Specifying the “What” and Separating the “How”: Doings, Sayings, Codes, and Artifacts as the Building Blocks of Institutions

Abstract

I propose a “refurbished” object account of the building blocks of institutions. I distinguish between state theories, process theories, and object theories of institutions and institutionalization, arguing that while process accounts are an improvement over state approaches, they cannot provide a self-sufficient framework without theorizing the objects that the processes are supposed to be applied to. To achieve this goal, I build on an analytic disaggregation of the culture concept to specify the possible set of “things” that can be said to be institutionalized. I argue for an analytic distinction between “doings” (practices, habits, routines), “sayings” (vocabularies), semiotic codes, rules of the game, and artifacts as the broad classes of objects that could be subject to institutionalization processes and can thus form the “building blocks” of institutions. I conclude that process accounts need to be decoupled from object accounts, because the same processes may apply to all of these objects via distinct mechanisms, while other proposed processes only apply to a restricted set of objects.