Social institutions. Family is traditionally the most important institution in Cypriot society. Greek Cypriots traditionally identified themselves first as members of families, then according to their places of origin, and lastly as citizens of a nation. The typical traditional Greek Cypriot households consist of a father, a mother, and their unmarried children. At marriage, the parents used to give their children a portion of land, if available, along with money and household items. Urbanization and modernization have altered Greek Cypriot attitudes toward marriage. The great increase in the number of women in the work force also has liberated them from strict parental control. Greek Cypriot parents do all in their power to equip their children for the future. In present-day, this involves providing the best possible education for children, and securing a house for daughters. Cypriot women enjoy the same rights of social welfare as men in such matters as social security payments, unemployment compensation, vacation time, and other common social provisions. In addition, after 1985 women benefit from special protective legislation that provided them with marriage grants and with maternity grants that paid them 75 percent of their insurable earnings (Solsten, 1993). The overall educational level of Cyprus is high. Eighty-five percent of this generation has either a master or doctorate degree.
Social institutions. To begin with, we ought to define the notion of social institution (Greif 2006; Xxxxxx 2012). This represents of course a group of people, but it is much more than a collection of individuals. An institution is a social organization with a structure of relations (often hierarchical) that embodies and fulfills an abstract pattern of functions. People enter institutions and leave them regularly, but an institution endures as long as it maintains its overall pattern and functions. In theory, every member in an institution could be replaced and the institution would still be the same (and fulfill the same functions). A social institution is then an overall pattern consisting in fairly abstract concepts: goals, norms, functions, organizational structure and management rules. To describe an institution, it is by no means sufficient to list its members and the structure of their relations. And the fact that many institutions are associated with a particular building or location (e.g. the British Parliament, the Church of Rome, the White House…) is not essential to their function. But they usually result from socio-historical processes, which may explain their present structure and norms (see Xxxxxx and Xxxxxxxx 1966; Xxxxxx 1995). Examples of social institutions would be banks, firms, universities, museums, hospitals, churches, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, political parties, armies, etc. Their goals and functions vary widely and are not always easy to determine: if the goals of a university are obviously teaching and research, what are the exact goals of a church? But they all exhibit a goal- oriented, purposive behavior that transcends the details of their organization. One could distinguish between institutions and organizations (Xxxxxxxxx 1979; Xxxxx 2001), for example by considering organizations as concrete groups fulfilling particular tasks, and institutions as abstract patterns of rules or customs. There is also a frequent tendency in sociology to consider institutions as rule systems or customs that apply to society as a whole (i.e. marriage, religion, the legal system…). We will, however, consider institutions and organizations as two sides of the same coin (abstract vs. concrete), and speak mainly of institutions in order to emphasize their abstract character. Looking more closely, we can list the main components of institutions (or organizations), roughly in decreasing order of abstraction: • goal or goals • norms and values • specific...
