ABSTRACT
By institutionalization S. N. Eisenstadt means, in the first place, the process by which organized, "societally described" behavior is established. But he also uses the concept to refer to the movement of specification from general, background conditions to specific and concrete social arrangements—that is, to "the processes by which the various predispositions engendered in given structural, cultural, and organizational settings, are taken up and crystallized into specific organizational and symbolic patterns". The fact that newly differentiated structures are established only by groups acting in their "self-interest" explains why the institutionalization produced by social change can in turn produce new problems of its own. In the course of the last decade, Eisenstadt's analysis of this institutionalization process became in certain crucial respects more culturally sensitive and precise. In part, this fact reveals the influence of Shils, but, more significant, it indicates the response that Eisenstadt made to the structuralism of Levi-Strauss.
