Macro-dynamic Environments of the Meso Realm

Abstract

This chapter visualizes the macrorealm of social reality as a sociocultural environment of corporate and categoric units of the mesolevel realm. This environment imposes constraints on the operation of groups, organizations, communities, and categoric units. These constraints can be cultural, revolving around technologies, traditions, texts, values, ideologies, generalized symbolic media, and norms, or structural, revolving around the patterns of social relations evident in institutional domains, stratification systems, societies, and even intersocietal systems. Generalized symbolic media are given special emphasis because these are the media that are used in discourse and ideological formation within institutional domains (e.g., economy, kinship, religion, and education), the valued resources that are unequally distributed, and the resources exchanged among individual and collective actors within and between institutional domains. At a more structural level, modes of integration among social units are emphasized, and depending upon the configuration of these modes used, the environment of corporate and categoric units will vary. Modes of integration include segmentation, structural differentiation, structural interdependencies (e.g., exchange, overlaps, mobility, and embedding), structural domination, and structural segregation. Emphasis is placed upon how environments at the macrolevel of social reality evolve under selection pressures upon actors to solve problems facing a population.

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The meso-level social realm emerged as hominins, and later humans responded to selection pressures, driving the formation of the macro-level realm. These selection pressures pushed on individual and collective actors to create new kinds of corporate units to deal with escalating problems of adaptation. The history of human social evolution is, in essence, the evolution of macro-level structures using groups, organizations, and communities as the building blocks of macro-level sociocultural formations. As they evolved, these macro structures and the forces that drove their formation became the environment imposing constraints on corporate units and categoric units.

Thus, before the macro realm evolved, the social world of humans revolved around meso-level sociocultural formations—originally only groups but eventually organizations and communities.¹ Yet, as groups became increasingly lodged inside of organizations which, in turn, were embedded in community structures, the macro realm of reality was built up into institutional domains composed of relations among organizations addressing particular problems of adaptation and, increasingly, into stratification systems created by the unequal distribution of scarce resources by these organizations and the groups in them.

The other basic type of meso-level structure—categoric units—always existed as a response to the obvious differences among humans. Because sex and age are inherent realities of humans as mammals, the first categoric units made distinctions among people by their sex (gender) and age. While early hunter-gatherers worked very hard to prevent differential evaluation of members in these categoric units and avoided the unequal distributions of resources to members of different categoric units, settled hunter-gatherers and people in all subsequent societal formations did not. They began to evaluate members of categoric units and, on the basis of these evaluations, to allocate valued resources unequally. In so doing, they created new kinds of categoric units, beginning with quasi-classes composed of individuals who shared common types and amounts of valued resources. Moreover, very early on in human evolution after nomadic hunting and gathering, quasi-social classes were correlated with memberships in other categoric units. And, as societies grew and had contact with other populations—especially through warfare and conflict—categoric units like ethnicity, language, religion, or regional affiliation became parameters marking people as “different,” and once marked, they could be subject to discrimination in their access to resource-distributing corporate units, thus increasing the level of inequality and, ultimately, forming the bases of stratification.

Today, the macro structure of societies and even intersocietal systems are given; they exist and are often presumed by sociology to have always existed. Yet, knowing something about how the macro level of reality evolved is important to understanding the environment of the meso level of social reality. Even though meso-level structural units and their cultures evolved first in human history, their formation was still driven by macro-level forces, such as reproduction (of the species and corporate as well as categoric units), production (of resources needed for survival), distribution (of resources to kin and band members), and regulation (coordination and control of individuals). And, once population as a macro-level force increased in intensity, the elaboration of meso-level structures was increasingly constrained by the macro-level structures (and their cultures) built up from these meso structures. As corporate units became integrated to meet particular pressures from macro-level forces and as categoric-unit memberships determined access to positions in resource-distributing corporate units, the macro universe of institutional domains, stratification systems, societies, and intersocietal systems evolved and now constitutes the environment to which meso-level structures must adapt. Figure 2.1 delineates in abbreviated form this process of building up macro-level environments from the first meso-level structures.

Fig. 2.1

The evolution of macro level

In Fig. 2.1, the dark line denotes the sociocultural environments generated by the processes that are set into motion by selection pressures from macro-dynamic forces. As corporate units are formed, eventually they begin to differentiate and coalesce into the boundaries of institutional domains, and they increasingly will use diverse generalized symbolic media suited to domain activities in which they are engaged. From the use of these generalized symbolic media in interactions and transactions, ideologies developed for each domain. These ideologies always incorporate the more general value premises of a population and, in so doing, attach abstract values to more specific beliefs and norms governing the actions of individuals and corporate units within institutional domains. Ideologies thus moralize the diverse elements of culture within institutional domains. But, as institutional domains are formed and develop ideologies, the latter may begin to alter values, particularly if significant amounts of institutional change and elaboration occur. As corporate units form, they distribute resources unequally, either through their internal divisions of labor or through discriminatory practices causing differential access by members of categoric units to corporate units in the first place. In either case, discrimination often ensues, and out of this discrimination, categoric units take on increased salience, and/or new categoric units are formed. These may have already existed—say, for gender, age, ethnicity/race, or religious affiliation—but discrimination makes them highly salient because they are increasingly correlated with locations in the emerging system of classes. Classes, themselves, become categoric units and, if they are correlated with other categoric-unit distinctions, then the stratification system will evidence gender, ethnic, and religious dimensions. As the stratification system is formed, the ideologies of dominant institutional domains are consolidated into a meta-ideology legitimating the system of ranks and classes.

These ideologies and meta-ideologies become ever-more prominent parts of the environment of all corporate and categoric units. Institutional domains and their ideologies are the most immediate environments of all corporate units, while the stratification system and its meta-ideology are the most important environment for categoric units. Yet, institutional domains and their respective ideologies also constrain almost all categoric units, while the stratification and the distribution of individuals across strata will often constrain the operation and culture of corporate units. A theory of meso dynamics will, of course, need to specify the conditions under which the various structural and cultural formations at the macro level exert constraints on meso-level corporate and categoric units. The large arrows in Fig. 2.1 from these formations are intended to emphasize the constant sociocultural push of these macro-level dynamics on meso structures.

The environment of any given corporate unit thus consists of the pattern of relations among types of corporate units and their cultures that form an institutional domain, whereas the environment of a particular categoric unit is the stratification system and the status beliefs about characteristics, worth, and behavioral propensities among members of these units.² Today, most theorizing of the meso-level realm focuses on the environments and fields of organizations, but most of this analysis is rather ad hoc. Particular elements of these fields or environments—other organizations, the state and law, professions, markets, networks, etc.—can be selected to explain the operation of an organizational corporate unit.³ What these analyses ignore, despite the often-used label “the new institutionalism,” are the more general properties of institutions in general as they have evolved as corporate units proliferated and became integrated by a number of generic mechanisms. Moreover, while culture is also seen as part of the environment of any organization, the elements of culture selected—for example, corporate culture and professional ideologies—are also rather ad hoc and fail to conceptualize systems of culture that have evolved along with institutional domains, stratification, societies, and intersocietal formations. Important insights have been produced by these approaches, but they fail to conceptualize how robust the structural and cultural environments of the macro realm are (Abrutyn 2011; Friedland and Alford 1991). The result is that much contemporary analysis misses, I believe, critical environmental influences on corporate units in all institutional domains and on categoric units that bring stratification dynamics through the door of any corporate unit. This third volume of Theoretical Principles of Sociology is devoted to filling in, and expanding upon, the new institutionalism and other approaches, such as human ecology. Reconceptualizing the environments of the meso realm is the best place to begin.

Environments of Corporate and Categoric Units

The Environment of Corporate Units

What is “the environment”? This is not an easy question to answer, as is evident in the rather large literature on organizations and the comparatively smaller literature on groups and communities. For me, part of the environment of corporate units is, first of all, other corporate units—that is, groups, organizations, and communities—and their respective cultures. Corporate units almost always have relations with other units, which means that they must respond to each other. Second, these relations among corporate units are always embedded in the structure and culture of macro-level institutional domains and, generally to a lesser degree, the structure and culture of the stratification system. In turn, institutional domains and stratification provide conduits by which the structure and culture of societies and intersocietal systems affect the dynamics of corporate units, whether groups, organizations, or communities. Third, categoric units and their distribution have large effects on corporate units. Corporate units expand categoric units beyond sex and age because they differentially distribute resources that mark individuals as members of a social class and, potentially, as members of other categoric units whose memberships becomes correlated with particular social classes. Fourth, as the next chapter will seek to document, the environment of any corporate units is composed of the individuals—and the micro-dynamic forces driving their behaviors and interactions—who are incumbent in corporate units. People’s motivations, emotions, and behavioral propensities always influence corporate unit structure and culture; indeed, the forces of the micro realm have generated selection pressures for the formation of corporate units in history and, now, continue to influence meso dynamics.

The Environment of Categoric Units

The environments of categoric units are, first of all, the corporate units in which members of the members of categoric units are differentially distributed. Access to types of corporate units—workplaces, schools, churches, health care providers, recreational facilities, political parties, courts, and other corporate units lodged in various institutional domains—determines who gets what resources in a society, and when access involves discrimination, it inevitably creates new kinds of categoric units. For example, if people cannot gain access to school structures, they become labeled “uneducated”; if they cannot find work in the economy, they are labeled “unemployed” or, more severely, “deadbeats”; or if they are excluded from particular religious organizations, they are labeled by their lack of affiliation or by the religious organizations that would accept them. The distribution of people in the divisions of labor of these corporate units to which they have access also operates an environment for categoric units. For instance, people at high-salary and high-power positions will be evaluated and treated differently than those in low-pay and low-power locations within a corporate unit. And, if there is active discrimination by sex, age, class, religion, ethnicity, and other parameters marking categoric memberships, then differential access to corporate units and/or divisions of labor in these units will increase the salience of categoric-unit memberships and the power of status beliefs about these members—thereby making corporate units an even more powerful environmental influence on categoric units.

Secondly, other categoric units also operate as an important environmental influence. Evaluations of, expectations for, and discrimination against members of one categoric units are almost always made by members of other categoric units, particularly members of units that are considered more worthy by meta-ideologies and status beliefs. Thus, the status beliefs defining moral worth, value, and behavioral propensities among members of one categoric unit are generally juxtaposed against those of another, thereby increasing the salience of status beliefs for members of both valued and stigmatized categoric units. For instance, if more highly valued whites are discriminating against more lowly valued members of a nonwhite ethnic subpopulation, the relative evaluations and treatment of whites and nonwhites will be highlighted, thereby increasing the salience of both categoric units and reinforcing the legitimacy of status beliefs for members of these categoric units. At other times, membership in one categoric unit may intersect with that of another in ways that mitigate negative or positive evaluations. For example, if a person of color, where color is devalued and associated with lower-class categoric units, happens to have the income to be a member of a higher social class, the positive evaluation of the latter will generally reduce the salience of ethnicity. In contrast, membership in two devalued categoric units—say, a lower-class location and stigmatized ethnic subpopulation—the salience of both the devalued class and stigmatized ethnic memberships will increase.

Third, institutional domains and stratification systems are the most relevant macro-level environments for meso-level categoric units. Institutional domains are built from relations among corporate units as they address problems of adaptation; and as we will see, the modes by which they are integrated have large effects on the formation and evaluation of members of categoric units. Domains also reveal ideologies that adopt elements of societal values to the particular focus of an institutional domain; and as these ideologies are collated into a more general meta-ideology legitimating the stratification system, they establish standards of moral worth for members of categoric units, thereby becoming part of the cultural environment for status beliefs that specify evaluations of, and expectations for, members of categoric units.

