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Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

http://ant.sagepub.comVol 6(1): 30–39

10.1177/1463499606061732

Commentary onSearle’s ‘Socialontology: Some basicprinciples’Culture and institutions

Roy D’AndradeUniversity of Connecticut, Storrs, USA

AbstractIn response to Searle’s article on social ontology, this commentary focuses on therelation between the concept of culture and Searle’s work on institutions. Issuesconcerning the super-organic property of culture and collectivities, the fusion betweenideas and social agreement found in institutions, and the relation of values toinstitutions are discussed. The constructs culture, society, and personality aredeconstructed, revealing the high degree of overlap in the referents of these terms.Finally, a definitional reformulation of these three constructs is presented, treatingeach as a different kind of process.

Key Wordsculture • institution • ontology • personality • society • theory • value

In the early 1950s, Talcott Parsons formulated a new definition of culture. This defi-nition raised issues about the relation between culture and social institutions. Kluck-hohn, much respected and beloved, did not agree with Parsons’ formulation.Kluckhohn’s dissent, presented in a footnote to a summary statement by the authors ofToward a General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils, 1951), concerned the boundariesthat Parsons drew around the concept of culture. Kluckhohn said:

one whose training, experiences, and prejudices are anthropological tends to feel thepresent statement [on culture] does not give full weight to the extent to which rolesare culturally defined, social structure is part of the cultural map, the social system is builtupon girders supplied by explicit and implicit culture. (in Parsons and Shils, 1951: 27,emphasis added)

Kluckhohn also rejected the Parsonian position separating culture from behavior. Thecanonical definition presented in Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s review of over 400 defi-nitions of culture holds that culture includes both patterns of behavior and patterns forbehavior and artifacts.

Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired andtransmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups,including their embodiment in artifacts. (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952: 357)

Kluckhohn’s position was not followed by the young anthropologists emerging fromHarvard. Schneider’s position was almost pure Parsons: ‘cultural constructs, the culturalsymbols, are different from any systematic, regular, verifiable pattern of actual, observedbehavior. That is, the pattern of observed behavior is different from culture’ (1968: 5).Schneider thought this because, following Parsons, he believed that if culture includedbehavior, the concept of culture could not be used to explain behavior. Geertz, was, inhis way, even more scathing, saying that the omnibus definition of culture inKluckhohn’s Mirror for Man was a ‘conceptual morass’ (Geertz, 1973: 4).

Parsons thought of institutions as a ‘zone of interpenetration’ between the culturesystem and the social system. He held that ‘the institutional structure of society must beregarded as a special aspect of the social system’ (Parsons, 1954: 239), but at the sametime he also said that institutions were ‘culturally patterned’ (Parsons 1973: 54–5).However, these metaphors of maps and girders and patterns and interpenetrations arenot very helpful. What, in simple words, is the relation between culture and institutions?

Several things stand out in trying to construct the history of ideas about culture andsociety since the Parsons–Kluckhohn dispute. First, with the exception of Searle’s work,there are few well-developed definitions of institutions, even from economists andsociologists doing the best research on institutional change. Douglass North, Nobellaureate and pioneer in the development of the new institutional economics, definesinstitutions as ‘the rules of the game in a society, or more formally, the humanly devisedconstraints that shape human interaction’ (North, 1990: 3). The problem with this defi-nition, like most definitions of institutions, is that it is much too broad. FollowingNorth’s definition, driving on the left and putting the knife on the right become insti-tutions. No distinction is made between norms and institutions or between constitutiverules and regulative rules.

