast analogy, of an organism. A salient historical figure here isHerbert Spencer (1971, Part 3B—A Society is anOrganism). On this holistic, organicist model, socialinstitutions are analogous to the organs or limbs of a human body.Each organ or limb has a function the realisation of which contributesto the well-being of the body as a whole, and none can existindependently of the others. Thus the human body relies on the stomachto digest food in order to continue living, but the stomach cannotexist independently of the body or of other organs, such as the heart.Likewise, it is suggested, any given institution, e.g. law courts,contributes to the well-being of the society as a whole, and yet isdependent on other institutions, e.g. government. Here the“well-being” of the society as a whole is sometimesidentified with the stability and continuation of the society as itis; hence the familiar charge that holistic, organicist accounts areinherently politically conservative. This political conservatismtransmutes into political authoritarianism when society is identifiedwith the system of institutions that constitute the nation-state andthe meta-institution of the nation-state—the government—isassigned absolute authority in relation to all other institutions.Hence the contrasting emphasis in political liberalism on theseparation of powers among, for example, the executive, thelegislature and the judiciary.

In the context of a discussion of atomistic and holist accounts ofinstitutions, it is important to distinguish the view thatinstitutions are not reducible to the individual human persons (andtheir actions) who constitute them from the view that institutions arethemselves agents possessed of minds and a capacity to reason (seeSection 5). Institutions might not be reducible to theirrole-occupying human members and their actions for reasons other thaninstitutions per se being agents. Thus Epstein points out (2015: 46)that some facts about the firm, Starbucks, do not depend (in the senseof supervene) on facts about people and the actions they perform butrather on facts about coffee, for instance. (See also Ruben 1985).Peter French (1984) is an advocate of the view that institutions perse are agents possessed of a capacity to reason as are, in somewhatdifferent forms, List and Pettit (2011), Tollefsen (2015) and Epstein(2015). (See also Margaret Gilbert’s notion of a “pluralsubject” [1989: 200]). Searle (1990), Miller (2001) and Ludwig(2017) have argued against the proposition that collective entitiesper se are agents possessed of mental states. For instance, Ludwig hasoffered analyses of sentences that apparently ascribe mental states tocollective entities, such as ‘Germany intends to invadePoland’, in terms of the intentions of individual members ofthese entities, and the actions of collective entities in terms of themembers of the collective group in question being agents of an event(Ludwig 2017).

Thus far we have discussed atomistic and holistic accounts of socialinstitutions. However, there is a third possibility, namely, (whatmight be termed)molecular (or, alternatively, modular)accounts. Roughly speaking, a molecular account of an institutionwould not seek to reduce the institution to simpler atomic forms, suchas conventions; nor would it seek to define an institution in terms ofits relationships with other institutions and its contribution to thelarger societal whole. Rather, each institution would be analogous toa molecule; it would have constitutive elements (“atoms”)but also have its own structure and unity. A number of philosophicaltheories of social institutions are explicitly or implicitly molecularin character (Harre 1969; Searle 1995; Miller 2010; Bratman 2022).Moreover, on this conception each social institution would have adegree of independence vis-à-vis other institutions and thesociety at large; on the other hand, the set of institutions mightitself under certain conditions form a unitary system of sorts, e.g. acontemporary liberal democratic nation-state comprised of a number ofsemi-autonomous public and private institutions functioning in thecontext of the meta-institution of government.

A general problem for holistic organicist accounts of socialinstitutions—as opposed to molecular accounts—is thatsocial institutions can be responses totrans-societalrequirements or needs. Accordingly, an institution is not necessarilya constitutive element of some given society in the sense that it isboth in part constitutive of that society and wholly contained withinthat society. Examples of such trans-societal institutions are theinternational financial system, the international legal system, theUnited Nations and some multi-national corporations. Indeed, arguablyany given element of such a trans-societal institution stands in someinternal relations to elements of other societies.

In this section accounts of institutions have been discussed ingeneral terms. It is now time to focus on some specific influential,contemporary philosophical accounts beginning with ones based inrational choice theory.

2. Social Institutions and Coordination Equilibria

As noted above, the starting point for theories of social institutionsutilising a rational choice framework is Lewis’ theory ofconventions (Lewis 1969). According to Lewis—who was inspired byHume (Hume 1740: Book III)—conventions are the solutions tocoordination problems. (See also Schwayder 1965.) Thus the regularityin behaviour of driving on the right is the solution to thecoordination problem confronting road users. Here there are twoequilibria: everyone driving on the right or, alternatively, everyonedriving on the left. Everyone driving on the right is an equilibriumsince everyone prefers to drive on the right, given everyone elsedoes, and everyone expects everyone to drive on the right. Conventionsare certainly ubiquitous. However, social institutions evidentlyconsist in more than conventions. Importantly, as noted above, theyconsist in part in rules, including but not restricted to laws andregulations. But regularities in behaviour that result from compliancewith rules are not necessarily equilibria in the sense in use inrational choice theory. Accordingly, a serviceable account of socialinstitutions looks like it needs to help itself (at least) to bothconventions (or, at least, equilibria in the sense of Nash equilibria,i.e. (roughly) a combination of actions such that no actor has anincentive to change his or her action unilaterally), and rules.

Guala has propounded an account of institutions he refers to as therules-in-equilibrium approach. This account, as its name suggests,seeks to unify the rules-based conception of institutions and the viewthat institutions are the equilibria of strategic games (Guala 2016).As such, institutions facilitate coordination and cooperation; indeed,that is their defining function. However, regularities in behaviour inaccordance with an equilibrium strategy, e.g. everyone driving on theleft, typically take the form of a rule, e.g. ‘Drive on theleft’. Therefore, according to Guala, essentially institutionsare rules that people are motivated to follow, i.e. rules backed up bya system of incentives and expectations that motivate people to followthese rules. Accordingly, and in contrast with collective acceptanceaccounts (see section 3 below), there is no need to posit jointintentions or the like in order to ensure the rules in partconstitutive of an institution are followed—or otherwise toprovide the ‘glue’ that holds an institution together.