In sum, then, this rather cursory overview of macro and micro environments imposing themselves on meso-level structures and their cultures should be sufficient to indicate that we need a more robust conceptualization of environments than is presently found in the literature of “new institutionalism.” In organizational sociology, which is the most theoretically developed of the fields devoted to studying meso-level phenomena, the conception of environments is too simple, ignoring rather important dynamics. Moreover, the properties of environments are almost always conceptualized in a rather vague manner. For example, notions of “niches” in organizational ecology (Hannan and Freeman 1977, 1984, 1989), “fields” in the new institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Powell and DiMaggio 1991; DiMaggio 1986), or organizational “logics” (Fligstein 1990, 1991) in economic sociology are never entirely clear. They are suggestive, but it would be difficult to come up with a generally accepted, much less precise view, of what a niche, field, or logic is. Part of the reason for this vagueness is that these labels denote only selected elements from what are far more robust environments than these terms can include; the result is that the definition is constantly shifting depending upon which elements of environments are being highlighted in a particular analysis. Given the more limited purposes of organizational analysis, this is not a fatal error but, if we are to develop a more general theory of the meso-level social realm, we need to expand our conceptualization of environments. As I have emphasized, part of this expansion is understanding how these environments evolved over the long history of human existence, while another part is to include a more detailed analysis of how the forces of the micro and macro realms continue to generate pressures on meso dynamics revolving around corporate and categoric units. In this chapter, I begin with the macro environments of meso reality, turning to the micro environments in Chap. 3.

The structures of the macro realm are built from corporate and categoric units, and as these units evolve, they form institutional domains and stratification systems that evidence their own cultures. Thus, even though the structure and culture of macro-level sociocultural formations are intermingled in their operation, I think it is useful to begin to analyze each separately as somewhat different environments of the meso realm. Let me first look at the operation of cultural properties of the macro realm as a set of environments of corporate and categoric units.

Macro-level Cultural Environments of Corporate and Categoric Units

Institutions emerge as individual and collective actors confront problems of adapting to their environment(s). I have termed these problems of adaptation selection pressures because they place demands for new kinds of corporate units or segmentation of additional units from existing organizational templates. These selection pressures emerge along several lines, or what I call the generic forces of the macro realm (Turner 1995, 2003, 2010a): (1) population (growth but also diversification), (2) production (of goods and services), (3) distribution (of people, information, resources), (4) regulation (coordination and control), and (5) reproduction (of human bodies and sociocultural formations).⁴ In response to these pressures, entrepreneurs develop corporate units organizing a division of labor to meet the challenge posed by selection pressures. Some of these corporate units will be more fit than others, and the first ones that facilitate adaptation become the core units and the templates for the formation of additional corporate units (Hannan and Freeman 1977; Abrutyn 2011). Core actors are those who have mobilized necessary resources—demographic, organizational, material, and symbolic—into a corporate unit capable of responding to problems of adaptation.

The most important elements of culture during the formation of institutional domains are the symbol systems built up from the use of generalized symbolic media of exchange. As entrepreneurs mobilize resources, they begin to develop a symbolic medium for discourse and talk that, in turn, leads to the development of themes and eventually ideologies that translate general values of a population into prescriptions and proscriptions about good–bad, right–wrong, and appropriate–inappropriate for the networks of corporate units that emerge within an evolving institutional domain. As corporate units in emerging institutional domains develop, broad institutional norms for the domain as a whole are adopted to form a distinctive culture and normative system of each corporate unit. These normative systems are always constrained by the ideologies that are emerging through the use of generalized symbolic media, creating a hierarchy of cultural control, emanating down from core values to meta-ideologies, ideologies, institutional norms, division of labor norms, and corporate-unit culture (see Fig. 2.3 on p. 50 for a visual image).

In Table 2.1, some candidates for generalized symbolic media for various institutional domains are listed, as was outlined in Volume 1 of Theoretical Principles of Sociology (2010: 118). These are drawn from Talcott Parsons (1963a, 1963b), Parsons and Neil J. Smelser (1956), and Niklas Luhmann (1982, 1984), and the list only gives a sense for what these media might be. Clearly there needs to be more conceptual and empirical work on these media, but they are an idea from functional sociology that needs to be retained in conceptualizing the environments of the meso realm (Abrutyn and Turner 2011).

Table 2.1 Generalized symbolic media of institutional domains

As institutional domains begin to emerge and differentiate from other domains, their generalized symbolic medium become (a) the vocabulary of discourse, (b) the valued resource exchanged, (c) the valued resource unequally distributed, and (d) the moral basis for ideological formation. The level of constraint that they impose on meso structures varies with the degree of integration and consistency among values, ideologies, meta-ideologies, and norms the level of consensus over these cultural systems within and between domains the rate and scope of circulation of generalized media and the dominance of the institutional domains in which they operate. These considerations must be theorized in more precise ways in a theory of meso dynamics. For the present, let me emphasize some of the key ways that media determine the culture of the macro-level social realm.

Even though generalized symbolic media are indeed symbolic, they are also symbols denoting and calibrating value. For example, paper money is a symbol since it has no intrinsic value, per se; rather, this symbolic medium denotes amounts of value for securing other resources that people want and need. Even hard currencies, such as coins made of “precious” metals, have no inherent value except what actors chose to consider important and valuable (because hard currencies were “pretty” and/or scarce). In fact, water would have a great deal more value for thirsty people, although water is obviously not very convenient to use as money.

Generalized symbolic media also become the actual resources that are distributed unequally as stratification systems evolve from the unequal distribution of resources by corporate units in diverse domains. For example, money, power, health, learning, and other symbolic media circulating within and across institutional domains are highly valued as resources, and depending upon (a) individuals’ access to corporate units in various domains and (b) their location in the hierarchical divisions of labor in these corporate units, their total shares of these and other valued resources will vary. The varying amounts and kinds of valued resources received by subpopulations will eventually coalesce into a stratification system. The structure and culture of this system will, in turn, become part of the environment for all corporate and categoric units in a society. Thus, as symbolic media are distributed unequally by corporate units to their incumbents, stratification inevitably emerges as a property of the macro-social realm.

Because symbolic media are also the building blocks of ideologies within institutional domains, they also become crucial to legitimating the inequalities of the stratification systems. Typically, the ideologies of the dominant institutional domains are collated, as noted earlier, to produce a meta-ideology that legitimates the stratification system as a whole and that also forms the basis of status beliefs about the characteristics, moral worth, and behavioral propensities of individuals in the divisions of labor of corporate units and, even more significantly, about members of categoric units (Ridgeway and Berger 1986, 1988; Ridgeway and Correll 2004; Ridgeway and Erickson 2000). These ideologies have enormous power because they are built from the symbols that are also the valued resources that are being distributed unequally by corporate units. When the resource being distributed unequally and the symbols used to form a legitimating ideology for such equality are the same cultural elements, the ideology gains significant traction in regulating actions with a domain and in making inequalities seem right and just—at least for a time

Figure 2.2 outlines the process by which generalized symbolic media are used to build up the culture of the macro realm of social reality. Selection pressures set the process in motion by pushing on some actors to mobilize material, demographic, organizational, technological, and symbolic resources in order to meet the challenges posed by these pressures. There is, of course, no guarantee that these entrepreneurial efforts will prove successful, as the death of corporate units, larger sectors of domains, and even whole societies and intersocietal systems demonstrates. Nevertheless, the greater are the selection pressures, the more likely are individuals and collective actors to find new or change old sociocultural formations to cope with new problems of adaptation. For corporate units to develop, especially organizations whose division of labor is geared to goals that respond to selection pressures, a medium of discourse and exchange must develop, and this medium must carry evaluative content that makes talk, themes, and eventually ideologies moral. This symbolic medium is exchanged in interactions within and between corporate units, and it is exchanged by corporate units in one domain for the generalized symbolic medium of corporate units in other domains. For instance, money from corporate units in the economy may be given to corporate units in other domains—for example, whether as taxes to polity or income to families—for rights by economic actors to use authority (as franchised power given by polity to regulate actions within a corporate unit) or loyalty to economic corporate units from family members for employment that gives them income. Thus, a fourth critical property of symbolic media is that they circulate within and between domains, an issue to which I will return shortly. As corporate units segment and, then, differentiate, additional mechanisms of integration, beyond segmentation and differentiation, per se, increasingly come into play, as I will outline later when examining structural mechanisms of integration (see Table 2.3 on pp. 84–90).

Fig. 2.2

The evolution of culture

As generalized symbolic media are used in discourse and exchanges, they are codified into an ideology. This ideology provides moral premises for behavior and actions within a domain. Generally, the ideology adopts and adapts societal level value premises and translates them into moral codes that are relevant to an emerging institutional domain. As ideologies are formed, they also have reverse causal effects on value premises, typically reinforcing these premises but potentially changing them as the culture of a domain evolves. Societal and perhaps even intersocietal cultures thus evolve as their moral premises are used by actors to form ideologies, and as institutions evolve, their respective ideologies are adjusted to new circumstances. As ideologies change, they feed back into value premises, often altering some of these premises. Indeed, the more rapid is the development of institutions and the more dominant are the institutions undergoing change, the more likely are these institutional transformations to alter the ideologies of other domains and, equally, important the value premises of a society.

Similarly, as meta-ideologies are constructed from the ideologies of dominant institutional domains distributing highly valued resources, these meta-ideologies not only legitimate inequalities in the stratification system, but also reinforce value premises. And hence, stratification and its legitimating meta-ideology change, the new meta-ideology will also alter value premises. These reciprocal effects strengthen the power of culture as it is adapted to new circumstances. At the same time, ideologies and meta-ideologies become the cultural conduits by which highly abstract values are made relevant to actors in corporate and categoric units.

Ideologies and meta-ideologies instantiate practices in value premises and, thereby, provide the moral template for institutional norms regulating interactions and exchanges among actors. And these broad institutional norms always carry the moral content of values, ideologies, and institutional norms that, in turn, operate as a moral template for more specific norms guiding conduct of incumbents in the divisions of labor of corporate units within a domain or the behaviors of persons in categoric units. Thus, as symbolic media are used to form ideologies, meta-ideologies, institutional norms, and specific norms for members of corporate and categoric units, they moralize the cultural environments of meso- and micro-level social units. When moralized, cultural environments exert even more constraint on corporate units and on the other cultural elements of the domain in which they operate.

This influence of moralized symbols is particularly evident in “codes of professional conduct” that emerge in institutional domains. Such codes of conduct are often part of the more general process of professionalization of roles in organizations that engage in exchanges with other organizations in diverse domains. Thus, accountants, lawyers and judges, teachers and professors, doctors and nurses, priests and clergy, and actors in many other organizational corporate units codify ethics, drawn from ideologies and institutional norms, to assure client organizations and persons that they are trustworthy, thereby providing another layer of morality for exchanges within and between domains. Indeed, there is often a certain level of “moral outrage” when these ethics are violated. Interestingly, for certain domains, such as the economy in capitalist systems or polity in virtually all societies, “professional ethics” are not as highly institutionalized, as is the case when incumbents in organizations are professionalized and certified by specialized training in corporate units of the educational domain.

