Governing Social Practice: Technology and Institutional Change

Seminar with professor Jannis Kallinikos, London School of Economics

Jannis Kallinikos is Professor and PhD Programme Director in the Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management at the London School of Economics. His research covers a wide range of topics on the interpenetration of technology with the administrative and institutional arrangements of contemporary societies. Recent books include The Consequences of Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change, Edward Elgar, 2006 and Governing Through Technology: Information Artefacts and Social Practice, Palgrave, 2011.

Governing Social Practice: Technology and Institutional Change addresses the longstanding tendency of neo-institutionalism to crowd out from its research agenda the materialness of reality and all those object mediated arrangements that constitute the fabric of everyday practice. Whatever the effects of solidified beliefs and practices (usually referred to as institutions) may be, these cannot but be mediated and ultimately entangled with mundane yet pervasive objects and arrangements. This is far from trivial limitation, as it fails to account for the exchange mechanisms through which beliefs and objects, practices and technical arrangement bear upon, reinforce or undermine one another. We build our characterization, analysis and critique of neo-institutionalism on John Searle’s conception of institutions.

We try out our ideas in the empirical context of cultural memory (Libraries, Archives, Museums). We show how the recent digitization of their tasks and operations redefines the objects (books, documents, paintings) of their stewardship and the canonization practices though which these objects have traditionally been i) selected ii) ordered and iii) made available to audiences. Digitization also reframes the institutional mandate of these organizations as their services become increasingly entangled with those of information aggregators and search engines.

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