All human activity is subject to habitualisation. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern.

Habitualisation further implies that the action in question may be performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort. This is true of non-social as well as of social activity. Even the solitary individual habitualises her activity.

Habitualisation carries with it the important psychological gain that choices are narrowed. While in theory there may be a hundred ways to go about a project, habitualisation narrows these down to one. This frees the individual from the burden of trivial decision-making, providing a psychological relief that has its basis in man's undirected instinctual structure.

Habitualisation provides the direction and the specialisation of activity that is lacking in human biological equipment, thus relieving the accumulation of tensions that result from undirected drives. And by providing a stable background in which human activity may proceed with a minimum of decision-making most of the time, it opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation.

Habitualisation makes it unnecessary for each situation to be defined anew, step by step. A large variety of situations may subsumed under its predefinitions. The activity to be undertaken in these situations can then be anticipated. Even alternatives of conduct can be assigned standard weights.

Habitualisation processes precede any institutionalisation, indeed can he made to apply to a hypothetical solitary individual detached from any social interaction. 

How do institutions arise? Institutionalisation happens whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualised actions by people. Put differently, any such typification is an institution. The reciprocity of institutional typifications and the typicality of not only the actions but also the actors in institutions. The typifications of habitualised actions that constitute institutions are always shared ones. They are available to all the members of the particular social group in question, and the institution itself typifies individual actors as well as individual actions.

Institutions posit that actions of a particular type will be performed by people of a particular type/category.

Institutions further imply historicity and control. Reciprocal typifications of actions are built up in the course of a shared history. They cannot be created instantaneously.

Institutions have histories, of which they are the products. It is impossible to understand an institution adequately without an understanding of the historical process in which it was produced.

Institutions, by the very fact of their existence, control human conduct by setting up predefined patterns of conduct.

This controlling character is inherent in institutionalisation as such, prior to or apart from any mechanisms of sanctions set up to support an institution. These mechanisms (the sum of which constitute a system of social control), exist in many institutions and in all the agglomerations of institutions that are societies. Their controlling efficacy, however, is of a secondary or supplementary kind.

Primary social control is given in the existence of an institution as such. To say that a segment of human activity has been institutionalised is to say that this segment of human activity is under social control.

Additional control mechanisms are required only when the processes of institutionalisation are less than completely successful.

Institutions generally manifest themselves in collectivities containing considerable numbers of people. "This is how these things are done", attains a firmness in consciousness;  it becomes real and cannot be changed easily.

For children, especially in the early phase of their socialisation into it, it becomes the world. For the parents, it loses its playful quality and becomes "serious." For the children, the parentally transmitted world is not transparent.

At this point it become possible to speak of a social world, in the sense of a comprehensive and given reality confronting the individual in a manner analogous to the reality of the natural world. In this way, as an objective world, the social formations can be transmitted to a new generation. In the early phases of socialisation the child is quite incapable of distinguishing between the objectivity of natural phenomena and the objectivity of the social formations.

Language, the most important item of socialisation, appears to the child as inherent in the nature of things, and she cannot grasp the notion of its conventionality. A thing is what it is called, and it cannot be called anything else. All institutions appear in the same way, as given, unalterable and self-evident.

Empirically, the institutional world transmitted by most parents already has the character of historical and objective reality. The process of transmission strengthens the parents' sense of reality, because "This is how these things are done".

An institutional world, then, is experienced as an objective reality. It has a history that antedates the individual's experience and is not accessible to his/her biographical recollection. It was there before s/he was born, and it may be there after death.

The individual's biography is an episode located within the objective history of the society. The institutions, as historical and objective facticities, confront the individual as undeniable facts.

The institutions are there, external to self, persistent in their reality, whether she likes it or not. S/he cannot wish them away. They resist attempts to change or evade them. They have coercive power over self, both in themselves, by the sheer force of their facticity, and through the control mechanisms that are usually attached to the most important of them.

The objective reality of institutions is not diminished if the individual does not understand their purpose or their mode of operation. S/he may experience large sectors of the social world as incomprehensible, perhaps oppressive in their opaqueness, but real nonetheless.

Since institutions exist as external reality, the individual cannot understand them by introspections. S/he must "go out" and learn about them, just as s/he must to learn about nature.

It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity.

The process by which the externalised products of human activity attain the character of objectivity is objectivation. The institutional world is objectivated human activity, and so is every single institution. In other words despite the objectivity that marks the social world in human experience, it does not thereby acquire an ontological status apart from the human activity that produced it.

The paradox is that humans are capable of producing a world that they then experience as something other than a human product. The relationship between person, the producer, and the social world, one's product, is and remains a dialectical one. The product acts back upon the producer.

Externalisation and objectivation are moments in a continuing dialectical process, which is internalisation (by which the objectivated social world is retrojected into consciousness in the course of socialisation).

There is fundamental relationship between three dialectical hubs in social reality. Each of them corresponds to an essential characterisation of the social world.

Society is a human product.

Society is an objective reality.

Is person a social product?