individuals. Thus, I am using biology, on one level, as both metaphor/analogy and
on another level, to show how biology and institutional dynamics interact. The
nature/nurture dichotomy is erased as we see biological and social processes
interacting to produce a particular political reality.
While fear is a private experience, it is also socially (intersubjectively) moulded
and understood. The things that individuals fear, what a group finds dangerous, and
how they react to threats, is as much culturally and politically defined, as it is
idiosyncratic to individuals.^38 The remarkable diversity in human cultures, long
documented by anthropologists, extends to a diversity in responses to scarcity and
threat.^39 Emotions can be heightened or soothed in particular cultural and institu-
tional contexts. Emotions can also be mirrored in organizations, political climates,
and the international system. These social mirrors can in turn affect individual
emotions in an escalatory feedback loop of potentially spiralling fear. In sum, fear
is not only written on our individual bodies, but through institutionalization,
fear may also be written in the body politic, with political consequences.
Fear can be institutionalized. Institutionalization occurs when a group incor-
porates a belief, practice, or feeling into its repertoire of taken-for-granted know-
ledge of the world and its behavioural routines. During institutionalization, there is
room for disagreement about how to deal with a novel problem. The organization
then invents procedures for assessing and organizing knowledge about the problem
(intelligence gathering and threat assessment in the case of terrorism). The organ-
ization then develops standard operating procedures and routines for handling
challenges. While the response to a situation might have once involved a very
conscious move to use new knowledge or been motivated by a fresh emotion or
understanding, once institutionalized, the organization no longer makes an ad hoc
response to a situation. The organization sees the world through the newly
institutionalized beliefs and feelings, recognizes a situation as something that it should
address and uses guidelines for data gathering and information processing that are
appropriate for the newly institutionalized beliefs or feelings. Once the response is
institutionalized, the problem and its solution are normalized and become, in many
ways, taken for granted.
The routinized information sorting, categorization, and response becomes a
schema that actors tend not to reflect upon. Schemas are ‘higher order knowledge
structures ... that embody expectations guiding lower order processing of the
stimulus concept.’^40 Like grammar, schemas provide a framework for understanding
incoming information and quickly articulating a response. ‘In particular, information
that fits into existing schemata... is noticed earlier, considered more valid, and
processed much faster than information that contradicts or does not fit into any
particular schema.’^41 Schemas tend to persist, even in the face of disconfirming
evidence. Individuals will often ignore information that disconfirms the schema, or
in some cases, struggle to make the evidence fit the existing schema. Schemas may
change if the incoming evidence is undeniably, unambiguously not in keeping with
the existing schema. Thus, schema research supports what we know intuitively
about individual decision-makers: humans classify evidence on the basis of abstract,
166 Rethinking ‘man’