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Mary Douglas: How Institutions Think

1987, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 146 pages.

GeertHofstede There is a dictum ’If everybody agrees that a decision is right, it must be wrong’.
Department of It means that unanimous judgements are likely to be based on social control
Economics and
Business rather than on information. This is the kind of issue Mary Douglas’ book is
Administration, about. She introduces it as a contribution to the sociology of cognition. The
University of Limburg, author is a British anthropologist, Oxford-educated, with fieldwork experience
Maastricht, in Africa. She was a Professor of Social Anthropology at London University
The Netherlands
before she moved to the U.S. in 1977. The book is an edited version of a lecture
series presented at Syracuse University in 1985. Unlike most anthropologists,
Mary Douglas throughout her various publications has addressed herself to the
problems of modern industrial societies and their constituent institutions, using
non-literate ’primitive’ societies as models. Among her theoretical contribu-
tions the present is probably the most basic. Her own opinion is that it should
have been written before her other works rather than, as it is, post hoc. The fact
that by living in the U.S. she is exposed, even more than in Britain, to the
mythical belief in the independence of the individual actor which prevails in
U.S. society, may have contributed to her choice of this subject for her lecture
series.
Mary Douglas bases her arguments on Emile Durkheim and on a more recent
author whom she sees as being complementary to Durkheim, Ludwik Fleck.
Fleck (1896-1961) was a leading Polish bacteriologist who used the ‘case’ of the
identification of syphilis for a treatise on the philosophy of sciences. His book in
the German language Etitstehlitig und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen
Tatsache appeared in 1935, but it went almost unnoticed. Thomas Kuhn
rediscovered it in 1962, after Fleck’s death in Israel. In 1979, an English
translation appeared in the U.S.; a new German edition followed in 1980. The
history of Fleck’s intellectual contribution resembles that of Norbert Elias: the
1930s were not a period in which German-language contributions by Jewish
scholars were easily recognized. Fleck goes beyond Durkheim in including
science in the socially conditioned products of mankind; Durkheim’s respect
for scientific facts had made him stop short of science. In the case of the
identification of syphilis, Fleck shows how social forces first retarded and then
accelerated the recognition of scientific facts. A central concept in Fleck’s work
is the ‘Denkkollektiv’, which the translators have literally transposed as
’thought collective’; Douglas prefers ’thought world’. The Denkkollektiv is the
social system, including both laboratory practice and public support, which is
necessary for the discovery to be made; in its turn, the communication of
thoughts necessary for the discovery reinforces the Denkkollektiv.
From the work of these two founding fathers, Durkheim and Fleck, Mary
Douglas draws her conclusions about how institutions constrain and mould
human cognition. An important mechanism they use is analogy, such as when
they teach that certain social relationships are like certain natural phenomena.

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The complementarity of the right and left hand may be taken as a valid
analogon for the complementarity of men and women in society. This is one of
the mechanisms by which institutions put uncertainty under control, and
coordinate behaviour. From analogies, they develop systems of classification,
which are the only ways available to the minds of their members for ordering
their experiences. Then, institutions filter information, so that they selectively
remember and forget even scientific information. The collective forgetting of
Fleck’s work from 1935 to 1962 is an excellent illustration of this process. Mary
Douglas refers to the fact that every ten years or so, classroom textbooks go out
of date, not necessarily because new facts have come to light, but also because
of the changed political or even religious feelings that certain words and names
convey: ’the mirror ... distorts as much after revision as before. The aim of
revision is to get the distortions to match the mood of the present times’ (p. 69).
One chapter of the book is devoted to the case example of how psychologists
again and again ran into the discovery of the social origins of psychological
processes, and again and again they forgot all about it. In particular, the case is
taken of the British psychological researcher Sir Frederick Bartlett, who for a
lifetime got stuck just short of demonstrating the social influences on the
cognition of modern man.
An entertaining example of institutional classification is Douglas’ comparison
of the French versus the Californian wine trade. In a different society and with
different processes of industrialization, the French system of classifying wines
by region and chiteau has become meaningless in California, where one winery
produces many crus in direct competition with other wineries. The last chapter
. of the book shows how the power of institutions extends to making life and
death decisions, as when hospitals develop rules for allocating scarce medical
.
resources to seriously ill patients.
In spite of the neatness of the book’s theme and the clarity of the message, the
book does not read easily. One chapter, on ’How latent groups survive’, is
particularly cryptic. If we may apply the book’s message to itself, it comes
across as the product of an anthropological Dellkko//ektiv which is not freely
accessible to an outsider. To this reviewer, whose background is in social
psychology, contributions by anthropologists often seem electic, arbitrary, and
intuitive -

