Institutional Dynamics and Organizational Complexity
How Social Rules Have Shaped the Evolution of Human Societies Throughout Human History
Edited by
- Peter Richerson, University of California-Davis
- Jenna Bednar, University of Michigan
- Thomas Currie, University of Exeter
- Sergey Gavrilets, University of Tennessee
- John Wallis, University of Maryland
All the human societies we know from first-hand descriptions are structured by culturally transmitted rules–institutions. On the historical time scale, institutions are very dynamic and diverse. Even in relatively small scale societies, institutions such as marriage and kinship vary substantially from society to society. Over the last ten millennia agriculture-based subsistence technology has allowed human populations to increase. Institutional complexity has increased in parallel, for example to organize increasingly intricate divisions of labor and systems of economic exchange, making possible the rise of larger and denser human populations. We are interested in both micro and macro change processes. At the time scale of politics and everyday social life, institutions are subject to various forces that lead to change, e.g. economic innovations that precipitate institutional change, or the reverse. Political actors may cause formal rules to change for their own self-interest, and changes in personal preferences in the population may change informal rules from below. We want to understand how the decisions of individuals aggregated and coordinated to produce institutional change. At the scale of millennia, we observe long term trends such as increases in social complexity, and fundamental shifts in the way societies are organized. What drives these changes and what regulates the pace of such trends? What role does historical contingency versus functional constraints play in long term institutional evolution?
Suggested citation:
Richerson, Peter J., Jenna Bednar, Thomas E. Currie, Sergey Gavrilets, and John Joseph Wallis, eds, Institutional Dynamics and Organizational Complexity: How Social Rules Have Shaped the Evolution of Human Societies Throughout Human History. Open Access Book, Cultural Evolution Society, 2023. https://institutionaldynamicsbook.culturalevolutionsociety.org/
Table of Contents
Preface
Part 1: Locating Institutions in Time and Space
- Chapter 1. What are Institutions and how do they function?
- Chapter 2. Processes and patterns of institutional change/evolution: Institutions are diverse and changeable
Part 2. Major Institutional Transformations
- Chapter 4. Hunter-gatherer sociality and the origin of human normative thinking
- Chapter 5. Between hierarchy and equality: Building complex institutions in a transegalitarian society
Part 3: Institutional Diversity
- Chapter 9. Institutional origins of modern societies
- Chapter 10. The European nation state (~1600-present)
- Chapter 11. The Organization of social welfare expenditeres in the United States and Nordic Countries: 1900-2003
- Chapter 12. Chinese political institutional development
- Chapter 14. Institutional development in pre and post colonial Latin America
- Chapter 15. Institutional change in African states
Part 4: Institutional dynamics at different scales
- Chapter 16. Modern examples of small-scale groups
- Chapter 17. The institutional foundations of the global economy
- Chapter 19. Policy Dynamics: Insights about policy change
Part 5. Conclusions
- Chapter 20. Synthesis: What we know and don't know about Institutional change/evolution