Institutions appear ordinary.
Schools exist.
Courts exist.
Universities exist.
Markets exist.
Governments exist.
People continually interact with institutions.
They shape daily life so thoroughly that they often become almost invisible.
Yet a peculiar question emerges:
Where exactly is the institution?
The question initially appears easy.
One points to buildings.
Offices.
Documents.
Officials.
Procedures.
But difficulties appear immediately.
Universities can change campuses.
Courts can change buildings.
Governments can replace officials.
Rules can be revised.
And yet people still say:
It is the same institution.
Again the object seems to move elsewhere.
The object trap
Object-thinking attempts its familiar rescue operation.
Perhaps the institution simply is:
- the buildings
- the people
- the rules
- the organisational structure
- the documents
Yet every candidate quickly becomes unstable.
Remove one and the institution remains.
Replace another and the institution persists.
Change nearly all components and continuity still seems possible.
The supposedly stable object begins dissolving again.
The monster appears
Institutions behave strangely.
They shape actions.
Constrain possibilities.
Generate expectations.
Distribute authority.
Reward some activities.
Discourage others.
And yet institutions often seem to exist nowhere in particular.
No individual contains them.
No building contains them.
No single rule contains them.
Worse still, institutions seem capable of surviving individuals who oppose them.
People enter them and leave them.
Generations change.
Yet the institution continues organising behaviour.
The monster seems to live everywhere and nowhere at once.
The relational turn
Suppose once more that the puzzle does not begin with institutions.
Suppose it begins with assuming that existence requires a stable object hiding beneath activity.
Then the problem reorganises.
The institution no longer appears as a hidden thing behind behaviour.
Instead it becomes visible as an ongoing organisation of relations.
Practices.
Roles.
Expectations.
Norms.
Rules.
Collective activities.
Symbolic structures.
Repeated patterns of participation.
None alone constitutes the institution.
Yet through their continuing organisation, relatively stable patterns emerge.
The institution exists.
But it exists differently.
Not beneath behaviour.
Within ongoing patterns of behaviour.
The revelation
And now another hidden expectation begins becoming visible.
Object-thinking often imagines constraints as external things imposed upon individuals.
But institutions suggest something stranger.
Constraints themselves may emerge through organised participation.
The institution was not the strange entity.
The strange assumption was:
if something shapes behaviour, it must exist as a separate thing acting upon us.
The monster reveals another concealed expectation.
And the cave is still full of creatures.
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