No post for today.

Today is a Paper Due Day. No time to post. No time to sleep. No time to work, crap.... no it's 7:30 in the morning, guess I'll just go to work early today and bail out WAY early. Maybe I can finish my paper and sleep before class. Would you care for an excerpt from my paper? My brain hurts, I couldn't keep it up throughout the whole paper. I know that those first two paragraphs are exactly what he wanted, but my writting style quickly degrades as my graduate-student-writing-mode endurance fails me. eh, I got to say... I'm impressed I was able to spit out as much of that as I did. You really don't have to read what I'm attaching here, it's incredibly scholarly (aka impossible to read). Just thought you should see what grad school is like. Stupid sleep.

Institutions are a ubiquitous, often overlooked presence in the world. Their influence is felt at all strata of society, from world leaders at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to a local Junior High Yearbook Staff, we require hierarchy and a system that provides allowances and restrictions. Left to his or her own devices, and resisting an established structure, humans will almost inevitably descend into a state of chaos and inefficiency. Rare is the case that a leader will not emerge from a group and become the focal point of organization and action. Thus, once such a structure is set, a pattern followed, and a social hierarchy understood, an institution is born.

Institutions are a social framework, often created and maintained by the very same people who must adhere to it. In his article “Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance,” Douglass North defines institutions as “humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction,” which have either been formed purposefully or have gradually developed over time. It is the institution that allows or restricts certain actions by the various members of the group. Each person must work within the constraints he is given and failure to abide by the rules results in a penalty, not only to himself, but in effect, the team as a whole. The institution often values some rules more than others, resulting in varied repercussions for different violations. It can then be assumed that some rule breaking is expected, and therefore considered a legitimate strategy for obtaining one’s goals, provided that severity of the punishment does not outweigh the potential for benefit.