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gh the institution (Hall and Taylor, 1996; Peters, 1999). Finally,
institutions have a cogtlitive element, as they confer identities, and provide the
conditions through which individuals construct a shared discourse. The
anthropologist Mary Douglas (1987) argued that institutions generate the
cognitive and discursive conditions for the 'making up' of an individual
personn, or a sense of social 'self', by framing situations, defining identities,
and generating meaning out of a repertoire of available discourses.
A focus upon the importance of institutions as forms that both regulate
individual conduct and enable collective action has been characteristic of irzstitz~
tioizalisnz, which has a long and often dissident history as a methodology in
the social sciences. Institutionalism has presented itself, from quite eclectic
perspectives, as providing an alternative way of thinking to methodologies
shaped by assumptions about the rational individual, such as neo-classical
economics, or overly functionalist interpretations of how the behaviour of
individual agents is largely shaped by their positioning in a social structure, as
found in some versions of Marxism (Hindess, 1989). Institutionalism gives a
central role to the interplay between technology and organizations, the exercise
of power in markets, questions of ownership and control, and transformations
in institutional behaviour and social organization over historical time
(Hodgson, 1988; Stil\vell, 2002). For example, Hodgson (1988, p. 208) has
described the firm as 'an institution of power' that functions in part as 'a kind
of protective enclave from the potentially volatile and sometimes destructive,
even ravaging speculation of a competitive market'.
The institutionalist tradition is, by its very nature, a heterogeneous one. Its
core elements have been a demand that relations of potuer be recognized in all
forms of social theory, but particularly in economic theory (Galbraith, 1973),
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Theories of Global Media 45
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and that the social er~zbeddedlless of rlzarkets be given its rightful historical
and contemporary significance. The latter concept of a mutually constit~itive
relationship between institutions and markets has been developed historically
in the work of Karl Polanyi (Polanyi, 1944, 1957; cf. Jessop, 2002), who
argued that an economy is by definition embedded in instit~itionaal nd social
processes:
The human economy ... is embedded and enmeshed in institutions, economic and
non-economic. The inclusion of the non-economic is vital. For religion or government
nlay be as important to the structuring and functioning of the economy as
monetary institutions or the availability of tools and machines themselves that
lighten the toil of labour. (Polanyi, 1957, p. 34)
It is important to note that there are differences within institutionalist
thought, or what has been referred to as 'weak' and 'strong' institutionalism
(Hall and Taylor, 1996; Peters, 1999; Coriat and Dosi, 2002). At the 'weak'
end of this spectrum is ratiotznl cl~