INSTITUTIONS AROSE AMONG HUMANS TO SOLVE A particular problem. That problem was how to coordinate the actions of lots of people to accomplish a common purpose. Institutions are simultaneously one of the greatest and one of the worst inventions of human beings. They can make us extra smart or extra stupid.
An institution is a set of rules, procedures, conventions, and structures of authority that govern how a group of people will work to accomplish a purpose. If a small group of people want to erect a building or engage in a hunt, they do not need an institution. But if a large group wants to build a city or engage in the mass production of food, they need one or more institutions. An institution is meant to get everyone on the same page and coordinate a complex set of interacting activities toward a complex set of goals. Of necessity, it involves rules, even legal ones, and a system that distributes and enforces roles and authority.
Institutions are “frozen thought.” They exist in part to “think for us.” In any complex set of tasks involving lots of people, there are a great many things to think about, make decisions about, plan for, and reflect on. Institutions take some of these things and “freeze” them into set procedures that we do not need to think about and make decisions about. These procedures lower the cognitive load for people in the institution.
For example, in a school, rules or conventions determine that students will sit in rows, follow the authority of a teacher at the front of the room, divide up time into certain periods, and be judged (“assessed”) in certain ways. Lines of responsibility and authority are clear. People do not need to think about where to be when and how to get down to work. Lots of decisions are removed so that they can concentrate on what is most important to the institution’s purpose.
Standardization is an important part of any institution. In a court, the language, procedures, documents, and practices of law are highly standardized. This does not mean that they are identical from performance to performance. It just means that they are highly consistent with well-known precedents, models, and parameters for getting things “right.” The judge does not sit in the back of the courtroom, lawyers do not wear shorts, juries do not telecommute, arguments are not made in rap, and witnesses cannot question the judge or attorneys. All this removes a great many decisions from individuals, who usually just follow along without any thought about these matters. They simply take them for granted as “natural,” when they are, in fact, just conventional. Court systems in different countries operate by different conventions, though there are some conventions that are pretty common given the purpose of courts to make judgments about crime and punishment.
Institutions, of course, end up with large buildings and built environments designed in certain ways to facilitate their work. They can spread across countries and the world. They can be composed of a vast network of people, roles, places, and procedures. They can come to seem like “super people”; they can come to seem to be actors in their own right, to have agency beyond the sum of the people who compose them. We come readily to talk about them as actors: IBM did this, Harvard did that, schools act this way, and courts act that way.
It is not really clear what such talk actually means if we think about it, which we usually don’t. In any case, such talk has been enshrined in law in the United States where corporations (a type of institution) count as “people” and have free speech rights and the other rights the Constitution once appeared to reserve for real, live, individual human beings. And, alas, I, too, will use such talk here. But we should keep in mind that when we say an institution did something or wants something, it is, in reality, people in the institution who did it or want it, though it is not always easy to say who exactly these people are. And, surely, we should realize that corporations are not people, no matter what US law or courts say about the matter.
Institutions arise in history for a specific purpose. They often live a long life, sometimes long enough to have outlived their original purpose or at least to have entered times in which the original purpose means something quite different. For example, colleges in the United States and England were originally meant to train religious thinkers and leaders. Colleges and universities were, by and large, religious institutions—not churches, but training grounds for churches. Though they remained structured in much the same way, later in history many universities saw themselves as training secular thinkers and leaders who were to be some sort of “secular priests,” saving society not through spiritual truth, but through empirical knowledge. Today, in the United States, at least, universities are confronted with many students who are more interested in beer and bodies or “getting a good job” than in salvation or knowledge. At what point should the institution die or radically change?
Until the advent of digital media, as we will see below, humans had no way to coordinate the activities of large groups of people other than via formal institutions with their structures, rules, and often top-down chains of authority. Yet those of us who have spent our lives in and around institutions, which is virtually all of us, know that humans think of institutions as “vexed” things. We complain about them and often find their procedures silly, stupid, or counterproductive. I most certainly do.
After nearly forty years as an academic, I am appalled at many of the practices and proceedings of colleges and universities. Why is this so? Why do institutions, which were meant to make people smart and effective, so often seem to make so many individuals stupid and ineffective? For example, I am simply amazed at how often even smart people seem stupid when they are on a committee. I am even amazed at how often I am stupid when I am on a committee.
The truth is that institutions often function, more or less, to do what they are supposed to do, not perfectly, nor even always well, but as well as can be managed in a complex world where until recently there were not really alternatives that were any better. Like democracy, institutions were a poor solution to a problem whose other solutions seemed even worse. That said, institutions often function in dysfunctional ways. There are many reasons for this, but I want to focus on two important ones.
