However, this way of proceeding also has a place outside philosophy, in sociological theory. Broadly speaking, it is the starting point for the voluntaristic theory of social action associated with the likes of Georg Simmel , Max Weber , the early Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schutz Schutz and Parsons For example, the following idea in relation to social action is expressed by Parsons :.
However, unsurprisingly, the teleological account lays much greater explanatory emphasis on the means-end relationship in collective action contexts and much less on collective acceptance. That said, the starting point for both kinds of theory has been the notion of a joint action and its constitutive conative notions or,at least, terminology of shared intentions Bratman , we-intentions Tuomela , collective intentions Searle , collective ends Miller Chapter 2 , depending on which theorist is in question.
Examples of joint action are two people lifting a table together, and two men jointly pushing a car. However, such basic two person joint actions exist at one end of a spectrum. At the other end are much more complex, multi-person, joint actions, such as a large group of engineers, tradesmen and construction workers jointly building a skyscraper or the members of an army jointly fighting a battle.
Over the last several decades a number of analyses of joint action have emerged Gilbert ; Miller Chapter 2; Searle and ; Tuomela ; Schmid ; Ludwig A number of these theorists have developed and applied their favoured basic accounts of joint 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 of joint action such that ultimately a joint action consists of: 1 a number of singular actions; and 2 relations among these singular actions. Moreover, the constitutive conative attitudes involved in joint actions are individual attitudes; there are no sui generis we-attitudes. By contrast, according to supra-individualists Gilbert , when a plurality of individual agents perform a joint action, then the agents have the relevant propositional attitudes beliefs, intentions etc.
Moreover, the individual agents constitute a new entity, a supra-individual entity not reducible to the individual agents and the relations among them Epstein If the starting point for theorists in this strand of contemporary philosophy of action is joint action and its associated collective intentionality , it is by no means the endpoint.
Specifically, there is the important matter of the relationship between joint action and social institutions. For example, while joint actions per se do not seem to necessarily involve rights, duties and other deontic properties see Gilbert for a contrary view , it is self-evident that social institutions do so.
Theorists within this recent tradition agree that joint actions—or perhaps the collective intentionality definitive of joint actions—is at least one of the building blocks of social institutions. However, the question remains as to the precise relationship between joint actions and its associated collective intentionality on the one hand, and social institutions on the other.
More specifically, there is the question of how, or if, we-intentions can generate deontic properties, such as the institutional rights and duties definitive of institutional roles. According to collective acceptance accounts Searle and ; Tuomela ; Ludwig , social institutions are created and maintained by collective acceptance. Collective acceptance accounts are constructivist; institutional facts and, therefore, institutions exist only in so far as they are collectively believed to exist or are otherwise the content of a collective attitude, such as a we-intention.
Typically, such collective attitudes are not to be understood 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 of collective acceptance Ludwig are analysable in terms of interlocking individual intentions to achieve some outcome by means of a shared plan Ludwig Thus Searle claims his notion of a collective intention or we-intention is a primitive notion that is not reducible to an individual intention, nor to an individual intention in conjunction with other individual attitudes such as individual beliefs Searle 24—6; Searle Chapter 3.
On the other hand, Tuomela provides a non-reductive analysis of we-intentions. He makes a distinction between irreducibly collective we-mode attitudes and individualistic pro-group I-mode attitudes Tuomela 6—7 and does so on the grounds that the former involve the intention to act together as a group. However, Tuomela is open to the objection that the notion of acting qua member of a group can itself be analysed as acting in according with an individual end which each agent has interdependently with the others a shared interdependent end Miller 52— Collective acceptance is not simply a matter of psychological attitudes standing in some straightforward causal relation to the external world as is the case, for instance, with common or garden-variety intentions, including the joint intentions definitive of basic joint actions.
The idea is not that a group forms a joint intention to say push a boulder up a hill and, thereby, jointly cause the boulder to be relocated to the top of the hill.
Rather the notion of a performative is typically invoked Austin ; Searle Performative are speech acts which bring about an outcome in the external world e. Specifically, performatives are sayings which are also doings. An important species of performatives are declarative speech acts e. A key point about performatives appears to be that it is by virtue of a convention that saying such and such in a given context brings the outcome about Miller Accordingly, the outcome depends on collective acceptance in the sense of compliance with the convention and, indeed, to this extent the outcome is in part constituted by collective acceptance in this sense.
As mentioned above, Guala denies a central role to constitutive rules. According to Guala, following Hindriks , constitutive rules are essentially naming devices; they state the conditions of application of theoretical terms used to refer to institutions. For instance, a dollar note X counts as money Y if it is issued by the relevant authority. Here the Y term simply names a pattern of activity governed by regulative rules, e.
According to Ludwig, constitutive rules are regulative rules such that intentionally following them constitutes the activity they govern Ludwig Favourite examples of collective acceptance theorists are money, political authorities, and, most importantly for our concerns here, so-called status roles.
