 So this lecture is going to be about social institutions, what they are and about how they fit into a functionalist and a conflict point of view. Let's pretend for a moment that the worst has happened, apocalypse has occurred. And we have succeeded. We've killed off all the zombies. And the question is now what? How do we build a new society, a post-apocalypse society? Well, in order to do this, sociologists say that we are going to have to answer some basic questions. And these questions are what sociologists call social institutions. Now I want to be clear, you should think about these questions as kind of like DNA. These questions are answered differently by a lot of different people creating what some estimate to be over 7,000 different ethnicities. In some ways it's 7,000 different combinations of answers to these questions. So these questions are what all societies have in common and these questions have to be answered by societies in order to establish and maintain a society. And of course, if we're building from scratch, the first thing that we've got to figure out is how do we make decisions together? We've got to decide what to do, how to set things up, how to get things done, how to work together. And in order to do that, we have to establish some rules or at least some practices that will help us know what to do and how to make those decisions. And the answer to the question, how do we make decisions, sociologists call governance. So governance is a social institution that is based on how we make decisions. Each one of these social institutions has a question that has to be answered. And of course, societies are all over the place and how they make these, how they answer this question. Everything from one guy at the top gets to decide everything to we all have to talk to each other until we all agree in a kind of consensus and a whole bunch of other things in between. The next question that we got to answer is how do we distribute goods and services? So we need food, we need shelter, we need clothing, we need to be protected from the elements. We need to have people make roads, we need to have people provide transportation, provide manufacturing and so forth. And as we become more diversified and more complex a society, we have all kinds of goods and services that we need or want and they have to be distributed in some way. We call this distribution of goods and services or the answer to this question of how we distribute economy. So an economy is basically the method by which we distribute goods and services. And of course you can imagine that there are lots of answers to this question as well. In capitalism, most goods and services are distributed by who can afford it. So we exchange our labor for money and then we exchange money for goods and services. But there are other societies that distribute goods and services on the basis of need or on the basis of family status and so forth. So there are lots and lots of different answers to how we distribute goods and services. And of course if we're going to maintain our society and sustain it over generations then we have to figure out what to do with the kids because we have to make babies in order to survive and once we make them we have to have ways of taking care of them. Now this social institution is called Families, but I don't want you to have just a single family type in your brain when you think about this. Families can include everything from the entire village raises the kid to extended families, to fictive kin. All the different family types that we've talked about before are just any kind of way in which a particular group or society protects its children. So the word families is sort of misleading. We do not necessarily mean specific family types based around biology. That's just one answer to this question of how do we carry on from generation to generation. And then if we're going to meet up with other societies, exchange with them, people start moving around as the population regrows and so forth. You have immigration and of course you have to teach the kids who come up. So we have to teach our ways to newcomers in order to pass that information on from generation to generation. And again we call that education and in the same way that you don't want to think families in just the way we answer the question you don't want to think just formal education at this point. The answer of how do we teach our ways to the newcomers can be anything from mentoring, to sitting around a campfire, to telling stories, to having rituals that people go through. There are all sorts of ways in which we educate newcomers. And newcomers again can represent people who are immigrating into a group or they can be newcomers in the sense of new people as in children. This last social institution that sociologists have talked about traditionally may not be quite as obvious as the others. The question that gets answered is what is greater than ourselves? And this may not seem as obvious to the survival of the group as these other questions are, but it certainly seems that this is something that all groups have in common. And when you think about those sociological ways in which groups identify themselves and understand themselves, you understand that there is a need to know who the other is or who the out group is. And for a long time in human history that did not involve other human beings because human beings live very far apart from each other and didn't encounter each other often. I should say groups of human beings didn't encounter other groups very often. So the answer to this question has been, well, has been called by most sociologists as religion, but I don't want to mislead you too much. I've called it higher order because the answer to this question can include the climate, it can include nature, it can include things that are outside the control of the group all the way up to things, you know, deities and understandings of gods or who God is and so forth. So again, this doesn't seem like it's a survival question, but it is a question that every society so far has had to answer. And sociologists speculate that the reason that they, there's a need to answer that is that it helps develop group cohesion and group identity. So governance, economy, families, education, higher order, these all constitute what sociologists call social institutions. Now I want you to distinguish between the idea of an institution and a group. An institution is an abstract concept. It is not an entity that you can see or something that happens in the material space whereas a group is, you know, a group of people. You can see that they're a group and there's some ways in which you can know by observing that that group exists. Social institutions are observed sideways. They're not observed directly. So to give you an idea, governance is a social institution, but Congress is a group. So even though Congress is acting upon the question of how do we make decisions, governance is the answer which would be democracy or representative democracy or whatever, but Congress would not be the governance, Congress would be the group that performs the social institution. So I hope that that's clear. You need to distinguish between what is a group and what is a social institution and the distinction is that a