Theda Skocpol, whose book States and Social Revolutions (1979) did so much to placethe institution of the state at the center of understandings about historical change, doesnot, so far as I can find, define institutions or organizations. But Skocpol is clear aboutthe dangers of conflating cultural systems with the social order. She says:

[According to Sewell], ideology is ‘constitutive of social order . . .’ Who thinks aboutcultural meanings this way? Who treats culture as ‘constitutive of the social order’ –which means fusing into one concept both social relations and meaningful discourse. . . Anthropologists, of course. (1994: 202, italics added)

A major contribution of Searle’s book, The Construction of Social Reality (1995), isthat it provides an in-depth analysis of the construction of institutions. This analysis

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makes possible a better understanding of the relations between institutions and culture,institutions and norms, and institutions and values. It also allows us to see the relationof culture to society in a new way.

THE ANALYSIS OF INSTITUTIONSFor Searle, institutions are created by the assignment of a status function based on aconstitutive rule of the form X counts as Y in context C; thus a dollar bill counts as (is)money, and taking someone’s wallet counts as (is) theft. A truly huge number of suchstatus functions are collectively agreed upon in any society. The fact that such constitu-tive rules are collectively agreed upon then serves as the basis of assigning various deonticpowers (rights, duties, obligations, responsibilities – called here norms) to X because Xcounts as Y and Y has these powers.

Institutions can be corporate, like Microsoft, or non-corporate, like chess and property.They may be temporally based, like the 4th of July, or territorially based, like the state.They may be assigned to people, like roles, or to physical objects, like money and property,or to events, like an election. They may be general to the entire society, like a constitu-tional right, or specific to a small group like the secret handshake of the Masons. Theymay be formal or informal. They may be rigid in definition and assigning powers, orquite vague. And they may simply create Y out of thin air, the way a business corpora-tion is created out of pure nothing by the right kind of legal act. The incredibly widespread of things that can be institutions is due to the fact that humans can symbolizealmost anything.

Searle’s article in this journal issue and his book treat these points in detail. The overallpicture is clear and internally consistent, and so far as I know, unquestioned as an originaland accurate account of the construction of institutions. Searle is especially effective inpointing out the great power of institutions, the importance of language in the construc-tion of institutions, the systematic relations between institutions, and the objectivefacticity of institutions. And Searle’s account is universal; according to ethnographicaccounts all societies have institutions such as roles and feast days and property andmarriage.

Prototypically, the term institution refers to those institutions that create, formally orinformally, an organized collectivity, like the post office, the Congress, or the family.However, according to ordinary usage, marriage and Thanksgiving and dowry andproperty are also institutions. Thus one can distinguish between corporate institutions– like the post office or the family – in contrast to non-corporate institutions likeproperty and money. The important similarity is the fact that both are constructedthrough the same symbolic format and both involve the assignment of special powersto X as Y. But it is important to note corporate institutions have certain distinct causalpowers. Corporate institutions can act as agents; they can have rights and duties likepeople, can be sued, become bankrupt and so on. There is no way to sue a dollar bill,although it has the power to serve as a medium of exchange and be money.

COLLECTIVESTo return to the issue of the relation between culture and institutions and the socialsystem, given Searle’s formulation, are institutions culture? Of course, if we return to theconceptual morass of the omnibus definition of culture, there is no issue because almost

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everything is culture from crocks and pots to dining at the Savoy. (In fact, later on itwill be argued that this is not such a bad idea.) But in any case a basic question remains:How are institutions related to shared systems of ideas and meanings, whatever they arecalled?

The first thing to note is that the idea that X counts as Y in context C is not just ashared idea. First of all, as Searle points out, this kind of sharing is not the simpleaggregate sum of what individuals believe. The formula has to be collectively shared; itmust be something we share. This we is important. Institutions cannot be understoodas just the operation of individual minds, since for money to be money and marriage tobe marriage there has to be collective agreement about what these things are. The cogni-tion that is part of the creation of institutions is not the result of a group of people justthinking the same thing, as if they had all somehow individually and singularly decidedto think about funny looking pieces of paper as money. Not only is this unlikely, itwouldn’t do the crucial thing that institutions do. That is, some number of people eachindividually thinking something doesn’t bind anyone to anything. Institutions, by theirnature, bind us to do what is jointly agreed upon. If some piece of paper counts asmoney, then you must accept it as money. And if you say you don’t believe it is money,I will take you to the bank and prove that it is money. You can’t believe it isn’t moneyunless you are crazy, because as a reasonable person you understand that money isprecisely what we collectively agree is money. As Searle says, money is ontologicallysubjective but epistemologically objective. Even if you were from Alpha Centuri, youwould quickly learn what money is if you visited New York City.

