Understanding Social Institutions

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Sociology Class XI (Introducing Sociology), Chapter 3.

Who wrote the rules you live by?

You did not choose to be somebody's child or somebody's student. You did not pick the language of your school or the age at which you can vote. These are fixed by institutions, and the roles we play are not like the roles a film actor may or may not accept. In the broadest sense, an institution is something that works by rules set or at least acknowledged by law or custom, and whose regular working cannot be understood without those rules. Institutions constrain us, but they also give us opportunities. The school limits when you may leave, and it also opens the door to a career.

Institutions can be macro, like the state, or micro, like the family. This chapter takes up five areas: family, marriage and kinship; work and economy; politics; religion; and education.

Two lenses: functionalist and conflict

The chapter keeps returning to the two views from Chapter 2. Know them well, because many questions are really asking "which lens is this?".

A good habit while reading: ask how an institution constrains and also offers chances to men and to women, and how it affects the privileged and the dispossessed.

Family, marriage and kinship

Nothing seems more natural than the family. We assume everyone's family is like ours. Sociologists and social anthropologists have shown that family, marriage and kinship exist in every society but take different forms, and that the family (the private sphere) is closely linked to the economy, politics and education (the public spheres).

The functionalist picture. Functionalists see the family as performing tasks that meet society's basic needs and preserve order. They regard the nuclear family as best suited to industrial society, with the husband in the instrumental role of breadwinner and the wife in the affective, emotional role at home. This vision is questionable. It is gender unjust, and cross cultural studies show it is untrue: women form a large part of the labour force in industries such as garment export, and men are not necessarily the heads of households. Studies in India also suggest that families need not turn nuclear just because the economy industrialises.

Common sense says joint families are disappearing. Is that so? The reality is more complex.

Shah's point is a caution, not a final answer. It warns us against swallowing a common sense impression and asks for careful comparative and empirical study.

Varied family forms.

Families link to the larger society, and they change. After German unification in the 1990s, marriage rates fell sharply, because the new state withdrew the protection and welfare schemes the families had enjoyed. People felt economically insecure and responded by refusing to marry. This is an unintended consequence of a political event. The direction of change is not the same everywhere, and change and continuity coexist.

How gendered is the family? The belief that a son will support parents in old age while a daughter leaves on marriage makes families invest more in boys. Although a female baby is biologically more likely to survive than a male baby, infant mortality among girls is higher in India. A popular Telugu saying that raising a daughter is like watering a plant in another's courtyard reflects the same thinking.

The child sex ratio fell from 945 in 1991 to 919 in 2011, which is linked to female foeticide. It is lower in Punjab (846) and in some Haryana districts (below 800).

Marriage. The forms of marriage are classified in two ways: by the number of partners, and by the rules about who may marry whom.

Even where polygamy is allowed, monogamy is more common in practice. Polyandry may arise where harsh economic conditions mean a single male cannot support a family, or where extreme poverty presses a group to limit its population. In parts of north India, village exogamy meant daughters were married into villages far away, so that the bride would adjust in her new home without interference from her own kin, and the distance meant she saw her parents rarely, a sadness that folk songs capture. Widow remarriage was denied to upper caste Hindu widows, and the campaign for it was a major issue for 19th century reform movements. Today, in India, nearly 10 per cent of all women and 55 per cent of women over fifty are widows (Chen 2000).

The vocabulary of kinship.

Pause and predict: after marriage, a woman moves to her husband's village, which is 40 km from her parents' home. Is this village exogamy, or patrilocal residence, or both?

Check your answer: both. She marries outside her natal village (village exogamy), and the couple lives with the man's parents (patrilocal residence). They are different rules that often occur together.

Work and economic life

What counts as work? We usually mean paid employment, but this is an oversimplified view. Work, paid or unpaid, is carrying out tasks that require mental and physical effort to produce goods and services for human needs. Much work happens in the informal economy: transactions outside regular employment, sometimes with cash, often by direct exchange of goods or services, and not recorded in official employment statistics. A domestic helper's daily chores, a child running errands for food, and a vegetable vendor's day are all work.

In India the larger share of the population is still involved in rural agricultural or other rural occupations, while the service sector is expanding.

Transformation of work. Industrial processes were broken into simple operations that could be timed and monitored, and the moving assembly line was a major innovation. Mass production needed mass markets. More recently, as competition between firms and countries grew, production shifted to flexible production and decentralisation of work. In a study of the garment industry in Bangalore, the supply chain has more than a hundred operations between the designer and the consumer, and the manufacturer controls only 15 of them. If workers demand higher wages, manufacturers can move production elsewhere, which weakens union power, so activists may need to enlist the retailer and an international body of customers. The lesson is that new ways of organising production changed both the economics and politics of work.

Pause and predict: a woman stitches garments at home for a local supplier, paid in cash per piece with no written contract. Where does her work belong in the economy?

