Extitutional Theory: Modeling Structured Social Dynamics Beyond Institutions

Abstract

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

Keywords: Institutions, extitutions, social dynamics, complex systems, network science, organisational theory, governance theory