First Example in the Media:

The Weak Institutions Syndrome as the Effect of the Cultural-Institutional Gap

By: Paul Fudulu

III. The cultural-institutional gap


Rules are guiding behavior and by their behaviors individuals meet their own ends. Ends are characterized by values (de Jasay 1995:25) and, consequently, rules characteristic to some given community should be consistent with its cultural values and depicted by the same megagoods playing the role of arguments in its cultural utility function. Rules are constraining behavior and whenever they depict a given social reality they are representing the cultural opportunity costs pattern characteristic to that given social reality. The cultural values consistent with these rules are, according to Hofstede (1984), “values as desired”, that is, values as revealed by real social activities of individuals. They can be known but need not be consciously created by individuals. These values do not need to be articulated as well as the rules consistent with them do not need to be articulated by individuals, either. I term these cultural values natural cultural values and their corresponding rules natural rules. An entire set of natural rules guiding the behavior in some given human community is what I term natural order.

Whenever rules are consciously created, they are informed by cultural “values as desirable” (Hofstede 1984), that is, by cultural values that include human ideals and which, consequently, are more or less farther away from natural cultural values. I term these cultural values ideological cultural values and I term institutions all the man-made rules, which are an expression of these values. Consequently, institutions are, at least potentially, at some distance from the natural rules. This distance can be measured by the difference in the opportunity costs for the same megagood, as expressed by the natural cultural opportunity costs pattern and institutional cultural opportunity costs pattern. It is this difference that I call cultural-institutional gap and I place it in the center of the explanation for the weak institutions syndrome
Ideological cultural values are important in determining the magnitude of the cultural- institutional gap, but they are not making up the only causal factor. A community’s institutional setting can be imposed by some more powerful communities. The unidirectional movement of national cultures is by now well argued by solid social scholars (Kant 1784, Cunningham 1910, Fukuyama 1992). My afore-mentioned theory of available relative power leads to the same conclusion.


Whenever a community is confronting a cultural-institutional gap, it has to choose between two sets of rules: the natural order and the institutional setting. Generally, the median rational maximizer representing a community consistently chooses, that is, in his real life he will choose to play by the set of natural rules, which are consistent with his cultural preferences as revealed in action, that is, consistent with his natural cultural preferences. Unless there is in place an enough powerful external enforcement mechanism, an entire community will choose to play by the natural order rather than the institutional setting. The resulting effect is the weak institutions syndrome. 


Credit to: http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/papers/fudulu_041703.pdf


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This article shows us that life inside an institution, no matter what type, is extremely different from life outside.  The life style in an institution is radically different than that out in the world. The values are different in the different places. Whether the institution is a prison or a isolated culture, assimilation into the world is quite an undertaking.