The Declaration makes something the case by counting it as, that, by declaring it to be, the case. The fact that squirrel pelts, shells or bit of inked paper are used as mediums of exchange is sufficient for them to be money. For a squirrel pelt to count as money or to be treated as money or to be collectively accepted as money is just for it to be used as a medium of exchange.
The notion of collective acceptance either collapses into regular, interdependent, use or it is superfluous. Nor do such informal exchange systems necessarily generate deontic properties; if your squirrel pelt is refused as a medium of exchange by someone then your expectation in the sense of belief with respect to the future has been dashed, but no institutional right has been violated given the informal character of the arrangement.
Of course it would add greatly to the stability of this arrangement if these pelts or, more likely, bits of inked paper were somehow authorised as an official medium of exchange, and if a rule constituted system of institutional rights and duties in relation to the exchange of these shells was introduced and enforced.
However, such a deontological structure does not seem to be a necessary feature of the system of exchange Miller ; Guala Naturally, it could be replied to this that, nevertheless, institutional rights and duties, as opposed to the underlying functionality of the arrangement, requires performatives and, specifically, declaratives. What of political authorities? Specifically, it is a necessary condition of wielding authority that subordinates obey the commands of their superior.
What of status roles, i. These are the most important for our purposes in this entry. According to Searle see also Ludwig Chapter 8 , institutions necessarily involve what he calls status-functions, and something has a status-function—as opposed to a mere function—if it has, or those who use it have, deontic properties institutional rights and duties and, therefore, deontic powers Searle Thus an orthopaedic surgeon has a status-function, and therefore a set of deontic powers, including rights to perform operations and charge people for doing so, and duties not to perform operations he or she is not accredited to perform, e.
Importantly, as we saw above, according to Searle, constitutive rules do not regulate a pre-existing activity; rather the activity is created by, and consists in acting in accordance with, constitutive and related regulative rules. The first point to be made here is that contra Searle many institutional roles seem more akin to regularly driving a car than to chess pieces.
The institutional role of surgeon is a case point. The ability and activity definitive of a surgeon, i. More generally, a surgeon could seemingly carry out surgical operations on willing patients irrespective not only of whether she was professionally accredited and, therefore, possessed of the requisite institutional rights and duties , but also of whether she was widely regarded as a surgeon in her community.
Consider, for instance, a morally motivated, skilful, surgeon whose full-time job is transplanting hearts in a jurisdiction in which organ transplantation is illegal. If this is correct then the crucial issue that now arises concerns the relationship between possession of the deontic properties, i.
For instance, are institutional rights and duties in large part based on moral considerations, such as needs, e. One response favoured by collective acceptance theorists, such as Tuomela and Ludwig — , is to invoke the notion of an explicit or implicit agreement and, therefore, promise or 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 ultimately grounds deontic properties on a contractualist moral theory and, therefore, brings with it all the objections to such theories, e.
As noted above, the central concept in the teleological account of social institutions Miller is that of joint action. On the teleological account, joint actions consist of the intentional individual actions of a number of agents directed to the realisation of a collective end.
Note that intentions are not the same things as ends, e. Importantly, on the teleological account, a collective end—notwithstanding its name—is a species of individual end; it is an end possessed by each of the individuals involved in the joint action.
However it is an end, which is not realised by the action of any one of the individuals; the actions of all or most realise the end. So contra anti-reductionist theorists such as Gilbert, Tuomela and Searle, the teleological account holds that joint actions can be analysed in terms of individualist notions.
A second major point of differentiation from collective acceptance accounts is that on the teleological account conative notions, such as we-intentions and, more relevantly, collective ends, cannot in and of themselves generate deontic properties, specifically institutional rights and duties. Accordingly, the basis for deontic properties must lie elsewhere. As we shall see, on the teleological account, the basis for deontological properties is to be found in large part in the collective goods provided by institutions.
Collective ends can be unconsciously pursued, and have not necessarily been at any time explicitly formulated in the minds of those pursuing them; collective ends can be implicit in the behaviour and attitudes of agents without ceasing to be ends as such. Further, in the case of a collective end pursued over a long period of time, e. However, it does not thereby cease to be an end of that institution—which is to say, of those persons—even at those times when it is not being pursued.
As we saw above, organisations consist of an embodied formal structure of interlocking roles. These roles can be defined in terms of tasks, regularities in action and the like. Moreover, unlike social groups, organisations are individuated by the kind of activity which they undertake, and also by their characteristic ends.
So we have governments, universities, business corporations, armies, and so on. Perhaps governments have as an end or goal the ordering and leading of societies, universities the end of discovering and disseminating knowledge, and so on Miller Part B.
On the teleological account, a further defining feature of organisations is that organisational action typically consists in, what has elsewhere been termed, a layered structure of joint actions. One illustration of the notion of a layered structure of joint actions is an armed force fighting a battle. Call these component actions, level-one actions.
Thus the individual members of the mortar squad jointly operate the mortar in order to realise the collective end of destroying enemy gun emplacements. Each pilot, jointly with the other pilots, strafes enemy soldiers in order to realise the collective end of providing air-cover for their advancing foot soldiers. Finally, the set of foot soldiers jointly advance in order to take and hold the ground vacated by the members of the retreating enemy force.
