Institutions

The term institutions refers to assemblages of people and resources under socially recognized affiliations in private and public sectors. Institutions are widely recognized as important analytic objects in geography and the social sciences because of their production and control of resources (e.g., jobs, government subsidies, mortgage loans, access to public services and facilities). Institutions practice control of resources through rules of conduct, regulation of provider populations, and procedures of allocation. This science of allocation, far from being neutral and value free, flows out of an instrumentalist–political reality whose specifics are much debated. The two dominant schools of thought, Weberian and Marxist, posit different political realities. Whereas Weberians emphasize the drive of institutions to bureaucratically grow and self-perpetuate, Marxists speak of the drive of institutions to either directly accumulate capital or support the capital accumulation process of political–economic elites. In this context, each recognizes that institutions profoundly shape social and spatial patterns in their everyday functioning.

In their most powerful phase, institutions can individually or collectively evolve into bureaucracies whose hierarchies of managers, regulatory procedures, and modes of conduct organize an influential bureaucratic vision of social life and society. This vision reduces the complexities of subtle social issues[Page 261] to the arena of quick and efficient management and control. The result is the widespread acceptance of such narrowed issues (and how they should be dealt with) to the easy realms of right versus wrong, good versus bad, or desirable versus undesirable.

In human geography today, new institutional forms that transcend the simple public–private sector dichotomy are posited as emerging. Currently, the human landscape is seen to be populated by the likes of public–private partners, market-based local governments, and “quangos” (i.e., quasi-autonomous government organizations). Each represents the sense of a blurred public–private distinction as institutions carry important elements of both in their daily actions. These new institutional forms, unlike previous ones, embed the power of the public sector (e.g., sanctioned rules and regulations, subsidies, legitimacy affiliated with government intentions) and the private sector (e.g., capital, agglomerations of workers). In this context, many geographers today speak about the growing institutionalization of power in societies such as the United States and the United Kingdom.