Social Corporations as Social Institutions

Abstract

In this article I discuss “societal and communal” corporations and call them “social corporations”. They are public organizations owned either by a state or other public community, and they provide services at least to their “host” groups. Such a corporation is a non-profit (or approximately non-profit) organization in that it typically does not strive for profits going beyond those covering what maintaining its services cost to members. It is argued in this paper that such a social corporation (e.g. school, hospital, or mail service made into corporations) ideally functions as a kind of “extended” social institution. Such an extended institution (social organization) depends on more basic institutions like language, money, and property and provides services by their host group (e.g. “us”) for its target group. I argue that ideally properly functioning social institutions should be based on full-blown we-thinking, viz. we-thinking in the we-mode (criteria: group reason, collective commitment, and a collectivity condition) as well as the collective acceptance of a fact or property as institutional; see Tuomela (The Philosophy of Sociality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). Moreover, the creation of institutions ideally requires we-thinking in which group members together create an institution for them e.g. by declaration (in Searle’s (Making the Social World. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) speech-act sense) or, alternatively, by ordinary agreement-making. Extended social institutions (e.g. organizations like schools) involve constitutive and regulative norms in addition to positions, practices and goals that determine the services that are being provided. Institutional norms thus include constitutive norms that in part determine the institution’s goals and the services it is supposed to provide for its members (generally “us”). The goals are satisfied in part due to the institutional activities and practices as well as the “institutional services” that are supposed to satisfy the institution’s goals. A social corporation in my sense involves goals as well as collectively accepted constitutive and regulative rules plus the employees’ norm-governed social practices for reaching their goals. Accordingly, the employees and other members in general have positions involving status functions (deontic powers). The corporate goals include the provision of reasonably priced relevant social services for “us”, viz. the host group. The arguments of this article give support for the central claim that the social corporation that in general is “by the people for the people” functions as a social institution in the extended sense. In more general terms, a social corporation exists in a host community (or state) and involves a normative organization with positions – thus statuses and powers – for the individuals.