Social organisation

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This article is about a sociological concept. For zoosemiotics term, see Social animal

Social organization or social institution, is a group of social positions, connected by social relations, performing a social role. It can be also defined in a narrow sense as any institution in a society that works to socialize the groups or people in it. Common examples include education, governments, families, economic systems, religions, and any people or groups that you have social interactions with. It is a major sphere of social life organized to meet some human needs.

Social organizations can take many forms, depending on a social context. For example, for family context the corresponding social organization is of course the family. For business context - an enterprise, company, corporation, etc. For educational context - school, university, etc. For political context - government, political party, and others. Commonly, experts officially recognize these five major social institutions that have been evident in some way in every civilization in history: government, religion, education, economics, and family.

To give a simple example: productive institutions are dependent on educational institutions for a skilled workforce, educational institutions are dependent on the government for their funding, and government institutions, in turn, rely on productive institutions to create wealth to finance government spending. Sociologist call this institutional interdependence.

Max Weber concluded that in the history of mankind, organisations evolved towards rationalisation in form of a rational-legal organisation, like bureaucracy.

[edit] Organization vs institution

The term institution is in sociology sometimes used interchangeably with the term organization, as when referring to a formal organization like a hospital or a prison. In other parts of sociology, like sociology of organizations and especially new institutionalism (also new institutional economics in economics and historical institutionalism in political science), 'organization' and 'institution' refer to two different phenomena. Organizations are social entities that have members, resources, structures, authority, boundaries, etc. Institutions are ideas about how something should be done, look or be constituted in order to be viewed as legitimate. the issue is complicated by the fact that one may talk of institutions that govern organizations and the organization as an institution.