Book: How Institutions Think

Overview
Mary Douglas presents institutions as collective minds that shape how people perceive, classify, and reason about the world. She rejects the image of cognition as only an individual, internal process and redirects attention to the shared cognitive forms produced by organizations, professions, rituals, and social groupings. Institutions are shown not merely as arenas where decisions happen but as active constructors of categories, meanings, and what counts as valid knowledge.

Core Argument
Douglas argues that institutions supply the cognitive scaffolding for sense-making: they create templates for attention, label phenomena, and define acceptable inferences. Members internalize institutional classifications and cognitive styles, which channel perception and interpretation. This institutional framing determines what questions get asked, what counts as evidence, and which interpretations are conceivable, producing collective patterns of thought more persistent and influential than individual reasoning.

Institutional Mechanisms
Institutions operate through rituals, rules, vocabularies, and routines that encode categories and priorities. Formal procedures and informal customs together generate cognitive anchors, shared names, metaphors, and exemplars, that simplify complex reality into manageable schemata. These mechanisms produce boundary work that separates insiders from outsiders and delineates legitimate from illegitimate knowledge, embedding moral and practical judgments within classificatory systems.

Examples and Applications
Douglas draws on a wide range of social domains, law, religion, bureaucracy, markets, and science, to show how institutional cognition works in practice. Legal systems cultivate a distinct way of naming facts and attributing responsibility; religious institutions instantiate mythic and moral typologies that organize social life; scientific communities institutionalize standards of evidence and disciplinary languages that shape what counts as a fact. Everyday bureaucratic forms transform ambiguous social problems into standardized cases suitable for administrative processing.

Institutional Change and Stability
The book examines how institutional categories endure and how they change. Institutions tend to resist challenges because their cognitive frameworks are reinforced through reproduction and ritual; yet change occurs when new pressures or rhetorical strategies create alternative classifications that gain purchase. Innovations often spread when they align with existing institutional logics or when boundary-crossing actors translate new categories into familiar vocabularies. Path dependence and inertia are as much cognitive as structural.

Implications and Critique
Douglas's perspective challenges methodological individualism and narrowly rational models by making cultural classification central to explanation. This approach foregrounds the social production of knowledge, the politics of categorization, and the ethical consequences of institutionalized ways of thinking. The account invites scrutiny of how power shapes which cognitive forms prevail, and it cautions that reforms aimed at behavior or incentives must also address underlying classificatory schemes to produce durable change.

Conclusion
Institutions are not merely settings for action but generators of collective thought. By tracing how organizations create and maintain cognitive forms, Douglas reframes explanations of social order, disagreement, and reform. Understanding institutions as thinking systems highlights the importance of symbols, routines, and classifications in shaping what communities see as real, knowable, and valuable.