Margaret Gilbert, a philosopher from the same analytic tradition as Searle, argues thatcollectivities are created by people having a sense of common identity expressed by thefull-blooded use of we (1979). Gilbert contrasts the full-blooded sense of we with whatshe calls the tendentious sense of we, exemplified by the hospital nurse who inquires ofa patient ‘How did we sleep last night?’ Gilbert differs from Searle in stressing thatcollectives must involve a joint commitment or potential readiness to do something. Bythe joint commitment that comes with being part of a collective, the members of acollective are bound to the courses of action undertaken by the collective and areobligated to follow them. For example, following an example of Gilbert’s, if a universitydepartment, following its rules for making such decisions, decides not to hire somecandidate, the department chair may not then offer the rejected candidate the job. Sheis obligated not to. However, the chair might appropriately say something like ‘Wedecided not to hire you, but I wish we had’, distinguishing the part of her mind whichis singular from the part that is collective.

Recently, new findings have emerged which suggest that understanding alone cannotbe the whole story of collective cognition. As Tomasello et al. say:

Briefly, the main finding is that some nonhuman primates understand more aboutintentional action and perceptions than was previously believed (and this is also true,to some degree, of children with autism). But they do not thereby engage sociallyand culturally with others in the ways that human children do. Therefore, under-standing the intentional actions and perceptions of others is not by itself sufficientto produce human-like social and cultural activities. Something additional isrequired. Our hypothesis for this ‘something additional’ is shared intentionality. We

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propose that human beings, and only human beings, are biologically adapted forparticipating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordi-nated action plans (joint intentions). Interactions of this type require not only anunderstanding of the goals, intentions, and perceptions of other persons, but also, inaddition, a motivation to share these things in interaction with others – and perhapsspecial forms of dialogic cognitive representation for doing so. The motivations andskills for participating in this kind of ‘we’ intentionality are woven into the earlieststages of human ontogeny and underlie young children’s developing ability to partici-pate in the collectivity that is human cognition. (Tomasello et al., forthcoming)

My society, a huge collective, agrees that certain things count as property. As a memberof the collective, I share, whether I want to or not, that commitment. We have agreedthat property is property. Even if there is a part of me – some individual, Bartleby-likepart – that does not agree that things are really property, that does not diminish thepower of the fact that we have agreed to treat certain things as property. Furthermore,my national collective has collectively decided that I am a member of the collective – Iwas born in this country, and therefore count as a citizen – and since I am a member Iam bound by the laws of this nation no matter what I think about these laws. Ifindividual A, as an institutional fact, is defined as a member of collective Q, and thiscollective is committed to P, then, as a member of Q, A is committed to P, no matterwhat A may feel about it. The evidence is that this is a universal human rule, one thatadmits of few exceptions. We are a social species.

In summary, institutions are formed by collective intentions, not singular cognitions,shared or unshared. Collective obligations typically trump singular wishes. This impliesthat there is a superordinate reality that has enormous causal power over individuals, asDurkheim argued. Ontological prejudices against the existence of the conscience collec-tive notwithstanding, who will argue that the world is not this way?