Thus, to the extent that ideologies and meta-ideologies specify value premises for the activities of actors in institutional domains and legitimate both the domain as a whole and the stratification system created by the actions of corporate units, they provide a powerful force of cultural integration. And, if general institutional norms, more specific norms and expectations for incumbents in corporate and categoric units, and systems of ethics for professions within a domain all follow from the moral premises of ideologies, meta-ideologies, and value premises, key properties of culture are even more integrated and operate as a highly constraining environment for actors in corporate and categoric units. Indeed, the successive embedding of norms in ideologies, ideologies in meta-ideologies, and meta-ideologies in values adds even more integration among, and hence power to, moral codes at all levels of culture. Conversely, if this integration is weak or value premises, ideologies, meta-ideologies, and normative systems are inconsistent with, or stand in opposition (articulating different moral codes) to, each other, then the lack of cultural integration in the environment ensures that conflict among individuals in corporate units and members of varying categoric units as well as conflict between corporate units within and between institutional domains will emerge.

As emphasized, generalized symbolic media circulate not only within the domain in which they evolved but also to other domains. Some media are inherently more likely to circulate because, while moral, they are also “cooler media” that are emotionally neutral and, as such, can be used in a wide variety of institutional context. These more neutral media have some properties of what Parsons’ termed “universalism” (equally applied to evaluations of all actors). In contrast, media that are “hot” arouse emotions, are tied to particular institutional context, and reveal properties of “particularism” (applied to evaluations of individuals unequally). For example, money, power, learning, and knowledge are more easily imported into domains than are sacredness/piety and love/loyalty, and they are inherently “cooler” and more universalistic than are sacredness/piety and love/loyalty. Moreover, because they are universalistic, cooler media are more difficult to moralize, thereby allowing them to more readily circulate across institutional domains.

The nature of media, however, is only one condition affecting the rate and scope of circulation. Another condition is the degree of autonomy of institutional domains; the more autonomous and bounded is a domain, the more likely is its indigenous medium to circulate within a domain and the less likely are media from other domains to widely circulate. For example, in capitalist economic systems, the economy is relatively autonomous, with the result that medium of money will dominate transactions and will be the primary basis for ideological formation. Yet, even an economy will see the circulation of other media: franchised power from polity for authority in the corporate units, learning and knowledge from education and science (often in the form of technologies but also professional-level knowledge), and influence from law (via decisions in polity) to coordinate and control relations among economic corporate units and between these units and the units of other domains. Religion in the United States is perhaps a better example of how autonomy imposes boundaries. Law often restricts religious activity, but in a society valuing freedom, the dominant ideology of religion is “freedom of worship,” which translates into moralized limitations on how much other institutional domains can influence the operation of corporate units within the religious domain. Coupled with the fact that sacredness/piety is a “hot medium,” the ideology operates as a kind of cultural high-pressure area that keeps other media and the ideologies built from these media from penetrating religion. What is true of religion is even more the case for kinship in the United States where the value premise of freedom is translated into the rights of family to be free from external influence and for members of nuclear units to be guided by love/loyalty to the family first, with other commitments being secondary. True, families must take in money to survive, and their members are subject to laws about family members (especially marriage and child abuse) and often by the desirability of giving love/loyalty to religion in exchange for sacredness and piety, but the kinship system is still relatively impenetrable by even cooler media.

Penetration of external media into a domain is affected by the degree of cultural integration of a domain. High degrees of cultural integration exist when (a) the symbolic medium of a domain is the primary source of evaluative codes for discourse and ideological formation, (b) the ideology systematically draws its general moral premises from core societal-level values, (c) the ideologies of dominant domains used to form meta-ideologies are compatible and consistent with each other, (d) the level of consensus over the ideology and norms derived from this ideology is high among actors operating in a domain, and (e) the moral codes are successively embedded in each other and form a hierarchy of morality from highly generalized value premises down to norms. Under this set of conditions, symbolic media from other domains and the accompanying ideology will not penetrate a domain as easily or extensively, as is the case when some of these conditions do not prevail. Integration in the sense enumerated above may not, however, be highly adaptive to changing conditions because individual and collective actors may not easily give up moral beliefs and moralized norms, even when selection pressures would indicate that change is necessary.

Still another condition affecting cultural integration is the configuration of the structural mechanisms integrating the corporate units within a domain (to be examined shortly; see Table 2.3 on pp. 84–90 for a preview of these structural mechanisms). When segmentation is the dominant mode of integrating corporate units—that is, corporate units in a domain are essentially copies of each other—cultural integration is high, and individuals in corporate units are structurally equivalent and thus share worldviews. As a result, the domain can sustain its integrity from “invasions” of media and ideologies from other domains, but often at the expense of adaptability to changed conditions and new selection pressures. For example, because kinship in the United States is mostly composed of segmented nuclear family units, the power of the ideology built from love/loyalty (to family members) is great and limits the penetration of symbolic external media and the ideologies built from these media into kinship as an autonomous institutional domain.

As differentiation of new types of corporate units operates as an integrative mechanism, however, gaps appear in social structure that lower the degree of structural integration, and in fact, since differentiation of new kinds of corporate units has proven adaptive, some of these units may well be engaged in exchanges with many corporate units in diverse domains. In so doing, the symbolic media ideologies of corporate units in these outside domains will penetrate domains where differentiation is a mechanism of integration.

When integration is achieved by interdependencies, especially exchange relations within and between domains, the symbolic media and ideologies built from these media circulate and reduce the level of cultural integration, and the shift in structural modes of integration will similarly be more chaotic and complex. Yet, when integration is achieved by interdependencies, especially when mediated by markets, money, and law, a dramatically increased level of flexibility is introduced into a domain. And, despite the lower levels of integration, flexibility will often prove more adaptive under new selection pressures.

Similarly, mobility across corporate units within and between domains operates much like markets—and indeed is often regulated by them—because, as actors move among corporate unit, they bring with them some of the culture from diverse corporate units. Mobility in a domain may involve only variants of the ideologies and norms generated by the use of symbolic media in that domain, but these variants increase the cultural flexibility and adaptability of corporate units. And, if mobility involves individuals moving from corporate units in one domain (say, education) to corporate units in another domain (e.g., economy), the circulation of symbolic media—learning and money—and the ideologies built up from these media are likely to generate increased adaptive fitness.

Boundary overlaps of corporate units increase the diversity of cultures in play, especially if overlaps occur among corporate units in different domains. But, even if the overlaps are within a domain, the overlaps are typically created to improve synergies among somewhat differentiated units, and thus, both the structural complexity (and accompanying chaos) and the cultural diversity increase adaptability, even as they lower somewhat the level of integration.

Embedding of corporate units inside of more inclusive units operates to increase the structural integration of the units involved, but often at the price of decreased flexibility. Yet, if the level of differentiation among the units is high and if the level of interdependence and exchange is also high, then more flexibility and adaptability in the culture of the consolidated units will ensue. Moreover, if units within a domain are embedded in differentiated units, the embedding sustains some degree of structural differentiation and structural interdependencies (and exchange and mobility as well), thereby decreasing tight cultural integration which, in turn, increases the adaptability of the sociocultural formations created by embedding.

Domination of corporate units by core units within a domain and/or by corporate units outside the domain, such as those in an authoritarian polity or fundamentalists’ theocracy, increases cultural integration. At the same time, domination decreases flexibility of cultural codes and structural integration, thereby decreasing flexibility and adaptability.

To the degree that differentiation and structural interdependencies among corporate units increase the intersection of parameters marking categoric-unit memberships—that is, memberships in corporate units and divisions of labor within these units are not correlated with categoric-unit membership—then interaction rates among diverse categoric units increase. And as rates of interaction increase, the differentiated culture associated with categoric units—especially status beliefs about moral worth—becomes less salient in corporate units and the encounters that occur in these units, thereby reducing potential tensions emanating from the stratification system. And to the extent that categoric-unit memberships by, say, age, ethnicity, religion, place of birth, and gender consolidate somewhat different worldviews and cultures associated with these categoric distinctions, the culture of any corporate unit becomes somewhat less integrated by virtue of this diversity; yet, diversity can also create cultural variation and, hence, increased potential for adaptability to altered conditions and new selection pressures.⁵

The circulation of generalized symbolic media across institutional domains can loosen integration in the short run, creating ambiguity for which media and the ideologies built from these media should guide conduct of individuals and corporate units. Yet, interinstitutional circulation of cooler media, such as money, power, influence, learning, and knowledge, brings elements of the ideologies and normative systems built from these media to diverse domains. Scholars such as Jurgen Habermas (1973[1976]) sometimes characterize this movement of symbolic media as an invasion and “colonization” of the “lifeworld” by money and power (from economy and government) as they enter domains like education or science. Moreover, hot media like sacredness/piety can also circulate under certain structural conditions and be imposed on domains like education, polity, and economy that are dominated by cooler media. For example, the Iranian revolution in the 1970s set into circulation sacredness/piety into many institutional domains, diluting and distorting the operation of media in these domains and the ideologies that had been built up by actors using these media. Under these conditions, the integration by culture is precarious and, typically, must be imposed by patterns of structural domination and heavy doses of coercive power. Still, when the exchange of media from different domains is more balanced, with corporate actors giving their media for those of another domain, then these more balanced exchanges can provide a flexible basis of integration. Thus, as power and money circulate across domains and, in fact, are exchanged for the media of these other domains, this circulation creates a basis for society wide cultural integration under conditions of high structural differentiation.

For, when generalized symbolic media and the ideologies as well as normative systems built from these media within a domain are exchanged for the media of money (from economy), power (from polity) as franchised rights to authority in corporate units, influence (from law) as a means to achieve needed coordination, learning (from education), and knowledge (from science, often imbedded in higher education), this mixing of media provides cultural bases for structural interdependencies. Mixing of cultural symbols thus breaks down barriers that high degrees of institutional differentiation and autonomy can erect. Individuals, corporate units, and members of categoric units will possess a common repertoire of generalized symbolic media that can be used in interinstitutional discourse and a set of hybrid ideologies (or meta-ideologies) that provide a common moral basis for normative agreements among highly diverse actors.

As differentiation becomes a structural mechanism of integration (see later discussion), cultural integration cannot so easily be achieved without some mixing of generalized symbolic media and ideologies in ways that facilitate agreements and mutual understandings among differentiated actors operating within a domain and, most importantly, across differentiated domains. Corporate- and categoric-unit actors in diverse domains or in differentiated sectors of one domain will, if they are to form flexible relations that can endure, require a larger mix of media and evaluative symbols by which to construct relations that increase integration in highly differentiated societies. And so, family, religion, higher education, arts, sports, medicine, and corporate units in other domains can all achieve a certain level of cultural equivalence by exchanging their respective media for money and perhaps franchised power (as authority in corporate units) and incorporating elements of the ideologies built from these media into the ideologies that have been constructed by the indigenous media. Thus, medical administrators and doctors, clergy, parents, professors, art’s administrators, even artists themselves, and athletes all have similar experiences and worldviews, even though they are located in diverse domains. As a result, they will be less culturally insular and, moreover, significantly more capable of forming new kinds of relations with actors in corporate units in diverse domains, now and in the future. When these “hybrid” cultures are consistently mixed through exchanges of media, they provide a stable but flexible cultural environment for meso-level action.

