Power as Sanctified Conformity

Pertti Alasuutari’s Institutional Lens on Parliaments, Rituals, and Epistemic Governance

Editor’s note: Pertti Alasuutari is a Finnish sociologist and Professor Emeritus at Tampere University in the Faculty of Social Sciences. He has been a leading figure in cultural sociology, social research methodology and qualitative research throughout his career. He has served as Academy Professor and held various academic leadership roles, including dean and research institute director. His work examines cultural processes in contemporary society and he is widely published and internationally recognised.

This article examines sociologist Pertti Alasuutari’s argument that modern power is “sanctified” through institutional conformity—most visibly in the global replication of parliaments as organizational forms and in the rituals that render those institutions unquestionable. Building on the reported findings from Tampere University’s coverage and connecting them to Alasuutari’s corpus on epistemic governance and sociological institutionalism, I analyse how sanctification operates via discourses, routines, and cross-national referencing practices. I further discuss implications for comparative politics and sociology of knowledge, while outlining methodological avenues to study sanctification empirically.

From Legitimation to Sanctification

Legitimation is a central concept in political sociology—often framed as the process by which authority is justified and recognized. Alasuutari advances this conversation by emphasizing sanctification: the way organizational forms, routines, and discourses elevate power beyond contestation, rendering it part of the “natural” order. In the Tampere University feature, Alasuutari underscores how parliaments across UN member states have been replicated “from a common mold” since World War II, and how national lawmaking routinely invokes models and practices from other countries (e.g., other Nordic or OECD nations) as authoritative references. This normalization-through-reference is key to sanctification: similarity itself becomes a reason—a justification—for policy adoption.

This view coheres with Alasuutari’s long-standing work on epistemic governance, which theorizes how actors mobilize widely shared understandings of reality to shape policy and public life (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2019). In epistemic governance, authority rests not only on coercion or formal mandate but on epistemic capital—credibility, expertise, and the ability to define what counts as reasonable or modern.

Parliaments as Global Templates—and the Rituals That Sanctify Them

The reported piece notes that, despite claims to national uniqueness, states do not actually seek to diverge; they strive for recognition as members of an international community, and conformity becomes an ideal. Alasuutari’s group analysed samples of legislative initiatives and measured references to other countries as one indicator of conformity. In practice, comparative citations—“the Danish model,” “OECD standards,” “international trends”—operate as ritualized discursive moves that sacralise policy choices. The repeated invocation of other countries and global standards thus functions like a secular liturgy: it marks decisions as reasonable, modern, and legitimate, elevating them beyond ordinary contestation.

Alasuutari’s recent monograph, National Parliaments as a Global Institution (Oxford University Press, 2025), explicitly treats parliaments as components of world society, examining how shared external forms, work routines, and recurrent rituals (debates, votes, plenaries, committee structures) stabilize the institution and anchor its authority across contexts—even where legislatures operate as “rubber stamps” under authoritarian rule. The convergence in symbolic architecture and procedural choreography contributes to the sanctification of legislative power by aesthetic and performative means.

Sociological Institutionalism, Conformity, and Credibility

Alasuutari’s approach resonates with sociological institutionalism, which emphasizes how organizations conform to globally diffused models for legitimacy. His work with Ali Qadir articulates the discursive side of this institutionalism in the study of religion and, by extension, public authority: institutions maintain credibility through narratives, classifications, and references that resonate with shared cultural schemas (Qadir & Alasuutari, 2022). In the legislative domain, international trend-talk and model borrowing are not merely informational—they are performative actsthat secure compliance, socialize elites, and sanctify the institutional order.

Crucially, in epistemic governance, authority as epistemic capital entails the use of expert knowledge, comparative evidence, and normative frames (modernity, progress, European standards) to shape what is deemed rational and desirable.

As the Tampere report and Alasuutari’s book indicate, such frames have institutional carriers: parliaments, committees, independent authorities, and international organizations that circulate norms and best practices across polities, thereby deepening conformity.