Check your answer: in the informal economy. It is real work, paid or unpaid, that takes effort and produces goods, but it lies outside regular employment and is not recorded directly in official employment statistics.

Politics: power and authority

Political institutions are about the distribution of power. Power is the ability of individuals or groups to carry out their will even when others oppose it. It operates at every level: family elders assigning duties, a school principal maintaining discipline, a party president expelling a member. Authority is power that is accepted as legitimate, that is, as right and just. People comply because they consider the control fair, and ideologies help the process of legitimation.

Stateless and state societies. Studies of stateless societies by social anthropologists show how order is kept without a modern government: balanced opposition between parts, alliances that cut across kinship, marriage and residence, and rites involving both friends and foes. Some of these informal mechanisms are also present in state societies.

A state exists where a political apparatus of government (such as a parliament and civil service officials) rules over a given territory, backed by a legal system and the capacity to use military force. The functionalist sees the state as representing the interests of all sections, and the conflict view sees it as representing the dominant sections. A modern state is defined by sovereignty (undisputed political rule over a territory), citizenship and, most often, nationalism.

Citizenship rights were won through struggles that limited or overthrew monarchs, such as the French Revolution and the Indian independence struggle.

Governments were reluctant to grant universal franchise: early on, women and a large part of the male population were excluded, and holding property was often a condition. Broadening social rights led to the welfare state in Western societies after the Second World War. Nationalism is a set of symbols and beliefs giving a sense of belonging to a single political community, and it appeared only with the modern state. Sociologists study power beyond government itself, including its distribution between classes, castes and communities, and in associations such as schools, banks and religious bodies.

Two views. For the exam: power is the ability to carry out one's will even when opposed, and there is a fixed amount of it in a society, so if some wield power others do not. Another reading: some political thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, argue that power is not a fixed stock to be divided but something that grows when people act together. Why it matters: use the fixed amount idea when a question defines power as one party gaining at another's cost.

Religion: studied as a social institution

Sociology does not ask whether a religion is true. It differs from a religious or theological study in three ways.

All religions share a set of symbols that invoke reverence or awe, rituals or ceremonies, and a community of believers. Lighting a diya to honour the divine differs completely in meaning from lighting it to brighten a room. Following Emile Durkheim, sociologists distinguish the sacred from the profane. The sacred often includes an element of the supernatural, but some traditions, such as early Buddhism and Confucianism, had no concept of the supernatural while still revering sacred things and persons.

Religion and society are tied together. Religion has a close relationship with power and politics, and has also been behind movements for social change, such as anti caste movements and movements against gender discrimination. Classical sociologists expected secularisation, the decline of religion's influence as societies modernised. Contemporary events suggest religion still has a persisting role.

Two views. For the exam: classical sociologists believed religion would become less influential with modernisation (secularisation). Another reading: later scholars point to the persisting public role of religion in many societies and ask whether the secularisation expectation itself was too simple. Think about why religion persists.

Weber: how a belief system shaped the economy. Max Weber (1864 to 1920) argued that Calvinism, a branch of Protestant Christianity, influenced the rise of capitalism. His chain of reasoning is a good model for statement based questions.

A study of the pilgrim city of Nasik illustrates the link between religion and economic life: where the way of life of priests changed with new education and jobs, and where craftsmen who made copper and brass wares for pilgrims found demand uncertain and moved into industry and business.

Why it matters. Weber's point was not that religion alone made capitalism, but that religion can influence economic behaviour, just as the economy and politics influence religious behaviour. Religion cannot be studied as a separate entity.

Education: passing on the group heritage

For sociologists, education is a process of transmitting the group's heritage, which is common to all societies. In simple societies, children learn customs by taking part in adult activities, so formal schools were not needed. In complex societies, with a vast division of labour, work separated from home, states and nations, and complex symbols, informal learning is not enough, and education has to be formal and explicit. Modern societies also rest on abstract, universalistic values, unlike simple societies that depend on particularistic values based on family, kin, tribe, caste or religion. A school uniform is a small example of promoting uniformity and standardised aspirations.

In one school report, almost no children from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households attended in the cultivation season, since they took on household responsibilities, and girls did domestic and income earning work such as picking cow dung to sell. The report shows how caste and gender shape chances of education, which connects back to Chapter 1 and the question of a child's chances of a good job. A kindergarten study (Apple 1979) found that children learn that work means teacher directed activities and is compulsory, while free time is called play, a reminder that schools also teach through what they do, not only through the syllabus.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: functionalists say education selects the most able for the right roles, and conflict theorists say it reproduces inequality. In reality: both processes can happen in the same school system, with real mobility stories alongside real barriers. Why it matters: answer with the lens the question names, then add the other as a contrast.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Terms, Concepts and Their Use in Sociology gives the groups, status, role and social control used here.
• Next: Culture and Socialisation shows how norms and values enter people through the family, school and peers.
• Class XII link: Social Institutions: Continuity and Change revisits caste, tribe and family in India, and The Market as a Social Institution extends the economy section.