reflecting the way in which a field anthropologist collects data from

.

informants. There is a striking difference between the approach of Douglas’

book and that of a classic text on the same theme: Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, which dates from 1966. Berger
and Luckmann’s book stems from a sociological Dellkko//ektiv, or rather from
two, as it is the unique joint product of an American and a German scholar, and
it combines German thoroughness with American practicality and clarity of
formulation. Amazingly, Douglas does not even seem to know the other book,
a striking case of the ’institutional forgetting’ she herself describes. Although
. ,
the two books deal with exactly the same matter Berger and Luckmann’s is -

subtitled ’A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge’ there is very little over- -

lap in the literature they cite, apart from the fathers: Durkheim, Marx, Freud,

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Merton, and Parsons. There are obviously watertight compartments within the
social sciences. Although twenty-one years lie between the publication of both
books, they are still worthy of comparison there are few insights in Douglas’
-

book which are not yet reflected in the older text. The comparison shows that
Mary Douglas has not been able to attain the compactness and force of
conviction of Berger and Luckmann, whose work, even today, has lost nothing
of its appeal. Nevertheless, from a different vantage point, she offers a number
of refreshing and revealing insights on the theme, making her book an
attractive complement to Berger and Luckmann’s classic.

References Berger, Peter L., and Luckmann, Thomas Fleck, Ludwick

1967 [1966] The social construction of real- 1980 [1935] Entstehung und Entwicklung
ity: a treatise in the sociology of einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache:
knowledge. Harmondsworth: Pen- Einfuhrung in die Lehre vom Denkstil
guin. und Denkkollektiv. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.

J. L. Gross and S. Rayner: Measuring Culture. A Paradigm for the

Analysis of Social Organization (Introduction by Mary Douglas).
1985, New York: Columbia Press. 146 pages.

John F. A. Much has been written about ’culture’ in the field of organizational theory, but
Spangenberg little attention has been paid to the analytical framework of Mary Douglas who
Department of
Economics and designed one of the grand theories on culture in modern anthropology. This
Business Admini- work by Gross, a statistician, and Rayner, an anthropologist, looks at the
stration, Maastricht, measurement of the social organization which constitutes cultural bias. More
The Netherlands
exactly, their method is a quantitative refinement of Douglas’ so-called
Jeffrey Spangenberg grid-group theory which was introduced in Natural Symbols (Douglas 1970)
Department of and expanded in Cultural Bias (Douglas 1978). Since then, grid-group theory
Anthropology, (GGT) has been applied to different fields including financial control in
University of
Amsterdam, organizations and work-place crimes.
The Netherlands The theory asserts that people structure their ideas about the (natural and)
social world in a way compatible with the social structure. In addition, it
purports that different organizations with the same values on the grid and
group dimension will reflect similar cultural patterns. By representing these
dimensions on the X- and Y-axis, we can study the simultaneous effect of both
kinds of constraints.
’Group’, the horizontal co-ordinate, represents the extent to which people are
restricted in thought and action by their commitment to a social unit. High
group strength results when people devote a lot of their available time to
interacting with other unit members. It requires a long-term commitment and a
tight identification of members with one another. Individuals are expected to

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