The Concept of Social Institution

The Concept of Social Institution

[Citation: Gaurang R. Sahay, The Concept of Social Institution (2012, Unpublished)]

While rarely giving reasons for doing so, social scientists apply the term social institution to an amazing array of phenomena such as marriage, family, kinship, caste, religion, school, panchayat, etc. Such inclusiveness prompts questions about what these phenomena have in common. What makes anything a social institution? Without explicit conceptualization or criteria, it is difficult to tell. According to Hughes (1971:5), “The only idea common to all usages of the term institution is that of some sort of establishment of relative permanence of a distinctly social sort”. This comment, which Hughes made at the 1935 American Sociological Society meetings, is as apt today as it was then. Hughes was acknowledging the failure of sociologists — and psychologists and economists and so on — to specify the meaning(s) of the social institution concept.

The Term Social Institution in Twentieth-Century Sociology

Although this feature is only sometimes explicitly noted, the most universal theme in sociologists’ definition of social institution is endurance: An institution persists, it is not ephemeral. Other typical features that are implied or asserted are institutions’ external, macro, and constraining qualities and their equation with “major” societal realms such as family, religion, education, polity, and economy. Some authors say a particular set of institutions, those that meet “basic” societal “goals” or” needs,” is required for a society to exist; Berger and Luckmann (1966:55) describe society as “an agglomeration of institutions.” Many imply that institutions are harmonious and benevolent (e.g., Searle 1969, 1995) although Balzer (2003) and Nisbet (1953), among others, disagree. Bellah and colleagues (1991) claim that institutions have a moral or ethical quality. Some scholars apply the term institutions to formal organizations, for example, schools, nursing homes, universities. Some focus on what institutions are, others on what they do. Many represent institutions as internally consistent, conflict-free, fixed, and unchanging, yet a growing number focus on conflicts, internal inconsistencies, and change as well as power, inequalities, privilege, and disadvantage as institutional features (see Balzer 2003). Nearly all conceptions depict institutions as controlling, obligating, or inhibiting, although some also note their facilitating and empowering effects (see Berger & Luckmann 1966, Giddens 1984, and March & Olsen 1989 on this point). In the mid-twentieth century, many sociologists equated social institutions with ideas, norms, values, or beliefs with no attention to processes or practices. This narrow and static definition has been under challenge for some time by scholars who assert the centrality of practices in constituting social institutions (Giddens 1984; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina & Von Savigny 2001).

Relative to practices that constitute institutions, many contemporary scholars focus on rules, procedures, customs, and routines. March and Olsen (1989: 24), for instance, define institutions as sets of rules and routines that are “constructed around clusters of appropriate activities” and “appropriate procedures”. Giddens (1984: 21–23) acknowledges rules, procedures, and “enactment” in saying “Let us regard the rules of social life . . . as techniques or generalizable procedures [emphasis mine] applied in the enactment/reproduction of social practices. . . . The most important aspects of structure are rules and resources recursively involved in institutions”. Similarly, Connell (1987: 140) says social institution “classically signifies custom, routine, and repetition”.

Many sociology encyclopedias, dictionaries, and introductory textbooks define institutions globally, with a vague sentence or two followed by a list of examples. Two sources reflect both this pattern and the older, idea-focused definition. The 2000 edition of the Encyclopedia of Sociology (Borgatta & Montgomery 2000) lacks an entry for institutions. Instead, readers who search for the term are told to “see American Society.” The American Society entry (Williams 2000: 142) defines institutions in one sentence: “Institution here means a definite set of interrelated norms, beliefs, and values centered on important and recurrent social needs and activities.” The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology (Johnson 2000: 157), an e-dictionary, defines institutions similarly: Institutions are “an enduring set of ideas about how to accomplish goals generally recognized as important in a society”. Johnson’s invocation of “ideas,” like Williams’s of “norms, beliefs, and values,” implies that institutions are subjective (see below) rather than material or behavioral in content. Johnson’s use of the term enduring implies a time element, as does Williams’s use of the term recurrent, although neither discusses time explicitly. Neither says where goals or “recurrent social needs” come from nor how their importance is determined. Both fail to mention practices or acknowledge that institutions are conflicted, dynamic, and changing. Finally, both fail to address the relationship of individuals to institutions.

The examples listed by these sources, also typical, include “family and kinship, social stratification, economic system, the polity, education, and religion” (Williams 2000:142) and “family, religious, economic, educational, healing, and political institutions” (Johnson 2000:157). Giddens (1984) objects to equating institutions with such “substantive” lists because doing so implies that the phenomena are universal, necessary, and unchanging and, equally troublesome, that they stand “outside human agency.” As I explain later, I share Giddens’s concern.

1. Early Twentieth-Century Conceptions

In a commentary on a newly discovered and unpublished manuscript by Parsons (written in the 1930s but not published until 1990), Charles Camic (1990) addresses Parsons’s influence in shifting the concept of social institutions away from behavior and practices toward a “subjective only” definition. According to Camic, social institution was a key concept for “anthropologists, political theorists, economists, sociologists and even psychologists” in the early twentieth century (1990:315). However, simultaneous with Parsons’s rising influence on U.S. sociology, the meanings scholars attached to the institution concept became less consistent than they had been earlier.

