INSTITUTIONALISM

B.A.LL. B (INTEGRATED LAW DEGREE COURSE)

SOCIOLOGY-I (I SEMESTER)

“PROJECT WORK”

“INSTITUTIONALISM”

SUBMISSION TO: SUBMITTED BY:

MR. RANDHIR GAURAM NISHA GANDHI

FACULTY OF SOCIOLOGY-I 19RU11010

DESIGNATION: ASSISTANT PROFESSOR GAURAV TYAGI

19RU11019

SESSION:-2019-2024

SEMESTER:- I
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I take this opportunity to express our humble gratitude and personal regards to MR. RANDHIR
GAUTAM for inspiring me and guiding me during the course of this project work and also for
his cooperation and guidance from time to time during the course of this project work on the
topic “INSTITUTIONALISM”.

Date of Submission: 30-11-2019

Name of Student: NISHA GANDHI

GAURAV TYAGI

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ASCRIPTIVE SOCIAL SYSTEM-

Although trust is not unique to modernity; it is more necessary because of role

negotiability in modern societies. Relying upon a no functionalist view of role expectations
theory drawn from phenomenology and from the work of symbolic interactionists such as
Cooley and Mead, Seligman argues that the increasing differentiation of modern society and
the multiplicity of roles demanded of the modern self (we are a mile wide and an inch deep in
Seligman's analysis) has made trust essential. Trust is the lubricant that greases the wheels of
social exchange at the outer limits of social systems.

The crux of our dilemma, according to Seligman, is that as trust becomes increasingly
important, it is also less sustainable. Why? Changes in the division of labor have reduced
people's familiarity with others in similar class positions. Developments such as today's high
divorce rate, the emergence of a service economy, and even the recent baseball strike all
contribute to an expansion of roles and a weakening of trust. Rather than concluding that this
multiplicity of contemporary roles supports postmodernism's contention that there is no self
and only roles, Seligman’s phenomological presuppositions lead him instead to argue that the
self requires a stable basis. Thus Seligman views the emergence of speech codes and smoking
restrictions as evidence of the erosion of trust between individuals in the private sphere. Trust
is now being replaced by external systems such as law. More importantly, Seligman suggests
that the individual, as the basis of personal identity, may be disappearing. The individual is not
replaced by a postmodern sensibility that revels in its ability to recreate an identity at will, but
instead by pre-modern forms of group identity, of which multiculturalism is a prime example.

Seligman's argument is provocative and compelling, even though the reader is left
desiring more empirical detail to flesh out Seligman's at times impressionistic evidence.
Seligman's description and analysis of trust's importance to the modern project, in fact, are
more convincing than his prediction that we may be standing on the brink of a brutish,
Hobbesian world in which coercion rather than trust will govern social relations. Given the
impressive scope of Seligman's arguments, however, one thing is clear: understanding the
nature and limits of trust will be an increasingly essential sociological task of the twenty-first
century.
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CORNELL AND RUSSELL SAGE-

This interplay produced a volume with greater thematic coherence than most
multiauthored compilations. The contributors collectively reveal the recent florescence of
institutional seeds planted in economics by Ronald Coase (transaction costs) and Douglas
North (incentives), and in sociology by Mark Granovetter (embeddedness) and James Coleman
(social capital). Not to be confused with the new institutionalism disseminated within
organization studies, this macro structural strain conceives its paradigm as "choice-within-
constraints." Analysts attempt to explain the creation and maintenance of both formal rules and
informal norms, their interplay and regulatory impact on economic action, and historical
change in capitalist economic institutions. By including selections from economists Douglas
North and Robert Frank, the editors hope the volume "extends the intellectual legacy of
classical sociologists and earlier sociological institutionalists who similarly engaged in
productive intellectual trade with economics" (Nee & Brinton, 12). Sociology is hobbled by
absence of a distinctive micro level theory of choice that could effectively challenge the
dominant rational, utility-maximizing economic actor. Consequently, to avoid becoming a
decorative appendage to the gloomy science, sociological institutionalists must demonstrate
how their macro-level visions bring valuable constraint-side insights to the bargaining table.
For the most part, these contributors admirably clarify the terms under which successful
integration might occur.