Moreover, contra Searle (1995) and (again) contra the collectiveacceptance account (see section 3 below), for the most partinstitutional rules are merely regulative and not constitutive (Guala2016: ch.5). Roughly speaking, a regulative rule governs apre-existing action type, e.g. ‘Do not walk on the grass’,whereas constitutive rules (supposedly) create new forms of activity,e.g. the rules of chess, and have the form ‘X counts as Y incircumstances, C’ (Searle 2010: 96). According to Guala,constitutive rules are not necessary to institutions; regulative rulesare sufficient. (See section 3 below.)

Guala’s account has implications for controversies concerningalleged differences between the natural sciences and the socialsciences and, specifically, for the pluralist view that unlike naturalentities, social entities, such as institutions, are mind-dependent(Searle 2010). For example, the fact that a dollar bill is money andnot merely paper, depends on a collective belief that it can be usedas a medium of exchange. By contrast, a molecule of water is waterirrespective of anyone’s belief. At this point Guala invokes adistinction between causal dependence and ontological dependence. Ifx causesy thenx andy aredistinct existences;x andy are ontologicallyindependent. Thus a brick falling on one’s foot causes pain; butthe pain is not the same thing as the falling brick coming into hardcontact with one’s foot. What of dollar bills? On Guala’sview dollar bills are causally dependent on beliefs but notontologically dependent. Since the causal dependence of socialentities on beliefs and the like is consistent with the causaldependence of natural entities on one another and on beliefs etc., themind-dependence of social entities is merely a species of causaldependence and, therefore, does not imply a genuinely pluralist viewof the natural sciences and the social sciences (as would be the caseif dollar bills and the like were ontologically dependent on beliefs).A monist conception is admissible.

Moreover, according to Guala, the view that institutions aremind-dependent (Searle 2010: 17–18) is inconsistent with theexistence of mistaken beliefs about institutions on the part ofparticipants in those institutions. Guala seems correct in claimingthat there are some such mistaken beliefs, e.g. everyone might falselybelieve that their worthless devalued currency was money.

Guala also argues (2016: ch. 14) that his monist rules-in-equilibriumapproach is normatively neutral. Guala’s normative neutrality isopen to question. Guala’s rules-in-equilibrium account ofinstitutions helps itself only to instrumental normativity (includingthe rationality of compliance due to sanctions) and eschews moralconsiderations in favour of the permissive notion of preference. Thecontrast here is with the teleological account (section 4) whichgrounds institutions on collective goods, especially aggregate humanneed, e.g. the need for food (agricultural institutions), health(hospitals), education (schools), security (police services) etc. And,as David Wiggins has argued (1991) needs generate moral obligations.On Guala’s view cooperative enterprises which undermineinstitutions, e.g. corrupt cliques, criminal organisations, canthemselves be institutions, as can somewhat trivialconvention-governed games, e.g. tic-tac-toe, hopscotch.

More generally, Guala’s view seems to overstate the coordinatingfunction of institutions and, as a result, conflate the underlyingproblem solved by an institution with the surface problem that theavailability of multiple solutions gives rise to, i.e. the problem ofcoordinating on one of the available solutions. Thus the underlyingproblem of avoiding traffic collisions is solved by all traffictravelling in one direction keeping to one side of the road and alltraffic travelling in the opposite direction keeping to the oppositeside. However, this solution now gives rise to a coordination problemsince there are two equally good solutions, i.e. all driving on theleft or all driving on the right. This point applies to other rationalchoice coordination equilibria approaches, including Lewis’influential theory of conventions (Miller 1986).

3. Collective Acceptance Theory of Institutions

Collective acceptance accounts and, for that matter teleologicalaccounts, of social action in general, and of social institutions inparticular, fall within the rationalist, individualist, philosophy ofaction tradition that has its roots in Aristotle, Hume and Kant and isassociated with contemporary analytic philosophers of social actionsuch as Michael Bratman (1987), John Searle (1995), and Raimo Tuomela(2002). However, this way of proceeding also has a place outsidephilosophy, in sociological theory. Broadly speaking, it is thestarting point for the voluntaristic theory of social actionassociated with the likes of Georg Simmel (1971), Max Weber (1949),(the early) Talcott Parsons (1968) and Alfred Schutz (Schutz andParsons 1978). For example, the following idea in relation to socialaction is expressed by Parsons (1968: 229):

actions do not take place separately each with a separate, discreteend in relation to the situation, but in long complicated‘chains’ … [and] the total complex of means-endrelationships is not to be thought of as similar to a large number ofparallel threads, but as a complicated web (if not a tangle).

However, unsurprisingly, the teleological account lays much greaterexplanatory emphasis on the means-end relationship in collectiveaction contexts and much less on collective acceptance.

That said, the starting point for both kinds of theory has been thenotion of a joint action and its constitutive conative notions (or,atleast, terminology) of shared intentions (Bratman 2014), we-intentions(Tuomela 2013), collective intentions (Searle 1990), collective ends(Miller 2001: Chapter 2), depending on which theorist is in question.Examples of joint action are two people lifting a table together, andtwo men jointly pushing a car. However, such basic two person jointactions exist at one end of a spectrum. At the other end are much morecomplex, multi-person, joint actions, such as a large group ofengineers, tradesmen and construction workers jointly building askyscraper or the members of an army jointly fighting a battle.

Over the last several decades a number of analyses of joint actionhave emerged (Gilbert 1989; Miller 2001: Chapter 2; Searle 1990 and1995; Tuomela 2002; Schmid 2009; Ludwig 2016). A number of thesetheorists have developed and applied their favoured basic accounts ofjoint action in order to account for a range of social phenomena,including conventions, social norms and social institutions.

