On Thinking Institutionally (On Politics) [Paperback]

Hugh Heclo (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1594512965 | ISBN-13: 978-1594512964 | Publication Date: August 30, 2008

The twenty-first-century mind deeply distrusts the authority of institutions. It has taken several centuries for advocates of critical thinking to convince western culture that to be rational, liberated, authentic, and modern means to be anti-institutional. In this mold-breaking book, Hugh Heclo moves beyond the abstract academic realm of thinking about institutions to the more personal significance and larger social meaning of what it is to think institutionally. His account ranges from Michael Jordan's respect for the game of basketball to Greek philosophy, from twenty-first-century corporate and political scandals to Christian theology and the concept of office and professionalism. Think what you will about one institution or another, but after Heclo, no reader will be left in doubt about why it matters to think institutionally.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In On Thinking Institutionally, one of the country's preeminent political scientists offers important reflections on morally responsible governance and on the forces economic, political, and cultural that make good governance so challenging in our time. Heclo reminds us that political office must not be separated from its original meaning of duty and that institutions provide an opportunity to bring practical necessities and moral requirements together to serve the common good. --William A. Galston, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

On Thinking Institutionally is in the best tradition of Tocqueville an updated critique of the individualism that has been America s strength and its weakness. Hugh Heclo focuses attention upon an aspect of modernity that has been too long neglected: the failure of our institutions social, political, religious, economic to elicit any sense of loyalty, and thus the volatility and frailty of society itself. --Gertrude Himmelfarb

Hugh Heclo has written an eloquent defense of the enduring importance of authoritative institutions to human life, public and private. In an era suffused with so much noise, Heclo quietly reminds us that institutions serve that which is distinctively human, a life in community. --Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, The University of Chicago, author Democracy on Trial and many other books

About the Author

Hugh Heclo is Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University, a former Professor of Government at Harvard University, and prior to that a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and White House staffer in Washington, D.C. His latest book, Christianity and Democracy in America, will be published by Harvard University Press in the spring of 2007.

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Paradigm Publishers (August 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594512965
• ISBN-13: 978-1594512964
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 4.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #673,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Institutions (Can) Contribute to Human Flourishing, February 26, 2009

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George P. Wood (Springfield, MO) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: On Thinking Institutionally (On Politics) (Paperback)

Hugh Heclo, On Thinking Institutionally (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008). $19.95, 221 pages.

I am the pastor of a denominational church, but I live in a culture that despises organized religion (and institutional anything). While I understand my culture's distrust, I nonetheless value my church and my denomination. According to Hugh Heclo, I think institutionally.

To think institutionally is to have "respect-in-depth" for or "an appreciative stance" toward institutions. This respect and appreciation differentiate thinking institutionally from thinking about institutions. The former adopts the "internal perspective" of institutions; it is committed to the values they embody. The latter is a more academic enterprise that doesn't care one way or another whether institutions survive.

Institutions themselves "represent inheritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations." They overlap with but are not identical to organizations. Examples include sports, medicine, journalism, religion, marriage, business, and higher education. Institutions "constitute socially ordered grounding for human life. This grounding in a normative field implicates the lives of individuals in a lived-out social reality." Because institutions are inherently social, a "culture wholly committed to distrusting its institutions is a self-contradiction."

Unfortunately, modern culture seems wholly committed to such distrust. There are two basic reasons. On the one hand, there is what Heclo calls "performance-based distrust." Basically, institutions have let us down. Athletes dope up, journalists plagiarize stories, clergy abuse children, businessmen erect multi-billion-dollar Ponzi schemes, professors falsify research, etc. On the other hand, there is what Heclo calls "culture-based distrust." Essentially, modern culture has taken libertarianism to heart. "Our moral polestar amounts to this central idea: the correct way to get on with life is to recognize that each of us has the right to live as he or she pleases so long as we do not interfere with the right of other people to do likewise." In such a culture, institutions appear both hypocritical (with respect to their own ideals) and oppressive (with respect to individuals).

And yet, our very distrust of institutions reveals our dependence on them. When we critique institutional hypocrites, for example, we do not dispense with the ideals they embody. We don't throw the journalistic baby out with the plagiarized bathwater. We demand that journalists write their own true reportage. Even libertarianism, with its vaunted individualism, relies on a web of institutions--the market, the legislature, the law court--as means by which individuals can relate to one another. We may not like institutions, but we cannot dispense with them either. To think institutionally in the modern age is to adopt a critically appreciative stance in which we "distrust but value."

Our culture has the distrust side of this equation down pat. Heclo focuses our attention on the value side. For him, institutional thinking incorporates three basic concepts: "faithful reception," "infusions of value," and "stretching of time horizons."