FUSIONSWhile there is not likely to be much assent to the idea that collectivities are a super-ordinate level of reality, perhaps at least the argument that the constitutive rules ofinstitutions are not the same as ordinary cultural meanings can be accepted, and thatthe difference is that some kind of collective coercion is involved. Contra Skocpol,institutions are a fusion of the social (the collective) and the ideational (the culturalproposition that X counts as Y in context C ). These fusions, however ordinary in our dailylife, are hard to think about because they create as single entities things we believe areontologically distinct. Ideas are one kind of thing while collective agreement is anotherkind of thing. It is hard to get one’s mind around the fact that there can be an entity –a real thing – that is both. But again, there it is – an institution is a thing formed by thefusion of a cultural idea that X counts as Y in context C with a collective commitmentto this idea. An agreed upon idea is not just an idea. It is something both agreed uponand an idea. Neither has causal priority. Paradoxically, one cannot think an institutionaway because it is more than a thought, yet an institution cannot exist unless peoplethink it is real.

For example, although the nation can be talked about as if it were basically just anidea – an imagined community, as Benedict Anderson says (1991) – a nation is more

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than something imagined. Nations, unlike ideas, are institutionally created collectivitiesthat can declare war on each other, kill each other’s citizenry, expand boundaries, andon and on. The nation has an enormous range of causal powers. Perhaps some peoplelike to believe that the modern nation is basically something imagined because if it werethen it could be thought away. It is interesting that most cultural anthropologists, intheir current Hegalian mode, like to talk about culture as if it were nothing but pureidea and simply exclude the term institution from their talk (see, for example, discussionsabout culture in Borofsky et al., 2001). And usually when cultural anthropologists sayanything about institutions, they talk about them as if they were an epiphenomenon ofideas, ignoring the fact that the causal powers of institutions are strikingly different thanthe causal powers of ideas.

Institutions tend to be relatively permanent, but they do change, sometimes by top-down authority, sometimes by complex bottom-up interactions. Typically the incre-ments are small. The USA has a federal system and a presidency, Great Britain has acentralized government and a parliamentary system, and neither is likely to change muchin the proximate future whatever their advantages or disadvantages might be. Whileeconomic conditions, population pressure, new ideas, and many other factors influencethe creation and modification and elimination of institutions, the degree of complexityof interactions typically involved in institutional change makes institutional changedifferent in quality and quantity than the change of ideas simple.

An important fact about institutions is that they are constructed by a linked pair offusions. The first is the fusion of the constitutive rule with collective commitment. Thesecond is the fusion of an idea about how things should be with a collective commit-ment that they will be this way. This second kind of fusion is called here a norm. Normsare the collective shoulds of life, which Searle calls deontic powers. Norms are more thanjust ideas. Like institutions, norms are collectively agreed upon; one can be sanctionedfor breaking a norm. Thus an institution contains two basic ideas: the first that X countsas Y, the second that certain norms apply to situations involving Y. For each of theseideas there has to be a separate collective agreement and commitment.

VALUESValues that are embedded in institutions are said to be institutionalized. Some examplesmay be helpful. Consider the institution of grades. Certain letters – A, B, C and so on –count as the symbolic entity called a grade. Grades have procedural powers; one musthave passing grades in certain courses in order to graduate; very high grades can give onehonors; bad grades can lead to suspension and so on. Values are embedded in the insti-tution of grades in the sense that the normative standards that are used to assign gradesinvolve the application of certain values. Grades are based on value criteria concerningknowledge, learning, and performance. These values are institutionalized in grades, aswell as in other educational institutions such as appointments, promotions, graduations,honors and so forth.

To give another example, the parent role is part of the institution of the family. Thissymbolic status is assigned on the basis of biological and social facts, and once assigned,brings with it a whole complex of formal and informal rights and duties, creating a hostof normative obligations. The norms of parenting vary from family to family, but almostalways include taking care of the physical and psychological health of the children,

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providing financial support, being loving, disciplining, and so forth. Evaluation of howwell the parent performs the role institutionalizes these norms as value criteria forparental roles. Parents who do not spend enough time with their children are thoughtto be doing the wrong thing; wrong because the values expressed by the norm have beenviolated. To not spend enough time with one’s children is taken to mean that one doesnot really care, and caring about one’s children is a strong value. And once values becomenormative criteria, they can then legitimate these norms. For example, why should wehave grades? To assess and reward the competence of the student, something that isvalued. Thus the value we place on competence legitimates the giving of grades if thesevalues have been personally internalized.

