Unpacking social order: toward a novel framework that goes beyond organizations, institutions, and networks

Abstract

This article addresses one of the oldest, most fundamental questions: how social order comes about. Many established conceptions of social order either tend to overemphasize one specific form of social order such as institutions or networks thereby losing sight of others, or subscribe to a single binary definition often distinguishing between spontaneous and organized social order. Although we do not deny the analytical fruitfulness of these approaches, we argue that they fall short when it comes to fully grasping certain social phenomena. Against this backdrop, we expand existing approaches by accounting for the multi-dimensionality of social order. Drawing on decisional organization theory, we present a theorization of social order that outlines four properties: ontology (system or structure), determination (decided or non-decided), changeability (decidable or non-decidable), and acceptance (accepted or contested). As we will show, this framework offers a fine-grained understanding of social order on a more generalized level, accounting for the complex, relational, and processual nature of social order. This approach allows us to move beyond established categorizations of social phenomena into, for example, institutions or networks, and to put the emphasis on properties of social order, the identification of tipping points, the unpacking of complexity, and the analysis of potential incompatibilities.