SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Social institutions are the significant social structures and practices that organize societies in regular, patterned ways. Social norms and sanctions guide and maintain these institutions. Individuals' demographic decisions and behaviors are channeled by social institutions, which create constrained opportunities and choices. Social institutions help to define demographically relevant statuses, such as student, spouse, parent, and worker. Normative prescriptions associated with institutions further delineate the appropriate age for adopting one of these statuses, and the appropriate sequencing of associated "roles." Changes in social institutions may give rise to alternative life pathways for individuals, as with changes in marital roles in the United States when the labor market presented new work opportunities for married women.

The term "institution" is widely used within the discipline of sociology, but is not uniformly defined. Precise understandings vary with theoretical orientation. For example, functionalists are more inclined to conceive of institutions as structures that perform particular functions or roles in society. By contrast, social interactionists emphasize the fluid set of practices and behaviors which define institutions. Recent theoretical work on the life course points to the key role of institutions in connecting individual life histories to community influences and the forces of social history. This is a view of institutions as structures that channel behaviors. But social institutions also provide the way in which social historical changes are made real through their connection to individual persons. In economics the market system of capitalist states is a key institution, with effects on nearly every aspect of family life. Shifts from socialist to more market-oriented economies, as occurred in China and Vietnam at the end of the twentieth century, have had pervasive effects on demographic behavior.

Beyond structures and practices, more general terms have been used to define social institutions, including "ideas" about how to accomplish societal goals and "focuses" of social organization. Despite diversity in precise definition, most social scientists agree that universality is a characteristic of significant social institutions. Social institutions are recognized for their place in organizing social life within and across societies. As such, they are significant in any given society, and provide a useful prism for organizing comparative analyses of population across societies.

Population events influence and are influenced by social institutions. These relationships are dynamic and subject to feedback. They are central to any understanding of the determinants and consequences of population change. The social institutions that are most widely recognized as relevant to population change include family and kinship systems, religious institutions, the education system, the health system, political organization, and the economy. These institutions are the social structures through which changes in fertility outcomes, infant and adult mortality, immigration and emigration, and the age structure of the population come about. Conversely, population processes are key to the shape and form of social institutions, creating a constant interplay between the two. The complexities of this interrelationship may be illustrated by drawing attention to three important features:

1. The multiple dimensions of interdependence of social institutions and population;
2. The multilevel and across-level aspects of the interdependence within and between social institutions and population processes; and
3. The embeddedness of the relationships between social institutions and population processes in social, economic, historical, and political contexts.

Institutions and Population Change

Educational and economic institutions structure individual demographic behaviors with resultant effects on population processes. Government decisions concerning universal education, the structure of the schools (local or national control, performance standards, single or mixed sex), and the location of schools are the basis for family calculations about the costs and benefits of education for sons and daughters. The educational system–through enrollment differentials by place of residence, class, and gender, as well as by the form and content of lessons taught in schools–shapes population-relevant knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Educational content can make schooling a strong or a weak tool for obtaining human capital. Educational systems that train children from rural areas in basic intellectual and work skills help determine whether an individual will work locally or will migrate elsewhere in search of further schooling or other employment opportunities. Schools can increase knowledge about contraceptive use, and alter couple dynamics in ways that promote or hinder adoption of contraception.

Families recognize the value of education, and see education as one way to produce "higher quality" children. This growth in the demand for education, in turn, may overwhelm educational systems, which often lack the resources, school facilities, and teachers needed to meet the new demand. In cases where the public education system is not able to satisfy the demand for accessible and high quality education, parents may enroll their children in private schools, recasting the institutional structure of education.

The rapid decline in the infant and childhood mortality rates in much of Asia and parts of Africa over the second half of the twentieth century came about largely through improved public health systems and better transportation and communication systems, fostered by the development plans of national governments. These improved survival rates had unforeseen consequences, including rapid population growth, a younger age structure, and greatly increased successive cohort sizes. Such changes are particularly problematic for social institutions that are highly age-structured.

Typically, increased demand for skilled labor during economic development is met by improvements in the education of urban populations, by migration from rural to urban places, and by immigration. The result is the urbanization of society. As cities grow in size, national and local governments increasingly are faced with the need to provide expensive urban infrastructures and to address the interests of large cohorts of young persons whose aspirations are unmet.