Once a set of values has been embedded in an institution, then performing the activi-ties regulated by that institution brings the value criteria directly into the life of theparticipant. One may not like the values institutionalized in military life, but once inthe military these values form criteria one must accommodate to. One salutes and doesas one is ordered, and these norms embed values of hierarchy and authority into everydayroutines. People often participate in institutions with institutionalized values that theythemselves have not internalized. There are students who do not like school because thevalues of gaining knowledge and learning are not their values. There are employees whodo not like the world of business because they disvalue competition and the pursuit ofprofit. It is theoretically possible for whole institutional complexes to exist, embeddedwith value criteria nobody believes in but everyone must act in accordance with.

This independence of institutionalized values from internalized values makes forcomplexities. Values live in three different places. They live in the culture – culture inthe sense of symbolic representations that are part of the ideational heritage of a society.For example, almost every movie has strong value messages. Values also live in thepsyche, where they are more or less deeply internalized. And they live in social insti-tutions, where they form the evaluative criteria based on the norms created by thatinstitution, further legitimizing these norms. Some degree of integration is normallyfound among the values found in the ethical ideas of a society, in its personalities, andin its institutions. It is this core of integrated values that makes a society good and rightfor its people.

THE DECONSTRUCTION OF CULTURE, SOCIETY, ANDPERSONALITYOne of the things a Searlean analysis leads to is the deconstruction of the notions ofculture and society and personality, in which these global constructs are broken intomore specific constructs, such as institutions, motives, values, and norms. Once takenapart this way, it is apparent that these elements overlap considerably. Consider thefollowing schema:

personality (psyche) motives ideas valuesculture ideas values norms? institutions?society/social structure values? norms institutions practices

The layout shown here makes clear the high degree to which psyche, culture andsociety are composed of overlapping elements. Looking at this high degree of overlap,

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one wonders how they could ever have been defined as distinct. One of the central con-fusions in the social sciences has been the tendency to think that what makes cultureand society and psyche different is their content. While content is normally what makesthings different, the attempt to define society, or culture, or personality in terms ofcontent results in problems and perplexities because, as outlined here, these termscontain so many overlapping elements.

One solution to the overlap problem is to restrict each concept to non-overlappingitems. Following this strategy, personality would be restricted to motives, culture to ideas,and society to practices. But then what is one to do with ideas that are culturally sharedyet central to people’s personalities? Or with institutions like games, rituals, and formsof marriage that, by almost anyone’s definition, are both part of culture and part ofsociety? And what can one do with values, which are important elements of all threeconcepts?

Analytically, what is distinct about psyche (psyche is what psychology is a science of )and culture and society is not a matter of content but rather the way in which elementsare organized. For example, what is different about the organization that connectselements of culture and organization that connects elements of the psyche is that culturerefers to the flow of mental contents across persons and over time, while psyche refers tothe causal organization of elements within the person. Cognitive models tend to gener-alize easily across persons because cognitive learning is quick and can effectively beformulated and communicated in natural language. But for values to function as feltevaluations, not just thoughts about what is good, and for norms to function as feltshoulds, there must be some degree of internalization (Spiro, 1987). Internalizationtypically requires socialization, which is why values do not generalize as easily andextensively as cognitive models. More Americans know about the lack of civil libertiesin China than care about them. Motives and sentiments are even less often part of acultural heritage because they are even harder to teach to everyone.

