This article strives to provide an original conceptual frame- work that should open a way to clarification of general philosophical debates on rules and norms. It makes a clear distinction between rules understood as social facts grounded on specific relation- ships between social subjects and rules understood as linguistic entities. Norms are taken as specific social rules and divided into three different types: social constitutive norms, particular constitutive norms, and institutional norms. Attention is also devoted to relation between normality and (...) normativity, to the role of permissions and to specific features of technological ‘rules’. In the last part of the article the outlined conceptual apparatus is employed for analysis of two passages from Wittgenstein’s Investigations. (shrink)