 In a previous module, we talked about social institutions as subsystems within the overall society. We talked about how they provide both structure and function within the overall system. In this video then, we'll be focusing on the function that these social institutions perform. If you remember back to our definition for a system, we defined it as a set of parts that are interrelated in performing some collective function. Thus all systems perform some function. They take in resources of some kind and process those according to some set of instructions or rules in order to generate an output. And this is of course the same for all social systems. Within any given social system, a number of collective functions need to be performed for the system to be maintained and developed over time. These functions might include basic biological reproduction of the population for which we have the institution of the family or economic functions such as manufacturing products for which we have businesses or political functions such as collective social decision making for which we have the institution of government. All of these different social systems have to aggregate individuals, assign functional roles to them with all of these roles being then integrated within some overarching process that takes in resources and performs an operation on them to produce some required outcome. The division of functional tasks within a society takes the form of the interaction among heterogeneous specialized positions that are called roles. A social role defines a set of behaviors and actions of someone who holds a particular social status. Roles such as mother, manager or teacher constitute a set of responsibilities, expectations, norms and behaviors that a person has to fulfill in order for the institution to function effectively. Roles define differentiated states that individuals must occupy in order for the organization to fulfill some collective function. As such they typically exist in relation to each other, what we call reciprocation roles such as the role of doctor and patient, student and teacher, father and daughter etc. In order to coordinate activity around some common function we need not only roles but some set of relations between these roles that define how they interrelate. Doctors and patients, students and teachers know how they should interrelate in order to enable the joint outcome. In large social systems we have organizational charts that define how the different positions relate to each other and within very formal situations they may define specific protocols for interaction such as a soldier having to salute before interacting with a member of a higher rank or having to call the queen her majesty. But the primary objective here is to automate the interaction between the agents so that it does not have to be renegotiated each time. When everyone knows their role, place and how to relate to others within the system this will enable a frictionless process to take place. Next, in order for the system to perform some collective function we need to define what exactly that function is. If we think about writing and business model we are really trying to define the functioning of that enterprise by answering the questions of what problem will this business solve, who will it solve it for and what resources will it use to do that. So systems take in inputs and through some process they perform a set of operations on these inputs to generate some output. We could think about the military as an example. It will take in people, finance, technology and other resources in order to generate the desired functional output of securing a nation. In order to do this there needs to be some set of rules that define how the whole process should be performed. Thus formal institutions are typically endowed with a set of instructions as to how this function should be performed. For example, governments have a well defined set of rules encoded within the constitution and law as to how they should conduct the process of governing a country, how decisions should get made and what they can and can't do during this process. The same would be true for an institution of education or even religion. These rules might be formal as in these examples or more informal as we might have best practices within a business or even within our culture we have constructions of how an ideal family, friend, community etc should be which is essentially an informal set of rules as to how to perform that functional role. What we might call a norm, the specific cultural expectations for how to behave in a given situation. But of course social institutions may also be dysfunctional. Political regimes may be corrupted, parents abusive or businesses inefficient. The sociologist Robert King Merton introduced the concept of dysfunctionality within social systems. Talking about religion for instance he pointed out the dysfunctional features of religion in a multi-religious society. In such a society, religion, instead of bringing about solidarity it could become the cause of disorganization and disunity as it divides the community up into different religious groups. As such dysfunctionality is also seen to be disruptive to the stability of a social system. As a concrete example of dysfunctionality I will quote one commentator on Uganda's government bureaucracy. Quote you have to marvel at the hooch bar of the government officials around here. Every day they commute into work only to spend most of their day seemingly reading the newspaper or out to lunch. Not such a bad gig if you can get it even if the pay isn't great. You can always top it up by demanding express service fees to stamp the forms you're supposed to stamp anyway. We won't take this comment too seriously but it's a nice concrete illustration of endemic dysfunctionality. Within systems theory is called entropy which is a measure of the state of disorder within a system that can be correlated to its incapacity to do work or function. According to Wikipedia, social entropy is a macro sociological systems theory. It is a measure of the natural decay within a social system. It can refer to the decomposition of social structure. Much of the energy consumed by a social organization is spent on maintaining its structure, counteracting social entropy, e.g. through legal institutions, education and even the promotion of television viewing. Anomii is the maximum state of social entropy. Social entropy implies the tendency of social networks and society in general to break down over time, moving from cooperation and advancement towards conflict and chaos. As we've previously discussed, because