Social Institutions

An institution, for our purpose here can be broadly defined as:

"A pattern of shared, stable, behaviour".

Thus, the characteristics of social institutions are that they involve behaviour that is carried out by large numbers of people (shared) and this behaviour must be of a type that continues over a reasonable period of time (stable). 

Examples of social institutions in our society, therefore, might be things like:

• Work
  Education
  Family
  Religion and so forth.
  

We can use a further example to explain this idea in a little more detail.

The family can be considered to be an institution in our society for a number of reasons:

a. It involves large numbers of people (all of us will, at one time or another, have been involved in some sort of family group).

b. The are general social norms governing the conduct of family life.

c. It is behaviour that is probably as old as our society itself (there has always, as far as it is possible to know, been some sort of family group in our society).

When we talk about an institution in this way, it is important to avoid the mistake that everyone within the institution behaves in exactly the same way. Family life in Britain, for example, involves a diverse mixture of forms (dual-parent, single-parent, nuclear, extended, reconstituted and so forth).

However, what it can be assumed to mean is that there are general cultural norms in existence governing the various ways that children, for example should be socialised, how parent should relate to children and so forth