Extitutional Theory: Modeling Structured Social Dynamics Beyond Institutions

Résumé En

Interaction among individuals underlies all social processes. Underpinning the emergence of complexsocial organisations is the ability for individuals to influence one another, either directly, through peerpressure and social reinforcement, or indirectly, through the establishment of larger social structures,such as communities, families, companies, governments, and many other types of institutions. Severaltheoretical frameworks have been developed in a variety of disciplines to understand how individualsorganise themselves into these social structures and how these social structures in turn contribute toshaping individual attitudes, infrastructures, tools, behaviours, ideas and beliefs. The concept ofinstitutions is particularly central to most theoretical frameworks in the field of organisational andgovernance theory. While some of these frameworks focus on the structural properties of social groupsthat support or reinforce intended social interactions, others focus on social environments and culturalphenomena as a means to investigate how culture affects social dynamics and individual practices in thecontext of interactive and relational social structures. Yet, while most of these frameworks do recognizethe interplay that subsists between the structural elements and the cultural components of these socialgroups, they often assimilate both of these components into a monolithic framework ofanalysis—thereby limiting the opportunity to distinguish between the different logics that animate eachof these components. In this paper, we introduce an integrated theoretical framework to analyse theinterplay between formalized social structures composed of codified roles and rules which are commonlydescribed as “institutions'', and the more latent interpersonal relationships that shape and animate theseinstitutions—we introduce the notion of “extitutions'' to describe the latter. The main contribution ofthis paper is to provide an ontological framework to characterize the reciprocal interactions between theextitutional and institutional aspects of social groups, explicitly disentangling their respective influencesin order to better comprehend the operations and dynamic evolution of these groups. The paper buildsupon neo-structural sociology to elaborate a comprehensive framework of analysis for advancing theformalisation of both institutional and extitutional dynamics and how they affect or influence each otherover time from a multi-faceted and multi-layered network standpoint.