Among the early twentieth century scholars who touted the concept’s utility for understanding society were economist Walton Hamilton (1932) and sociologists Charles Horton Cooley ([1909] 1962), L.T. Hobhouse ([1924] 1966), and William Graham Sumner ([1906] 1979). Hamilton, one of Parsons’s teachers at Amherst College, defined an institution as a complex phenomenon with multiple facets: “‘a cluster of social usages,’ possessing some ‘prevalence and permanence,’ ‘embedded in the habits of a group of people or the customs of a people’ and accompanied by formal and informal ‘sanctions’ that ‘function’ to ‘fix the confines of and impose form upon the activities of human beings’” (Hamilton 1932:84 as cited in Camic 1990:316). According to Camic, this formulation was “not idiosyncratic” but was widely embraced, by for example Cooley, Hobhouse, and Sumner who viewed institutions as central to sociology’s domain. These scholars focused on the practices (or usages) aspect of institutions, heir endurance over time, and their constraining influence on societal members. That is, institutions were “recognized and established usages governing [social] relations (in conjunction with the ‘principles’ and ‘organization’ of those usages)” (cited in Camic 1990:316 from Hobhouse [1924] 1966:49); “usages that are crystallize[d and] enduring” (cited in Camic 1990:316 from Cooley [1909] 1962:313); and usages that are “endowed with a coercive and inhibitive force” (cited in Camic 1990:316 from Sumner [1906] 1979:67). Institutions were framed as organized, persisting, and “behavioral,” not only ideational or normative.

According to Camic (1990:317), MacIver “codified” these themes when he argued that social institutions are one of two “great classes [of] social fact,” the other being social relations. For MacIver, institutions were “forms of social activity” or “the established forms or conditions [e.g., rules] of procedure characteristic of group activity” (cited in Camic 1990:317 from MacIver 1928:7, 1936:16–17). MacIver said institutions entail activities, or practices, that inform and enable members about how to get things done. They also maintain order by encouraging or requiring some activities and discouraging or forbidding others. He noted also that institutions persist over time, and thus he made their time element explicit. These principles were “virtually axiomatic among sociologists” by the 1930s, Camic (1990:317) says.

Talcott Parsons, whose influence on U.S. sociology in the twentieth century was extensive, rejected MacIver’s inclusion of the “forms of social activity/ procedures” so as to “preserve” the concept for sociology. Parsons was responding to claims by psychologists and behaviorists that “the habitual behavior of individuals should be viewed as units of biology, chemistry and other natural sciences,” not sociology (Camic 1990:316–17).6 Parsons responded by differentiating the notion of institutions into “uniform modes of behavior and forms of relationship” and “the idea of sanction” and, then, relinquishing the former to the behaviorists and retaining the latter for sociology. The former became equated with an “objective” approach to institutions (e.g., MacIver’s and his predecessors) and the latter with the “subjective” approach favored by Parsons. This step equated an institution with “the normative rules that underlie it,” setting “aside modes of behavior and forms of relationship” and “leaving behind much of what otherwise might have been regarded as these thinkers’ institutional analysis” (Camic 1990:317–18).7

[When Parsons] tries to counteract behaviorist reductionism by grounding institutions in common ultimate values, much of what sociologists and institutionalists of his time were pointing to with the term institution — diverse forms of social activity, specific prescribed usages, historically-changing economic, political, religious, familial and other practices, and their variable sources simply disappears. (Camic 1990:318)

Parsons’s actions fostered confusion where many of us labour (and fail) to equate institutions with “norms, beliefs, and ideas” and organizations with “practices and structure,” as if institutions lack practices and structure and organizations lack norms, beliefs, and ideas. While his conception allowed societal members to have agency in shaping the norms, beliefs, and values that constrain them, Parsons’s rejection of behavior and practices removed the dynamics by which change is produced. As a result, social institutions suggested a society where conformity and stasis are usual and conflict and change are unusual.

2. Later Twentieth-Century Conceptions

Not everyone agreed with Parsons. Nisbet (1953: 87–90) critiqued sociologists’ definition of institutions that ignored people; represented each institution as separate from all others; suggested an ahistorical picture; depicted institutions as free of conflict, inconsistencies, and change; and failed to address their origins. He called for more attention to human agency in creating and changing social institutions and for scholars to frame institutions as rife with conflict, incoherence, and change. Conflict within as well as between institutions is pervasive, and these dynamics should be explored (see also Roscigno 2000 on interinstitutional dynamics).

Berger and Luckmann (1966) challenged prevailing definitions by reinstating the “objective” aspects of institutional phenomena and linking their “subjective” and “objective” qualities. Rejecting the implications of a functionalist view of institutions as “positive” or necessary, they made the issues of power and domination key to institutional dynamics. Focusing on institutions’ coercive powers, Berger and Luckmann (1966) highlighted legitimation dynamics wherein powerful elites claim and justify to a broader social audience the rightness and necessity of institutional arrangements that work to their benefit. Here institutions are actively constructed, as human products, claiming that a repeated action “frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern. Habitualization [the repetition of a pattern] . . . implies that the action in question may be performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effect” (Berger and Luckmann 1966:52–53). Although not inevitably, processes of habitualization often develop into institutions.

Berger and Luckmann emphasized both historicity and control: “Institutions always have a history, of which they are the products” (1966:54); they do not develop spontaneously in response to “societal needs or goals.” Institutions have a “controlling characteristic.” “To say that a segment of human activity has been institutionalized is . . . to say that this segment of human activity has been subsumed under social control” (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 55). Their emphasis on the controlling effect(s) of institutions resonates with work from decades earlier by Cooley, Hamilton, and MacIver. Berger and Luckmann also insisted that institutions span an extensive amount of time, a point with which contemporary theorists agree.

Giddens (1984) extends this prior work by making recursive human practices key to the constitution of institutions. Social institutions are recursive human practices with the greatest time and space distanciation. Recursive human practices are not repeated identically each time; through recursive human practices, group members constitute and reconstitute social institutions. In Giddens’s view, “Institutions are . . . the more enduring features of social life . . . , the human practices that last longest and extend farthest in geographic space — the most “temporally long-established and spatially widespread” (1984: 23, 301). Only recursive practices that last a long time and extend far in space should be deemed institutions.

Time’s importance to a conception of institutions is reflected in Giddens’s (1984) distinction between individuals’ repetitive daily routines and life span experiences and the long “duree” (endurance) of institutional time.

