Human Institutions : A Theory of Societal Evolution

Jonathan H Turner
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group Inc
9780742525597
0-7425-2559-7

In recent years 'the New Institutionalism' has focused more on organizations in their social and cultural environments than on societal-level institutional systems. Thus, missing from these studies has.

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been a larger sociological analysis of institutions, per se. In his newest book, leading social theorist Jonathan H. Turner offers a creative, richly grounded reinterpretation of social evolution. He ressurrects a level of analysis undertaken by earlier functionalist theorists, but with a new-found emphasis--that of discovering the larger forces driving the formation of human institutional systems. Only by exploring the larger macro-dynamics can the institutions of economy, kinship, religion, polity, law, and education be fully understood, as Turner persuasively shows in this magesterial explication of twenty millenia of human social life.