Certain basic social needs must be met and basic problems must be solved if a society or other organisation is to survive for long and function effectively.
These functional requirements are not inherent in any individual member, as are the biological needs for food or the psychological need for safety. Rather, they are located in the social relationships that comprise an organisation and link it to its natural and social environments.
They must, therefore, be satisfied through various kinds of organizational actions. Social theorists have offered different lists of these requirements, but all would include such things as
(1) Maintaining the population.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
(2) Training new members
(3) Providing channels of communication
(4) Assigning roles and tasks to members
(5) Establishing social norms and operation rules
ADVERTISEMENTS:
(6) Procuring necessary resources from the environment
(7) Making collective decisions
(8) Co-ordinating internal activities
(9) Controlling deviant actions
ADVERTISEMENTS:
(10) Defending against external threats.
Once a workable and acceptable means of fulfilling a particular requirement has been developed in a society, it tends to be repeated. It becomes encrusted with convention and tradition, so that people view it as the proper way, or perhaps the only conceivable way to handle that requirement. So, an institution is a persistent normative pattern of inter-related organisations that are all concerned with a particular functional requirement and hence share common activities and norms.