leaving behind experienced straw bosses and workers in each locale. Each of the
three highways was completed as planned, but only one had any prospects for
sustained maintenance (Montgomery 1983 , 99 ).
2 Why Might Any of This Matter
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Without institutional thinking to make them real, institutions truly are little
more than unpopulated, empty formalities. No one really lives there. TheWrm,
the political body, the university, the marriage—all so-called institutions become
sites for transient, interpersonal transactions with no deeper, more enduring
meanings. Institutions have been described as solutions grown by cultural evolu-
tion, often seeming to take shape planlessly like coral reefs (Sait 1938 ). If this is even
partially true, then it would be imprudent, to put it mildly, to regard institutional
thinking as something archaic and unimportant.
At the societal level, there is the basic matter of sustainability and survival. We
began by considering the most elemental form of institutional thinking, the habit
of not critically thinking about what you are doing but simply carrying on with
your job in the unexamined larger scheme of things. The steady habits (not the
same thing as addictive behavior) have immense survival value for society at large.
Institutional thinking habits are implicit testimony to and support for the value of
the going concern of the social order. The multitude of nameless people ‘‘just doing
my job’’ amounts to a sheet anchor sustaining civilized life together, something we
are never likely to notice until disaster strikes.
The scale of such sustaining work ranges from the most personal home life to the
massive social structures of civilization itself. To grab for the family photo album when
the house catchesWre is an elemental act of this mentality. At the other extreme,
history oVers compelling examples of societies surviving through devastating cata-
clysms by virtue of ordinary people simply carrying on with appointed duties. One
historian has noted the similar grounds of social survival in the atomic bombing
of Japan and the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe: ‘‘In the worst years of
the mortality, Europeans witness horrors comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but
even when death was everywhere and only a fool would dare to hope, the thin fabric of
civilization held.... Enough notaries, municipal and church authorities, physicians
and merchants stepped forward to keep governments and courts and churches and
Wnancial houses running—albeit at a much reduced level’’ (Kelly 2004 , 16 ).
In ordinary times as well, institutional thinking has great value in the political
councils of society as a going concern. It tends to interject several kinds of reality
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