The events and routines of daily life do not have a one-way flow to them; they are recursive or repetitive. . . . [T]he routines . . . are formed in terms of the interaction of passing (but continually returning) days and seasons. Daily life has a duration, a flow, but it does not lead anywhere; the very adjective “day-to-day” and its synonyms indicate that time here is constituted only in repetition. The life of the individual, by contrast, is not only finite but irreversible, ‘being towards death.’ Time in this case is the time of the body . . . and the life cycle is really a concept that belongs to the succession of generations and thus to a third dimension of temporality. . . . This [third dimension] is the ‘supra-individual’ duree of the long-term existence of institutions, the long duree of institutional time. (35)

As already noted, Giddens objects to defining social institutions substantively (1984:34), that is, as family, education, religion, and so on — and he opposes a strict micro–macro distinction between individuals and institutions, saying it suggests that institutions are detached from or only external to people. Rather, institutions are “internalized” by the human actors who constitute them. While institutions are simultaneously constraining and enabling, Giddens places more emphasis than do many others on internalization and enablement.

Unique among authors reviewed so far, Giddens instates the body and embodiment in institutional dynamics, affirming the significance of bodies that materially exist and consequentially do things, a theme developed further by Connell (1987) in relation to gender and sexuality (see also Acker 1990; Lorber 1999). People have bodies that do things via physical and communicative action and, in acting, constitute themselves and society, with structuration referring to the simultaneous constitution of “agents” and “structures” (Giddens 1984:25–26). Giddens acknowledges people as situated actors who actively constitute and reconstitute social institutions and, in so doing, suggests where institutions “come from” and how they are maintained, resisted, and changed.

Toward (Re)Defining Social Institution

Building on particularly above review, I identify the following features of social institutions:

1. Institutions are profoundly social; they are characteristic of groups. Institutions are constituted by collectivities of people who associate with each other extensively and, through interaction, develop recursive practices and associated meanings.

2. Institutions endure/persist across extensive time and geographic space. Social institutions have a history that can be studied. In accord with Giddens (1984), only phenomena with extensive time and space distanciation are usefully viewed as social institutions.

3. Institutions entail distinct social practices that recur (Giddens 1984), recycle (Connell 1987), or are repeated (over time) by group members. Through acting or doing, individually and collectively, group members constitute institutions. Distinctive practices differentiate institutions from each other. Barnes (2001) equates social institutions with practices, and Tuomela (2003:123) views social institutions as “norm-governed social practices” (also Searle 1969, 1995). Even Bellah and colleagues (1991:40), who generally favor a “subjective”/Parsonian view, acknowledge that institutions are “patterns of social activity that give shape to collective and individual experience” [emphasis in this and the preceding quote is mine]. Practices that recur over extensive spans of time and geography are defining features of social institutions and the means by which they are constituted (Connell 1987; Giddens 1984).

4. Institutions both constrain and facilitate behavior/actions by societal/group members. Institutions constrain group members by forbidding some alternatives and choices of actions and empower them by making some alternatives and choices of action possible and preferable (March & Olsen 1989).

5. Institutions have social positions and relations that are characterized by particular expectations, rules/norms, and procedures. An institution entails a set of social positions that are interrelated, “make sense,” and are enacted relative to each other. For instance, religion has lay member, pastor/priest/rabbi/ayatollah, acolyte, elder, deacon, worshiper, and so on. The behavior of incumbents to these positions is shaped by widely shared cultural rules or norms.

6. Institutions are constituted and reconstituted by embodied agents. Institutions exist because embodied agents, societal members with material bodies, enact practices to constitute them. Institutions persist because embodied agents continually constitute them, although in varying ways (see points 9 and 10). The material body is a critical element in the social relations and dynamics of institutions and, according to Connell (1987), its influence must be studied without invoking biological reductionism or other essentialist interpretations (also Giddens 1984; Lorber 1994).

7. Institutions are internalized by group members as identities and selves and they are displayed as personalities. Institutions are not only external to individuals. Members’ experiences within — with and in — institutions become incorporated into their identities and selves as members identify with their positions, the practices they enact, and the positions they occupy. Through this dynamic, institutional phenomena acquire personal meaning and significance (Connell 1987).

8. Institutions have a legitimating ideology that proclaims the rightness and necessity of their arrangements, practices, and social relations. Legitimating ideology that justifies institutional practices and social relations is created by elites who benefit from the arrangements and practices they valorize (Berger & Luckmann 1966). Gender or caste ideology is widely known and generally believed.

9. Institutions are inconsistent, contradictory, and rife with conflict. Despite their persistence, institutions are not highly coherent or integrated. They entail many diverse practices, some of which conflict with others. Due to inconsistencies and internal conflicts, struggles among group members over particular practices are common, not rare.

10. Institutions continuously change. Related to the prior criterion, and paradoxically contrary to the second criterion about endurance, institutional relations and practices are in flux. One reason is that present practices modify past practices (Connell 1987) and produce slightly, sometimes vastly, altered practices. Also, the interdependence of institutions means that changes in one institution “unsettle” conditions and practices in other institutions, causing disruption (Nisbet 1953; Roscigno 2000). Finally, over time, old institutions die out and new ones are constituted. For example, slavery is mostly relegated to the past, whereas the mass media institution is a recent creation. Attention to dynamics not only within but between institutions, for example, between gender and the media, is required by this criterion (see Grindstaff 2002).

11. Institutions are organized in accord with and permeated by power. Institutional positions and practices allocate privilege and advantages to incumbents of some social positions and subordination and disadvantages to others. Power differentials are manifest in the recursive practices that orient, constrain, and facilitate members’ behavior. Social positions that are highly valorized provide incumbents with power over incumbents of less valorized positions. I agree with Stephen Lukes (1974) that organization per se creates power (cf. Balzer 2003). Wherever social practices and relations are “organized,” as they are in institutions, power differences and dynamics are at play.