institutions serve some function, we can theoretically reason about the effectiveness with which they achieve this. The social system's efficiency is how effective it processes the input of resources to the output of some social function. The lower we turn down the efficiency, the more the system is being defined by its consumption of resources as opposed to its function and this consumption of resources within the system generates entropy. This is a bit like eating a banana. Once you've consumed it, you're left with the banana skin that you consider waste and that waste, which is entropy, has to be exported from the system. You throw it in the bin and the bin is then taken outside to be disposed of. The more bananas you eat, the more banana skins that you're going to have to throw away somewhere. If these banana skins aren't disposed of, they will pollute your local environment. That is to say, if you don't export the entropy, it will degrade the functionality of the system. We can describe this more formally with reference to what are called dissipative systems. The idea of a dissipative system was introduced to the scientific literature by the chemist and physicist Ilyar Prigge to describe thermodynamic systems, but it's come to be seen as applicable to all complex adaptive systems. We'll be talking about complex adaptive systems in future videos, but what is of relevance here is that closed systems obey the second law of thermodynamics, meaning there is an increase in entropy over time, a natural accumulation of increasing levels of random disorder. Disappative systems and complex adaptive systems, like societies and institutions, avoid this natural decay process because they're open systems, they import energy and resources and they export entropy. If they are successful in doing this, they will be able to accumulate resources in order to either consume more or develop their internal structure as they become more functional, like a biological organism ingesting food to grow larger. Equally, if they cannot export this entropy, then their internal structure will be degraded and thus their capacity to function equally degraded. How the social system manages to export entropy is then critical to understanding how it works and why it is the way it is. But this idea of social entropy is of course very abstract in that it represents any form of disorder within a social system. The exporting of entropy may then be an individual's use of violence against another or corruption that degrades the functionality of the overall organization. And as we now understand entropy in terms of information, thanks to information theory, it can also be defined as lack of information or not knowing. Thus lying to someone, the production of propaganda, manipulating information, these are all examples of exporting entropy. A person's misunderstanding of their environment can also be considered social entropy. We're clearly dealing with a very abstract concept here, but it does have a coherent theoretical and mathematical underpinning. Social dysfunctionality is closely related to the subject of informal institutions. Institutions can be formal or informal. Informal institutions are largely organic, meaning they emerge naturally out of some pre-existing substrate whenever there is a function to be performed. Whereas formal institutions are typically more artificial being designed by some set of explicit principles. Formal institutions are made explicit and are socially accepted functions. For example, the family unit is a socially accepted functional unit, which is made formal and explicit by the process of marriage. But we also have functions within society that are not socially accepted and are thus not made formal. But at the same time, they don't go away. They simply persist in an informal fashion. Prostitution might be an example here. The rules and roles to the workings of that institution are not made explicit and formalized. They remain latent and informal. Informal institutions may be used as a course of action which might not be publicly popular or even illegal and can be seen as effective ways of making up for the lack of efficiency in a formal institution. For example, in countries where formal institutions are particularly inefficient an informal institution may be the most effective way of actually carrying out a given task and this ensures that there is little pressure on the formal institution to become more efficient. Our previous example of the government official improvising in offering express service fees to stamp the forms may be an illustration of this. The relationship between formal and informal institutions is often closely aligned and informal institutions often step in to prop up inefficient institutions. Thus when analyzing a given social system we should be aware of both the formal and informal social systems. Whereas they'll typically present themselves as two contrasting systems the reality is more often that informal institutions are created out of the failures of the formal institutions and society's incapacity to accept and find solutions for integrating them into the overall social system. There is a symbiosis between the two. For example, in many countries the law enforcement agencies do not try to remove prostitution or the consumption of cannabis but instead may actively work to maintain it in a particular state. So social systems have manifest and latent functions manifest being those that are made explicit as the function of that institution latent being those that are performed but typically not made explicit. For example, universities have the manifest function of teaching students the knowledge and skills necessary for some occupation but universities also serve the latent function of socialization. In this video we've been talking about institutions as performing social functions. We talked about a number of components to this process including the need for functional roles some well-defined set of relations between these roles and their integration into some overall process that transforms an input to an output through a set of instructions either formal or informal. We talked about how institutions may be functional or dysfunctional with dysfunctionality leading to the generation of social entropy a state of disintegration and decay that needs to be exported from the social system in order to maintain its structure and functionality. Finally, we talked about formal and informal institutions. In the coming video we'll be continuing on with our discussion on social institutions when we talk about them as forms of social structure for maintaining order and stability.