There is much talk these days about the decline in our institutions. Aren’t they failing to perform, being systematically undermined, even destroyed? On the one hand, people are heard lamenting that our courts are compromised, that our Parliament is dysfunctional, or that our higher education is in a mess. On the other hand, it is also heard that as long as a powerful individual is getting things done, why care about institutions? The rules and procedures of institutions are cumbersome and time-consuming. If the same result is obtained with bypassing them, why bother? So, do institutions matter? If they do, why? What are institutions meant to do? What are they, anyway?
I propose that an institution be seen as closely related to a social practice but not identified with it. How can we make sense of this rather opaque claim? Let’s go step by step. What is a social practice? First, unlike an individual act, a practice necessarily involves several people. No single individual has the power to sustain it. Second, unlike a one-off act, a practice is recurrent. Third, people jostling in a crowd have no collective purpose, indeed they may be purposeless altogether. A social practice, on the other hand, exists for the realisation of a common need or purpose, and therefore requires coordination and cooperation among individuals. A practice is necessarily sustained by a group. Fourth, a practice is skill-based and therefore must be learnt. And being collective, it involves a pooling together of skills. An individual throwing a ball against a wall is not engaging in a social practice but a fielder throwing it to a wicket-keeper in a match is.
To sum up, a social practice is an enduring, purposive and valuable activity of a group sustained by the pooling together of multiple skills. Without social practices, human life is neither possible nor worthwhile.
Enough on social practice. But where does an institution figure in this? Like other human artefacts, practices are fragile and have a propensity to disintegrate without collective effort. They need to be collectively established by continual reiteration and renewal. But meaningful replication by groups requires mutual trust and expectations, best achieved by fixing roles and formulating rules enforced by someone in a position of authority. So, when a social practice embeds roles and is governed by rules/norms that tightly bind together a group, organise it into a stable collective, we have an institution. Thus, cricket, education, medicine and governance are practices; but cricket associations, universities, hospitals and government departments are institutions. We frequently use the term institution both for valued social practices and for rule-governed, organised groups, but perhaps it is best to reserve the term ‘institution’ for rule-governed organisations, rather than for valued social practices.
A pointer
And this gives a clue to why institutions matter — they help sustain valuable social practices. Besides, they unburden individuals by economising on time and effort. Since they evolve by collective effort over time, they embody social wisdom not immediately available to individual consciousness. Imagine if each individual was to take part in a practice as if it was starting from scratch, needing just his critical moral reflection to kick in! We would be left thinking endlessly with no time to act. This is why we minimise our thinking and outsource it to social rules and norms. And also why we need rule-bound institutions.
It follows that institutions give birth to a new, emergent morality — roles must be performed well, rules must be followed, and those given the task of enforcing them must do so responsibly, fairly, impartially. Institutions give rise to a set of role-specific rights and duties. Only a surgeon has the right to use a knife on a patient’s body; only professional judges can give binding judgments in court; only those with the required qualification have a right to teach in universities. No matter how great an individual captain, cricket teams win only when each player performs as his assigned role requires and when rules are properly enforced by the umpire. Each social practice is sustained largely by its own specific institutional morality.
When an institution breaks down or is deliberately attacked, at stake is the valuable social practice related to it. The practice of education suffers when universities are run by people with little understanding of academic norms and values. If the Election Commission turns partisan, the democratic practice of free and fair elections is severely jeopardised. Active citizenship is endangered when institutions of media abandon fair and objective reporting of processes and events or when political decision-making is done behind closed doors by people who misuse power. When a powerful individual bypasses institutions, the damage he causes to social practices is incalculable.
Institutions are corrupted when they begin to thwart rather than facilitate practices. And hollow, if disconnected entirely from practices which give them their point, when they begin to serve only themselves and their officialdom. For example, when a university administration consumes more funds for its salary and perks and spends less on the academic life of students and teachers. Or when politicians and bureaucrats forget why they occupy the political and administrative position they do: to serve the people.
Of course, like individuals who constitute them, institutions also go to sleep! They suffer from lethargy and inertia. When that happens, they need to be reawakened and renewed, something impossible without collective self-reflection. If so, both for their own sake and for the sake of the practices they serve, institutions must not throttle this activity of self-reflection. From time to time there should be collective deliberation about the purpose and importance of social practices and institutions, on why they matter.