First, since institutions are frozen thought, they often freeze a solution to a problem. The solution was good originally but gets to be less and less good as circumstances (and the problem) change. Once a solution is frozen, it takes lots of work to unfreeze it, to get people to rethink it and refreeze (“institutionalize”) a different solution. Even if it can be unfrozen, it unfreezes slowly and only with much effort and controversy. People become used to the frozen solution. They take it for granted. Sometimes they have invested a lot of time and effort in learning to follow it. Sometimes they feel it was sanctioned by “higher authority” that ought not to be challenged.
The QWERTY keyboard is often used as an example of frozen thought that is impossible to unfreeze, though it is now a solution to a problem that no longer exists. In the “old days,” mechanical typewriters had keys that would jam if you typed too fast. So the keyboard was purposely laid out in such a way as to discourage fast typing. Keys that were often typed together were placed far apart on the keyboard. With electronic devices, like computer keyboards, there is nothing to jam, and we can type as fast and furiously as we wish. Yet we still lay out the keys on the keyboard in the worst possible way for fast typing. So why don’t we get rid of the QWERTY keyboard?
We do not get rid of the QWERTY keyboard because each generation puts effort into learning it, gets used to it, and comes to see it as “normal” and “natural.” People do not want to invest in undoing what they have learned, confront an “odd” and “unnatural” layout of the keys, and learn something new. Furthermore, and equally important, there is no institution that can initiate the change on a grand scale and force people to follow along. The QWERTY keyboard is a once-good thought/decision/solution that is now a bad one, frozen in time, with a life of its own without its original function.
Institutions of all sorts are full of their own QWERTY keyboards. They are full of rules, procedures, and structures that have frozen solutions into forms that are now dysfunctional or irrelevant. Being frozen, however, they discourage any active human thinking about them, thinking that might lead to new decisions. We humans should often think about, reflect on, and make new decisions about institutionally frozen solutions, but mostly we do not. People who have long followed and are well practiced at the frozen solutions often have a vested interest in not unfreezing them. Newcomers may want to change them, and see more clearly the need to do so, but, in an institution, they almost always lack the power and authority to do so. Indeed, they often get accepted as a true “insider” within the institution only when they stop questioning the institution’s frozen thoughts, decisions, and solutions.
Why do we have to arrange the seats in a classroom all in a row and stare at one person, the teacher? Why should every course meet for the same amount of time and get the same amount of credit? If you ask questions like this in a school or college, you had better have the authority (or gumption) to make changes and push against the inertia of the college before you lose your job. And, indeed, enough people are asking such questions now that change is beginning to happen, though slowly and unevenly. Change is also happening here, as in so many other places today, due to digital media offering us new and better solutions to problems for which many an institution has only old and frozen solutions.
The second reason that institutions are often dysfunctional is built into the nature of human beings. An institution is founded for a purpose. The purpose can disappear or it can change over time, even when the institution does not itself disappear. At any time, however, an institution has goals of its own. These are goals that the people in the institution are supposed to carry out for the good of the institution. Sometimes, such goals are part of an institution’s mission statement.
However, humans always have their own local goals. In fact, they have two sorts of local goals. They have personal goals. These goals are what they want to accomplish for themselves, based on their own needs and desires and their own assessment of them. And they have social-interactive goals that involve interacting with other people. In face-to-face communication (and now in its digital forms) they have very human needs for solidarity with others and for respect from them. They have desires to maintain contact and not lose face or threaten other people’s face in social interaction.
These local goals, of both sorts, can and often do conflict with the more global goals of the institution. People gossiping around the water cooler at work can interact in ways that undermine the goals or mission of a business, for example. In face-to-face talk around the water cooler a person may encounter a conflict between showing support for the institution and validating his or her interlocutor’s griping about the institution. This validation is a form of social bonding and conflict avoidance. Humans are built in such a way that when they face a conflict between global goals and the local goals of social interaction, they almost always choose the latter over the former. The power and “gravity” of social interaction is very hard to overcome.
Universities want their professors to teach well so that they can keep their tuition-paying undergraduates happy. They also want their professors to publish because this brings the university status. However, professors often find the latter goal more personally rewarding (in status and money) than they do the former goal. Universities abet this conflict by rewarding publishing more than good teaching. Humans are built in such a way that when they face a conflict between global goals and local goals based on personal needs and desires, the latter almost always win out over the former. Personal goals are a powerful force, powerful enough to overcome institutional strictures and commitments. This is not simply a matter of greed or selfishness. It is a survival instinct, not just for one’s life, but also for one’s dignity as a person. People are willing to sacrifice only for groups whose survival seems synonymous with or deeply connected to their own (part of what makes it meaningful).
