The Embodied Approach to Institutions

In this chapter, Aoki’s theory of institutions is developed with Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and symbolic capital as an alternative to the disembodied economic and game-theoretic approach to institutions as media of information. This is inspired by the Hegelian view of institutions as “second nature,” which is analyzed as inward embodiment of the social world. This chapter highlights the role of power as necessary to enforce institutions, and the role of institutions in creating agential power that is allocated differentially across people, thereby also producing inequality. The model integrates Searle’s notion of institution in terms of metaphor and conceptual blending, and articulates two forms of intentionality, distinguishing I- and We- modes in analyzing agential power. This general approach leads to Fiske’s four types of social relationships, the We-mode defining Community, and the I-mode Hierarchy, Reciprocity, and Market. These four types relate to different cognitive scaling operations and important embodied schemas, respectively the CONTAINER, VERTICAL, BALANCE, and RESOURCE schemas.