Improvement in earnings opportunities for women leads to their higher labor force participation rates and, depending on the form of labor, more autonomy in determining the use of resources (such as the purchase of contraceptives and medical care for young children). The rising opportunity costs of withdrawing from the labor force lead to later marriage and smaller family size, and make it increasingly likely that more mothers of young children will work. Changes in the market demand for labor (a demand that is sensitive to internal migration, immigration, fertility, and mortality) can transform the family by redefining appropriate gendered activities, including expectations of mothers and fathers concerning their appropriate roles in the family.

Population and Institutional Change

Social institutions are enduring entities but they are not static. Changes in social institutions can be shaped by demographic change. Take fertility decline: fertility declines can have pervasive effects on the family. A primary activity of that institution is the nurturance of children. As the number of children in a family decreases, the activity of caring for children changes. Family members may spend less time in the activity of caregiving because there are fewer children. Traditional tasks of motherhood often become concentrated in a shorter time-span within women's lifetimes, freeing women to pursue alternative activities. Alternatively, children's needs may be redefined in a way that does not reduce family members' time in caring for young children, but instead qualitatively changes the nature of caregiving.

Fertility change also has implications for family and other social institutions through its effects on the age structure of a population. In Asia, where fertility decline has been rapid and pension schemes are limited, concern is emerging over the increasing burden of providing care to aging elders, a responsibility expected to fall to a generation of children that grows smaller with each successive cohort. Similarly, at the aggregate level, declines in fertility through the birth of smaller cohorts are linked to cohort size. Instability in successive birth cohorts has implications for the economy, as workers retire and are not easily replaced by the generations that follow.

Population change, especially that involving delays in marriage and limitation in family size (to levels below replacement) have produced an economically less favorable (older) population age structure in many countries. States are responding to this changed population age structure. Change in the population age structure affects the structure and composition of the labor force, and the schools that train workers. As schools become increasingly willing to admit girls and young women, women's educational attainment and labor force participation grows, creating new potential for increases in labor force size and productivity. In some countries where fertility rates have been below replacement for two or more decades, immigration has been encouraged as a way to facilitate adjustments to a declining indigenous labor force size. With such immigration new groups appear in the population that may espouse different religious beliefs, family roles and practices, and gender roles, challenging existing social institutions.

The connections between social institutions and demographic change depend on context. While particular relationships–such as that between education and union formation–exist across time and place, their form and content depend on social, economic, historical, and political context. Population policies, with their demographic consequences, are inherently political. States may set population goals and implement policies and programs to promote the achievement of those goals, usually with specific related aims in view. States can encourage population growth, perhaps of selected groups, to win or maintain political power, or to enhance their military strength. Or, as was more common in recent decades, states can discourage rapid population growth, hoping thereby to promote economic development.

In 1979 China adopted a one-child policy to spur modernization and development. In the implementation of this policy, which enforces fertility reduction, numerous social institutions were enlisted. Schools taught a curriculum that emphasized the importance of smaller families and the citizen's duty to the nation to abide by the policy. A family planning system, separate from the health system, was developed to promote birth control and ensure availability of related services even in the most remote places. Local governance and relationships between individuals and local leaders were shaped by the state's promotion of this policy. Local leaders were given birth quotas and could lose their jobs for failure to meet these targets. The resulting pressures were felt in daily interaction at the village or neighborhood level, as families were rewarded for adopting the prescribed behavior or sanctioned for violating state policy. In short, social institutions were used by the state to promote desired population change. These institutions (family, health care, education, and government), in turn, were substantially altered not only by the policy's demographic results, but also by the means adopted to implement it.

Conclusion

The study of social institutions, their structures and processes, is a first step toward understanding population processes and the causes of population change. Anthropological demographers and social historians have been among the leaders in emphasizing this approach, seeking to delineate the "opportunity structure" or "choice set" bounding individual demographic behaviors. Quantitative analyses of population survey data can benefit from understanding the impact of institutions on personal lives, although they often fail to do so. Changes over time in individual demographic behavior need to be interpreted in terms of the broad shape of social history, as filtered by institutional structure and change, linking individual lives to historical time. Gender, religion, and ethnicity are personal factors especially central to understanding whether and how these linkages are handled by families and individuals. Thus, attention to social institutions is critical to understanding nearly all aspects of demographic behavior and population change.

See also: Action Theory in Population Research; Culture and Population; Social Mobility; Social Networks.

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Dennis Hogan

Susan Short