Social rule system theory
These rules have a tangible existence in societies – in language, customs and codes of conduct, norms and laws, and in social institutions such as family, community, market, business enterprises, and government agencies.
Thus, this theory posits that the making, interpretation, and implementation of social rules are universal in society, as are their reformulation and transformation.
Human agents (individuals, groups, organizations, communities, and other collectivities) produce, carry, and reform these systems of social rules, and this frequently takes place in ways they neither intend nor expect.
[1] What is more, at the same time that social rule systems strongly influence actions and interactions, they are formed and reformed by the actors involved.
Human agency is manifest in this dialectical process, played out by participating actors having their specific competencies and endowments, their situational analyses, interpretations, and strategic responses to immediate pushes and pulls to which they are subject.
The development of a more systematic conceptualization and theorizing about social rules and systems of social rules emerged in the late 1970s in the collaborative work of Thomas Baumgartner, Tom R. Burns, Philippe DeVille, and later Helena Flam, Reinier de Man, Atle Midttun, Anders Olsson, and others.
[3] Rules may be imprecise, possibly inconsistent, and open to a greater or lesser extent to modification and transformation by the participants.
Rules are key concepts in the new institutionalism,[4] in several variants of socio-cultural evolutionary theory,[5] and in work in semiotics,[6] linguistics,[7] and philosophy on “language games”.
[9] In general, much of the use of rule concept in the social sciences and humanities has been informal and even metaphorical, with the major exception of Chomsky.
They also generate opportunities for social actors to behave in ways that would otherwise be impossible, for instance, to coordinate with others, to mobilize and to gain systematic access to strategic resources, to command and allocate substantial human and physical resources, and to solve complex social problems by organizing collective actions.
[12] On the actor level, one refers to roles, particular norms, strategies, action paradigms, and social grammars (for example, procedures of order, turn taking, and voting in committees and democratic bodies).
Grammars of action are associated with culturally defined roles and institutional domains, indicating particular ways of thinking and acting.
Shared rules are the major basis for knowledgeable actors to derive, or to generate, similar situational expectations.
They also provide a frame of reference and categories, enabling participants to readily communicate about and to analyze social activities and events.
As Harre and Secord (1972:12) point out, “It is the self-monitoring following of rules and plans that we believe to be the social scientific analogue of the working of generative causal mechanisms in the processes which produce the non-random patterns studied by natural scientists.” Social rule systems play then an important role in cognitive processes, in part by enabling actors to organize and to frame perceptions in a given institutional setting or domain.
For instance, a formal organization such as a bureaucracy consists of, among other features, a well-defined hierarchical authority structure, explicit goals and policies, and clear-cut specialization of function or division of labor.
Rule system theory stresses rule-based cognitive processes such as framing, contextualizing, and classifying objects, persons, and actions in a relevant or meaningful way (Carson, 2004).
In line with the new institutionalism, social rule system theory stresses that particular institutions and their organizational instantiations are deeply embedded in cultural, social, and political environments and that particular structures and practices are often reflections of as well as responses to rules, laws, conventions, paradigms built into the wider environment.
Selective environments operate to bring about the successes of some rule structures and the failure of others and, thereby, shifts in the prevalence of different forms.
The introduction by social agents of new rules and their expression in transformed patterns of action or in innovative physical artifacts – such as technologies and socio-technical infrastructures – is a major part of institutional change and evolution.