Integration of culture is also determined by the nature of the meta-ideology legitimating stratification and the degree of stratification itself. As a general rule, the more stratified is a society, the greater are the cultural differences among social classes, and hence, the greater is the potential for class-based tension and conflict. And if ­categoric-unit memberships, especially religion and ethnicity, are correlated with high- and low-class positions, then the conflict will be more intense when it periodically erupts in corporate units, such as organizations and more often in ­communities. If the meta-ideology is composed of ideologies accepted by members of diverse classes, however, this meta-ideology can be effective in legitimating stratification and transferring blame for the fate of lower-class persons to their “personal failures,” although the anger associated with inequalities can often break through this cultural façade of “false consciousness.” Moreover, if the cultures of classes are very different and are laced with additional differences by categoric-unit membership that are enshrined in status beliefs, meta-ideologies may not be able to sustain cultural integration. The result is that the environment of corporate units is filled with contradictory cultural elements, heightened emotions over inequalities, and high potential for conflict.

In Fig. 2.3, I have diagramed the elements of culture, with an eye to how they can become integrated. This conception of culture is obviously highly simplified, but it is sufficient for my theoretical purposes. All cultures carry a storehouse texts, traditions, and technologies that constrain the formation of values and, reciprocally, are reinforced or changed by values. An integrated culture at this level would be one where values emerge as highly abstract moral cultural codes that reinforce the themes and tenets of key texts. As generalized symbolic media are used by actors in building up institutional domains, the ideologies that develop will, in an integrated culture, instantiate value premises in the actions and transactions within and between corporate units (and individuals in corporate units). In this way, as Durkheim (1963[1893]) emphasized, the highly abstract values become more specific and germane to concrete social relations. In turn, these ideologies constrain the formation of broad institutional norms, with these general norms constraining specific norms in the division of labor of corporate units and, along with the ideology of a domain, the evolution of corporate-unit culture. Thus, flowing down from highly abstract values are a series of symbol systems that specify value premises in emerging institutional domains and that provide normative regulation of relations within and between corporate units in a domain. Reciprocally, in a highly integrated cultural environment, lower-level cultural codes are embedded in, and will thereby reinforce, increasingly more abstract codes—institutional norms, institutional ideologies, meta-ideologies, value premises, and if needed, reinterpretation of texts and traditions.

Fig. 2.3

Elements of the integrationof cultureand macro-level environments of meso realm

As corporate units distribute resources unequally and as stratification emerges, symbolic media of dominant resource-distributing institutional domains will coalesce into a meta-ideology legitimating stratification. Even though this legitimization may be unfair, it is essential to an integrated culture. And, in societies where class categoric units are correlated with other categoric units, status beliefs about the desirable and undesirable characteristics of members of these units will, in an integrated culture, be constrained by the moral tenets of the meta-ideology while reinforcing the these tenets, and in so doing, both the meta-ideology and status beliefs will generate expectation states for members of categoric units that are consistent with the moral tenets of meta-ideologies and the norms evident in corporate units where members of categoric units are incumbent. If, however, structural and cultural changes are occurring at the corporate-unit level, these changes will work their way up the integrated hierarchy of cultural systems portrayed in Fig. 2.3, altering these so that they are consistent with what is occurring “on the ground” in relations of individuals in corporate units. These changes may come from mobilization and formation of social movement organizations (SMOs) to protest inequalities (by members of categoric units), large shifts in political policies, transformations in the economy, and other of changes in corporate units. The key to integration is that the hierarchy of moral codes is sufficiently flexible, especially at the junction of ideologies and meta-ideologies, to accommodate the changes in norms, corporate cultures, status beliefs, and expectation states at the meso level of corporate and categoric units. Value premises can typically accommodate changes because they are highly abstract, but if texts and traditions have narrowed the scope and lowered the abstractness of values, as might be the case, say, in a theocracy where values are coextensive with religious ideologies, then cultural contradictions and conflicts will be evident and the system of culture will eventually disintegrate.

As generalized symbolic media circulate across domains, they systematically generate hybrid meta-ideologies built from the ideologies of diverse institutional domains. A complex society will thus reveal not only a meta-ideology of dominant domains that legitimates the stratification system but also sets of additional meta-ideologies that are built up as generalized symbolic media are used and exchanged in diverse domains. The key is that these meta-ideologies, in an integrated system, reinforce the main tenants of the dominant meta-ideology; or if change is occurring in the relations among corporate units in diverse domains or members of categoric units, these meta-ideologies can alter the dominant meta-ideology and, if necessary, the dominant values, texts, and traditions. If, however, changes in the circulation of symbolic media create new meta-ideologies that stand in conflict with the dominant meta-ideology legitimating stratification, then the culture system will evidence disintegrative pressures.

The cultural environments of corporate and categoric units are thus potentially complex and highly dynamic in differentiated societies or in societies that are part of extended intersocietal formations. A highly integrated culture of the macro realm will reveal (a) embedding of less general symbol systems in ever-more general codes, (b) consistency among cultural elements up and down the hierarchy of moral codes, and (c) consensus over each element in the hierarchy of moral codes. Such a system will generate stable environments for corporate units and categoric units, but often at the expense of flexibility. Indeed, if changes at the corporate- and categoric-unit levels are rapidly occurring and if the moral tenets of the various levels of culture are rigid and too mired in dogmatic texts and traditions, then at some point the cultural environment of corporate units will begin to disintegrate and become chaotic. Cultural conflict will inevitably generate structural conflicts among corporate units in diverse domains—for example, among corporate units in polity, religion, and economy—as well as among members of categoric units (e.g., mobilized ethnic subpopulations pushing for economic and political changes in patterns of inequality and the culture that has legitimated these).

In sum, then, the cultural environments of corporate and categoric units can be very complex, somewhat fluid, and often filled with contradictions. The level of cultural integration can be high, but integration of culture often imposes less flexibility on actors in corporate units and members of categoric units—thereby decreasing adaptability of corporate units and institutional domains. As I briefly previewed above, cultural integration is very much affected by the mechanisms of structural integration. Indeed, since culture is ultimately tied to social structures, modes of structural integration can significantly alter the environments of corporate and categoric units. And, depending upon the actions of corporate units and members of categoric units, the cultural environment can be sustained, or it can disintegrate. Thus, before we can begin to get a sense for the robust environments of the meso realm, it is necessary to outline the basic modes of structural integration of institutional domains and stratification systems of the macro level of social reality—as is done in the next section.

Macro-level Structural Environments of Corporate and Categoric Units

Institutional domains are created by virtue of mechanisms of integration among the corporate units operating within and between domains. In turn, the specific configuration of mechanisms that connect corporate units within and between domains determines, to a very high degree, the environments of any corporate unit and, to a lesser extent, any categoric unit. Coupled with the operation of the integrative dynamics revolving around systems of cultural symbols—that is, relations among generalized symbolic media, values, ideologies, meta-ideologies, norms, and professional codes examined above—the sociocultural environments for meso-level formations are determined. And, depending upon the patters of integration at the structural and cultural levels, as well as the connections between the two levels, the environments of meso-level sociocultural formations will vary, and despite wide variations in these environments, they will reveal clear and often converging patterns that can be theorized.

Similarly, stratification systems like institutional domains evidence cultural and structural mechanisms of integration. At the cultural level, classes and social strata usually reveal a distinctive culture, while the system as a whole is, to varying degrees, legitimated by the clarity and power of the meta-ideologies combining the ideologies of the dominant institutional domains. At the structural level, the level of access of individuals to resource-distributing corporate units and the number of domains in which access is possible will have large effects on structural integration of stratification. Moreover, the configuration of mechanisms integrating corporate units within and between domains will also have large effects on the integration of the stratification system as a whole.

I should add a cautionary note here on what the concept of integration denotes. For me, integration is not an evaluative term but a descriptive one that describes (1) the mechanisms by which sociocultural formations are organized and (2) the capacity of these mechanisms to sustain sociocultural formations in their environments over time. As I have mentioned, a highly integrated culture or institutional system may be highly effective in sustaining patterns of organization over time, often at high costs to individuals, but in the long run, the pattern of integration may generate internal tensions that erupt into conflict or that reduce flexibility and adaptability should environments change. Thus, highly integrated cultural and structural environments of meso-level units may generate consistency over time, compared to less integrated environments that are more chaotic, but the latter can be more adaptive in the longer run. The means by which culture and structural formations at the macro level of social organization can change or remain the same for long stretches of time can be theorized, as can the effect of these macro-level environments on corporate and categoric units of the meso realm. As long as theory, such as the new institutionalism, selectively simply picks elements as they affect modern economic organizations (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell 1983), theorizing will be historically time bound and, at best, relevant to only advanced postindustrial capitalist societies. Moreover, analysis will not include the full range of corporate units in all institutional domains and the complete profile categoric units in the system of stratification.

Mechanisms of Institutional Integration and Meso-level Environments

Table 2.3 (on pp. 84 to 90) lists the mechanisms of structural institutional integration in a manner similar to Volume 1 of Theoretical Principles of Sociology (2010: 141–42), but with an emphasis on how different mechanisms, alone or in various configurations, generate varying institutional environments for meso-level units. Later, I will turn to the integration mechanisms operating on the stratification system to complete the analysis of the environments created by meso-level dynamics.

Structural Segmentation.

When corporate units are created in response to selection pressures, the most successful become templates for subsequent corporate units. This is the easiest route to integration because the structure and culture of the units are already in place. A generalized symbolic medium is available for discourse and exchange; ideologies for the domain have been built up or in the process of being codified; institutional norms and specific norms for the corporate unit are known; divisions of labor in new units are structurally equivalent to those in the old, thereby giving incumbents common worldviews (Sailer 1978).

When the first corporate units evolved, segmentation was the principal means for integrating them. When units are structurally equivalent, they are generally culturally equivalent as well. Durkheim termed this process “mechanical solidarity” because individuals and the units that they build will experience and adapt to the same environment composed of similarly structured organizations, the common culture that they carry, and the converging experiences of incumbents in organizations. Thus, new groups look like the one’s already in place, communities look much the same as they proliferate, and organizations copy those that have been successful.

Even when domain-wide segmentation is no longer possible, corporate units operating within resource niches within a domain will often copy each other. New institutionalists emphasize this process in their analysis of how organizations respond to similar “fields” will tend toward isomorphism (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Organizational ecologists (e.g., Hannan and Freeman 1977) stress that once the structure and culture of founding organizations begin to proliferate and sustain themselves in a resource niche, they become legitimized, with the result that they are increasingly likely to be copied, even as a niche becomes increasingly dense and competitive. Markets can also increase segmentation because, as Harrison White (1981, 1988) has argued, successful competitors in markets become models for organizations that seek to enter a particular market segment. For example, large discount retailers in the United States emulate what works in the market, as was the case for Walmart which imitated the structure of K-Mart, and any new firm that enters this market will typically imitate Walmart. The same is true even in noneconomic niches, such as higher education, with various niches in this domain (say, large teaching university, small liberal arts college, large public research university, elite private research university). All universities and colleges in similar niches look similar because they are, first of all, copying what has been successful, and, secondly, they are responding to similar environments composed of (a) the demographics of students, (b) the ideologies of higher education, (c) the material resource niches composed of those who can pay fees and fund research activities, (d) authoritative mandates from polity and law, and (e) markets for professionalized personnel.