This conflict between local goals and wider institutional goals is problematic for any institution. Institutions have to do something to mitigate this conflict. They have to get members to serve institutional goals, sometimes even at the expense of personal and social-interactive goals. Accomplishing this requires building into people real loyalty toward an institution’s goals, mission, and values. This is not easy to do, especially if and when people see that aspects of an institution’s “frozen thought” have become dysfunctional or meaningless (save as ritual). It is not easy to do when an institution’s goals, mission, or values seem opaque or vague or inconsistent, as often happens when different aspects of an institution’s ways of proceeding become frozen on different and inconsistent goals and values.
For example, newly empowered undergraduate consumers in colleges (students who now pay more and have more choices) have come to demand better teaching and better services. In response, a college introduces policies to accomplish this, but leaves in place the now outdated procedures that heavily reward publication over teaching, thereby sending an inconsistent message to both faculty and students. Another example: facing a new high-tech economic environment that more and more demands collaborative project-based teams for success, a company reorganizes its work force into so-called cross-functional teams, but leaves in place its old winner-take-all merit system that pits workers against each other, thereby contradicting the value of cooperation and collaboration.
When people see contradictions, mixed messages, and a lack of lucidity around goals and values in an institution, they revert to privileging their local goals over the institution’s goals. They may give lip service to the institution’s goals and “talk the talk” (at least in front of bosses), but they don’t “walk the walk.” As we have said, humans are built in such a way that they will almost always favor their local goals over institutional goals unless something works to mitigate this conflict.
Humans have certain personal needs and goals that will invariably trump wider institutional goals. They need a sense of belonging, as well as a sense of being respected. They need to feel like agents whose actions matter. And, as we saw in an earlier chapter, humans are particularly sensitive to cheating and unfairness. They need to believe that arrangements are fair. If institutional procedures fulfill these personal needs and goals, there can be a good marriage between people’s personal goals and the institution’s goals and mission, since people now feel committed to the institution.
However, such marriages are getting rarer and rarer in institutions in many countries today, especially in the United States. In our global economy, the bottom line comes to matter more and more. People’s needs are regularly sacrificed in the name of efficiency and income or even just survival in a fast-changing, highly competitive environment that is often focused mostly on short-term gain.
So two of the key reasons institutions so often seem dysfunctional are their inability to quickly unfreeze no longer useful or functioning aspects of their frozen thought and their inability to mitigate conflicts between local (personal and social-interactive) goals and more global institution-wide goals.
These problems for institutions are particularly pronounced because they now face competition. Today, thanks to digital and social media, institutions face a competing solution to one of their main purposes, that is, the efficient and effective organization and coordination of large groups of people. Via texting, Twitter, websites, and mobile devices, people can organize themselves quickly and democratically to respond to immediate problems and then, often, disperse. They can show up in a city center, protest, and disappear, only to reappear somewhere else.
Via websites and digital design tools, people can organize themselves into large “knowledge communities” and produce products, knowledge, and designs of all sorts. They can create an effective “amateur” cat-health sharing site, competing at times with professional vets on issues of cat health and breeding. Substitute anything else besides cat health and you will probably find a large group of “amateurs” producing competitive knowledge and solutions around it. Such knowledge communities produce, for example, art, video games, digital stories, digital movies, music, legal advice, robots, political and environmental activism, citizen science, and a great many other things. They need no institution to organize them or to assess them. They do this for themselves, sometimes even in opposition to institutions as they school themselves and compete to design things that were heretofore “owned” by corporations (including making ads or even counter-ads or gathering their own news).
Such self-organizing knowledge communities also freeze thought. They have their own standards and conventional ways of proceeding, often built bottom up and democratically to some extent. But they seem to be able to unfreeze decisions and solutions faster than formal institutions can. And they very often meet people’s personal and pro-social goals and needs in very deep ways while simultaneously allowing them to contribute to a larger group in a meaningful way.
It remains to be seen how formal institutions (including governments) will fare in the face of this competition. Perhaps they will co-opt it for their own ends. Perhaps they won’t be able to. We will see.
Sometimes it is not institutions that freeze thought, but minds themselves. We humans sometimes fear thinking—it might lead to results we don’t like—and, as we have seen, soothe ourselves with comfort stories. But for some people comfort stories are not enough. They make up facts so that they can convince themselves that what they hope is true is true in a literal, non-metaphorical way. We turn now to one of the most fascinating aberrations of the human mind: Pseudo Empirical Stories.