ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the hints that Margaret Archer provides about institutions and their place in the constitution of society. It describes what other social theorists have suggested such constellations of institutions and engagement with their work demands that we have some sense of how we might arrive at candidate institutions. New institutionalist theory was developed in the United States in opposition to the impoverished view of organisational action that was shared by both functionalist sociology and mainstream economics. The field of institutional economics, largely based on the work of Douglas North, operates with a clear notion of institutions at a supra-organisational level. Institutions display a logic that gives meaning to the practices that organisations and individual engage in, forming the 'laws of motion' of a particular order. Roger Friedland, by contrast, has taken the idea of institutional logic in a very different dimension, informed, in particular, by his work on religion.