social institution is abstract where a group is more concrete. So we're going to talk about social institutions. The next question that often comes up, especially because this is where conflict theory and functionalism break with each other, is what is power? And we've talked about this before in the semester, but just to remind you, a good definition of power is strength over time. Strength in that it is somebody who tells somebody else what to do and they do it. And over time meaning that it can be sustained that as, you know, that when this particular group entity or person has power, they are able to repeat this process and have people repeatedly obey them and do what they ask of them, not just a one-time, a one-off. We don't think of people as being powerful and they get their wages once. We think of people as being powerful if they get their way consistently over a period of time and then they stop getting their way over a period of time and we start thinking of them as less powerful. So time is a very important element to this. If we're going to talk about power, then we have to start talking about the power elite. The power elite is a concept by C. Wright Mills. He wrote a book called Power Elite. This is where this comes from. And in that he talks about a group of people within a society who are a social group. They play together. They go to the same schools, grew up in the same neighborhoods, go to the same church, belong to the same clubs. You know, they basically know each other, have known each other's families for a long time, belong to the same organizations and so forth. What he's saying is that this is no different than any other social group. This is no different than your inner circle, your closest people to you. It's just that when the powerful do this, when a group of people whose decisions influence other people's lives do this, it can become a situation in which that power is multiplied. So when he looked at how these social groups played together, he identified Mills, identified three particular centers of power in which the power within these entities become interchangeable with each other. And he talked, this was written in the 1950s, and he talked about political, military and economic elite. And what he means by interchangeable is that as the power in one of these areas grows, then the power in the other two areas grow. And one of the reasons that they're interchangeable is because there's an exchangeability of roles at this elite level. So oftentimes it's talked about as leadership skill or as people who have good standing in the community, that kind of thing. So it's taking a look not so much at their history, their education or their abilities or skills. It's taking a look at where their positions are within society and within the social group of the power elite. And what this means is that if you are in politics, it's not unusual for you to also end up being in business. And if you're in business, it's not unusual for you to end up part of the political system. And if you're in the military, it's not unusual for you to retire and become part of the economic system or go into politics. And so this exchangeability of roles means that if your experience was in one of these spheres, it opens doors for you in the other two spheres. And I mean this is even true of political and economic going into the military. Most of the time if you're part of this elite, you come in as an officer. And I know that at least one situation where the guy who was the first head of the CIA was made a general in the Air Force without ever rising up through the ranks. But usually it goes the other way. Usually you have people like Dwight D. Eisenhower or even our first president, George Washington, who the only office they ever held politically was the presidency that they were deemed as qualified for that job because they were generals. And their military record allowed them to get in. And you also have a lot of people who come out of politics and go into economics or vice versa and especially within the same realm of regulatory industry. So you have people who go into politics and write laws about particular industries and then once they're done with that and they've served their terms, they go into the industry that they wrote a law about and become experts on the loopholes in those laws. So this exchangeability of roles at the elite level happens all the time, sometimes to tragic ends. We saw this with Katrina, the head of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, was a friend of President Bush's and he had no background in emergency management whatsoever. And so when Katrina hit, he screwed up. He was doing things like calling for meetings the next day instead of doing things in a timely manner. And within three days of all of this falling apart, he became the person that was fired and somebody else was brought in. But by that time the damage was done and quite a few people may have lived that died after Katrina because of that mismanagement. But most of the time it doesn't have those kind of dire consequences. And we know that a lot of money is being exchanged and there's a lot of conflict of interest and a lot of expansion of power for a few people. But it doesn't have the dire consequences that Brownie being the head of FEMA during Katrina had. So this occurrence is not that unusual. Nowadays we would probably add some other spheres into this. If Seawriting Mills were writing now, we probably would add media because there are a lot of people who come and go in these spheres into the media. And you might also add sports because you now have athletes who pursue political careers or athletes who come out in the middle, you know, people who come out in the military and pursue athletic careers and people who are commentators on television shows, that kind of thing. So there are, you know, celebrities and sports and media are probably expanded circles of his power elite. But the basic thing that Mills was getting at was that this is a logical progression that occurs when a group of people interact. People interact with each other and are close to each other within social circles. And it doesn't require an evil plan somewhere. There's not necessarily an evil cartel making this happen. Basically this is what happens when you and beings hang out together and create groups together. But, you know, you and I would, if we worked somewhere and knew that our boss was looking for an employee and we knew a friend who was looking for a job, we had to hook them up and recommend them to our bosses and so forth. And, you know, somebody more qualified might not get the job, but the ripple effect probably wouldn't go beyond that. The problem is that when those who are part of the power elite do this, the ripple effect of this goes way beyond their group. So Mills's publication of this and his observation of this mechanism is part of what helped create the need for affirmative action. Because we came to understand that it wasn't the prejudices of the people who were making these decisions that were keeping other groups out, minority groups out and keeping minority power out. It wasn't a matter of attitude. It was a matter of doing what most people do in their social groups. So it needed to be broke up. There needed to be a conscious