The Institutions are Alright
Long Live Rock?
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
Here is something speculative to start the Summer. A rock ‘n’ roll post, as it were, because I grew up in the rock ‘n’ roll era, and rock ‘n’ roll is no longer here to stay. But why did it … fade away?
Academic conferences, especially in-person academic conferences, are institutions of a sort: regularized, structured, patterned interactions among a community or communities of humans. Sometimes they are more formal, especially if they are (or become) “regular” on some periodic basis. Sometimes less so.
As institutions, in my experience conferences have often been extraordinarily generative, intellectually and sometimes socially. The other day, a colleague said to me: I watched you from across the conference room taking notes (by hand!) all day long. What were you writing down? I said: Ideas for papers and books. A bundle of them. Will they come to fruition? Who knows. But the tap waters of the mind are flowing, I don’t want to lose every drop down the drain.
Having recently returned from an unusually generative conference, I’m here to link that observation with a point of a different sort:
How do institutions end?
Not “how to institutions get started?,” or “how does institutional diversity take root?,” or “how do institutions change?,” each of which is an interesting and important question in itself. How do institutions end?
As one does, I did a quick scan of the literature; I didn’t find much but was steered quickly to “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. (Wikipedia summary here.) That’s not exactly new to me, and not exactly what I was looking for (their answer, in a nutshell, is that nations thrive or not based on the quality of their political and economic institutions), but it’s not unhelpful, either.
I have a preliminary sketch of my own answer (for more on that skip to the end of this post, thanks to my recent, generative conference experience), but I’ll start instead by setting out the things that intrigued me enough to collect them into a general question.
One:
My recent experience was not only generative; it was also the beginning of something – a gathering - that I hope will continue, from time to time, in various formats, in various places, and with a growing community of colleagues. This is the knowledge commons (or “Governing Knowledge Commons,” or “GKC”) world of institutional research, which I helped to launch almost 20 years ago and which has been gathering steam slowly ever since. How do institutions begin, get anchored, and persist, is a question that has been top of mind for me and several colleagues for some time. In this instance the questions go to the development of a field of research. “How do institutions end?” is the bookend to “how do institutions begin?”
Two:
Earlier this Spring I helped to organize the end of a different conference, a small workshop on “cyberlaw” that met for the first time in 2002, convened more or less annually after that, with a rotating cast of participants joining a core of committed participants, and then – by agreement among the core – closed, earlier this Spring, with a final edition and an invitation for unnamed others to pick up the organizational thread in the future. Perhaps a new group will step up. And perhaps not. I don’t regret helping to wind down the event, though in a modest way I mourn its passing. In its time, this little group was the single most inspiring and intellectually engaging conversation I participated in, year in and year out. I do wonder, though, in a research sense, what happened?
Three:
In my presently generative state, and reflecting on the dynamics of community-based collaborative institutions – very much one of the key pillars of commons research and practice, I wonder: Whatever happened to casual carpooling? More than 20 years ago, that practice – informal carpooling arrangements by which residents of the East Bay collaborated their way across the San Francisco Bay into San Francisco – was a canonical micro case study of successful distributed or “peer” production, analogous to open source computer programs and Wikipedia, in the work of Harvard professor Yochai Benkler. Like the early Internet itself, casual carpooling was one of those phenomena that seemed unreal, until you actually saw it and lived it. And then you - or many of you - were inclined to overlook its obvious flaws and risks and just dive (and drive) right in.
The Bay Area was not the only place where a species of casual carpooling arose, but I was a regular Bay Area casual carpooler myself, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I got in and got out with no harm to body or soul. So I have always focused my interest on that case.
Did the pandemic kill the system? Apparently not. That link takes you to what appears to be a recent description; the photo at the head of the piece captures the very spot where I used to stand and wait (sometimes) and where I used to pick up riders (sometimes). Do institutions ever really end? Do they simply succeed, but in different (and perhaps suboptimal) ways? Maybe “end” isn’t the right question; maybe “fail” is better. Or maybe “new and exciting” becomes “domesticated and ordinary.” Maybe casual carpooling isn’t sexy any longer; maybe it’s simply part of the wallpaper of Bay Area transit infrastructure.
Four:
Linking all of this to recent pieces here about universities, I wonder: What might it mean for “the university” to end, taking (for example), Newman’s “Idea of a University” as a baseline? One could take others (Kerr, for example); one could, of course, take not the idea or the concept of a university but instead a particular university.
Say, a spectacularly endowed private university in Massachusetts. I’m thinking, of course, of the name that is on the tips of the tongues of so many people right now:
Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts.
I’ll confess that when I first conceived of this essay, I imagined that Clark U. really had ended. I was modestly surprised to learn that it is still operating, essentially as a small college with a proportionately large graduate population.
I will, in time, dive in to figure out what happened to Clark (there is a relevant narrative history here), but – briefly – it’s important point out how Clark, perhaps uniquely among the private universities founded in the late 19th century by industrialists and financiers, failed to make the transition to global academic preeminence during the 20th century. Money as such wasn’t sufficient to make higher ed’s garden grow. Stanford – check. Chicago – check. Vanderbilt – check. Duke – check. Even Rockefeller, in a way – check, though in a narrower sense. (During that same period, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia successfully made leaps from high profile elite colleges to extraordinary wealth and status as research universities.) Clark, an intellectual giant in its infancy, is not today a global academic brand on that level.
Is that a story of Clark’s “ending”? Maybe not at all, or only in part. Maybe Clark succeeded in building “the university,” in a way, and the others ended, differently? Framing makes a huge difference. #RollCougs!
In any event, here is a first cut of what I am interested in exploring. How do institutions end? Why? When? How do we know? And who is “we”?
A bulleted list of research themes and questions follows, with far too little explanatory material and commentary from me. (Anyone who knows the knowledge commons work will see more than a few affinities between this list and the research framework known as “GKC.”) More detail is warranted, later.
A clutch of questions go to structural attributes, both internal and external:
Affordances
Incentives
Resource stocks and flows, that is, the character of relevant goods and pools as inputs, outputs, and infrastructures
Disruption via technology, practice and/or organizational forms
Branding and consumer/user/participant perceptions and goodwill, in the sense that discontinuities grow too large between the institution’s formal identity and its actual practices and values. Metaphorically speaking, the leopard may not change its spots, but under the skin, it may no longer be a leopard.
A second clutch goes to system dynamics:
Costs and benefits
Spillovers, both positive and negative
Success (the institution solved the problem that it emerged to solve)
Failure (the institution clearly failed to solve both the problem that it emerged to solve, as well as any other problem that it might have evolved to solve)
Standardization, bureaucratization, and inertia (brittleness/lack of resilience or adaptability). Institutions often emerge as forms of resistance to existing patterns. The original versions of the university in Western Europe and the UK, for example, can be characterized that way; the modern research university is quite substantially – and differently – the antithesis of “the resistance.”
Complexity - too much or too little, relative to the scope of relevant social problems and to decision making effectiveness
A third clutch goes to interpersonal dynamics:
Motivations (again, this borrows from the idea of resistance; institutions may be infused with an initial sense of purpose and values that … erode or fail to transfer effectively across time or space)
Leadership and vision (and the lack thereof)
Exclusion (lack of effective participation in decision-making)
Principal / agent problems: predatory behavior and power dynamics
I am all but certain that I have missed some resources and references, including some critical ones. Please: let me know what they are.