In social and human sciences, an institutional approach has become widely applicable and influential. The paper suggests insights into the institution from the culturological perspective - as an essential sociocultural phenomenon. First, the authors explain a sociocultural nature of institutions and institutionalization. They demonstrate that in the logic of cultural studies, the society itself as a joint life and activity of people is a product of culture, its special, socio-organizing subsystem. The latter creates extra-biological (extra-genetic) forms of operational co-existence of people and collectives, a sustainable system of their relationships. For a society, a fundamental, universal form of being-in-common as a way to organize and reproduce the human collective activity is institutions established by culture. The authors also show the basic significance of an organizing (order-producing) function of institutions as well as the necessity of their other essential functions: social integration, guidance (regulation), and socialization of individuals. The paper highlights multiple positive effects of institualization for all spheres of public life. Second, the paper considers general onto-functional properties of institutions, both ‘all-cultural’ and specific ones. The authors emphasize the irreducibility of culturally-created forms of social organization to institutions; they argue that the understanding of an institution as an intangible system of norms and values acts as the foundation for this unjustified reduction. The authors advocate the opposite view seeing the most significant feature of an institution precisely in the material character of this type of organization: the institution is an objectified, materially-embodied construct - establishment, an order of activities and relations with its real chronotope implemented in the ‘body’ of the material organization. The paper singles out universal, but heterogeneous components in the composition of institutions. Material components along with the material organization include physical-instrumental (’technical’) means of being-in common. Information-based ones embrace goals, values and norms (‘charter’, by B. Malinowski), and institutional identity (ideology), which, in its entirety, shape the flagship base of the institutions activity. Energetic or power components involving material, mental, and spiritual ones provide institutional ‘will’, their imperative character, i.e. the power of institutions. The composition of institutions comprises special actors-managers (one more essential feature of institutions) to effectively implement their functions and power mechanisms. All these components form an integral onto-functional system.