effort to break that logical progression and ensure inclusion of other groups in a conscious way. And to use the terminology in an affirmative, meaning a positive way. A couple of things to mention at this point. One is that it's pretty obvious that political military economic also parallels Eisenhower's idea of the military industrial complex. And of course this is created as a situation and unintended consequence of a push for more and more military intervention or military S intervention. And there are of course other industrial complex that exists when the political and economic spheres become interchangeable with each other and create these power situations which have unintended consequences. And another concept that we haven't talked about before is interlocking directorates. Interlocking directorates are when people serve on the board of directors for more than one corporation. And this is perfectly okay to do if those corporations don't have any thing in common. If they're not in the same industry, they're not competitors with each other, are they're not part of the down chain. So the way that goods and services are distributed and manufactured is that you generally have a vertical line between the manufacturer down to the customer. And that vertical line involves companies that are competing with each other to produce things, to manufacture things. And then you have companies that are competing with each other to distribute those things, usually trucking or shipping companies. And then you have retail outlets that are selling these things to the ultimate customer. So this chain that exists in economics can be monopolized. If a company owns the means of production and they own the means of distribution and they own the retail shop, then they can have an economic advantage over companies that they're competing with at all three of those levels. And this of course is why software companies like Apple and Microsoft get in trouble all the time with antitrust laws, because they very often buy up some of their distributors and own this chain in a way that makes it very difficult for smaller companies to compete with them. But another way to accomplish this is to put people on the board of directors for all three of these different types of companies within a chain. And of course, you know, you can't, if you sat in a board meeting at one place, you can't forget or not know what was said at that board meeting when you sat in a board meeting in another place. And these interlocking directorates can create that vertical monopoly. And there are a lot of laws against horizontal interlocking directorates, horizontal monopolies, so you can't serve on a board of directors for two companies that are supposed to be competing against each other, because your service of that would give them an unfair monopolizing of the market. But a lot of times the chains are not within one country, they're multinational. So consider for a minute that you might have a manufacturing company in Mexico and a trucking or shipping company out of Canada and a retail company out of the United States. And you basically would have somebody who sat in the board of directors of all three, there's certainly no rules about whether or not an American can serve on a board of directors in another country. And when it becomes international, it becomes very hard to break it up over antitrust because there are no international laws to appeal to and you lose jurisdiction. So this is a way that a lot of companies sort of make their positions more solid by having these interlocking directorates. And they generally are suggestive of an amalgamation of power and creating unfair advantages in the market. But they wouldn't exist if the power elite didn't exist because these people who were tapped to do, to sit on multiple boards are usually part of this power elite. So the last functionalist idea that I want to talk about, and this also can be considered a conflict idea because it helps locate where the power is, is something that sociologist Robert Merton talked about, and that is manifest versus latent functions. So the word manifest means visible and the word latent means hidden. So we're talking about the explicit function that an organization or a group has. This is a declaration on their part. You know, most organizations nowadays have something called a mission statement. Let's take an example of the College of Southern Nevada. You can see the mission statement for CSN up on the inner campus communication systems, little televisions all around. It shows up every once in a while. It's on their website. It's in all of their literature. They're pretty direct about it. You know, it's basically the same thing that would be said at most colleges, has to do with, you know, making sure that a diverse population is educated and prepared for the world outside and qualified and the jobs that they're going to do and so forth. And, you know, this is, of course, one of the purposes that CSN exists, but it probably isn't the only purpose that it's serving. There are purposes that CSN and other educational institutions serve that benefit either society as a whole or a power elite group. These benefits sometimes are positive. I'm not trying to imply that they're only negative, but oftentimes they are negative. And as such, they're not talked about directly. So they can be hidden functions. One of the ways to figure out where they're at is to follow the money. So who's benefiting? Who's profiting from an organization? Can give you an idea of what purposes they're serving? Taking CSN, one of the functions of college and, in fact, of most education in the United States nowadays is to teach you how to obey. To be a good worker bee, you are faced with all kinds of authorities, both administrative and within the classroom. And these authorities you're expected to listen to and obey as part of getting your degree. And this puts you in the habit of listening to authority and obeying authority, which puts you in a habit that a lot of people in the power elite like. Because whether you work for them directly or you merely vote politically on a local or national level, you oftentimes do things because you're told to by them, and directly or indirectly. And as such, that benefits them. And that's probably one of the reasons why education persists and why colleges like the College of Southern Nevada persists. Has as much to do with this kind of function as it does with educating and training and so forth. So the thing about latent functions is that they oftentimes are very powerful, not just because they're hidden, but because they're the thing that actually people would lose money or time or effort or power if they went away. And so these latent functions are oftentimes the reason why you can make perfectly logical arguments that in order to fulfill the manifest function, things need to change. But if those changes would create problems with the latent function, then there is a huge resistance to that change. So this has been a discussion of some functionalist ideas. These ideas of course have a conflict theory take on them, but you should be able to understand after this lecture what a social institution is and how power works within society and specifically how manifest and latent functions work.