Moreover, their environments will consist of regularized exchanges of symbolic media with corporate units in other domains. For example, because money circulates through most domains in industrial and postindustrial societies, money will come to higher education from diverse sources, including families who pay tuition and fees, alumni who make donations to endowments, economic actors that fund research or make donations, government that support research and teaching in state universities, corporate units in science that also sponsor research, fans who pay for tickets to watch university sport teams, and so on for other domains. What is being exchanged is money for learning and knowledge in most cases, except perhaps for sport where money is exchanged for competition (because colleges and universities in the United States overlap with the institutional domain of sports). When the same symbolic media are exchanged, these media carry on their backs the ideologies that have been built from these media, with the result that the flow of symbolic media reveals a similar pattern across educational corporate units. Thus, even when there is differentiation among corporate units in diverse domains, the pattern of exchanges across domains is, in a sense, segmented because the structure and culture of any basic type of college or university will evidence the same structural pattern of organization, similar patterns of exchange of symbolic media, and hence converging cultures. As a result, it is relatively effortless to move about any university campus in the United States because only a few basic types exist. Such segmentation of structure and culture is a powerful mechanism of integration. In fact, it is normally not very stressful to walk across and participate in any university in the world because they are, in essence, segmented.

The same is true in all other domains. The institution of kinship in postindustrial societies is integrated by patterns of structural and cultural equivalence; business organizations in various resource niches are much the same; communities segment along a few basic patters (large core city, suburbs, exurbs, and rural communities); government agencies converge in their structure and operation; courts at all levels of the legal systems are structured alike and reveal the same culture; and so it goes for corporate units in virtually all domains. Thus, even as differentiation of corporate units within and across diverse domains occurs, segmentation still operates as a basic mechanism of integration for corporate units in similar locations in the matrix of differentiation. Segmentation is the easiest route to structural and cultural integration, and so, when corporate units are in similar environments, they make similar adaptations to these environments, while mimicking those corporate units that have been successful in these environments.

As this kind of segmentation within differentiated institutional domains proceeds, each domain will reveal a relatively small number of diverse types of corporate units, thereby dramatically simplifying the culture and structure of a domain. When retailers, universities, governmental agencies, law firms, courts, research organizations inside and outside of academia, sports teams, medical clinics and hospitals, K-12 schools, churches, and all of the many corporate units in diverse domains evidence subsets of structural and cultural equivalence because of segmentation, the integration within and between corporate units across differentiated domains is simplified.

Furthermore, there are elements of segmentation even across corporate units that are otherwise differentiated from each other. For example, there are isomorphic elements among all community formations; there are similar structural patterns among all organizations of various sizes in how they are organized by bureaucratic authority linking offices (as Weber’s famous typology on bureaucracy outlines) and using money tied to promotions as incentives for work performance. The result is similarities among churches, schools, universities, businesses, law firms, governmental agencies, major league teams, hospitals and clinics, and so on for corporate units in all domains whose similarities far outweigh their differences in structure and, to a lesser extent, their culture. This kind of pan-segmentation provides an important basis of integration across all corporate units within and between domains, and in so doing, pan-institutional segmentation generates environmental homologies across differentiated corporate units. And homologous environments, especially in differentiated institutional domains, allow for more flexible integration than segmentation alone, which at some point is an inadequate response to selection pressures from macro-level forces.

Structural Differentiation.

The larger is a population and the greater are the selection pressures on its members, the more likely will segmentation alone prove maladaptive. Increasingly, new kinds of corporate units engaged in varied types of institutional activity will be necessary to manage macro-level selection pressures. Differentiation of corporate units thus ensues and, by itself, can provide an integrative basis for a society, but almost immediately, differentiation generates its own selection pressures revolving around problems of coordination and control of differentiated corporate and categoric units. Regulation as a macro-dynamic force thus pushes for new mechanisms of integration, most of which operate to generate structural interdependencies among differentiated units within and between institutional domains. Before turning to these mechanisms of interdependence, however, let me first examine differentiation, per se, as an integrative mechanism.

Historically, on an evolutionary timescale, societal differentiation began when other institutional domains began to evolve out of kinship. Settled hunter-gatherers, often organized around a Big Man and his allies, revealed a clear differentiation of polity and, at times, religious practitioners outside of kinship proper (Lenski 1966; Parsons 1966; Turner 1972, 1997, 2003). Some settled hunter-gatherers, such as the Chumash in Central and Southern California, went even further, revealing a true economic division of labor among specialists who coordinated their output for trade, hereditary leaders of communities and sets of communities, and religious practices not tied to kinship (Arnold, 1992, 1993, 1995a,b, 1996a,b). Yet, with the rise of horticultural (gardening with human power) and pastoral (herding) societies, the initial emergence of more distinctive economic, political, legal, and religious activity occurred within kinship which, in its most elaborated form, moved from separate nuclear families to a system of nuclear families embedded in lineages, lineages embedded within clans, and clans embedded in two moieties dividing a society in half. These structures were built around a descent and residence rules, but they looked very much like a complex organization and can be viewed, therefore, as the first true organizational corporate units. These unilineal kinship units were embedded in more settled villages, and typically a paramount political leader of a dominant clan emerged to govern within one community but often across a set of communities. Figure 1.3 on p. 22 illustrates the similar structural form of systems of kinship built from a descent rule, which, as is clear, look very much like the organization chart of a business corporation or any bureaucratic structure.

As populations grew and began to use nonhuman sources of power, kinship increasingly lost its capacity to organize an entire population, with the result that kinship began its long odyssey back to the nuclear form typical of nomadic hunter-gathers, thereby pushing out of kinship’s shrinking nest new kinds of corporate units engaged in distinctly economic, religious, and political activity. In this way, it became possible to organize larger numbers of individuals in society; and once this organizational template was in place, it became the implicit model for further differentiation under selection pressures. As all of the first sociologists recognized, especially the first functionalists like Herbert Spencer (1874–1896) and Emile Durkheim (1963[1893]), the scale of society could not grow without structural differentiation. As Spencer emphasized, a larger “social mass” requires a more complex structural “skeleton” to support and carry this increased mass. However, even as institutional domains began to evolve with organizational corporate units pursuing different goals in response to selection pressures, the form of these newly differentiated organizations was often segmental in that they copied successful formations that had evolved during the first wave of differentiation among institutional domains. And, over time, they copied bureaucratic templates because these proved to be relatively efficient and effective ways to organize large numbers of people. And it is for this reason that Max Weber (1922) could emphasize rationalization as a master social process that altered the structure of many corporate units and more general patterns of domination.

Thus, as I mentioned earlier, even as differentiation in the goals of organizational units varied, their structural forms remained much the same. True, an army accentuates some features more than a religious denomination or a business enterprise and school system, but the essential structures look much alike, especially if diagramed by their network structures and hierarchies of authority. Differentiation can only operate, therefore, as an effective mechanism of integration by generating some degree of segmentation that in turn increases sets of structural and, to a lesser extent, cultural equivalences among organizations in diverse institutional domains.

Within domains, dominant core organizations or powerful networks of organizations often force other organizations to copy the structural form of the core. Moreover, as organizations begin to exchange resources, including movement of personnel across organizations, there are pressures for segmentation not only of structure but also of culture built from the dominant generalized medium in the domain. These same kinds of pressures operate across domains, as organizations exchange symbolic media as resources, and through the back door of these exchanges come the ideologies built from these media, leading to some convergence of the respective structures and cultures of organizations. For example, if corporate units in the economy hire graduates of universities, the exchange revolves around money for learning, with the respective ideologies of economy and education also being exchanged. As noted above, hybrid meta-ideologies often emerge, and these lead to some degree of cultural convergence to accompany structural convergences. Although a large business corporation and a university reveal many organizational differences, their structural forms and, to a much lesser extent, their cultures tend to converge. While academics in capitalist systems often moan the encroachment of capitalist models of profit-making in the university, this trend is simply an obvious example of how interdependencies cause some degree of segmentation of corporate units across institutional domains. Indeed, to take another example, the mega (mostly Protestant) churches that have evolved in the United States look far more like economic actors than churches of the past (e.g., through their marketing efforts and their need to ensure a cash flow for their high overhead), just as the Catholic Church of the middle ages looked very much like a large business and, at times, political corporate unit. Thus, pressures for isomorphism not only occur within a domain, they occur across a domain as interdependencies among corporate units in diverse domains evolve and provide similar structural environments to which corporate units in diverse domains must adapt.

Institutional autonomy intersects with these segmentation pressures that accompany differentiation and that, in fact, provide for much of the integrative power of differentiation. If an institutional domain is relatively autonomous, its constituent organizations (and the groups in these organizations) may not be as isomorphic with organizations in other domains (Abrutyn 2011), but there will be some degree of isomorphism because of various patterns of interdependence (see discussion below) and because organizations in one domain will always look for successful organizations in their own and other domains to emulate, if the latter have been successful. The power of the ideologies within more autonomous domains also works to sustain institutional autonomy, especially if the ideology of the domain is potentially in conflict with the ideologies of other domains. Thus, the domains of science, education, kinship, and religion, for example, often have some autonomy, with the result that the structure of their corporate units and, more significantly, their respective cultures differ from those in other domains. And yet, except for institution of kinship in postindustrial societies, which is built around a group (i.e., the nuclear family) rather than from formal organizations, there is still considerable structural convergence in their various bureaucratic forms and some mixing of ideologies into a hybrid meta-ideology.

The degree of isomorphism in structure and culture of corporate units within a domain and between domains thus determines the nature of the environment of corporate units and, at times, categoric units as well. If there are high levels of differentiation among corporate units of a domain, then more complex patterns of structural interdependencies will exist in the environment of each differentiated type of organization, while the cultural environment will reveal a common ideology built up from the use of a common symbolic medium of exchange and, as a consequence, may provide a greater level of cultural than structural integration. In this manner, organizations revealing somewhat different structures (say, a small, family-run business versus a large multidivisional company in a capitalist economy) can become integrated by specific networks of exchange and, more importantly, by a common capitalist ideology.

The same process works across institutional domains, but here structural mechanisms revolving around interdependence are more important than common culture. Exchanges of symbolic media and other resources, such as material goods, services, and personnel, will be the principal integrative mechanism and, hence, will dominate the environment of any organization in diverse domains. Depending upon relative institutional autonomy and the power of the ideologies of respective domains, the degree of cultural integration will vary from relatively moderate because of meta-ideologies that may emerge across domains to relatively low when the ideologies of domains can potentially come into conflict. Thus, even though there are some pressures for structural and cultural convergence that create patterns of structural and cultural equivalence among differentiated corporate units within and between diverse institutional domains, differentiation always generates new selection pressures revolving around regulation, which in turn increases pressures for corporate units in domains, such as polity and law, to become part of the environment of differentiated corporate units in all other domains. These pressures also push for the creation of more structural mechanisms geared to creating and sustaining interdependencies among corporate units, as is explored below. And to the degree possible, these mechanisms of interdependence cause some convergence of structural forms and the development of meta-ideologies that blend, to varying degrees, the ideologies generated by the respective generalized symbolic media of diverse institutional domains. Thus, in contrast to segmentation as an integrative force, where the structural and cultural equivalences across corporate units generate a similar environment for each corporate unit, the environments of corporate units in differentiated societies will be more complex, depending upon the configuration of mechanisms of structural interdependence and the degree to which hybrid meta-ideologies are developed from these structural interdependencies.

Structural Interdependencies.