Individualism (of which more below) is committed to an analysis ofjoint action such that ultimately a joint action consists of: (1) anumber of singular actions; and (2) relations among these singularactions. Moreover, the constitutive conative attitudes involved injoint actions are individual attitudes; there are no sui generiswe-attitudes.

By contrast, according to supra-individualists (Gilbert 1989), when aplurality of individual agents perform a joint action, then the agentshave the relevant propositional attitudes (beliefs, intentions etc.)in an irreducible ‘we-form’, which is sui generis (Searle1990) and as such not analysable in terms of individual or I-attitudesTuomela 2013). Moreover, the individual agents constitute a newentity, a supra-individual entity not reducible to the individualagents and the relations among them (Epstein 2015).

If the starting point for theorists in this strand of contemporaryphilosophy of action is joint action (and its associated collectiveintentionality), it is by no means the endpoint. Specifically, thereis the important matter of the relationship between joint action andsocial institutions. For example, while joint actions per se do notseem to necessarily involve rights, duties and other deonticproperties (see Gilbert 1989 for a contrary view), it is self-evidentthat social institutions do so. Theorists within this recent traditionagree that joint actions—or perhaps the collectiveintentionality definitive of joint actions—is at least one ofthe building blocks of social institutions. However, the questionremains as to the precise relationship between joint actions (and itsassociated collective intentionality) on the one hand, and socialinstitutions on the other. More specifically, there is the question ofhow, or if, we-intentions can generate deontic properties, such as theinstitutional rights and duties definitive of institutional roles.

According to collective acceptance accounts (Searle 1995 and 2010;Tuomela 2002; Ludwig 2017), social institutions are created andmaintained by collective acceptance. Collective acceptance accountsare constructivist; institutional facts and, therefore, institutionsexist only in so far as they are collectively believed to exist or areotherwise the content of a collective attitude, such as awe-intention. Typically, such collective attitudes are not to beunderstood as reducible to individual attitudes or aggregates thereof.(Ludwig is an exception among collective acceptance adherents.According to him the so-called we-intentions constitutive ofcollective acceptance (Ludwig 2017: 132) are analysable in terms ofinterlocking individual intentions to achieve some outcome by means ofa shared plan (Ludwig 2017: 26)). Thus Searle claims his notion of acollective intention or we-intention is a primitive notion that is notreducible to an individual intention, nor to an individual intentionin conjunction with other individual attitudes such as individualbeliefs (Searle 1995: 24–6; Searle 2010: Chapter 3).Searle’s invocation of an unanalysed allegedly primitive notionis controversial in the context of reductive accounts (Miller 2001;Bratman 2014; Ludwig 2016).

Collective acceptance is not simply a matter of psychologicalattitudes standing in some straightforward causal relation to theexternal world as is the case, for instance, with common orgarden-variety intentions, including the joint intentions definitiveof basic joint actions. The idea is not that a group forms a jointintention to (say) push a boulder up a hill and, thereby, jointlycause the boulder to be relocated to the top of the hill. Rather thenotion of a performative is typically invoked (Austin 1962; Searle2010: 11).

Examples of performatives are: ‘I name this ship the QueenElizabeth’—as uttered when smashing the bottle against thestem; ‘I give and bequeath my watch to mybrother’—as occurring in a will (Austin 1962: 5).Performatives are speech acts which bring about an outcome in theexternal world (e.g. that the name of the ship is the Queen Elizabethor that my brother is the owner of what used to be my watch).Specifically, performatives are sayings which are also doings. InSearle’s terminology, merely saying something (‘Ido’) counts as something else (becoming a wife). An importantspecies of performatives are declarative speech acts (e.g. saying‘I declare war’ in a certain context counts as going towar). A key point about performatives appears to be that it is byvirtue of a convention that saying such and such in a given contextbrings the outcome about (Miller 1984). Accordingly, the outcomedepends on collective acceptance (in the sense of compliance with theconvention) and, indeed, to this extent the outcome is in partconstituted by collective acceptance (in this sense). Searle himselfspeaks of constitutive rules at this point; rules that have the form‘X counts as Y in context C’ (Searle 2010: 95).

As mentioned above, Guala denies a central role to constitutive rules.According to Guala, (following Hindriks 2009), constitutive rules areessentially naming devices; they state the conditions of applicationof theoretical terms used to refer to institutions. For instance, adollar note (X) counts as money (Y) if it is issued by the relevantauthority. Here the Y term simply names a pattern of activity governedby regulative rules, e.g. ‘Use the note as a medium ofexchange’. Other theorists who have, in effect, reduced orotherwise down-graded Searle’s notion of constitutive rules infavour of regulative rules, including systems of regulative rules areMiller (2001: 191) and, more recently, Ludwig (2017). According toLudwig, constitutive rules are regulative rules such thatintentionally following them constitutes the activity they govern(Ludwig 2017: 262).

Favourite examples used by collective acceptance theorists are money,political authorities, and, most importantly for our concerns here,so-called status roles. Thus Tuomela says (2007: 183):“‘performative’ collective acceptance must have beenin place for squirrel pelt to become money.” And Searle says(2010: 101): “But when we count pieces of paper of a particularsort as twenty-dollar bills we are making them twenty dollar bills byDeclaration. The Declaration makes something the case by counting itas that, by declaring it to be, the case.” The problem with thisview of money (in its role purely as a medium of exchange) is thatTuomela’s invocation of performatives and Searle’sinvocation of declaratives seem unnecessary. The fact that squirrelpelts, shells or bit of inked paper are used as mediums of exchange issufficient for them to be money. For a squirrel pelt to count as moneyor to be treated as money or to be collectively accepted as money isjust for it to be used as a medium of exchange (Miller 2001: 182;Guala 2016: 40).

