In recent years ''the New Institutionalism'' has focused more on organizations 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 ressurrects 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 macro-dynamics can the institutions of economy, kinship, religion, polity, law, and education be fully understood, as Turner persuasively shows in this magesterial explication of twenty millenia of human social life.