12. Institutions and individuals mutually constitute each other; they are not separable into macro and micro phenomena. Giddens (1984; also Nisbet 1953) rejects the claim that institutions are macro and individuals are micro, arguing that this distinction distorts their mutual constitution and implies that institutions are only external rather than also internalized (criterion 7). It also implies that they are not susceptible to human agency (criterion 3). This criterion rejects the premises that institutions are big and individuals are small and that institutions are separate from individuals.

13. Institutions are interdependent on each other. In other words, no institution is totally separate from others; each links to others, often extensively (Roscigno 2000). For example, gender and sexuality are intertwined — as are gender and family, gender and work/the economy, gender and religion — but so are family and the polity/ state, family and the economy, economy and the polity/state, and education and the polity/state, and so forth (Acker 1992). Assuming that any institution is separate from others will produce flawed understanding (Nisbet 1953). Interinstitutional influences are not only pervasive, they change over time. Thus, changes in gender in accord with second-wave feminism have “unsettled” the family institution, the military, and religion, among other institutions, by challenging the legitimacy of girls’ and women’s subordination (Connell 1987; Gerson 2002; Katzenstein 1998). In other historical eras, these institutions more extensively “unsettled” gender.

The Concept of Social Structure

The Concept of Social Structure

[Citation: Gaurang R. Sahay, The Concept of Social Structure (2012, Unpublished)] 

Social structure is a general social science concept. It contributes in a major way to a fuller and a scientific understanding of human society and its various dynamics by referring to its relatively long-lasting basic characteristics. In this note, there has been an effort to expound the important connotations attached with the concept and its explanatory importance in social science discourse.

I

The contemporary references to the concept of social structure in social science is generally traced to Emile Durkheim who has argued that human society constitutes interrelated and interdependent parts which are social in nature, and that this interdependency among parts regulates systematically the behaviour of institutions and their members. Although the concept of social structure has been defined or understood in many ways, it constitutes some general connotations which are following:

First, the concept of social structure calls for the specification of basic units or elements of society for analysis. The basic units of analysis are social relations which are generally of three types: first, the social relations that arise from the interactions among human beings such as role relationships (landlord-agriculture labour); second, the social relations that arise from the interactions within and among groups or associations involving common pattern of interaction, membership, sense of belonging and identification such as caste groups, classes, ethnic groups, gender groups, political parties, voluntary associations, etc.; and third, the social relations that arise from the interactions among elements of an institution or institutions such as family, kinship, caste, religion, panchayat, agrarian economy, etc.

Second, the concept also implies that the basic units of analysis have some kind of special or non-random relationships to one another. In other words, social relations are not arbitrary and coincidental but exhibit some regularity and continuity. For example, the relationships between husband and wife within a family and between the groups of labour buyers and sellers in a labour market are of a relatively definite and non-random character.

Third, interactions among the basic units of analysis are repetitive in nature. This implication of the concept of social structure spells out the dynamic or process side of the relationships among units.

Fourth, the concept implies that human society is differentiated into certain groups, positions, institutions, etc. that are interdependent or functionally interrelated. However, the relationships among units within a structure are different from the relationships with units that lie outside the structure. This idea spells out that the notion of social structure carries an implication of boundary or an idea of ‘difference-from-outside’.

Fifth, this idea of ‘difference-from-outside’ gives rise to the idea of ‘structure-in-situation’ or ‘structure-in-environment’ as well as the idea of the degree to which the structure is closed from or opens to influences or interactions with units outside the structure. For example, caste structure exists in an environment that includes various other structures such as property system, legal system, occupational system and educational system. Changes in the environment affect the caste structure and vice versa.

Sixth, the concept of social structure creates a discursive space for accounting the reasons for or causes of a structure and its various elements. It tries to explain questions: why does a particular set of relationships hang together and differentiate itself from other sets of relationships? Ideas of differentiation, adaptation, integration, domination, consent, coercion, etc. figure prominently in the analysis of reasons and causes.

Lastly, the notion of social structure implies that human beings are not completely free and autonomous in their choices and actions, but are instead influenced and constrained by the social relations they form with one another.

II

The concept of social structure has been of greater theoretical importance in social science. It is regarded as an explanatory concept, a key to the understanding human society and its various dimensions. To bring out its explanatory importance, social scientists with different theoretical backgrounds have conceptualised the idea of social structure in different ways for understanding certain aspects of human society which they have regarded as fundamentally critical. The more prominent conceptualisations have taken place in the realms of structural functionalism, Marxism and structuralism.

Structural functionalism and the concept of social structure

Structural functionalism has been a dominant theoretical framework in social science which has conceptualized the idea of social structure for understanding the effective functioning of society. Structural functionalists such as Emile Durkheim, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Brownislaw Malinowski, Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton have given the concept of social structure a central place in their work and connected it to the concept of function. They have defined social structure as a set of relatively stable patterned social relations or relations amongst units of human society including individuals. Such relations are patterned or normal because they are defined or controlled by institutions, i.e., socially established values and norms or patterns of behaviour. The continuity of the social structure is being maintained in any circumstances by the interdependent components of the social structure which have indispensable functions for one another and for the society as a whole which is seen as a continuing structurally differentiated but integrated organic entity. These functions have been categorised broadly as: situational (organizing the roles of institutions and individuals), instrumental (specifying the mechanisms for the attainment of specific goal), and integrative (regulating the relations of individuals as to promote cooperation and consensus). For most of the structural functionalists, social structure is essentially normative—that is, consisting of ‘institutional patterns of normative culture’. Put differently, social structure consists of norms, values, and rules that direct social and individual behaviour by defining status and role in specific situations. Moreover, these norms vary among different situations and spheres of life and lead to the creation of social institutions—for example, property relations, economic and social exchange, rites and marriage. Norms, roles, and institutions are all components of the social structure on different levels of complexity.

