Social institutions: a dialogue between sociology Chicago and pragmatist philosophy

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1590/s0102-6992-202136020005

Keywords:

Institutions, Human ecology, Pragmatism, Chicago school of sociology, Empowerment, Collective intelligence

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.

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Author Biography

Daniel Cefai, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Daniel Cefaï é diretor de estudos na Ehess, pesquisador no Centro de Estudo dos Movimentos Sociais (Cems); é cofundador e diretor de redação da revista Pragmata (https://revuepragmata.wordpress.com/les-numeros). Suas áreas de estudo abarcam a história da sociologia nos Estados Unidos, particularmente a pesquisa de campo (L’Engagement ethnographique, Paris: Éditions de l’Ehess, 2010) e a sociologia da ação pública, das mobilizações coletivas e dos problemas públicos, em uma perspectiva pragmatista (Pourquoi se mobilise-t-on? Paris: La Découverte, 2007). Criou a Bienal de Etnografia da Ehess e pesquisou sobre a questão dos moradores de rua (L’urgence sociale en action: ethnographie du Samusocial de Paris. Paris: La Découverte, 2011). Coeditou Arenas públicas. Por uma etnografia da vida associativa (Niterói, RJ: Editora UFF, 2011), L’Expérience des problèmes publics (com Cédric Terzi, 2012, Raisons Pratiques), e, mais recentemente, Pragmatisme et sciences sociales: explorations, enquêtes, expérimentations (SociologieS, 2015) e Problèmes, expériences, publics: une enquête pragmatiste (Sociologie et Sociétés, 2019).

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Published

2021-09-13

How to Cite

Cefai, D. (2021). Social institutions: a dialogue between sociology Chicago and pragmatist philosophy. Sociedade E Estado, 36(02), 461–485. https://doi.org/10.1590/s0102-6992-202136020005