Some reflections on power and culture with Andy Crouch

At the moment I'm reading Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power eBook: Andy Crouch: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store and I'm finding some helpful and intriguing things in it. One of the things I'm musing over is his characterising of culture in the form of an analysis of institutions.
"Institutions have four essential elements". (Crouch, location 2674) these are 'artefacts, 'arenas', 'rules' and 'roles'. These are mostly understandable: artefacts are things that we make, arenas are places where activities take place, rules are the consensus of how artefacts should be deployed in our social spaces and relationships, and roles are the kinds of self-deployment gestalts that we exercise in relation to artefacts, arenas and rules we participate in.

What I've been musing over is that there is a lot of resonance between this analysis of institutions and my own characterising of culture which can be seen in a number of lectures I've given over the last ten years (check out here or from slide 8 here ). There is a relationship between culture and institutions. I think that institutions (defined by Crouch thus: "Institution is the name that sociologists have given to any deeply and persistently organized pattern of human behavior"): institutions are particular intensifications of culture, a nexus and entanglement of cultural components. So it is worth considering them together while remembering that they are not trying to do the same job, quite.

You'll see if you check out those slide sequences that I characterise culture as the intersection of mind ('ways of thinking' which includes affective and well as cognitive stuff), material (which includes events and artefacts) and practices (things like queueing or voting). Crouch's artefacts and arenas are what I deal with under 'material' that is 'artefacts and events'. I guess I would say that an arena is an artefact for the staging of events. Of course 'artefact' doesn't have to mean something humans have crafted, it may be something 'natural' which in made part of a particular cultural event. It becomes an artefact by use, even though it may undergo little or no material change except by being incorporated into a human cultural 'game'. Rules would be part of 'mind' -being something to do with the way we think (and relating to affectivity -usually, they express feelings about things like fairness and enjoyment). Rules do also implicate 'practices' since, by and large, that's what they seek to regulate. Similarly, it seems to me that 'roles' falls across two of my categories: roles are an intersection of human mental/affective categorisations and on the other hand practices by which roles are defined and in turn define.

Of course, as I mentioned a but earlier, Crouch is aiming to define and characterise institutions. And to do so in relation to the exercise of power. Whereas I have been trying to characterise culture more generally with a view to enabling Christians to reflect on culture generally and in specific instances. To be sure, when considering institutions, 'roles' is an important consideration, though I think that seeing roles from the point of view of a human mind-construct is probably most important and I think it is important, too, to be able to consider the balance between perceptions and practices affects roles and contributes to them, rather than simply seeing them an a basic category. I think they are better understood as an intersection of understandings, affects, ways of doing things.

So, I'm starting to wonder whether the tripartite characterisation I've developed is adaptable to being a specifically institutional analytic and if so (as I suspect it should), whether it then enables me to use it in relation to a theological appreciation of institutions relating to 'principalities and powers' in other words whether this analysis enables me to strongly link cultural analysis and corporisations. This is important to me since I'm leaning towards approaching corporisations as specific stable precipitates of cultural 'ingredients'/interactions.

Hopefully, I'll be able to take this further in another post shortly.