missing not simply in an intellectual sense, but in a human sense of what it is we
need to pass on to younger people to help them get their bearings. What is missing
is the understanding that comes from working from the inside out. Very intelligent
academics have much to say about institutions from the outside, but what it is it
like to be on the inside, to be thinking institutionally?
To think about science is not the same thing as thinking with a scientiWcmind.To
think about marriage is not necessarily to think like a married person, and similarly,
to think about Christianity is not equivalent to having, as Paul put it, the mind of
Christ Jesus ‘‘in you’’ (Philippians 2 : 5 ). So too, thinking about institutions is not the
same thing as thinking institutionally. ‘‘Thinking about’’ does not tell us what it is like
for a person to go around with presuppositions of things institutional in his or her
head. In fact, ‘‘thinking about’’ may actually diminish capacities for thinking institu-
tionally. It has the eVect of conWning a person to a subject/object relationship, never
telling you what it means to inhabit mentally the world presented by institutions. This
outside-in vs. inside-out distinction matters because, while thinking about institutions
is an academic’s intellectual project, thinking institutionally is something that people
do or do not do in the real world—at the oYce, in their family relations, at the polls,
in talking about the news at the local diner. Whatever academics may say about
institutions, an institutional way of thinking—and its absence—has consequences.
Thus, my self-appointed task here is to describe a way of thought that comes with
being inside an institutional frame of mind and looking out. This mental interiority
amounts to an ‘‘appreciative system’’ (Vickers 1965 ). The term appreciation does not
necessarily mean an attitude of gratitude (though as we shall see there is that at work). It
means a coherent, sensitive awareness in making judgments. I may not ‘‘appreciate’’ your
singing but I can ‘‘appreciate’’ that it is a song we both know that you are trying to sing.
Such an interpretive approach trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images,
andsoonmeantothosewhoseinstitutions, actions, images they are (Geertz 1983 ).
To make this appreciative system more attractive to modern sensibilities, it is
very tempting to tone down the ostensibly alien quality of institutional thinking. I
hope to resist that temptation. By seeing the elements of institutional thinking in
their starkest form, we may really begin to get the idea of the thing. Unminced
words may even spark the thought that perhaps it is non-institutional rather than
institutional thinking that is quite strange. Institutional thinking is undramatic,
unassuming, and unfashionable. That helps explain why we hear so little about it.
1 What Is It To Think Institutionally?
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Just as human speech is always a matter of speaking some speciWc language, so
institutional thinking always occurs in the context of some particular institution.
thinking institutionally 733