One of the more difficult sociological concepts to\u00a0explain is the social institution. \u00a0When sociologists talk about institutions they don’t mean hospitals or churches or any of the\u00a0concrete organizations that easily come to mind, they mean something much bigger and more difficult to pin down. \u00a0They \u00a0mean institutionalized ways of doing things or, as I’ve defined them elsewhere:<\/p>\n
Persistent patterns of social interaction aimed at meeting the needs of a society that can\u2019t easily be met by individuals alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Education, then, is an institution, as is medicine and transportation. \u00a0In my textbook<\/a>, I discuss the examples of sanitation and sport. \u00a0One can’t play on a team all by oneself and it’d be pretty gross to take a personal potty with you everywhere you went. \u00a0Instead, we have organized sport and the provision of toilet facilities. Eventually, institutionalized ways of solving social needs get taken-for-granted as\u00a0the way we do things<\/a>, often to the point that we forget that they were invented in the first place.<\/p>\n
I was inspired to write about this by a post<\/a> at Sociological Cinema<\/a> by sociologist Tristan Bridges. \u00a0He uses a clip<\/a> from The Devil Wears Prada<\/em> to illustrate just this phenomenon. \u00a0Meryl Streep plays the editor of a fashion magazine. \u00a0Fashion is an institution because we can no longer feasibly make our own clothes. \u00a0Even the most industrious and clever among us, those who make their own clothes, will buy the fabric\u00a0with which to do so. \u00a0Almost no one in a Western country has the faintest idea of how to make fabric, let alone the resources.<\/p>\n
In the clip,\u00a0Streep’s character\u00a0responds icily when a holier-than-thou fashion outsider scoffs at her as she goes about her work.<\/p>\n
She says:<\/p>\n
You think this has nothing to do with you.<\/p>\n
You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.<\/p>\n
But\u00a0what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.<\/p>\n
And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002 Oscar de la Renta did a collection\u00a0of cerulean gowns and then I think it was Yves\u00a0St. Laurent\u00a0—\u00a0wasn’t it? —\u00a0who showed cerulean military jackets…<\/p>\n
And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. \u00a0And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled down into some Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.<\/p>\n
However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical that you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people\u00a0in this room.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
An institution has emerged to put\u00a0clothes on our back. \u00a0The scoffer who inspires Streep character’s rant would like to think that she is outside of the fashion industry, that it has nothing to do with her. Likewise, many of us would like to think that we’re outside of the institutions that\u00a0we don’t like. But we’re not. \u00a0That’s the rub. \u00a0No matter how enlightened or inspired we are to fight social convention, we can’t get outside the institutions that organize our societies. \u00a0We’re in them whether we know it or not.<\/p>\n
Here’s the clip; it’s worth it, even given\u00a0the advertisement:<\/p>\n
[youtube]https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vL-KQij0I8I[\/youtube]<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the more difficult sociological concepts to\u00a0explain is the social institution. \u00a0When sociologists talk about institutions they don’t mean hospitals or churches or any of the\u00a0concrete organizations that easily come to mind, they mean something much bigger and more difficult to pin down. \u00a0They \u00a0mean institutionalized ways of doing things or, as I’ve defined […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":63956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[225,15,373,8118],"class_list":["post-63954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-clothesfashion","tag-culture","tag-color","tag-organizationsinstitutions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/08\/23.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63954"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71678,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63954\/revisions\/71678"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}