What of political authorities? Searle says (1995: 91–2):“More spectacular examples are provided by the collapse of theSoviet empire in the annus mirabilis, 1989.… It collapsed whenthe system of status-functions was no longer accepted.” However,such collapses of political systems seem to demonstrate a specialfeature of institutional positions of authority rather than ofinstitutional roles in general. Specifically, it is a necessarycondition of wielding authority that subordinates obey the commands oftheir superior. Presumably, they do so because they believe the personin question has a moral right to be obeyed and/or they fear sanctionsif they do not obey (Miller 2001: 189).

What of status roles, i.e. institutional roles, in general? These arevery important for our purposes in this entry. According to Searle(see also Ludwig 2017: Chapter 8), institutions necessarily involvewhat he calls status-functions, and something has astatus-function—as opposed to a mere function—if it has,or those who use it have, deontic properties (institutional rights andduties) and, therefore, deontic powers (Searle 2018). Thus anorthopaedic surgeon has a status-function, and therefore a set ofdeontic powers, including rights to perform operations and chargepeople for doing so, and duties not to perform operations he or she isnot accredited to perform, e.g. brain surgery. These status-functions,and therefore deontic powers, have been created by collectivelyaccepted constitutive rules (constitutive rules, as we have seen, havefor Searle the general form ‘X counts as Y in context C’).Importantly, as we saw above, according to Searle, constitutive rulesdo not regulate a pre-existing activity; rather the activity iscreated by, and consists in acting in accordance with, constitutive(and related regulative) rules. Accordingly, institutional roles areof the same general kind as pieces in a game of chess (to use one ofSearle’s favourite examples (Searle 2018: 305)) and, therefore,unlike driving a car (which, according to Searle, pre-exists theregulative rules that govern it (Searle 2018: 305)); institutionalroles and their defining deontic properties, are institutional factscreated by collectively accepted constitutive rules.

The first point to be made here is that contra Searle manyinstitutional roles seem more akin to regularly driving a car than tochess pieces. The institutional role of surgeon is a case in point.The ability and activity definitive of a surgeon, i.e. cutting andstitching human bodies, is evidently logically prior to theinstitutional rights and duties that attach to the institutional roleof a surgeon (Miller 2001: 186). More generally, a surgeon couldseemingly carry out surgical operations on willing patientsirrespective not only of whether she was professionally accredited(and, therefore, possessed of the requisite institutional rights andduties), but also of whether she was widely regarded as a surgeon inher community. Consider, for instance, a morally motivated, skilful,surgeon whose full-time job is transplanting hearts in a jurisdictionin which organ transplantation is illegal.

If this is correct then the crucial issue that now arises concerns therelationship between possession of the deontic properties, i.e.institutional rights and duties, at least in part constitutive of aninstitutional role, on the one hand, and the actual ability toundertake that role, bearing in mind that the activity is, at least insome cases of institutional roles, logically prior to itsinstitutional raiment. Specifically, are the institutional rights andduties in part definitive of institutional roles, such as that of asurgeon, merely the creation of collectively accepted constitutiverules, irrespective of how collective acceptance and constitutiverules are understood (see, for instance, Ludwig (2017: Chapter 8) fora view that derives from, but is somewhat different to,Searle’s), or are they based on more than this? For instance,are institutional rights and duties in large part based on moralconsiderations, such as needs, e.g. the institutional right to performheart transplants is based on the needs of patient for a new heart, asper the teleological account of social institutions (section 4 below)?One response favoured by collective acceptance theorists, such asTuomela (2013: 126) and Ludwig (2017: 129–130), is to invoke thenotion of an explicit or implicit agreement (and, therefore, promiseor quasi-promise) as in part constitutive of collective acceptance(because either constitutive of we-intentions or of conventions).However, this reliance on the notion of an agreement ultimatelygrounds deontic properties on a contractualist moral theory and,therefore, brings with it all the objections to such theories, e.g.that there typically no explicit agreements and a lack of evidence ofmany implicit agreements.

4. The Teleological Account of Institutions

As noted above, the central concept in the teleological account ofsocial institutions (Miller 2010) is that of joint action. On theteleological account, joint actions consist of the intentionalindividual actions of a number of agents directed to the realisationof a collective end. (Note that intentions are not the same things asends, e.g. an agent who intentionally andgratuitously raiseshis armex hypothesi has no end or purpose in doing so.)Importantly, on the teleological account, a collectiveend—notwithstanding its name—is a species of individualend; it is an end possessed by each of the individuals involved in thejoint action. However it is an end, which is not realised by theaction of any one of the individuals; the actions of all or mostrealise the end. So contra anti-reductionist theorists such asGilbert, Tuomela and Searle, the teleological account holds that jointactions can be analysed in terms of individualist notions. A secondmajor point of differentiation from collective acceptance accounts isthat on the teleological account conative notions, such aswe-intentions and, more relevantly, collective ends, cannot in and ofthemselves generate deontic properties, specifically institutionalrights and duties. Accordingly, the basis for deontic properties mustlie elsewhere. As we shall see, on the teleological account, the basisfor deontological properties is to be found in large part in thecollective goods provided by institutions. Moreover, in virtue of thecollective ends of institutions being collective goods, theteleological account is anormative account.

Collective ends can be unconsciously pursued, and have not necessarilybeen at any time explicitly formulated in the minds of those pursuingthem; collective ends can beimplicit in the behaviour andattitudes of agents without ceasing to be ends as such. Further, inthe case of a collective end pursued over a long period of time, e.g.by members of an institution over generations, the collective end canbelatent at a specific point in time, i.e. it is notactually being pursued, explicitly or implicitly, at that point intime. However, it does not thereby cease to be an end of thatinstitution—which is to say, of those persons—even atthose times when it is not being pursued.

