Social institutions and mass society

Social institutions are enduring regulatory and organizing structures of any society, which constrain and control individuals and individuality. While we may enter into and leave institutions, as we employ the term in everyday discourse, in fact they more or less permanently both surround and enter into us, as a (or the) condition of our social existence. What we refer to as ‘our home’, for example, is an institution in itself. It represents the meeting-point for other institutions of privacy, property, wealth, knowledge, kinship and gender relations, and so on, all of which give rise to the rules, codesand relations of ‘our’ domestic lives.

More over the language can be called ‘the social institution above all others’. This is because language is the fundamental means by which the flux of experience and sensationis translated into a social reality, classified, ordered, given or denied meaning and significance.

The ability to use language, and other means of communication, is so central precisely because it makes possible the organization and mobilization of experience. The social and material environment is organized into nameable ‘things’, imbued with meanings. Language serves as the basis for social relations, the institution whereby social reality is constantly and collectively (re)negotiated, (re)produced and challenged. It is however important to recognize the essential interconnectedness and fusion of institutions. No one institution ever operates in isolation from others, as if in a vacuum. It may be useful to think of all social institutions in terms of the varying degrees to which they represent historical and continuing social responses to conflicts at the levels of: (1) Economy, concerned with the production and distribution of material goods and wealth. (2) Politics, concerned with the exercise of powerand processes of social regulation. (3) Culture, concerned with the production, exchange and reproduction of meanings.

Seeing institutions in this way involves recognizing that they combine certain important identifying features, which generally appear to be external to the individual. The ‘language’ and the ‘law’, for example, both seem to exist ‘outside’ of the actions and demands of individuals. Second, this ‘outsideness’ is partly defined by its constraining or coercive power and authority over individuals.

In Goffman’s terms, ‘every institution has encompassing tendencies’. Some, such as prisons and mental hospitals, as he suggests, can be regarded as total institutions in terms of the high degree of power and direct regulation they exert over their ‘inmates’. For others, their apparent externality and control is guaranteed by their apparent timelessness; by the fact that often, like the buildings, they were there before us, and may survive us as apparently ‘natural’, ‘normal’ even ‘unchanging’ features of social life.

Given their social and cultural centrality, it is not surprising that the study of institutions has served as a broad focus for theoretical and empirical problems and debate. Their characteristics and functions are defined differently by contesting theoretical perspectives. A triangle of recurrent problems has fuelled this contest.

First, the problem of determination: to what extent and by what means do institutions control, constitute and hence determine all individual action and communication – are we all, always, institutional ‘agents’ or ‘inmates’?

Second, the central issue of whose control?: to what extent do institutions represent the particular values, interests and legitimized power of dominant groups or classes in society, as opposed to reflecting an overall social consensus?

Third, the wider historical issue of the role of institutions in social and cultural change, especially the potential tensions and contradictions between their reproductive (conservative) tendencies and their transformative (innovative) capacities.

In short, social institutions, in both their material and discursive forms should perhaps form the prime focus for the study of culture and communication. They are the major social sources of codes, rules, and relations.

Mass society theory is an early twentieth-century model of the social organization of industrial/capitalist societies which characterized them as comprising a vast workforce of atomized, isolated individuals without traditional bonds of locality or kinship, who were alienated from their labour by its repetitive, unskilled tendencies and by their subjection to the vagaries of the wage relationship (the cash nexus) and the fluctuations of the market.

Such individuals were entirely at the mercy of totalitarian ideologies and propaganda; influence by the mass media (comprising, in this period, the emergent cinema and radio). Mass society theory was an understandable response to the economics and politics of the 1930s, and was neatly summed up in Charles Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936). But it has hung on in a common sense version which is associated largely with cultural and literary critics for whom industrialization and modern society in general remain a regrettable aberration from values and habits which these writers fondly imagine used to prevail before the invention of machines, democracy and the like.

Mass society theory has been refuted by historical evidence, but its continuation as an ideology can be accounted for by attending to the term most often used as the polar opposite of mass, namely elite. This indicates the politics of mass society theorists – they are advocates of various kinds of cultural elite who should be privileged and promoted over the masses, claiming for themselves both exemption from and leadership of the misguided masses. These terms, mass and elite, are of course convenient ‘erasures’ or euphemisms for class.

Mass society theory has been active in a wide range of media studies, where it tends to produce apocalyptic visions of what the television and cinema are doing to the masses (but never, oddly enough, to the critic). Any time you speculate on what ‘effect’ the media have on (other) people, especially if your thoughts turn to notions such as dependency, aggression, narcotization, brutalization and desensitization, then you are thinking mass society theory. Don’t! Go and watch television, and ask yourself why these things aren’t happening to you.