Just as culture is a characteristic of elements that move across place and person andtime, so psyche can be thought of as the way ideas, motives, feelings and values areorganized within a single person. Personality is the organization of ideas, motives,feelings, and values within the human being. Society, on the other hand, involves theorganization of practices that produce the basic human necessities and frivolities – food,shelter, companionship, self-protection, reproduction, education, entertainment and soon. Functionalism is still a bad word in the social sciences, but the fact is that most ofthe practices generated by institutions do something, people know what they do, andpeople attend to making sure these practices do what they should. Society exists becausepractices do what they do – the bread gets to the table, the business produces itsproducts, the schools teach, the churches minister to their congregations and so on.These practices are organized in human societies by institutions, norms, and values.

Thus, in the conceptual framework presented here, culture, psyche, and society are notwords for different kinds of things, they are words for different organizing processes.They are needed for this purpose. But they have become a source of confusion becausethey are used as if they were names for different kinds of stuff.

As an aside, one nice thing about defining culture as process is that one can have boththe omnibus definition in which culture contains artifacts, institutions, symbols, ideas,and dining at the Savoy, and also have culture as a causal force or causal power. For

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example, the activity of typing, which I am now doing, plus the computer I am usingand the English language I am writing in are all causally linked to the past and to otherpeople through a long chain of historical causal processes. They did not just appear outof nowhere. I am typing because (among other reasons) typing is part of my culture, Iam using a computer because (among other reasons) computers are part of my culture,and I am writing in English because (among other reasons) English is part of my culture.Culture in the sense of a historical causal process has enormous power; it has broughtus most of what we do and have.

As a life work, Searle has taken central but poorly conceptualized ordinary humanphenomena – speech acts, institutions, intentions, and consciousness – and brought tothem the analytic skills of the philosopher in defining, analyzing, deconstructing andreconstructing these phenomena. Such skills are in short supply in the social sciences,where conceptual confusions abound and invade our theories. The Construction of SocialReality is an outstanding contribution to philosophic analysis in the social sciences, provid-ing a foundation from which a clearer description of social and cultural life can be built.

ReferencesAnderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread

of Nationalism. London: Verso.Borofsky, R., F. Barth, R. Shweder, L. Rodseth and N. Stolzenberg (2001) ‘WHEN:

A Conversation about Culture’, Current Anthropology 103: 432–46.Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.Gilbert, Margaret (1979) On Social Facts. London: Routledge.Kluckhohn, Clyde (1949) Mirror for Man. New York: McGraw Hill.Kroeber, A.L. and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and

Definitions (Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology andEthnology, Harvard University, Vol. 47 no. 1). Cambridge, MA: The [Peabody]Museum.

North, Douglass (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parsons, Talcott (1954) ‘The Problem of Controlled Institutions’, in Talcott ParsonsEssays in Sociological Theory (rev. edn), pp. 30–57. New York: The Free Press.

Parsons, Talcott (1973) ‘Clyde Kluckhohn and the Integration of Social Science’, inW.W. Taylor, J.L. Fisher and E.Z. Vogt (eds) Culture and Life: Essays in Memory ofClyde Kluckhohn, pp. 54–5. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Parsons, Talcott and Edward A. Shils (1951) Towards a General Theory of Action.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schneider, David (1968) American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice Hall.

Searle, John R. (1995) The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press.Skocpol, Theda (1979) States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Skocpol, Theda (1994) Social Revolutions in the Modern World. New York: Cambridge

University Press.Spiro, Melford (1987) ‘Collective Representations and Mental Representations in

Religious Symbol Systems’, in Melford Spiro Culture and Human Nature:

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Theoretical Papers of Melford E. Spiro (edited by Benjamin Kilborne and L.L.Langness), pp. 161–84. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Tomasello, Michael, Malinda Carpenter, Joseph Call, Tanya Behne and Henrike Moll(forthcoming) ‘Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of CulturalCognition’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

ROY G. D’ANDRADE is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. His major research

area is in psychological anthropology, especially the relation between cognition, culture, motivation, and

values. He has completed a book manuscript on values, and is currently working on a book on general theory

in the social sciences. Address: Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, 354 Mansfield Road,

Unit 2176, Storrs, CT 06269–2176, USA. [email: rdandrade@ucsd.edu]

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