As we saw above, organisations consist of an (embodied) formalstructure of interlocking roles. These roles can be definedin terms of tasks, regularities in action and the like. Moreover,unlike social groups, organisations are individuated by the kind ofactivity which they undertake, and also by their characteristicends. So we have governments, universities, businesscorporations, armies, and so on. Perhaps governments have as an end orgoal the ordering and leading of societies, universities the end ofdiscovering and disseminating knowledge, and so on (Miller 2010: PartB). Here it is important to reiterate that these ends are, firstly,collective ends and, secondly, often the latent and/or implicit(collective) ends of individual institutional actors.

On the teleological account, a further defining feature oforganisations is that organisational action typically consists in,what has elsewhere been termed, alayered structure of jointactions. One illustration of the notion of a layered structure ofjoint actions is an armed force fighting a battle. Suppose at anorganisation level a number of “actions” are severallynecessary and jointly sufficient to achieve some collective end. Thusthe “actions” of the mortar squad destroying enemy gunemplacements, the flight of military planes providing air-cover andthe infantry platoon taking and holding the ground might be severallynecessary and jointly sufficient to achieve the collective end ofdefeating the enemy; as such these “actions” constitute ajoint action. Call each of these “actions” level-twoactions. Suppose, in addition, that each of these level-two“actions” is itself—at least in part—a jointaction whose component actions are severally necessary and jointlysufficient for the performance of the level-two “action”in question. Call these component actions, level-one actions. So thecollective end of the level-one actions is the performance of thelevel-two “action”. Thus the individual members of themortar squad jointly operate the mortar in order to realise thecollective end of destroying enemy gun emplacements. Each pilot,jointly with the other pilots, strafes enemy soldiers in order torealise the collective end of providing air-cover for their advancingfoot soldiers. Finally, the set of foot soldiers jointly advance inorder to take and hold the ground vacated by the members of theretreating enemy force. The actions of each of the individual footsoldiers, mortar squad members and individual pilots are level-oneactions.

On the teleological account a further feature of many socialinstitutions is their use ofjoint institutional mechanisms.Examples of joint institutional mechanisms are the device of tossing acoin to resolve a dispute and voting to elect a candidate to politicaloffice.

Joint institutional mechanisms consist of: (a) a complex ofdifferentiated actions, e.g., voters voting and candidates standingfor election (the input to the mechanism); (b) the result of theperformance of these actions, e.g., Barack Obama is elected Presidentof the United States (the output of the mechanism), and; (c) themechanism itself, e.g., the mechanism whereby voters vote, candidatesstand for election, and whoever gets the most votes is elected. Notethat there is interdependence of action here. Thus, a given agentmight vote for a candidate. He will do so only if others also vote.But further to this, there is the action of the candidates, namely,that they present themselves as candidates (and do so only if thereare voters who vote or, at least, it is believed that there are). Thatthey present themselves as candidates is (in part) constitutive of theinput to the voting mechanism. Voters votefor candidates. Sothere is not only differentiated action, there is interdependentaction. Moreover, this differentiated, interdependent action of thevoters and the candidates is a species of joint action; it has apurpose or collective end, e.g., to elect the President. Moreover,this purpose or collective end, if realised, is the result of thejoint action; the joint action consisting of the individual actions ofvoting and standing as a candidate. The result is that some candidate,say, Barack Obama is voted in. That there is a result is (in part)constitutive of the mechanism. That to receive the most number ofvotes is to be voted in, is (in part) constitutive of the votingmechanism. Moreover that Obama is voted in is not a collective end ofall the voters. (Although it is a collective end of those who votedfor Obama.) However, that the one who gets the mostvotes—whoever that happens to be—is voted in is acollective end of all the (bona fide) voters, including those whovoted for some candidate other than Obama.

If the end realised in joint action, and organisational action inparticular, is not merely a collective end, but also a collectivegood, then moral properties may well be generated. In the first place,the collective good might consist in an aggregate of basic human needsthat have been met, as in the case of food producers, schools,hospitals and police organisations. But, arguably, such needs generatemoral obligations; other things being equal, the desperately poor (forexample) morally ought to be assisted by the ongoing, organised jointaction of those able to assist.

In the second place—at the, so to speak, production, as opposedto the consumption, end of joint action—the realisation ofcollective ends that are also collective goods may well generate jointmoral rights. It is easy to see why some agents, and not other agents,would have a right to such a good; they are the ones responsible forits existence, or continued existence. In this connection consider themanagers and workers in a factory that produces cars which are soldfor profit. Managers and workers in the factory—but notnecessarily others—have a joint moral right to be remuneratedfrom the sales of the cars that they jointly produced—and notsimply on the basis of some contractual arrangement that they may haveentered into. It is also clear that if one participating agent has amoral right to the good, then—other things being equal—sodo the others. That is, there is interdependence of moral rights withrespect to the good. Moreover, these moral rights generate correlativemoral duties on the part of others to respect these rights. Naturallythese prior joint right and duties can be, and are, institutionalisedincluding by way of contract based legal rights and duties that tosome extent respect the relative contributions made by theparticipants.

Unlike the collective acceptance account the teleological accountpresupposes some important moral rights and duties. Thus a policeofficer’s institutional duty to arrest an offender is based inpart on his victim’s moral right to protection. As such, it isopen to the charge that moral rights and duties presupposeinstitutional forms rather than the reverse. Specifically, the conceptof a right might be held to make no sense outside an institutionalenvironment. Indeed, Searle (2010: Chapter 8) offers this kind ofargument, including in relation to human rights (Burman 2018). Anotherobjection is that many members of organisations do not have thecollective ends of the institution of which they are members; perhaps,for instance, they only perform their roles because they are paid todo so (Miller 2001: 180; Shapiro 2014; Bratman 2022: Chapter 4).

In this section the teleological account of social institutions hasbeen elaborated. In the following section the procedural social rulemodel is presented and in section 6 issues of institutions and agencyare discussed.