Marxism and the concept of social structure

Marxists, including critical theorists, have used the concept of social structure for understanding social relations characterised by inequality, domination, subordination, contradiction, etc. that generate conditions for change within the structure and of the structure. In the Marxist theoretical framework the concept of social structure consists not only of normative patterns but also of the inequalities of power, status, and material privileges, which give the members of a society widely different opportunities and alternatives. These inequalities define different strata, or classes, castes and gender groups, which form the stratification system, or class, caste and gender structure, of the society. Both aspects of the social structure, the normative (norms and values) and the distributive (wealth, status and power) aspect, are strongly interconnected, as may be inferred from the observation that members of different political strata, castes and classes often have different and even conflicting norms and values.

This leads to a consideration, which is contrary to structural functionalism, that certain norms in a society may be established not because of any general consensus about their moral value but because they are forced upon the others by those who have both the interest in doing so and the power to carry it out. For example, the norms of caste or race apartheid reflect the interests and values of only one small section of the population, which has the power to enforce them upon the majority. In some forms of Marxism this argument has been generalized: norms, values, and other normative ideas are explained as the result of the inequalities of power between groups with conflicting interests. This Marxian view is succinctly summarized in Marx's phrase, ‘The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas’.

In Marxism, the concept of social structure represents a reality being constituted by various levels of the structure – economy, polity and ideology (caste, gender and ethnicity) – which are interrelated and relatively autonomous of one another, but not in a predetermined way. Relatively autonomous and interdependent character of the various levels or units of the structure are possible because each is due to more than one cause and has several raison d’etre. The relationships among the different components or levels of the structure may be of different nature and weightage that keeps on changing from one situation to another.

Contrary to structural functionalism, Marxism holds the view that the reality being represented by the concept of social structure is not always empirically present to the senses. It underlies behind the apparent or observable relations as an unconscious structure. For example, various apparent phenomena like wages, income and profit conceal the fact they are not things in themselves but relations between people of different classes. Put differently, profit or income for one is the unpaid labour for others. To quote Marx, ‘The final pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface, in their real existence and consequently in the conceptions by which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to understand them, is very much different from, and indeed quite the reverse of, their inner but concealed essential pattern and the conception corresponding to it’. This aspect of Marxist understanding of social structure has been highlighted particularly by structural Marxists such as Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Nicos Poulantzas and Maurice Godelier.

Structuralism and the concept of social structure

Another important conceptualisation of social structure in social science has taken place within the theoretical framework of structuralism. In structuralism, social structure has been conceptualised as a deep structure or sub-structure that underlies all apparent social relations. It is an unconscious cognitive model which is unobservable but has observable effects on individual and social behaviour. For structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss, this model or structure also acts as an epistemological construct which is characterised by four important features. First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system, i.e., it is made up of several elements, none of which undergo a change without effecting changes in all the other elements. Second, for any given structure or model there is a possibility of ordering a series of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type. Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if one or more of its elements are submitted to certain modifications. Finally, it makes immediately intelligible all aspects of empirical facts.

This conceptualisation of social structure is largely based on the lessons from structural linguistics. In structural linguistics, it is believed that language is a structured supra-individual unconscious reality and its elements are interrelated in non-arbitrary, regular, rule-bound ways. A speaker follows grammar or rules of the language without being aware of doing so. Structural linguistics detects this underlying reality, including the rules of transformation that connect structure of the language to the various observed expressions.

Structuralist notion of social structure has been developed and used by various scholars such as Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan to understand various dynamics of individual and social behaviour. For example, Lévi-Strauss has studied the different forms of kinship systems, myths, and customs of cooking and eating and detected the common structure lying behind the various forms of a social or cultural phenomenon. He argues that the variety of individual and social behaviour the structure generates is potentially unlimited. The structure is not readily observable; it must be discerned from intensive interpretive analysis of myths, language, texts or symbolic order (the real, symbolic and imaginary).

Changing pattern of Agrarian structure in India: A Preliminary Note

[Citation: Gaurang R. Sahay, Changing pattern of Agrarian structure in India: A Preliminary Note (2009, Unpublished)]

The term agrarian structure denotes a framework of social relationships in which all agricultural activities such as production, marketing and consumption are carried out. The institution or the framework of social relationships determines how and by whom land is cultivated, what kind of crops can be produced and for what purpose, how food and agricultural incomes can be distributed, and in what way or in what terms the agrarian sector is linked to the rest of economy or society.

Agrarian structure or its various dimensions and dynamics such as land reforms, Green Revolution and agriculture labour have been the major concerns of Indian social scientists, particularly sociologists and social anthropologists. They have tried to understand and analyse them in different forms by using different concepts right from the time of independence. To present a systematic and detailed picture of the Indian agrarian structure and its various dynamics it has been proposed to divide the trajectory of the problem into three phases: pre-colonial phase, colonial phase, and post-colonial phase.

1. Agrarian Structure during the Pre-colonial Period

The discourses on the pre-colonial Indian agrarian structure are quite homogenous in terms of the ideas and lessons that they provide. The main concepts which were developed and used to understand the pre-colonial Indian agrarian structure are: 1. Oriental Despotism (Montesquieu, Hegel, Bernier and James Mills), 2. Asiatic Mode of Production (Karl Marx) and 3. Prebendal Patrimonialism (Max Weber). The concepts are, more or less similar, similar to each other in terms of their contents and meanings. They bring out following features of the pre-colonial Indian agrarian structure:

1. Absence of private property in land
2. Possession and use of land on communal basis
3. State or king as the absolute owner of land
4. Torrid climatic environment
5. State controlled irrigation or public hydraulic works
6. Division of agrarian society into self-sufficient, autonomous and isolated village communities or village as idyllic little republics
7. All kinds of relationships organized around the institution of caste or, to put in different words, caste system as the basis of self-sustaining and self-producing Indian village communities
8. Surplus labour as tribute to the despotic king
9. Absence of classes leading to servile social equality
10. Absence of hereditary nobility
11. General slavery or exploitation of the people directly by the despotic state or king without any relationship of dependence and exchange at the lower levels and juridical restraints

These structural features made Indian society, which was overwhelmingly agrarian, ever static and historyless. Marx writes, ‘Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of the successive invaders who founded empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society’ (Marx 1968: 185).

