The main social institutions of society are entrenched standards, motives, principles and ideology of behavior that govern people's daily lives. Each of these institutions performs a specific set of functions: the formation and implementation of regulatory practices, that is, a modular code of activity at the individual and collective levels; creation and development of ethical standards defining the categories of “black” and “white”; designation of technologies for achieving specific goals - procreation, obtaining wealth, power, etc.
Thus, the main institutions of society set the goals of its development, as well as build ways or trends of their achievement. Accordingly, each institution contains elements of governance, social and economic reproduction.
Modern sociology distinguishes several such universal entities: family, property, state, ideology (religion) and education. We consider them each separately.
A family
The family is considered the foundation of what we today call the "main institutions of society." This is connected not only with the fact that a family or related clan represents the initial model of a self-regulating social system. The fact is that on the example of blood-kinship and tribal ties all the other
social mechanisms were worked out
: group hierarchy, symbolic and economic exchange, education, internal classification and, finally, political dominance. Today, the family is a mechanism of double, biological and social reproduction. Primary education, moral principles, primary ethical assessments and manner of staying in a social environment are all tasks that are solved at the marriage level.
State
The state, as the main institution of society, is focused not only on ensuring the security of its members, but also on obtaining legal, social, spiritual and power guarantees of the accumulated economic resources. The modern state actually provides two such guarantees: inviolability of
private property (economy) and human life, rights and freedoms - individual being in the political sense is also perceived as private property.
Own
The main institutions of society as an economic system arose precisely from the traditionalist understanding of whether a thing belongs to a particular owner. If at first the property was collective (more precisely, territorial, and represented the space where the process of gathering and cattle breeding was carried out), then from the moment the group hierarchy and then the phenomenon of social classification arose, it becomes private or shared, focused on individual enrichment. Moreover, property, in addition to its purely economic function, is clearly tied to the “family” category, thereby providing the opportunity for direct inheritance of accumulated wealth.
Religion
Religion for some reason is considered part of the spiritual world, although it is actually freely included in the system of "basic institutions of society." After all, generalized mystical views, like, in fact, education, perform a purely ideological function - the definition and justification of the dominant model of social development.