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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2018
The scholarly discourse on social norms in the tradition of Thomas Schelling (1960) often makes a sharp distinction between social norms and social conventions. In attempting to apply that distinction to actual practices and to teach it to practitioners and students I encountered frequent difficulties and confusions, and finally concluded that it is untenable. I recommend a return to some version of Ullman-Margalit’s (1977) distinction between social norms of cooperation and social norms of coordination. Social norms, I say, are distinguished by beliefs in a relevant group that the rule is typical among them and approved of among them. I describe four ways that social norms of coordination, including conventions of social meaning, are influenced by social approval and disapproval. I contend that the effort by Southwood and Eriksson (2011) to show that social conventions and social norms are essentially different breaks down because their conception of social norms is overly moralized. I present a more social conception of social norms that does without the regnant distinction between “social norm” and “social convention” and instead allows for social norms of cooperation, social norms of coordination, and other kinds of social norms.
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