Colonial ethnographers and British administrators-cum-sociologists such as Baden Powell, Henry Maine and Charles Metcalfe followed both in words and spirits such an ‘orientalist’ understanding of Indian social formation and its agrarian structure. To quote Metcalfe, ‘The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they want within themselves, and almost independent of foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds revolution; Hindu, Pathan, Mughal, Maharatta, Sikh, English are masters in turn; but the village communities remain the same’ (quoted from Cohn 1987: 213).

However, historical research by Indian scholars, particularly in post-independent India, has convincingly contested this orientalist understanding of Indian socio-economic structure, and proved that

1. Everyone had no equal rights over land or land produce. The village did not hold its land in common. Common were its officials and servants (Neale 1962: 21).
2. The land rights could even be purchased and sold. The agrarian society was internally differentiated in terms of class, and was unstable and not self-sufficient (Habib 1963:154).
3. There was a sizeable population who worked as labourer (Dharma Kumar 1992).
4. The authorities discriminated between the different sections of landowners while fixing the revenue demands. The large landowners were required to pay less (Dharma Kumar 1992).
5. Pre-colonial agrarian relations were also not free of conflicts and tensions (Habib 1963; Moore 1966; Dhanagare 1983).

f) Production of crops, particularly cash crops, for market (Habib 1982).

2. Agrarian Structure during the Colonial Rule

The British colonial rule did many things and introduced many measures to reorganize rural/agrarian society in a framework that make governance easy, profitable and manageable. Most important noteworthy measures with far reaching consequences are following:

a) The Land Tenure/Revenue System

1) The Permanent Settlement System

Under this measure, the intermediary Zamindars (the tax collecting officials in earlier regime) was granted ownership right over land from which they previously only had the rights to collect revenues.

2) The Ryotwari System

Under this, the actual land tillers were given formal property rights over land. The Royat was a tenant of the state, responsible for paying revenue directly to the state treasury, and could not be evicted as long as he paid his revenue.

3) The Mahalwari or Malgujari System

Under this system, the village was identified as unit of assessment. Though an individual cultivator in a village was made owner of the land, the villagers were asked to pay the revenue collectively. A member of the dominant family of the village was generally given the responsibility of collecting the revenue.

These colonial measures introduced ‘more intensive and systematic exploitation’ (Guha 1983: 7) and forced the peasants to become increasingly involved with the market, even when they did not have the capacity to produce surplus. These measures brought about major changes in the agrarian structure. The most significant ones are following:

b) Commercialization of Agriculture

It means a shift in the agrarian economy from production for consumption (food crops) to production for market (cash crops). The demand of raw material in British industries and the manifold increase in the land revenue compelled the peasantry to shift to cash crops (Blyn 1966). One obvious consequence of this shift in cropping patterns was a significant increase in the vulnerability of local population to famines (Kumar 1982; Sen 1976).

c) Commodification of Land

Due to colonial policies land began to acquire the features of a commodity. The moneylender, who until then lent keeping a peasant’s crops in mind, began to see his land as a mortgageable asset against which he could lend money.

d) De-industrialization of the Indian economy

The influx of cheap goods from England after the industrial revolution hastened the process of de-industrialization by ruining the village artisans that also resulted into the massive pressure on cultivatable land.

e) Land Alienation

It was a pan-Indian phenomenon irrespective of the system of revenue settlement: Zamindary, Ryotwari, or Mahalwari (Dhanagare 1983). In the past the professional moneylenders generally did not evict the peasant from his land but made him tenant if he did not pay back the debt, whereas the landlords evicted him from the land and made him landless. Thus tenancy and landlessness grew significantly (Bhattacharya 1985; Bailey 1958).

f) Conservation and/or Dissolution of the elements of Pre-colonial Agrarian Structure

There is almost a consensus among scholars that while colonial rule destroyed some pre-colonial elements of agrarian structures, it also preserved many. It broke down earlier structures without reconstituting them, and, as Utsa Patnaik argues, the ‘bourgeois property relations’ developed without corresponding development of capitalist relations of production and forces of production in agriculture (Patnaik 1990; Banaji 1990). Alavi argues that colonial rule brought about peripheral capitalism in India which generated a disarticulated form of ‘generalised commodity production’ because the surplus agriculture produce was reinvested not in the local economy but in the metropolitan centers (Alavi 1990: 170).

3. Agrarian Structure in Post-colonial India

Independence from the colonial rule marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of agrarian structure. The main objective of the Indian state was to transform the stagnant and backward economy and to make sure that the benefits of transformation and growth were not monopolized by a particular section of the society. Keeping this in background the govt. of India introduced various measures. Significant ones are following:

a) Land Reforms

Land reforms in independent India finds its raison d être in the constitution which begins with the Preamble that is based on the four cornerstones of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, and further strengthened by certain specific provisions, particularly the directive principles of state policy, which set out that the state shall, in particular, direct its policies such that:

1. The citizens, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood;
2. The ownership and control of the resources of the community are so distributed as to subserve the common good;
3. The operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and other means of production to the common detriment.

Land reforms measures were among the most significant efforts of the state to achieve these goals. The govt. of India directed its states to abolish intermediary tenures, regulate rent and tenancy rights, confer ownership rights on tenants, impose ceilings on holdings, distribute the surplus land among the rural poor, and facilitate consolidation of holdings. A large number of legislations were passed by the state governments over a short period of time.

The actual implementation of these legislations and their impact on the agrarian structure is, however, an entirely different story. Most of these legislations had loopholes that allowed the landlords to tamper with the land records, evicting their tenants, and using other means to escape the legislations (Joshi 1976; Radhakrishnan 1989).