5. The Procedural Social Rule Model

Michael Bratman has recently (Bratman 2022) elaborated what might bereferred to as a procedural social rule model of institutions in thecontext of our concern here with social institutions understood asorganisations and systems of organisations. This model emerges in thecourse of Bratman’s exploration of the proposition that plansand planning are central to the organisational structure of humaninstitutions. This proposition is not necessarily controversialassuming, of course, that Bratman does not want to deny thatinstitutions often also evolve in unpredictable ways that are not inaccord with prior plans. The procedural social rule model that emergesis based in part on Bratman’s prior planning model ofsmall-scale shared intentional activities (SIAs) (Bratman 2014), andin part on his recourse to H. L. A. Hart inspired social rules ofprocedure (Hart 2012).

Bratman’s model of SIAs can be glossed as follows. Two or moreindividual agents each intentionally perform a singular action torealise a shared or we-intention, thereby performing a joint action oractivity. Thus, for example,A intends that we (i.e.,A andB) paint the house, andB intendsthat we (A andB) paint the house. A controversialfeature of this account is thatAintendsB’s contributory action (of, saying, painting theceilings) andBintendsA’scontributory action (of, saying, painting the walls), given thatA’s action of painting the walls is underA’s control andB’s action of paintingthe ceilings is underB’s control. On alternativeconceptions, participants in joint actions merely havebeliefs about one another’s contributory actions.Bratman also has recourse to what he refers to as a shared policy(roughly, a shared habit). Thus,A might have the policy(habit) of going for a walk. However,A andB mighthave the shared policy to walk together, ifA intends that we(A andB) walk together habitually (and likewiseB intends that we walk together habitually).

Bratman recognises that his model of small-scale SIA’s will notapply straightforwardly to organised institutions, such as acorporation or an army. For one thing organised institutions caninvolve thousands of members and in such large-scale organisationsseemingly each employee will not intend the actions of (at least) themany other employees who are unknown to him (Bratman 2022: 4.1.2). Foranother thing, such institutions consist of rule-defined roles whosehuman occupants are replaceable by other humans.

Bratman’s response is, in effect, to conceive of organisedinstitutions as structures of rules. On this view a paradigm instanceof an organised institution is a legal system. Hence the relevance ofHart’s theory of law (see also Epstein 2015). Legal systemsinvolve compliance with (on Hart’s view) rules on the part ofmembers of large populations. Moreover, institutional roles can bedefined (in large part, at least) in terms of such rules. FurtherHart’s notion of procedural rules is a key element of his theoryof law and, suitably modified, of Bratman’s account ofinstitutions. Roughly speaking, a procedural rule is a secondary rulegoverning primary rules, e.g., a legal rule of recognition thatdetermines what counts as a valid law. Importantly, a small set ofprocedural roles can provide a unifying role in relation to anotherwise disparate very large set of primary rules.

An immediate problem with an attempt to integrate Bratman’smodel of SIAs with Hart’s notion of a social rule (conceived asa shared policy) is that on Bratman’s account compliance with asocial rule involves each participant intending the compliance of allthe other participants. Whereas one might find this to have someplausibility in the case of shared policies in small groups it lackscredibility when the social rules in question have potentiallyhundreds of thousands of participants most of whom are unknown to oneanother.

Bratman’s response to the problem involves in partdistinguishing between what he refers to as the kernel and itspenumbra. Members of the kernel intend the compliance of the actionsof other members to a social rule. By contrast, those in the penumbrado not have this intention. Nevertheless, members of the penumbracomply because they are “kernel-induced” (Bratman 20224.1.4), e.g., they are motivated by sanctions.

Having elaborated his account of a social rule and a cluster thereof,Bratman now turns directly to the matter of organised institutionsand, specifically, the step from a cluster of social rules to anorganised institution. It is here that Hart’s notion of aprocedural or secondary rule (‘a rule about rules’) playsa key role notably, in Bratman’s hands, in inducing a structureof institutional roles and offices (Bratman 2022: 5.2). Moreover,consistent with some of these roles and offices being positions ofauthority, some of these social rules of procedure areauthority-according social rules. This recourse to the notion of anauthority-according social rule of procedure marks a discontinuitywith the prior notion of a mere social rule, since social rules(understood as shared policies) do not, as such, necessarily imply anyauthority relations. Armed with this notion of a social rule ofprocedure, including authority-according social rules of procedure,and their outputs—as well as, of course other social rules andthe individuals who comply with all these various rules (either in thekernel or the penumbra)—Bratman characterises an organisedinstitution in terms of a web of social rules of procedure. At thispoint a question arises as to how an organised institution thuscharacterised can be individuated, given that there may well be nosingle overarching social procedural rule that unifies the othersocial procedural rules. Bratman suggests that the various socialprocedural rules in question need to constitute a “richweb” of such rules that are consistent with one another and thatinterlock, e.g., the content of the output of the social proceduralrule concerning advertising (of, say, the pharmaceutical product,penicillin), specifies the content of the output of the socialprocedural rule concerning goods to produce (penicillin).

Having characterised organised institutions in terms of webs of socialrules (understood as shared policies), especially social proceduralrules, Bratman turns to a further issue, namely, whether organisedinstitutions per se have intentions. This issue is addressed in thefollowing section, albeit not specifically Bratman’s treatmentof it. Suffice it to say here that Bratman claims that there are suchintentions and suggests that institutional intentions are theinstitutional outputs of the social procedural rules constitutive ofinstitutions (on his account of institutions). Here he has recourse toa functional theory of intention. Consider an output of Medic Supply,namely the supplying of medical supplies toC. According toBratman, this output was set to function in ways characteristic of anintention; therefore, it is an intention of Medic Supply (Bratman2022: Ch. 7).