In Table 2.3 on pp. 84 to 90, rows 3a through 3d highlight what I see as the most general mechanisms of integration by structural interdependence. Depending upon the configuration of these mechanisms within and between corporate units in differentiated institutional domains, the environment of any corporate unit and some categoric units will vary. In turn, these structural configurations also affect the nature of the cultural environment of any corporate unit and, in this case, the environment of members of categoric units as well. Let me now review these structural mechanisms in the order list in Table 2.3.

Exchange

As corporate units differentiate, they increasingly become dependent upon other specialized corporate units for necessary resources, whether for materials or services. Under these conditions of demand for resources, markets using money and credit inevitably emerge and begin to differentiate horizontally (as market sectors for different types of resources and services) and vertically into meta-markets where the medium of exchange in lower-level markets (e.g., money, stocks, bonds, mortgages, insurance contracts, commodities contracts, and the like) becomes the resource exchanged in a higher-order and often highly speculative market (Collins 1990; Braudel 1977, 1982[1979]; Turner 1995, 2003).

Once operative in response to selection pressures from distribution and regulation as macro-level forces, markets become differentiating “machines” in societies because they allow for the diversification of demand and thus create incentives for specialized corporate units to meet this demand. Indeed, as Collins (1990) argued, they become “the driving force of history.” As markets expand and differentiate, markets become part of the environment of virtually every corporate unit in all institutional domains because the medium of exchange increasingly revolves around money, which circulates across all domains. The result is that the symbolic medium of money becomes conflated with the distinctive symbolic media of all other domains, thereby creating sets of hybrid meta-ideologies built around money and other symbolic media within diverse domains. In so doing, money links corporate units across institutional domains and reconciles, to varying degrees, potential conflicts in their respective ideologies. The result is that there is a certain level of segmentation in the cultures of differentiated institutional domains because money as a symbolic medium becomes part of the meta-ideology of each domain. In so doing, money creates cultural equivalences in the environments of most domains.⁶

As markets expand and as money circulates across domains, it provides the necessary liquid resources to support (via taxes and fees) polity and law as autonomous domains. At the same time, markets themselves create selection pressures for regulation by administrative agencies of polity and by legal codes, most of which in any legal system involve specifying the rules by which contracts for exchange are to occur. Since market transactions extend across most, if not all, domains, polity and law become part of the environments of all institutional domains, imposing administrative and legal constraints on diverse kinds of corporate units—families, churches, teams, clinics, schools, businesses, nonprofits, and virtually all of the many diverse corporate units in institutional domains. Moreover, government and law become not only the means for organizing communities (as a type of corporate unit), they also become part of their environments as ever-more encompassing layers of law and government impose restrictions on lower-level governmental formations in communities and the organizations embedded in these communities.

As government and law become part of the constraining environments of corporate units, the media of power and influence circulate in virtually all domains. And, like the circulation of any medium across institutional boundaries, the media of government and law carry with them ideologies of these domains that, in turn, become part of the meta-ideology in any given domain. The result is that institutional domains now have several ideologies mixed with the ideologies of each domain, thereby creating a broader institutional base for converging meta-ideologies that are now part of the cultural environment of each domain. Moreover, since the media of economy, polity, and law are generally dominant in a society, the meta-ideology from these domains exerts even more constraint as part of the cultural environment of any corporate unit. At times, as is the case in contemporary Iran, religion and its medium are dominant, with the result that the meta-ideology in diverse domains is still a broad hybrid but one dominated by sacredness/piety, mixed with money, power, and influence (from Islamic law). Still, this meta-ideology operates like the meta-ideologies built from money, power, and influence in capitalist democracies in that the cultural environments of diverse corporate units converge and provide powerful symbolic basis for integration.

When market forces extend across institutional domains, they expand the ideology extolling the efficiency and uses of markets beyond actual monetary exchanges. Other, nonmonetary exchanges increasingly become viewed as what I termed (in Volume 1 of Theoretical Principles of Sociology) quasi-markets. For example, dating is seen as a market process, hopefully involving the exchange of love for love, but there is money in the mix (if only to pay for dates and/or a dating service). Or churches may exchange clerical knowledge of the sacredness for piety from their members (although money as a donation and a marker of piety is almost always involved as well). Thus, both structurally and culturally, relations are seen as mediated by markets and quasi-markets, which again allows the environments of diverse corporate units to converge.

Convergence in their structural patterns of exchange and in the cultures of most corporate units in most domains creates a weak form of segmentation that, in turn, provides for a strong basis of integration in even highly complex societies. Moreover, there is more flexibility in these environments because markets are capable of accommodating new kinds of exchanges among new corporate units requiring new kinds of resources, and hybrid meta-ideologies will always carry some flexibility because they are not as tightly integrated, as is the case where the sole mechanism of integration is segmentation and cultural homogeneity in societies with very low levels of differentiation (or “mechanical solidarity” in Durkheim’s terms).

We can see the power of markets as mechanisms of interdependence and their capacity to form stable and converging structural and cultural environments by comparing their dynamism in the capitalist West with that of the old Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries of the Cold War era. For the most part, markets in this part of the world were (dreary and understocked) depots that distributed goods and services in response to top-down allocations by economic planners; demand from individuals and corporate units was much less important in determining the products available in these dreary distribution depots. The result was that money was not the dominant symbolic medium, but rather power and its use in formulating a restrictive political ideology backed up by the coercive and administrative arms of the state dominated not only economic transactions but also relations among all corporate units. The environments of all corporate units were thus much the same and provided considerable integration but at the cost of flexibility and, more importantly, dynamism in the economy where per capita productivity continued to decline from its initial peak in the early 1960s. By the time the Soviet Union fell apart 30 years later, the inflexibility and lack of dynamism of the Soviet Union in a world that was rapidly going capitalist were all too evident. Thus, a powerful basis of structural and cultural integration can be highly successful in the short run but lack the flexibility and dynamism in the long run.

And so, as free markets rework all bases of interdependence across institutional domains and as they drive further differentiation, they also create more segmental subenvironments for all corporate units than might be expected. They first circulate money and the ideology of capitalism; then they pull in polity and law because of their own integrative problems and because of the need to regulate money and transactions, and as they do so, they generate sets of hybrid meta-ideologies that provide a common culture across even highly differentiated institutional domains.

Structural inclusion and embedding

When smaller corporate units become embedded in larger units within a domain, the level of integration among the units increases. When organizations first evolved, they were built from the inclusion of group-level corporate units into systems of authority linking groups to coordinate pursuit of particular goals, many of which were ultimately responses to selection pressures. Thus, organizations reduce the number of free-standing groups in a society and, in so doing, integrate the environments of groups and organizations, and the greater the rate and degree of embedding of groups inside of organizations, the more stable will the structural and cultural environments of both groups and organizations become, while at the same time, the more likely are these organizational units to be capable of dealing with selection pressures.

Organizations, even virtually built ones, must be located in physical space, which means that they are likely to be embedded inside of community corporate units which provide infrastructures for the operation of organizations and their constituent groups. Since communities reveal clear tendencies toward segmentation, they reduce the complexity of the environment for organizations because they will generally build up similar infrastructures, evidence similar patterns of governance, and organize similar districts for key functions, whether economic, governmental, religious, educational, legal, and familial (housing and recreation), with the result organizations in the same or different communities respond to similar local environmental pressures. Historically, and to the present, community structures and their culture have been influenced by the configuration of organizations in institutional domains within the borders of the community. For example, many of the first larger cities in various parts of the world were dominated by political and religious organizations. Later cities could be based on market transactions or particular industries or trades, or a city could revolve around its infrastructural functions (as a port or a way station on a transportation route). Increasingly, cities can revolve around particular service industries, such as banking or equities trading, and even today, cities can be built to provide a inclusive unit for particular institutional activities of corporate unit, beyond the early pattern evident for politically and religiously based communities (which still persist, of course, in capitals of states and nations and foundational centers of religion). For example, entire communities or significant portions of them can be organized to service corporate units devoted to education (e.g., college towns), science (research parks), entertainment (as an emerging institutional domain), medicine (mega-medical campuses), and kinship (suburbs), and economics (manufacturing, banking, insurance, trade). When communities reveal a similar configuration of corporate units devoted to a particular range of institutional activities, the culture of these communities will converge, as will the development of infrastructures facilitating exchange, distribution, and movement of people and resources. The result is increased integration not only within the community but also across communities revealing a similar profile in terms of such variables as population size and mix of institutional domains. As a consequence, groups inside of organizations, organizations inside of communities, and segmentation of communities into a few basic forms increase the structural and cultural integration of all corporate units in all institutional domains across a society. The sociocultural environments of individuals, corporate units, and categoric units will be similar, thereby facilitating adaptation to these environments. Structural and cultural equivalences feed off each other, with structural equivalence generating common worldviews and ideologies, and with the latter coalescing into a common culture that constrains individual actions and structural formations. Thus, even in highly differentiated societies, equivalence provides for integration and environmental stability.

Community corporate units are typically embedded in larger geographical units, such as counties and districts inside of states or regions, which in turn are embedded in societies. Integration increases with such inclusion because agents of polity are successively embedded in ever-larger and more inclusive governing units while being regulated by a system of ever-more inclusive laws culminating in the system of laws at the societal level. The environments of communities are thus not only other communities with which exchanges may occur but communities regulated by the same system of law and governance from regional, state, and national polities. The result is that, aside from the effects of community segmentation, per se, two of the key environmental forces—that is, corporate units from polity and law—will be structured and operate in the same manner for all communities, as will the environments for all of the corporate units of differentiated domains located within any community. A further result is that the culture of communities and institutional domains will converge because of community segmentation and embedding in the same successive layers of polity and law created by larger geographical sociopolitical formations.

Just as groups are embedded in organizations, smaller organizations often become embedded in larger ones, or through merger processes, organizations of varying sizes become included in a new, larger corporate unit within an institutional domain. The result is to increase the level of overall integration in a domain. One force behind structural inclusion is markets; corporate units are always exposed to the vagaries of market forces—for example, competition, downturns, fraud, collapse, inflation, etc.—and one way to limit exposure is to internalize functions within a larger corporate unit rather than through market-mediated interdependencies. Integration comes from more extended hierarchies of authority rather than market-based interdependencies, coupled with a corporate-unit culture built from the generalized symbolic medium of an institutional domain. This kind of integration, however, creates problems of structural and cultural rigidity, exposure of the larger and less flexible corporate units to market forces, and because of these potential problems of regulation and control, intervention by polity and law becomes inevitable and, hence, part of the environment of corporate units, especially those in the economy.

As a consequence of these dynamics, the environments of corporate units in a domain become populated by larger corporate units, which often force smaller units to merge and form a more inclusive unit in order to compete in the markets that spread across institutional domains outside of the economy. As units become larger, the ideology of an institutional domain becomes more unified, especially if some larger corporate units dominate transactions within a domain. Moreover, there is generally some convergence in the structural forms and culture of larger units, with the result that the environment of units inside a domain is stabilized and simplified because of these segmentation pressures.

The systems of authority that extend across larger corporate units engaged in various institutional activities increase the likelihood that domination will become an important mechanisms of integration (see later discussion). Large units may exert considerable influence on corporate units in polity and law, but the reverse is even more likely to be true: larger units come under the authority of polity and its administrative agencies or, alternatively, the influence of laws enacted by polity as well as adjudicative structures (e.g., courts) and enforcement agencies funded by tax revenues collected by polity. In this way, extrainstitutional authority outside a domain hooks up with the larger and longer reach of intrainstitutional authority generated by the successive embeddedness of corporate units, whether organizations incorporating small organizations and their constituent groups or communities providing places, infrastructures, and services to larger organizational units in institutional domains. The result is increased structural integration and, at the same time, a mixing of ideologies of several institutional domains into a meta-ideology, both of which simplify and stabilize the environments in which corporate units of varying types and size operate—often at the price of reducing institutional flexibility and, hence, adaptability.