Despite over all failure, land reforms succeeded in weakening the hold of absentee landlords over rural society and assisted in the emergence of a class of substantial peasants and petty landlords as the dominant political and economic group (Bell 1974: 196; Chakravarti 1975: 97-8; Byres 1974). However, it was only in rare cases that the landless, most of whom belonged to class of dalits, received land. The beneficiaries, by and large, belonged to middle level caste groups who traditionally cultivated land as a part of the calling of their castes. Otherwise, the land holding structure continued to be fairly iniquitous.

b) Provisions for institutional Credit

The govt. of India introduced various provisions of Institutional credit to weaken the hold of traditional moneylenders over the peasantry. According to the RBI Report 1969, approximately 91per cent of the credit needs of the cultivators were being met by informal sources of credit. 69.7 per cent of it came from usurious moneylenders. The govt. asked cooperative credit societies and commercial banks to lend to the agricultural sector on priority basis. However, the studies showed that much of their credit went to the relatively better off sections of agrarian society and the poor continued to depend on the servile exploitative sources (Thorner 1964; Oommen 1984; Jodhaka 1995).

c) The Community Development Programme (CDP)

This programme, which was patterned on American experiences, was launched on 2 October 1952, and its objective was to provide the substantial increase in agricultural production and improvement in basic services, which would ultimately lead to overall development of the all sections of agrarian society. However, it failed in its objective and resulted in helping only those who were already powerful in the village.

d) The Green Revolution

Green Revolution is an agricultural development project that includes higher yielding variety seeds (HYV) and other fertility enhancing inputs i.e. chemical fertilizer, controlled irrigation facilities and pesticides. The components of the project consisted of providing cheap institutional price incentives, marketing and research facilities.

The idea of Green Revolution was based on the ‘trickle down’ theory of economic growth. It carried the conviction that agriculture could be peacefully transformed through the quite working of science and technology without the social costs of mass upheaval and disorder (Frankel 1971: Chat. V).

The Green Revolution led to a substantial increase (at the rate of 3 to 5 per cent per annum) in the agricultural production (Byres1972). However, it did not mean same thing to all sections of the agrarian society. While bigger farmers had enough surplus of their own to invest in the new capital-intensive farming, for smaller farmers it meant additional dependence on borrowing, generally from informal sectors (Jodhaka 1995: A124; Harriss 1987: 231). The Green Revolution also resulted into a totally new kind of mobilization of surplus producing farmers who demanded a better deal for the agricultural sector (Dhanagare 1991; Brass 1994; Gupta 1997).

Did the benefits of Green Revolution ‘trickle down’ to agricultural labourers? It has been one of the most debated questions in the studies on agrarian change in independent India. It is an almost accepted fact among the scholars that the Green Revolution has made the countryside prosperous in general terms, however, it has also increased economic inequalities in the villages (Bardhan 1970). The wages of agricultural labour has gone up but, due to increase in the prices, their purchasing power has gone down (Bagchi1982; Dhanagare 1988). The proportion of agriculture labour to total population increased mainly due to depeasantisation (Aggarwal 1971). The Green Revolution also helped in making the agricultural labour free from relations of patronage and institutionalized dependency (Bremman 1974; Beteille 1971; Gaugh 1981; Bhalla 1976). It increased the ‘proletarianisation’ of labour (Brass 1990). Over all, it has been assessed that due to the Green Revolution a smaller class of big peasants established dominance over the larger class of agriculture labour.

The changes brought about by the Green revolution and other measures of the govt. of India in the agrarian structure generated a debate among the Marxist scholars on the nature of mode of production in Indian agriculture. The debate was started by Rudra’s (1970) claim that agrarian India is still feudal. Most of the participants in the debate, such as Chattopadhyay (1972a, 1972b), Gough (1980), Banaji (1972, 1973, 1977), Harriss (1982) and Breman (1985) argue that capitalist mode of production indeed is on its way to dominating the agrarian economy of India and most certainly that of the regions which has experienced the Green Revolution. Some others, like Bhaduri (1973a, 1973b), Pradhan Prasad (1973, 1974), N. K. Chandra (1974) and Ranjit Sau (1973, 1975, 1976) hold a different view about the nature of agrarian society. They opine that agrarian mode of production in India exhibits some features of capitalism; however, its basic nature is semi-feudal.

Basic Readings

Bardhan, P. 1970. Land, Labour and Rural Poverty: Essays in Development

              Economics. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Beteille, A. 1974. Studies in Agrarian Social Structure. Delhi: Oxford 

              University Press.

Frankel, F. R. 1971. India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and 

              Political Costs. Bombay: Oxford University Press.

Joshi, P. C. 1976. Land Reforms in India: Trends and Perspectives. New

              Delhi: Allied Publishers.

Lehman, D. (ed.). 1974. Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Reformism: Studies

              of Peru, Chile, China, and India. London: Faber and Faber.

O’Leary, B. 1989. The Asiatic Mode of Production: Oriental Despotism,

              Historical Materialism and Indian History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Patnaik, U. (ed.). 1990. Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The ‘Mode of

              Production Debate in India’. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Raychaudhury,T. and Irfan Habib (ed.). The Cambridge Economic History

              of India, vol.1. Delhi: Orient Longman.

Shanin, T. (ed.), 1987. Peasants and Peasant Societies. London: Blackwell.

Book Review: Understanding Indian Society: Past and Present: Essays for A.M. Shah

B.S. Baviskar and Tusli Patel (eds.): Understanding Indian society: past and present: essays for A.M. Shah. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010, viii + 378, pp., Rs 378 (hb). ISBN 978-81-250-3845-0 (Source: Sociological Bulletin, 59(3), December 2010)

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In terms of teaching, research and institutional development, Prof. Arvindbhai Manilal Shah, a former Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, occupies a rare position in Indian sociology. His interest in sociological research goes back to his undergraduate days when he got an opportunity to be associated with M. N. Srinivas during his fieldwork in Rampura. From then on he has consistently researched and published in various major subject-areas of sociology/social anthropology: kinship, family, caste, village, religion, and culture. His major contribution to Indian sociology has been that he brought fieldwork in centre of teaching and research activities and sensitised us to the importance of historical perspective for sociological understanding. He was an outstanding teacher and research supervisor, and a successful administrator too. In the instant volume, his students, colleagues and friends have put together fifteen essays including an elaborate introduction detailing the academic contributions of Prof. Shah and an epilogue presenting his biographical sketch.