Seeing Sanctification Beyond the Surface

One of the article’s central insights is methodological: if we only see an organization as flawless in its accustomed forms, we miss how people could genuinely influence outcomes.

This admonition invites researchers to look past the taken-for-granted status of parliaments and policy routines, asking how ritual repetition and comparative referencing delimit the imaginable policy space. In related work, Alasuutari has argued that conversation analysis and ritual theory help uncover the microfoundations of institutional authority—how everyday interactions reproduce organizational sanctity (Alasuutari, 2023).

The COVID-19 case studies cited in his research network further show how global discourses structure national strategies: Sweden’s pandemic response is analysed as navigation within a global repertoire of justifications, constraints, and comparisons (Rautalin & Alasuutari, 2025), while intergovernmental organizations respond to crises under epistemic uncertainty through ritualized behaviours and discursive positioning (Ulybina, Pi Ferrer, & Alasuutari, 2022). These studies demonstrate sanctification in the tempo of crisis: even urgent decisions are anchored to references that secure their acceptability.

Challenging the Sanctified Order

Alasuutari’s lens on sanctification carries three implications:

Comparative policy studies should treat references to foreign models as dependent variables worth analysing, not merely as background context. The density, direction, and framing of these references indicate the degree to which conformity sanctifies power.
Institutional ethnography of parliaments can systematically map ritual sequences—agenda-setting, committee hearings, floor debates, voting—as performative infrastructures of sanctification.
Democratic innovation requires desanctifying certain institutional routines by opening them to experimental redesign—e.g., alternative deliberative formats, transparent model-borrowing with explicit local fit assessments, and citizen-facing “comparative audits” that justify when international trends are appropriate and when local divergence is preferable.

Seeing Power’s Halo

By foregrounding sanctification, Alasuutari gives scholars a sharper tool to interrogate how power is rendered untouchable—not by force alone, but through forms, rituals, and discourses that present conformity as virtue. The global homology of parliaments is a paradigmatic case: its aesthetic, procedural, and discursive convergence across regimes sustains a world institution whose authority is amplified by epistemic capital and comparative referencing. Recognizing these mechanisms enables sociologists, political scientists, and practitioners to rethink policy design and institutional accountability in a world where similarity often substitutes for argument.

References

Alasuutari, P. (2023). Conversation analysis, institutions, and rituals. Frontiers in Sociology, 8, 1–8. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2023.123456 (example link; see research portal) [researchpo…al.tuni.fi]
Alasuutari, P. (2025). National Parliaments as a Global Institution. Oxford University Press. (Author page and research portal entry) https://researchportal.tuni.fi/en/persons/pertti-alasuutari/ [researchpo…al.tuni.fi]
Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (2019). Epistemic Governance: Social Change in the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan (SpringerLink). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4 [link.springer.com]
Qadir, A., & Alasuutari, P. (2022). The discursive side of sociological institutionalism in the study of religion. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 35(1), 1–23. (Author page with DOI) https://www.tuni.fi/en/people/pertti-alasuutari [tuni.fi]
Rautalin, M., & Alasuutari, P. (2025). Navigating in the global discourse: The case of Swedish COVID-19 strategy. Acta Sociologica, 68(3), 370–388. (Open access via research portal) https://researchportal.tuni.fi/en/persons/pertti-alasuutari/ [researchpo…al.tuni.fi]
Ulybina, O., Pi Ferrer, L., & Alasuutari, P. (2022). Intergovernmental organizations in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic: Organizational behaviour in crises and under uncertainty. International Sociology, 37(4), 415–438. (Author page with DOI) https://www.tuni.fi/en/people/pertti-alasuutari [tuni.fi]
News source: Tampere Universities. (2025, December 2). Sociologist Pertti Alasuutari shows how power is sanctified. English index page; Finnish article with full text. https://www.tuni.fi/fi/ajankohtaista/sosiologi-pertti-alasuutari-nayttaa-miten-valta-pyhitetaan [tuni.fi], [tuni.fi]