Several theoretical essays underscore the relevance and limits of exchange, game
theory, networks, and organizational perspectives in accounting for the emergence, survival,
and change in formal norms governing economic action - contracts, property rights, laws,
regulations, and the state. Victor Nee and Paul Ingram argue, con-Granovetter, that personal
ties provide too weak a foundation on which to erect reliable, credible trust and commitment
that can sustain large-scale economic action. They offer a three-level analytic framework
(institutional formal norms, organizations, and small group informal norms), accompanied by
five propositions, which they then apply to co-authorship norms in a synchrotron. (If you think
tenure reviews in sociology are tough, how would you like to make sense of articles with 250
names?) Gary Hamilton and Robert Feenstra propose merging Weber's ideal types of economic
action with Leon Walras's vision of the economy as organized interconnections across multiple
markets to synthesize equilibria with multiple outcomes. Their model is still too vague to
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determine under what conditions are alternative capitalist forms launched down their historic
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paths. Bruce Western suggests numerous ways of developing institutionally and historically
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informed analyses of labor markets, aimed at explaining the impact of centralized versus
decentralized labor relations norms in advanced nations. Alejandro Portes and Julia
Sensenbrenner defend six complex propositions on solidarity and trust among immigrant
groups, while Ivan Szelenyi and Eric Kostello outline an institutional theory of inequality in
the post-communist Eastern European nations. Douglas North's Nobel Prize speech reprises
his quarrel with neoclassical economics, Collectively, these essays offer an immense orchard
of promising fruits to be plucked, sorted, washed and graded.

Essays emphasizing empirical applications offer tantalizing glimpses of the

neoinstitutional payoff. Ingram's investigation, for example, examines how big hotel chains
rewrote the U.S. hospitality industry's "rules of the game" persuasively for the dynamic
coevolution of institutions and new organizational forms. Consistent with a winner-take-all
model of market rents and employer discrimination, Frank closes gender gaps in entry-level
earnings with appropriate controls on a unique Cornell University post-graduate survey. Mary
Brinton and Takehiko Kariya detect the supersession of personally embedded job searches by
institutionally based recruitment in recent Japanese cohorts.

Several studies examine preindustrial societies in which the intrusions of cultural

beliefs on economic decisions are perhaps more transparent. Jack Knight and Jean Ensminger
conceptualize confficts over changing the female circumcision practices of a pastoral Kenyan
tribe as a bargaining process involving cross- generational and cross-gender ideologies and
differential norm enforcement. Clan bridewealth norms have distributional consequences that
are powerful incentives for some community groups to sustain the status quo. Avner Greif,
applying game theory to merchant-agent opportunism in medieval long-distance trading,
discusses how divergent cultural heritages shape economic outcomes. The collectivist
orientations of the Maghribi Jews ultimately proved less viable than the individualism of
Genoese Christians in sustaining efficient exchanges that gave rise to the West. Similarly for
early modern England, Rosemary Hopcraft shows that a conjunction of localized state
institutions with less-communal field systems were essential for the greater productivity and
prosperity that launched Britain's industrial revolution. And Robert Ellickson's delightful
dassic essay on informal negotiation of cattle trespass norms in rural California reminds us that
rationality has its limits on the open range just as in the scholar's study.

In choosing to hybridize markets, industries, and organizations, the editors scanted

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other arenas of institutional propagation, most importantly the polity. With the notable
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exception of the pieces by Ingram, Hopcroft, and Szelenyi and Kostello, the state is largely
invisible, as are political parties, elections, interest groups, courts, bureaucracies and
constitutions. But surely these institutions have a great deal to say about the choice-within-
constraints under which modern political economies operate. This book offers its readers an
excellent overview of institutional currents connecting sociology and economics, but it cries
for a companion that does the same for political science and political sociology.

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