Question 5. Social institutions and their functions

With an increase of the scale and structural complexity of social communities, the need to establish a number of social institutions manifested itself. Social institution in sociology may be defined as a historically stable form of organization and regulation of common human activity, they enable functioning of communities and society as a whole, provide for socialization of individuals, namely help to introduce them into society and to fulfill certain social functions and roles. Social institutions – are the mechanisms of self-organization of life in the society and social interaction of various communities of people. One of the founders of sociology, as an independent science, British scientist Herbert Spencer is the first, who introduced this concept in sociology. He distinguishes five major social institutions that are created within communities in order to organize effectively their internal life as well as their relations with other institutions and communities:

• Domestic or family institutions that create the smallest social community - the family, the purpose of which is to organize family life, to provide for parenting and preparation of children for adult life;

• Ritual or ceremonial institutions that establish patterns of everyday social behavior, as well as customs, rituals, etc.;

• Political institutions (government, political parties, institutions of justice, the army) that maintain political interests and relations existing in a particular society;

• Religious institutions that provide consolidation of society, establish moral norms and principles of human coexistence;

• Professional and industrial institutions (guilds, corporations, trade unions) that are set up on the basis of division of labor.

As a rule, social institutions consist of:

• set of norms, social roles, statuses, regulations and orders; • patterns of behavior that are supposed to be obeyed; • system monitoring their compliance; • special institutions, that are engaged in this activity.

 With the development of society some social institutions lose their significance or as their role in social life starts to decline (this we can observe in the case of ritual-ceremonial Institute) they turn into "institutions-soothers"(definition proffered by contemporary British sociologist E. Giddens). Other social institutions, on the contrary, strengthen their social position. Besides, in the course of time new institutions emerge. Sometimes the process of creating new social institutions takes decades, this is because people as social beings seek for appropriate forms which can help organize their coexistence. However, nowadays the duration of this creating process has greatly reduced. In many countries, including Ukraine there exist simultaneously remnants of the old social institutions, old patterns of behavior, norms and laws that were inherited from the times of the USSR, and absolutely new sprouts. Moreover, in the modern world it is a common occurrence when the social life creates new social groups, movements and initiatives, but social institutions that make them organized are not yet created. In these cases, social efficiency of those unorganized institutional formations remains insufficient and they are not able to bring considerable benefits for their participants.

Classifications of social institution are built according to certain criteria. The first typology is based on the criterion of purpose and sphere of activity. It is presented in Table 1.

№	Name of institutions	Types of social institutions and forms of work	Areas of their work
1.	Economic	Property, money, banks, business associations, etc.	Provide for production and distribution of social wealth, regulate currency
2.	Political	Government, parliament, court, prosecution, etc.	All are related to the establishment, implementation and maintenance of a certain form of political power, protection and reproduction of ideological values
3.	Cultural-educational	Science, education, family, religion, art institutions	Promote the assimilation and reproduction of cultural, social values, socialization of individuals, their entry into public life
4.	Social	Social movements and associations, social funds, charities, voluntary organizations, interest clubs, and so on.	Organize voluntary association of people, regulate everyday social behavior and interpersonal relationships

According to the method of human behaviour regulation there can be distinguished formal and informal social institutions. Formal institutions conduct their activities on clear principles (laws, decrees, instructions), they perform administrative and supervisory functions based on specific sanctions, connected to incentives and penalties. These institutions include government, army, school, etc. Informal institutions have no clear regulatory framework, social control is established through the rules existing in public opinion, traditions, and customs. They embrace different cultural and social foundations, associations of interest, and so on.

All social institutions fulfill certain social functions, in other words, they play certain roles in life of an individual, community or society as a whole. In an aggregate form all these functions are given in the Table 2.

№	Name	Meaning
1.	The function of establishing and reproduction of social relations	Providing the stability of social structure through rules and norms of behavior of members of communities with the help of appropriate social control
2.	Regulatory function	Regulating relations between members of society in general and specific social communities in particular by developing specific patterns of behavior, the way a person fulfills other people’s expectations.
3.	Integrative function	The processes of cohesion, interdependence and mutual responsibility of members of social communities and society in general that takes place under the influence of institutional norms, rules, sanction, and systems of social roles.
4.	Transmitting function	Transmitting social experience to new generations of certain communities and the general public through the mechanism of socialization and acquisition of values, norms and social roles.
5.	Communicative function	Dissemination of information and various forms of communication (a) within a particular institution as a means of management and monitoring of norms and (b) outside the institution in its interaction with other social institutions.

Social institutions should not overlap and substitute for each other in their activities. However, if this still happens and one of the social institutions takes over functions of other institutions that are totally alien to him - the natural division of functions between them is destroyed, and the state of social equilibrium is disturbed, which may even lead to destruction of the existing social order. This happened, for example, during the USSR when the soviet government and Communist Party (a political institution) usurped almost all the commitments of other social institutions, brutally interfering in life of every person, every family, imposing Soviet rites and suppressing church life, building socialist economy, which purpose was not to meet the needs of people, but to strengthen the military-industrial complex, transforming trade union into the "school of communism" and depriving people of their rights of social work protection. As a result, there suffered not only a person, whose life was completely regulated and dependent on state, but society in general. Only now and still with great difficulty the process is getting to normal namely, it slowly returns to open, civil society with an extensive network of social communities and institutions with a bigger range of self-organizing and self-governing functions.

In general, the most visible for the modern societies are the activities of political, economic, social, educational, scientific and religious institutions (sociologists usually combined the last three into one group of cultural institutions).