To social scientists, a handshake can be an institution just like a parliament
Ask a sociologist what an institution is and the answer may include a firm handshake. The broadest definitions cover any regular, shared practice that shapes behaviour, formal or not, while narrower ones insist on written laws and complex organisations. Either way, institutions are the rules humans invent to steer one another.
What all definitions share is persistence: laws, conventions and norms that last. Institutions store practical knowledge about how society works and have been compared to the theories of natural science. Émile Durkheim even called sociology the science of institutions, their origins and their workings. Broad meta-institutions such as the family or money contain whole clusters of related ones.
Scholars phrase it in strikingly different ways. Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen call institutions building blocks of social order, collectively enforced expectations about how people behave. Samuel Huntington described stable, valued, recurring patterns of behaviour, and Robert Keohane spoke of connected rules that assign roles and shape expectations. Game theorist Randall Calvert defined an institution as an equilibrium: following its rules is rational for almost everyone precisely because almost everyone else does.
Economists argue institutions decide whether nations prosper. Douglass North saw them as humanly devised constraints on interaction that strongly affect the costs of trading and producing, and noted that small historical quirks can transform them. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson agree, arguing that economic institutions set the incentives for investment and that groups who gain from them often seize political control. Steven Levitsky and María Victoria Murillo add that institutional strength rests on stability and enforcement; where rules are weak and ignored, people cannot rely on one another.
Once established, institutions can become hard to escape. In a 1985 paper, Clio and the Economics of QWERTY, economist Paul David described lock-in, where one technology dominates even though better ones exist, because early choices steer later ones. Informal institutions are just as sticky: unwritten rules known to everyone in a country, sometimes including clientelism or corruption, are often treated as part of its culture.
Source: Institution