Structural overlaps

When organizational corporate units engage in exchanges creating interdependencies, they often take a further step for more integration: merging of some of their activities and, thereby, creating structural overlaps. For instance, universities often set up research parks on their campuses, or near them, and share personnel, administrative overhead, and budgets with the research arms of for-profit economic corporations; they can also encourage overlaps with religious corporate units when they allow on-campus counseling and other services provided by religious corporate units. Similarly, even competitive corporate units in the economy of a capitalist society can create overlapping research groups in new organizations or even set up joint production units. Overlaps allow organizations to draw upon each other’s resources without dealing with the vagaries and uncertainties of markets, while also enabling them to save on other resources from administrative overhead, research and development, marketing, and personnel.

Overlaps have many of the same effects as inclusion, but when they involve organizational corporate units from different domains—for example, education, science, economy, polity, religion, and law—the overlaps increase the level of inter-institutional integration in several ways. One is that their organizational forms will be similar and have many of the same effects as segmentation in creating structural equivalences, but perhaps more important is the effect on culture, as symbolic media and ideologies are mixed and reconciled to produce inter-institutional meta-ideologies that extend across domains and thus generate expanded and more stable cultural environments for individuals and corporate units in diverse domains.

Overlaps also can potentially increase the rate of intersection between corporate units and categoric units. If overlaps allow for members of different categoric units to gain access to the same organization, or to residential areas where the overlapping organizations are located, then individuals from diverse backgrounds will have higher rates of interaction, and over time, the salience of categoric-unit memberships will be reduced. Similarly, if members of diverse categoric units can also be distributed across the full range of positions in the divisions of labor in overlapping units, the salience of categoric-unit membership and the status beliefs that devalue some and valorize others will be reduced (see Chap. 5). When tension-producing inequalities legitimated by status beliefs and the meta-ideology of the stratification system from which they are drawn lose their power, while the meta-ideologies of diverse domains increase in salience and power, then the environments for individuals and corporate units will evidence less potential for conflict and more potential for increased cultural unity. The inherent tension built into all stratification systems is thus mitigated. If, however, the reverse is true—overlaps sustain discrimination against members of devalued categoric units and reinforce status beliefs and the underlying meta-ideology legitimating stratification—then the environments of individuals and corporate units will be filled with potential cultural conflict.

Structural mobility

Movement of incumbents across corporate units, especially those in diverse institutional domains, increases interdependencies between corporate units and, most significantly, their respective cultures. For example, when universities send out trained professionals to corporate units in diverse domains—economy, government, law, medicine, religion, arts, etc.—they bring with them the generalized symbolic medium of the university (learning), the ideology of education, and professional ethics derived from this ideology; they must then reconcile this cultural set with that of the institutional domain in which their corporate unit of destination is located. As an outcome, meta-ideologies are built up, and a certain amount of cultural homogenization occurs, which in turn simplifies both the structural and cultural environments of individuals and corporate units.

In highly differentiated societies, then, career movements of all incumbents in corporate units work to increase common cultures. And if rates of movement are high and the destinations are in diverse institutional domains, then differentiated domains will share at least some common culture or at least be familiar with differences in culture and thus be more able to adapt to these differences. Moreover, if high rates and distances of mobility increase intersections of categoric units with diverse corporate units and all locations in their respective divisions of labor, the rates of interaction among members of diverse categoric units increase, and over time, the salience of categoric-unit membership declines—thereby mitigating tensions associated with inequality and relevance of status beliefs and meta-ideologies legitimating the stratification system. In contrast, when mobility is low and corporate units present barriers to mobility, especially when active discrimination against certain categoric-unit members is operating, then structural differences become large cultural differences, and highly differentiated environments always present greater problems of adaptation for corporate units and individuals in them.

As is the case with overlaps, if access to resource-distributing corporate units in key institutional domains (e.g., economy, education) and/or to high-resource bestowing locations in divisions of labor of corporate units is restricted by discrimination against members of devalued categoric units, then the status beliefs and legitimating meta-ideology of stratification also become part of the cultural environment of individuals and corporate units. The effect is to inject the tensions associated with stratification into the environments of all actors, creating more problems of adaptation. Conversely, as noted above, if mobility allows diversely categorized individuals to have access to all resource-giving corporate units and all locations in division of labor of these units, the salience of status beliefs and the meta-ideologies of stratification are reduced.

Structural domination

With differentiation and the evolution of mechanisms of structural interdependence, the consolidation of power inevitably increases, creating systems of domination within and across institutional domains. There are four fundamental bases of power (Turner 1995, 2010a): (1) coercive, (2) administrative, (3) symbolic, and (4) material incentive. The configuration of these bases and their location within our outside a given institution affects much of the social and cultural environment of any particular organization. If the coercive base is used heavily by polity, then the administrative base also becomes highly centralized to organize coercion and to monitor conformity to political directives. The result is for the environments of all corporate units in all institutional domains to be dominated by decisions of polity—as was the case in the Soviet Union and is now the situation in most totalitarian regimes. Typically the legal system becomes highly restrictive in how it regulates relations among corporate units and manages acts of deviance. Moreover, the cultural environment is heavily infused with ideologies built up from power as a generalized symbolic medium but a conception of power as imposed upon actors in contrast to being facilitative of transactions among corporate units. The environments of corporate units become part of an extended system of top-down authority, backed up by law and ideologies of power that dominate other institutional ideologies, with relatively little use of material incentive bases of power. Instead, incentives to actors revolve around avoiding punishments and the heavy hand of coercive and/or administrative power. Authoritarian regimes all over the world illustrate how this form of domination creates highly restrictive environments for individuals and corporate units organizing their activities. Such systems are, at least in the short term, integrated because they persist, but as the Soviet Union learned, they reduce flexibility and adaptability to an external intersocietal universe that was going capitalist and leaving the Soviet Union behind by all measures of economic productivity.

The opposite profile of domination is where material incentives and symbols from a meta-ideology built from money, power, and influence dominate. The meta-ideology will emphasize the expansion of wealth loosely regulated by additional incentives provided by tax revenues collected (or uncollected) by polity and by the legal system designed to facilitate rather than limit market transactions. The consequence is an environment for all corporate and categoric units that is less restrictive. Administrative bases of power are relatively weak and decentralized; ideologies emphasize the dynamism of free markets and lower taxes on corporate unit activities; only strategic use of coercive power is condoned, and material incentives are designed primarily to stimulate economic growth. Such a system is somewhat chaotic, subject to often unstable and extreme market oscillations, while increasing wealth and per capita income of some, while at the same time increasing inequalities between the affluent and poor. Moreover, all actors will generally confront more risk.

Domination by polity almost always causes the elaboration of the law, but the nature of law—that is, the restrictiveness of legal codes, the degree of open debate in an arena of politics during their enactment, the degree and severity of their enforcement, and the fairness of their adjudication in courts—will depend upon the pattern in the configuration of bases of power along the two extremes outlined above. The more the coercive configuration prevails, the more likely will polity and law be part of the environment of all corporate units in all institutional domains, whereas the more the material incentive profile dominates, the more polity and law will be part of the environment of a more restricted set of domains, particularly economy, education, and science, and even here, the restrictiveness of law and administrative actions by polity will be far less than in the more coercive-based configuration of the bases of power.

When the consolidation of power occurs under the influence of corporate actors in nonpolitical institutional domains, typically religion, it will generally gravitate toward the more coercive base of power. The emerging theocracy will rely upon a linkage between the coercive and administrative bases, while the meta-ideology created by mixing ideologies constructed from power and sacredness/piety as symbolic media will be highly moralized and restrictive, demanding religious orthodoxy and commitment. And the legal system will be closed, as the case with Islamic law, to legislation that violates the tenets of the religious belief (ideological) system. If polity is, as Marx and most Marxist believe, dominated by core actors and dense networks of economic corporate units, then polity and law will move toward the material incentive configuration of power, with polity and law being relatively weak compared to the consolidation of wealth and influence of economic elites. If less dynamic market systems are typical, such as was the case in more feudal societies, polity will vacillate between centralization of power (e.g., in the king) and decentralization of power away from a central figure (e.g., owners of manorial estates). In either case, the environment of all corporate units will revolve around the meta-ideology mixing the virtues of feudal forms of power (around the coercive-administrative bases of power), elite privilege and control of economic and legal activity, and religious beliefs legitimating elite and religious wealth.

Domination is also a function of the autonomy of institutional domains and the power of core actors and corporate units in a domain. Through their control in the formulation of institutional ideologies and networks of interdependencies (often through control of key market sectors in the economy but also in other domains), intra-institutional domination of a domain biases the structural and cultural environments of all corporate units within the domain and the environments of those corporate units in other domains that form interdependencies with units in this domain. This pattern domination is not confined to just the economy; indeed, it can occur in all domains in all types of societies. For example, in horticulture, kinship units dominate all other institutional activities; in early feudal system, a particular set of religious corporate units can dominate other corporate units in other domains such as political, legal, economic, and educational corporate units and, in the case of the West, corporate units and individuals seeking to institutionalize science. Even in societies with markets, such as Iran, the networks among religious actors dominate activities in polity, education, and, to a lesser extent, economy and family.

Domination is, therefore, a bit more complicated than portrayed by Karl Marx and Max Weber, even with the latter’s more nuanced analysis. And it is in the very nature of power to be intrusive, even in a less coercive profile, and thus the structural and cultural environments of corporate units in any domain are constrained by the way in which power is institutionalized structurally as it forms patterns of asymmetrical interdependence and as it codifies symbolic media into intrainstitutional ideologies and extrainstitutional meta-ideologies. And, depending upon the autonomy of institutional domains, the pattern of consolidation of power around its bases and the capacity of core corporate units in other domains to consolidate power through control of networks will vary. Patterns of domination can become quite complex because they involve more than polity and law but actors in other domains who possess counterpower or sufficient power to mitigate against the power of polity and influence of law.

Structural Segregation.

The separation of corporate units engaged in incompatible activities and of categoric units that are differentially valued can, in the short run, reduce conflict. However, when corporate and categoric units are separated in space, there is almost always a differential evaluation of these units, and those that are devalued will be subject to discrimination. For example, if prostitution is pushed to a “red light district,” resentments will still build, and corporate units will begin to cross the lines marking them off from the mainstream. Or, if highly polluting activities are separated from normal routines in communities, it is inevitable over the long run that questions will be raised about whether or not such activities should be occurring in the first place. Segregation of corporate units engaged in incompatible or harmful activities is accomplished by the use of power that forces, whether formally or informally, certain types of corporate units to move away from the mainstream. Still, these are all still part of the macro-structural and cultural environments to which meso-level units must adjust.