The actions of each of the individual foot soldiers, mortar squad members and individual pilots are level-one actions. On the teleological account a further feature of many social institutions is their use of joint institutional mechanisms.
Examples of joint institutional mechanisms are the device of tossing a coin to resolve a dispute and voting to elect a candidate to political office. Joint institutional mechanisms consist of: a a complex of differentiated but interlocking actions the input to the mechanism ; b the result of the performance of those actions the output of the mechanism , and; c the mechanism itself. Thus a given agent might 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. That they present themselves as candidates is in part constitutive of the input to the voting mechanism. Voters vote for candidates. So there is interlocking and differentiated action the input.
Further there is some result as opposed to consequence of the joint action; the joint action consisting of the actions of putting oneself forward as a candidate and of the actions of voting.
The result is that some candidate, say, Barack Obama is voted in the output. That there is a result is in part constitutive of the mechanism. That to receive the most number of votes is to be voted in, is in part constitutive of the voting mechanism.
Moreover that Obama is voted in is not a collective end of all the voters. Although it is a collective end of those who voted for Obama. However, that the one who gets the most votes—whoever that happens to be—is voted in is a collective end of all the voters, including those who voted for some candidate other than Obama. If the end realised in joint action, and organisational action in particular, is not merely a collective end, but also a collective good, then moral properties may well be generated.
In the first place, the collective good might consist in an aggregate of basic human needs that have been met, as in the case of food producers, schools, hospitals and police organisations. But, arguably, such needs generate moral obligations; other things being equal, the desperately poor for example morally ought to be assisted by the ongoing, organised joint action of those able to assist.
For example, the United States is a society that encompasses many cultures. Social institutions are mechanisms or patterns of social order focused on meeting social needs, such as government, economy, education, family, healthcare, and religion. Some sociological methods focus on examining social institutions over time, or compare them to social institutions in other parts of the world.
In the United States, for example, there is a system of free public education but no universal healthcare program, which is not the case in many other affluent, democratic countries. Throughout the rest of this course, we will devote much of our attention to studying these specific social institutions.
What behavioral rules are in effect when you encounter an acquaintance at school, work, or in the grocery store? Generally, we do not step back to consider all of the intricacies of such normative rules. Rarely do we physically embrace or even touch the individual, and this is often because in our culture we see this as the norm, or the standard of acceptable social behavior.
Only when confronted with a different norm do we begin to see cultural differences or even understand that this everyday behavior is part of a larger socialization process. In a sense, they impose structure on how individuals behave. For example, if all the laws that exist in our community disappeared, would I still have a normal day? Probably not. People would be speeding down the street, looting my neighborhood coffee shop, and perhaps a stranger would be sleeping on my living room couch. All the things that I'm used to would be completely disrupted.
Maybe a more reasonable example is, let's say all the schools had a new rule of no classes on Fridays. Then parents would have to figure out childcare for that day. Institutions and their rules definitively guide what we do. You may be thinking that you don't have a kid and maybe you don't need child care services. But in general, individuals are reliant on the institutions in their community. But is the reverse true? Do institutions need individuals? In general, they need lots of folks to contribute to allow them to function.
But they don't typically need any one random individual. For example, a local social service organization may sponsor projects such as clearing up litter or providing scholarships to needy students. A local club, such as a chess club, may invite participants to learn and enjoy the game. Schools are institutions in the sense that students have come together to learn scientific knowledge , develop skills , acquire values , and develop good habits such as study habits, self-discipline, and hygiene.
The school as a social institution prepares students to contribute to society and have a productive future. In addition to mastering the curriculum, students are also learning how to interact with others, such as peers and teachers, which involves governing their behavior , conforming to established norms and values, and negotiating outcomes. In sociology, the family is considered a social institution. Through parents and other family members, individuals learn to define goals and expectations.
Traditionally, a family is defined as a group of people who are related to an individual by blood, marriage, or adoption. However, it can also refer to other kinds of relationships. Additionally, families can be nuclear or extended. A nuclear family consists of parents , siblings , and offspring. An extended family consists of grandparents , aunts , and uncles. The nuclear family tends to have a greater impact on individual social norms compared to the extended family.
While families and education influence our goals, expectations, and norms, genetics also play an important role in defining behaviors including criminal behavior and the ability to interact socially. For example, an epigeneticist may study families who have endured trauma or tremendous stress during their lives to determine whether the second or third generations show signs of anxiety or depression.
Surprisingly, anxiety disorders were found to be significantly more common up to the third generation, even when the parents second generation reported no major stressful events in their lives. Traditionally, reproduction is an important goal of the family as a social institution.
Before the introduction of antibiotics , it was very common for children and adolescents to die before reaching adulthood from infectious diseases. Today, families tend to have fewer children because of medical advances and changing societal norms. A larger family simply means more mouths to feed. In this era, society is more aware of potential negative effects on offspring from issues such as divorce or domestic violence.
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