# There are two levels of institution According to Oxford English Dictionary, an institution can be: 1. a society or organization founded for a religious, educational, social, or similar purpose. * The US government * A department of the US government * A specific university * A specific newspaper * A specific VC firm * A specific company * A specific nonprofits 2. an established law, practice, or custom. * The institution of marriage * Governments as a whole * Academia * Journalism * Venture Capital * The startup ecosystem (“Silicon Valley”) * Charity * Finance (“Wall Street”) Type I institutions are specific organizations, or subset of an organization. An organization is not necessarily an institution. It’s fuzzy to say, but an organization needs some amount of gravitas and longevity. Type I institutions can become paragons of Type II institutions: for example the NYT standing in for journalism, or Sequioa standing in for venture capital. You can start an organization that becomes a Type I institution. Type II institutions are emergent behaviors - you can’t start one directly. The closest you can come is to create a type I institution that inspires imitators and becomes a paragon for the new type II institution. Type II institutions are by their nature fuzzy Every type I institution seems to have a dual Type II institution, but does every type II institution have type I institutions? At first glance, it looks like the answer should be yes . But looking at marriage, what are the corresponding Type I institutions? Would it be churches, or married couples themselves? I think you could convince me that each married couple was a Type I institution whose dual was the Type II institution of marriage. There are clearly many Type I institutions that comprise a Type II institution, but is every Type I institution a member of only one Type II institution? Normatively, we want the answer to be no, for each newspaper to purely belong to Journalism, for each university to purely belong to Academia. But in reality the answer is no - each organization is part of multiple Type II institutions: newspapers and universities are also businesses, startups can be both part of Silicon Valley and whatever institution they’re ‘disrupting’ - Journalism, Finance, Insurance, you name it. I suspect that these divided institutional loyalties may be part of the cause for increased institutional mistrust. Both types of institution are fractal. [[Every time you zoom in on a fractal, it presents the same pattern on a different scale]] There’s governments, and within governments there are Federal governments, city governments, etc. Similarly, there is the US government, and different parts of the US government. When we talk about institutions we carelessly jump back and forth between the two levels - “Synecdoching.” <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/There+are+two+levels+of+institution) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/There+are+two+levels+of+institution)