How Institutions Think

Mary Douglas' seminal book is an anthropological study of the basis for collective action through institutions. She moves away from the rationalist choice model that privileges the decision-making of sovereign individuals, and which would view organisational decisions as the outcome of negotiations between powerful individuals within the organisation. Instead she argues that organisational decisions are largely shaped by the institutional 'thought-world'. All institutions generate their own world of images, symbols, ideas, and past experiences, and people in the institution to some degree must accept this thought-world in order to function. Thus individuals' decisions in an institution are largely shaped by the institution as a whole. Moreover, the institutional thought-world orders experience and memory, and exercises a relatively large degree of control over the way its members perceive and react to new ideas. In Douglas' term, institutions exercise 'social control of cognition'.