Human Institutions: A Theory of Societal Evolution

In recent years the New Institutionalism has focused more on organisations in their social and cultural environments than on societal-level institutional systems. Thus, missing from these studies has 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 resurrects 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 macrodynamics can the institutions of economy, kinship, religion, polity, law and education be fully understood, as Turner persuasively shows in this majesterial explanation of twenty millennia of human social life.