Content area
Full Text
The Institutional Order: Economy, Kinship, Religion, Polity, Law, and Education in Evolutionary and Comparative Perspective, by Jonathan H. Turner. New York: Longman, 1997. 306 pp. NPL paper. ISBN: 0-673-98125-8.
Not long ago, most scholars might have found this book's argument a bit too conventional. Who would have doubted that societies contain an institutional order, worthy of study in its own right? Who would have objected to an evolutionary analysis showing how institutions adapt to changes in the scale and complexity of social relations? Who would have frowned at the idea that institutions have distinctive effects on other institutions that cannot be explained by noninstitutional features of social life? Despite the budding revival of evolutionary thinking in the social sciences, today Turner's argument might appear more controversial. Turner selfconsciously offers The Institutional Order as a kind of manifesto, "to resurrect an interest in a more purely institutional-level mode of inquiry." Parsons and Smelser's Economy and Society and his own Patterns of Social Organization serve as guides.
Although Turner's purpose may...