Social Institutions and Basic Principles of Societal Organization

Bondarenko, Dmitri M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-51437-2_3

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Recently, a group of archaeologists have proposed an alternative approach that defines institutions as groups of people who follow regularized practices: "We conceptualize institutions as organizations of people that carry our objectives using regularized practices and norms, labor, and resources" (Holland-Lulewicz, et al, 2020); see also Bondarenko et al (2020). This definition, which omits the four key features of institutions listed above, in fact describes what sociologists call organizations.…”

Section: Institutions and Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutions, Generative Processes, and Urban Order in Early Cities

Smith

2024

Preprint

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I address the question of what holds cities—particularly early cities—together. I first discuss the question of urban order, or social order in cities. Archaeologists are starting to come around to the standard answer to that question in the social sciences: urban order is created and maintained by the operation of two types of social forces: institutions (top-down forces) and generative processes (bottom-up forces). I review the changes in archaeological thinking that led from obsolete and inadequate models of social order (statism and agency) to the emerging current understanding. I discuss the concept of institutions, including a new archaeologically-useful definition, and describe five types of early urban institutions (political, economic, political economy, social, and religious). I then present three types of generative process: population/demography, self-governance, and self-coordination. I also urge archaeologists to stop using idiosyncratic definitions of concepts (like institution) that serve to isolate archaeology from wider scholarship in the social and natural sciences.

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Section: Institutions and Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutions, Generative Processes, and Urban Order in Early Cities

Smith

2024

Preprint

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“…For decades, archaeologists have highlighted heterogeneity across both space and time in how different relationships and societal characteristics may covary (or not) with one another (e.g., Feinman and Neitzel 1984). These basic axioms continue to be expressed today in the analysis and comparisons of institutional arrangements (Bondarenko et al 2020; Holland-Lulewicz et al 2020; Kowalewski and Birch 2020) and in broader conversations about relational approaches to archaeological analysis and the lasting impacts of culture historic frameworks that do not generally allow for heterogeneity in models of social and cultural change (Feinman and Neitzel 2020; Holland-Lulewicz 2021). Despite this common recognition, archaeologists often treat multiple networks (reflecting different kinds of institutions) as a priori analytically independent of one another.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Heterogeneity of Social Network and Institutional Covariance in the American Southeast

Holland-Lulewicz

2023

Am. Antiq.

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Social, political, and economic institutions covary with one another in heterogenous ways across space and time. Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a set of analytical tools and conceptual frameworks that have allowed for formal comparisons of interactions, affiliations, and relationships in reconstructing historical trajectories of institutional change. Although archaeologists have made full use of a range of metrics that describe the structural variation of social networks, formal approaches to analyzing the covariance of networks, and the institutions that structured networks in the past, remain undertheorized. In most cases, descriptive metrics are compared between networks built from different datasets or networks separated in time. Using quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) correlations to compare matrices of archaeological data, I draw on a ceramic dataset of approximately 350,000 sherds from the Southern Appalachian region to investigate how decisions related to manufacture choice and to stylistic design covaried with one another between roughly AD 800 and 1650. I explore how material attributes may or may not vary independently of one another and what that means for our analyses of the institutions they reflect. The results contribute to broader comparative analyses of institutional change and perennial discussions of social evolution.

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Social Institutions and Basic Principles of Societal Organization

Cited by 2 publications

References 57 publications

Institutions, Generative Processes, and Urban Order in Early Cities

Institutions, Generative Processes, and Urban Order in Early Cities

The Heterogeneity of Social Network and Institutional Covariance in the American Southeast

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