Faithful reception entails that the "emphasis" of institutional thinking "is not on thinking up things for yourself but on thoughtfully taking delivery of and using what has been handed down to you." As a pastor, I cannot think of a better example of this than the institution of the Lord's Supper, about which Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:23: "For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you." Another example from the world of organized religion is baptism. In both cases, the institution in question is handed down by tradition. It implicates participants in webs of spiritual meaning and relationship. All institutions do this, although in different ways. To think institutionally is to accept this state of affairs gratefully.

Infusion of value draws on a distinction between "strictly instrumental attachments needed to get a particular job done and the deeper commitments that express one's enduring loyalty to the purpose or purposes that lie behind doing the job in the first place." I think, here, of a docent I encountered at Mount Vernon. In 1853, Ann Pamela Cunningham founded the Mount Vernon Ladies Association in order to purchase and maintain George Washington's estate "in trust for the people of the United States." Her purpose was not merely commercial or touristic. She believed that Americans could learn much from Washington's ideals by traveling to his home. When I visited Mount Vernon a few years back, one docent in particular caught my attention. Unlike some other employees, who ran through their historical scripts in a perfunctory manner, this docent knew his material and was enthusiastic about it. Indeed, it was clear from our dialogue that he was conversant not only in primary source material but in secondary material as well. After retirement, he took on the job of docent because he believed in Washington's ideals and wanted to teach them to an interested public. He infused his job with value because of commitment to the institution's purpose.

Finally, the stretching of time horizons means that the institutionally minded person is "attentive to precedent" as he plans for the future. Heclo points to the Roman legal concept of usufruct as an embodiment of this attentiveness. "It refers to the right to make full use of something while also being under the obligation to pass on intact, without injury, the substance of the thing itself." This concept derives from farming--usufruct means "use of fruit"--so a farming analogy is appropriate. A farmer plants a seed, waters and fertilizes it, prunes it, and after time enjoys its fruit. This process takes years. Cared for properly, the tree will continue to bear fruit for its owner long after the original seed-planting farmer has died. Destroy the tree, however, and it bears no fruit. An institutionally minded person cares not merely for the fruit, but also for the tree. He has long-term as well as short-term commitments. The non-institutionally minded person cares only for today.

Institutional thinking requires that we act differently. A "way of thinking" necessarily gives rise to a "way of being." Heclo identifies three important terms in this regard: profession, office, and stewardship. Profession pertains to institutional "content," office to institutional "position," and stewardship to institutional "process." An institutionally minded professional--such as a member of the clergy or a doctor or a lawyer--recognizes that he must master the content appropriate to the institution in which he participates. Christian pastors, for example, must know Bible and theology. It is knowledgeable interaction with this content that marks the professional out from the layman. To continue the example, pastors have certain duties inherent in their position: to preach, to baptize, to communicate, to discipline, to counsel, etc. But they must also be attentive to the processes by which they exercise these duties in the context of a local congregation. All stewards--not just pastors--receive these duties in trust, are responsible for "faithful management" of them, and must give an "accounting" of their actions to others (their Board, for example and ultimately God).

As I wrote above, institutions implicate participants in webs of meaning and relationship. To an institutionally minded person who acts in institutionally appropriate ways, meaning in life is not generated by an autonomous self acting independently of others. Meaning, like life itself, is given through relating. Contrary to the sociological and ideological trends of modern culture, then, institutionally minded people know that we really do need each other.

Which brings me back to my situation: I am the pastor of a denominational church in a culture that despises organized religion along with just about every other institution. While I appreciate and to an extent agree with my culture's critique of the soul-deadening side of institutions, I see their life-giving power too. Institutions can oppress, but they can also liberate by connecting us to purposes larger than ourselves and communities stretched across time and space. As long as human beings are social creatures, there will be institutions. The only question is whether they will serve the purpose of human flourishing.

Let us pray--and think and act--that they do.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MUST READ for everyone concerned about current societal events, March 7, 2009

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Thoughtful Reader "papa" (North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Thinking Institutionally (On Politics) (Paperback)

This book is a must read for everyone in today's complex society. The economy needs the institutional knowledge application provided in this outstanding book. Pass it on to as many people as you can.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Inconvenient Truth, December 5, 2009

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John M. Good - See all my reviews
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This review is from: On Thinking Institutionally (On Politics) (Paperback)

I wanted a recommendation on this book and I got it from David Brooks, New York Times.
Each of us has a tail of organizations we have worked for or with. This book explains the value of looking upon those experiences as valuable to each of us in thinking about our future behavior and commitments. At a time when decisions are made rapidly in a profit- worshiping world,institutional thinking reminds us that morals and ethics of the past retain their validity today.