6. Institutions and Agency

As mentioned above, it is convenient to conceive of socialinstitutions as possessed of four dimensions, namely, structure,authority/power, function and culture. While the structure,authority/power, function and culture of an institution provide aframework within which individuals act, they do not fully determinethe actions of individuals. There are a number of reasons why this isso. For one thing, rules, norms and ends cannot cover everycontingency that might arise; for another, rules, norms and so on,themselves need to be interpreted and applied. Moreover, changingcircumstances and unforeseeable problems make it desirable to vestinstitutional role occupants (individually or jointly) withdiscretionary powers to rethink and adjust old rules, norms, and ends,and sometimes elaborate new ones (Warwick 1981)

Legitimate individual or collective discretionary activity undertakenwithin an institution is typically facilitated by a rational internalstructure—including role structure—, and by a rationalinstitutional culture. By rational, it is here meant internallyconsistent, as well as rational in the light of theinstitution’s purposes. For instance, a hierarchical rolestructure might be rational in one institution, e.g. a defence force,but not another, e.g. a university. Again, a culture of greed mightundermine an institution’s purposes, e.g. in a financialinstitution.

Aside from the internal dimensions of an institution, there are itsexternal relationships, including its relationships to otherinstitutions. In particular, there is the extent of the independenceof an institution from other institutions, including government. Onethinks here of the separation of powers among the legislative,executive and judicial institutions in the United States of Americaand elsewhere.

It should be noted that, strictly speaking, independence is not thesame thing as autonomy, but is rather a necessary condition for it. Aninstitution possessed of independence from other institutions mightnevertheless lack autonomy, if it lacked the kinds of rationalinternal structure and culture noted above. Indeed, internal conflictscan paralyse an institution to the point where it becomes incapable ofpursuing its institutional purposes, e.g. a bitterly dividedlegislature.

Granted that institutional actors have a degree of discretionarypower, nevertheless, they are constrained by institutional structure,and specifically the role structure of the role that they occupy. Asis often pointed out, institutional structure also enables the actionof institutional actors (Giddens 1984). Police officers, for example,have significant powers not possessed by ordinary citizens.

A much-discussed issue in the philosophical literature that arises atthis point concerns the alleged agency of of institutions;specifically, the view that institutions (and other collectiveentities) per se are agents. As mentioned, advocates of this view inone form or another, include French (1984), Gilbert (1989), List andPettit (2011), Tollefsen (2015) and Epstein (2015).

List and Pettit provide an argument based on judgement aggregation insupport of their view and suggest, further, that the actions ofcollective entities supervene on those of their members. The judgementaggregation paradox (see also Copp 2007) is supposed to demonstratethe existence of processes of irreducibly collective reasoning fromwhich irreducibly collective intentions and judgements—and,ultimately, group minds—are inferred. (See Szigeti 2013 forcounter-arguments to List and Pettit). A key question is whether theexamples provided by Copp, by List and Pettit, and by others can beaccommodated by an analysis which does not help itself to processes ofreasoning that are irreducibly collective. Consider the well-knowntenure committee example (Copp 2007).

The tenure committee consists of three members and the criteria forassessment are excellence in teaching, research and administration.Each of the members of the committee believes the candidate isexcellent in only two of the areas. However, the committee can reachits conclusion to deny or confirm tenure on the basis of aconclusion-driven procedure or a premise-driven procedure. If theconclusion-driven procedure is used tenure will be denied since onthis procedure each votes to confirm tenure only if he or she judgesthe candidate to be excellent in all three areas (and this is not thecase—rather each member judges the candidate to be excellent inonly two areas, albeit the members differ from one another regardingwhich two areas). On the other hand, if the premise-driven procedureis used tenure will be confirmed. For on the premise-driven procedurethe members vote three times, once for each criterion, and each membervotes on each criterion. If a majority judge the candidate to beexcellent on a given criterion then the candidate is deemed to beexcellent on that criterion. Since with respect to each of thecriteria a majority would vote that the candidate is excellent, theresult would be that the candidate is deemed to be excellent in allthree areas and tenure would be confirmed. The adherents ofirreducibly collectivist reasoning claim that that the choice betweenthe premise-driven way and the conclusion-driven way is a choicebetween submitting to individual reason and submitting to irreduciblycollective reason. The claim that the conclusion-driven way involvesirreducibly collective reasoning has its critics (Szigeti 2013; Miller2018) who mount some version of the following argument.

Both the conclusion-driven procedure and the premise-driven procedureinvolve a voting mechanism; and voting mechanisms have been analysedin wholly individualist terms e.g., on some teleological accounts (asper section 3 above). In addition, both the conclusion-drivenprocedure and the premise-driven procedure involve a process ofreasoning from premises to a conclusion. However, in theconclusion-driven procedure, as in the premise-driven procedure, theactual process of reasoning is carried out in the individual heads ofeach of the members of the tenure committee, i.e., in each case it isapparently individually-based. Of course, arguably, each member of thetenure committee is of the view that tenure ought to be confirmed(given that each believes excellence in two areas is a sufficientcondition for tenure). However, each member is also committed to theconclusion-driven procedure and that procedure delivers (in thecontext of the input from each of the members of the committee) theresult that tenure ought to be denied. Perhaps, therefore, they oughtto abandon the conclusion-driven procedure. However, according to thecritics mentioned above, it is not clear that its application involvesirreducibly collective reasoning. Rather they claim that itdemonstrates only that a commitment on the part of individuals tovoting and other institutional procedures can deliver unanticipatedresults and/or results that are inconsistent with their priorindividual preferences.