More potentially volatile is segregation of members of devalued categoric units from members of more valued units. Here discrimination is systematic and legitimated by meta-ideologies legitimating stratification and the status beliefs and expectations states derived from these meta-ideologies. When categories of person are separated in physical space, when they are denied access to resource-distributing corporate units, and when they are given only low-status positions in those corporate units where they have minimal access, resentments build and eventually lead to conflict. Thus, segregation among members of categoric units can work for a time, but over the long run, it will promote disintegration as resentments build and members of categoric units that have been the victims of discrimination become mobilized to pursue conflict. A conflict generated by stratification of categoric units will always be potentially more volatile and violent than conflict over incompatible activities of corporate units. Indeed, the negative emotions, counter-mobilization of new ideologies against meta-ideologies, and the organization of victims of discrimination can tear a society apart. Thus, segregation of members of categoric units only works for a relatively brief time and, in the end, promotes disintegration more than structural integration.

Mechanisms Integrating Stratification Systems and Meso-level Environments

As outlined in Chap. 1, stratification systems are generated by the unequal distribution of valued resources by corporate units—often the symbolic media of an institutional domain. As stratification systems evolve, they evidence five fundamental properties (Turner 1984, 2010a): (1) the unequal distribution of resources; (2) the formation of relatively homogeneous subpopulations or classes on the basis of shares and configurations of resources held by individuals, families, and other corporate units; (3) the rank ordering of classes on the basis of their members’ relative worth as defined by meta-ideologies and status beliefs; and (4) rates of mobility across class boundaries. These four properties all vary. A society is highly stratified if levels of inequality are high, classes are homogeneous, rank ordering of classes on a scale of worth is linear, and rates of mobility across classes are low. Conversely, a society is less stratified if unequal distribution of resources is low and possession of one resource is not highly correlated with holdings of other valued resources, classes are not homogeneous and boundaries among classes are ambiguous, rank ordering of classes is not highly linear, and rates of mobility across class boundaries are high and promote intersection of parameters marking categoric-unit members with locations in a fuller range of corporate units across institutional domains and within the full spread of locations in the divisions of labor of these corporate units (see pp. 153–185 of Volume 1 of Theoretical Principles of Sociology for a more detailed discussion and Chap. 4 in this volume).

These two extremes are end points of a scale that reveals many intermediate points between high and low levels of stratification. Yet, these extremes also represent two different routes to high degrees of structural integration in stratification system. It is the intermediate points of stratification that are less integrated and more likely to initiate conflict in a society. I draw this conclusion because both high and comparatively low levels of stratification can persist in their respective environments for long periods of times. It is the more intermediately stratified systems that are more weakly integrated because both sets of the mechanisms working to integrate high and low levels of stratification exist and generate tensions that lead to collective action (see Chap. 8 on social movement organizations).

Integration in Highly Stratified Societies.

In highly stratified populations, the differentiation of institutional domains is not as great as it is in less stratification systems. Access to resource-distributing corporate units, especially in economy, polity, law, and education, is not universal and is highly restricted to members of valued corporate units. The unequal distribution of resources is often legitimated by a highly moralized meta-ideology dominated by religion and polity, giving elites moral rights to their privilege while morally stigmatizing those who do not have rights to valued resources. This meta-ideology is typically well aligned with societal values and institutional norms operating in all domains, but especially religion and polity. Ironically, such a system is often considered legitimate by a large proportion of the population, even those in the lower classes. If tensions and protests emerge (e.g., banditry or rural revolts in weak feudal systems or acts of terrorism in modern states), the state’s capacity for social control is high and can typically crush incipient revolts.

A highly stratified system imposes boundaries to mobility across class lines; individuals and families see “their place” in the system as permanent, often accepting the meta-ideology legitimating their class location. When aspirations for mobility are so low, expectations for a “better life” are equally low, with the ironic result that individuals are less likely to be aroused by the pervasive inequalities that are perceived as an inevitable contingency of daily life. A system like this, however, cannot be sustained in a highly dynamic society because any change in the structure and culture of the society breaks the system of control imposed by stratification. For example, dynamic markets cannot exist, and when they do begin to emerge, they create new expectations for what is possible while generating many new kinds of corporate units in expanding domains that offer new opportunities for resources. Whether from the “wheels of commerce” (Braudel 1982[1979]) of early capitalism in Europe, the dramatic expansion of capitalism in the world system surrounding the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, or the spread of capitalism in present-day China, free markets generate change, and change of any sort disrupts the basis of integration in highly stratified systems.

Class location thus becomes the principal categoric unit in a society, although gender, region of origin, religion, and ethnicity are almost always salient. Indeed, memberships in these other types of categoric units are highly correlated with class location, thus institutionalizing consolidation of parameters linking diverse categoric units with class-based categoric units defining stratification. At times, particular categoric units, such as Jews in early capitalist Europe, can secure new positions in emerging corporate units, but the prejudice and discrimination against (and stigma of) members of these “mobile” categoric units sustain the integrity of the class system by confining them to “middle-man minority” roles (Blalock 1967; Bonacich 1973; Turner and Bonacich 1980). Thus, highly stratified systems create an environment for corporate and categoric units that (a) restricts the number and form of corporate units in economy, polity, law, education, and religion and (b) limits persons’ access to resource-distributing positions in divisions of labor in these units. Such structural restrictions are legitimated by a highly moralized meta-ideology, often dominated by religion or state ideology.

Yet, if highly stratified societies discriminate in ways that lead to high correlations between class and other categoric memberships, such as religion and ethnicity, then the tensions generated by such discrimination will increase and begin to undermine the stability of the system. Class is a potentially volatile dynamic, but when class is correlated with other categoric units, this volatility increases dramatically. And as a result, the environments of meso-level units are dramatically transformed, often making them more conducive to mobilization for conflict (see Chap. 8).

Integration in Societies with Low Levels of Stratification.

In societies revealing higher rates of mobility across less clearly bounded and rank-ordered classes, the legitimating meta-ideology revolves around “freedom of opportunities.” In such systems, inequality is still very high, but the illusion of opportunities is also high, and structural arrangements in institutional domains—democratic polity, positivistic law enshrining freedom and civil rights, universalistic education, and dynamic markets in the economy—all work to create a meta-ideology that legitimates the rights of individuals to be successful and mobile across boundaries of the class system. The linkage of education and labor markets offers routes to mobility, with the ideology of education (universalistic access to learning that translates into job opportunities for earning money in economy and other institutional domains). Individuals thus have dramatically expanded access to a larger range of corporate units in all institutional domains. Moreover, civil rights laws typically offer “proof” that discrimination on the basis of categoric-unit memberships does not operate, thereby giving equality of opportunity to all. As a result, the correlation between categoric-unit membership and class location is lower than in highly stratified societies (although de facto and de jure discriminations still operate and ensure that some members of categoric units will have less opportunity to gain access to resource-distributing corporate units, thus sustaining a class system biased by such prominent categoric units as gender, ethnicity, and religion).

This kind of stratification system is typical of capitalist systems, although many capitalist societies offer a heavy dose of “welfare programs” to mitigate the vagaries of markets and to ensure members of a society of certain basic resources needed to sustain themselves. For example, the state may universalize access to corporate units distributing health as a valued resource, educational credentials certifying levels of learning as yet another valued resource that increases access to money, power, and influence in, respectively, economy, polity, and law.

The environments for meso units created by this form of integration are much more chaotic and dynamic because they place large burdens on individuals to secure (or fail to secure) access to resources in corporate units. The symbolic media and ideologies of democratic polity, positivistic law, and open education generate a cultural environment emphasizing individual success and achievement through “hard work.” Structural arrangements in virtually all institutional domains, especially when mediated by dynamic markets, regularize competition among individuals for access to corporate-units resources, while persisting patterns of discrimination restrict (to varying degrees) access of categoric-unit members to resource-distributing corporate units and/or their divisions of labor. The result is that the consolidation of categoric memberships with high- and low-class locations above and below poorly demarcated middle classes. If mobility to the loosely structured set of middle classes becomes possible, tension and conflict decrease, but if membership in devalued ethnic and religious categoric units is persistently correlated with more clearly defined lower classes, then the conflict potential generated by the stratification system increases and undermines patterns of integration.

Yet, even though opportunities are not limitless and despite persistent discrimination against members of categoric units, this system of stratification is integrated because it tends to blame individuals for their “lack of initiative” or “failure to assimilate”; if such definitions of the situation are pervasive, individuals internalize this blame as “self blame.” The consequence is that the persistence of stratification is not blamed on either the system itself or the culture that legitimates this system but, instead, on individuals who have failed to take advantage of opportunities. Conflicts, particularly violent- and class-based conflict, are thus less likely to erupt. And, when conflict does emerge, it is almost always around persisting patterns of discrimination against categoric-unit members who have been denied full access to corporate units in education and economy. In fact, social movements for change in the distribution of resources are less likely to attack the system and its culture, per se, but instead to push for extending the more open system and its opportunities for access (through individual effort) to members of all devalued categoric units. The plea is for universalism rather than the destruction of the system of stratification or the institutions that have generated this system.

Thus, the environments of these kinds of stratification systems raise expectations as a normal course of market-driven capitalism and a democratic state, which can lead to social movement mobilizations when the tenets of the meta-ideology legitimating the more open stratification system are seen as not operative for certain categories of person (see Chap. 4). There will, then, be much more turmoil in such a society with a more open stratification system, but frequent, lower intensity, and institutionalized forms of conflict (by law and an arena of comparatively open politics) release tensions rather than letting them accumulate to point of class-based conflict (Coser 1956), especially class conflict in which categoric-unit parameters like race/ethnicity and religion are also involved (because of their consolidation with class locations).

Conclusions

Some of the claims of macro-chauvinists are correct in this sense: the macro-level structures and cultures of a society generate many of the environments for corporate and categoric units, as well as micro-dynamic encounters. What meso-level units build up—that is, institutional domains and stratification—becomes the environment of these meso units. The culture and structure of the macro realm thus constrain what can be done at both the meso and micro levels of social organization. Thus, the first priority of an analysis of meso dynamics is to get a handle on the properties of these macro-level environments, and it is for this reason that this chapter appears so early. I will consistently draw upon what has been said in this chapter to understand both the dynamics of categoric units (Chap. 4) and corporate units (Chaps. 5, 6, and 7), as well as the pressures for change that these environments generate (Chap. 8). In particular, the modes of structural and cultural integration of the macro realm, especially at the level of institutional domains and stratification systems, are a critical part of a theory of meso dynamics, and so, I will constantly make references to these as they are outlined in Tables 2.2 and 2.3.

Table 2.2 Integrative elements of culture and environments of corporate and categoric units

Table 2.3 Structural integrative mechanisms and institutional environments of corporate and categoric units

Macro environments are only part of the story. The micro level of social reality—that is, interactions in encounters—also becomes an environment of the meso realm. It would be rare for any one encounter to change formations at the meso level, but when chains of encounters strung out over time and when viewed collectively exert enormous power on not only what transpires in encounters but also what occurs in meso-level social units. The reason for this power is that it is at the micro level of reality that human emotions are aroused, and these provide much of the energy that fuels all of the social universe. Thus, as positive or negative emotions build up over time and spread among individuals in encounters, these become the energy behind the formation of micro-level environments. In almost all meso-level formations, the emotions of individuals, the beliefs and attributions that individuals develop about the causes of these emotions, and the motivations that mobilize individuals to accept or reject meso-level processes in corporate and categoric units represent a constant source of pressure on the meso realm.

As I have emphasized, the meso level of reality is caught between the forces driving the macro and micro realms. A useful way to conceptualize this pincher movement on the meso level is as a series of environments generated by macro-dynamic and micro-dynamic forces. Once we conceptualize these environments, then we can begin to develop theoretical principles on how they affect meso-dynamic processes.