The volume is thematically divided into four parts. Part 1 deals with gender relations. Based on the case study of five Muslim women in Delhi and an understanding of life-cycle rituals in the Muslim community such as aqiqah, bismillah, burqa and dastarkhwan, Mohini Anjum rejects the usual portrayal of Muslim women as being docile, submissive and subjugated. She argues that Muslim women are quite articulate, assertive and independent in different ways in their lives, and have been able to create space for themselves and make their voices heard in an otherwise patriarchal closed society. Tulsi Patel’s paper, based on data collected by the Grameen Bank about Bangladeshi Muslim women, radically differs from Anjum’s. She argues that the Muslim women, caught in a horrid complex situation created by poverty, religion and patriarchy, face miserable conditions and harsh dilemmas while trying to meet the conflicting demands and struggling to break out the structural forces that shape their relentless oppression. In this context, the paper discusses the interplay between women’s agential capacity to bring about a little change in their life through the microcredit programmes of the Grameen Bank and oppressive structures. In this process the paper brings out poignant everyday life experiences of Muslim women. Based on the colonial records on sex ratios among different castes, the paper by L. S. Vishwanath shows that female infanticide was a mechanism for maintaining caste status. Referring certain castes such as Rajputs, Kanbis, Lewa Patidars, Jats, Ahirs, Gujars, and Khutris, he argues that the castes that practiced hypergamous marriages resorted to extensive female infanticide during the nineteenth century because such marriages involved substantial dowry payment to the groom’s side.

Part 2 is about religion or religion-based phenomena. Based on a study of around 1000 laity in Mangalore, the paper by Alphonsus D’Souza opines that it is particularly due to modernization after the Second Vatican Council the perception of laity regarding the nature of the role of the Catholic priest has changed. Majority of the laity believe that the priests, apart from performing purely cultic or ritualistic functions, should actively work for the welfare of the people by providing leadership in socio-cultural and political areas. Media reports on the communal riots in Gujrat in1992 constitute the data base of the paper by Lancy Lobo and Bishwaroop Das. The paper narrates the incidence of riots and argues that different state-based newspapers approached and reported the riot differently. For example, Gujrat Samachar was very critical of the progressive secular people and castigated them as ‘pseudo-secularists’, and it claimed that the riot was caused chiefly by the Godhara incident. Whereas Gujrat Today suggested that the riot was an outcome of the overall legitimization of communal and criminalized politics. The paper by Ragini Shah claims to contradict Max Weber’s thesis on religion and development by presenting an ethnographic study of a Hindu organization ‘Muni Seva Ashram’. By narrating the social work initiated and completed by the Muni Seva Ashram, the paper argues that Hinduism is equally concerned with this-worldly activities.

Part 3 talks about the issues of cultural dimension of development, agro-industrial cooperatives, Indian diaspora, and informed consent in medical practice. T. Scarlett Epstein’s paper, which is based on diverse field experiences, brings out the cultural dimension of the problem of development by reasoning that since in Asian or African countries wisdom and experience are positively related with age, the development planners must create space for the grandparents in their scheme of things because they can be mediators in the process of production and their views can prove to be a fruitful lesson for development workers. The paper by B. S. Baviskar and D. W. Attwood shows the significant roles of cooperatives in the promotion of agro-based industrialization in rural areas. Once it happens, the authors argue, other forms of industry follow the process. Such industrialization is more beneficial to rural populace because it is led by the institution of cooperatives. P. J. Patel and Mario Rutten’s piece presents, in a historical perspective, the sociological dynamics of the Patidar diaspora in central London. The Patidars settled in London after they were driven out from African countries. The paper shows that in order to maintain their identity and culture the diasporic Patidars have built Hindu temples, publically and consistently perform rituals and celebrate festivals, run centre to teach Gujrati language to the younger generation, and visit villages in central Gujrat to maintain and strengthen their social or kinship relations and practice including the traditional pattern of marriage. It also spells out the changes which are occurring in the diaspora in terms of the dilemmas that the younger Patidars are facing. The paper by Aneeta Minocha argues that there is a cultural dimension to the practice of informed consent in India because family or kin groups of the patient play major role in it. The paper presents the hotly debated doctrine of informed consent along with the repercussions it will have for the empowerment of patient and consequently in changing the traditional patient-doctor relationship.

The last part is devoted to some disciplinary concerns. The paper by Andre Beteille is a detailed study of two all-important conceptualizations of kinship conventionally known as ‘elementary unit of kinship’ and ‘atom of kinship’. Contrary to the widely-held belief that the ‘atom of kinship’ is conceptually more perfect, he argues that ‘elementary unit of kinship’ is more inclusive and provides clear guidelines in the empirical investigation of kinship and in ordering of complex and seemingly incongruous data. Rajni Palriwala in her paper presents a case study of the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, to explore the dynamics of engendering of a social science syllabus. The paper argues that though the department has become gender sensitive over the last two decades, gender sensitive writings are still asked to prove themselves conceptually and empirically good enough to be included in the syllabus. The paper by Shanti George argues for creating space for children in anthropological research by accepting a child as an ethnographic participant. She believes that children can prove to be a rich source of relevant and creative information, and it is important to know the life-world of children, a very important section of the household, through their vision and version.

Thus, like the works of Shah, papers in this anthology are appealing, creative and provoking, and based on field and/or historical data. In fact, this work is a testimony to the great influence that the works of Shah command in contemporary sociological/social anthropological scholarship in India.