Social institutions: a dialogue between sociology Chicago and pragmatist philosophy

Abstract

This paper goes back to Robert E. Park and William I. Thomas statements on the process of social disorganization /reorganization and the way this was dealt with in some of the Chicago sociology dissertations in the 1920s. Social institutions were considered to be living organisms which are born, grow and die and which exist through their transactions with their environments and through the genesis of these transactions. The basic processes of this ecology of social institutions, in the biotic and the moral orders, were grasped through the categories of competition and selection, isolation, invasion, and succession, cooperation, parasitism, and symbiosis, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. The statistical and cartographical descriptions and analyses made it possible to account for ecological processes of functional and territorial, ethnic and racial differentiation, distribution and segregation. This first stage, in the 1920-30s, helps to understand how W. F. Whyte, H. Blumer, and E. C. Hughes studied the process of institutionalization of hospitals, firms, unions, churches, and social movement organizations in the 1940s-60s. This classical ecological perspective is enriched here through its confrontation with pragmatist philosophy – Park and Thomas were close to. Institutions, beyond their ecological grounding, are taken as experiential fields and cultural matrices, which grow up around attempts to define and master social problems. The Deweyan notions of public reason, collective intelligence, and collective learning by communities of debaters, investigators, and experimenters, come into play. Social institutions are accumulators, condensers and generators of experience, know-how and knowledge: they empower or disempower the people. Such a set of questions allows us to tackle in a fresh perspective some issues of sociology of organizations.