Supposing institutions, in particular, are collective agents thereremains the question of the relationship between these collectiveagents and their human members. The favoured relationship, e.g. byList and Pettit, is that of supervenience (but see also Bratman 2022:Ch. 10). Epstein has provided detailed arguments against thesupervenience thesis. He distinguishes between what he refers as thegrounding and the anchoring of social phenomena, includinginstitutions and institutional objects, and utilizes H. L. A.Hart’s distinction (mentioned above) between primary rules andsecondary rule in doing so (Hart 1961). Roughly speaking, primaryrules directly govern the behaviour of citizens, e.g. laws againstmurder. Secondary rules determine what the primary rules are, e.g. thelegislative processes for enacting primary rules. According toEpstein, the grounds of a primary rule against murder consist of factssuch as intentional killing, whereas secondary rules, e.g. thelegislative enactment process, would anchor the primary rule. Let usnow see how this grounding/anchoring distinction works by way of theexample of the Supreme Court of the US. According to Epstein (2015:223), the fact that the Supreme Court issues a particular opinion isgrounded in facts such as that its members voted in particular ways.Moreover, their powers, e.g. to vote, are anchored in part by the USConstitution and the Judiciary Acts (which established the US courts).However, says Epstein, some grounding facts are external to factsabout the members of the institution in question, e.g. external tofacts about the justices of the Supreme Court. Therefore, the actionsof a group depend on more than the actions of the members of thegroup. For instance, the issuance of an opinion by the Supreme Courtdepends on more than the votes and other actions of the justices ofthe Supreme Court, it also depends on the constraints on their actions(Epstein 2015: 227), e.g. constraints imposed by, i.e. anchored in,the US Constitution and the Judicial Acts. Epstein takes thisdependence of the actions of the Supreme Court on external facts, andspecifically the actions of persons other than the members of theSupreme Court, to undermine the supervenience claim.

Another important issue in relation to agency concerns the nature ofthe relationship between institutional structure and the agency ofinstitutional actors (Pleasants 2019). More specifically, a questionarises as to whether or not one of these is logically prior to theother (or whether neither is). Thus some theorists, e.g. EmileDurkheim (1964) are held to conceive of structure as sui generis inrelation to individual agency; and indeed, at least in the case ofstructuralists such as Althusser (1971), explanatory of human‘agency’. The proposition of structuralists such asAlthusser (see also Foucault 1978, Asta 2018 and Burman 2022) is thatinstitutional structures (in the sense of a structure of social rolesand social norms) are a basic, non-reducible feature of the world andthe actions, values, self-images and the like of individual humanagents must conform to these structures because individual agency,properly understood, is in fact constituted by such structures. Anindividual human agent is simply the repository of the roles andvalues of the institutions in which the ‘agent’ lives hisor her life. Other theorists, e.g., arguably Max Weber (1949) andmethodological individualists, conceive of institutional structure assimply an abstraction from the habitual and interdependent actions ofindividual human beings actors. Social reality is wholly compromisedof individual human agents and their ongoing, patterned interactions;there is no structure as such. (Theorists such as Durkheim occupy amid-position in which there is both sui generis structure andnon-reducible agency; such theorists now confront the problem ofconflict between structure and individual agency—which overrideswhich?)

In relation to this issue Anthony Giddens (1976 and 1984) hasattempted to reconcile the felt reality of individual agency with theapparent need to posit some form of institutional structure thattranscends individual agency.

According to Giddens, structure is both constituted by human agencyand is the medium in which human action takes place (Giddens 1976, p.121). This seems to mean, firstly, that structure is nothing otherthan the repetition over time of the related actions of manyinstitutional actors. So the structure consists of: (i) the habitualactions of each institutional agent; (ii) the set of such agents; and(iii) the relationship of interdependence between the actions of anyone agent and the actions of the other agents. But it means, secondly,that this repetition over time of the related actions of many agentsprovides not just the context, but the framework, within which theaction of a single agent at a particular spatio-temporal point isperformed. Structure qua frameworkconstrains any givenagent’s action at a particular spatio-temporal point. (Inaddition, and as Giddens is at pains to point out, structure quaframeworkenables various actions not otherwise possible,e.g. linguistic structure enables speech acts to be performed.)

Here we need to remind ourselves of a characteristic feature ofinstitutions, namely, their reproductive capacity. Institutionsreproduce themselves, or at least are disposed to do so. On theteleological account of institutions, this is in large part becausethe members of institutions strongly identify with the institutionalends and social norms that are definitive of those institutions, andtherefore make relatively long term commitments to institutions andinduct others into those institutions.

The contrary view is proferred by, for example, Roy Bhaskar (1979: 44)who suggests that this reproduction of institutions is the unintendedresult of the free actions of institutional actors in institutionalsettings. (See also Merton 1968: Part 1 Section 3.) By way of supportfor this proposition Bhaskar claims that people do not marry toreproduce the nuclear family or work to reproduce the capitalistsystem.

Doubtless, unintended consequences—or, more precisely,consequences not aimed at as an end—have an important role inthe life and for that matter, the death, of institutions (Hirschman1970). Such consequences might include ones produced by evolutionarystyle causal mechanisms or ones involved in so-called “hiddenhand” mechanisms. (Albeit, in the case of modern institutions,such as corporations, “hidden hand” mechanisms are oftenthe product of deliberate institutional design, and so theirconsequences are in a general sense aimed at by the designers, if notby the participating institutional actors themselves.) But they alsomight include the unintended consequences of conflict and powerstruggles, whether within institutions, between institutions or as aresult of external non-institutional (or only partially institutionalin our sense) socio-economic forces. Marxism (Marx 1867), forinstance, posits such conflict, although depending on the version ofMarxism in question, the socio-economic forces in question might beregarded as quasi-intentional, even if unconscious, phenomena (seealso Foucault 1978, Asta 2018 and Burman 2022). Here, as elsewhere inthis entry, it is important to distinguish between mere causal power,e.g., possessed by non-human entities, including collective entities,as well as individual human beings, on the one hand, and on the otherhand, the intentionally exercised power of one human being (or groupof human beings) over another. It is also important to distinguishbetween the latter relational notion of power (including some forms ofinstitutional power) from ability. Evidently, a person can exercise anability i.e., perform an action, without exercising power in thelatter sense (Morriss 2002; Miller 2017).

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agency: shared |autonomy: personal |intentionality: collective |justice: distributive |legal philosophy: economic analysis of law |responsibility: collective |rights: human