Institutional Innovation

I would say this, but abstraction helps me get to the heart of matters. So before synthesising around the notions of institutional innovation I want to step back and look briefly at the idea of institutions. Those who are turned off by abstraction need not click for more.

As with all categories there are grey areas, overlaps and omissions. Different writers slice things differently, but then institutions are emergent features of society. To a political economist the institutions of society can be divided into two broad categories:

• Institutions of production
• Institutions of (cultural) reproduction

Institutions of of production divide into several groups:

• Primary industries: agriculture, (hunting), fishing, mining, forestry and other “extractive” industries
• Secondary industries (or institutions of transformation): manufacturing
• Tertiary industries: transport, logistics, retail, marketing, etc
• Institutions of finance may be in both; political institutions, too; depends who you talk to.

Institutions of reproduction include:

• The family (clan, nation, etc)
• Religion
• Education
• Military
• Sport
• etc
• maybe finance and politics, too.

For every big abstraction there are smaller abstractions until we finally get to the real world, concrete instances of e.g. my family, or Oxford Brookes University, the mosque on Manzil Way, Nat West Bank branch on Cowley Rd and so on.

Categories shift, of course. Consider the automobile. In one view it is simply a component of tertiary industry: a mode of transport production. But, the car is also a cultural institution with strong reproductive potential. There are many other institutions of this sort: fashion, food, etc.

And, categories shift over time. In the past, clearly up to the 17th century or thereabouts, the institutions of production were subordinated to the institutions of reproduction. Enterprise was for “the Glory of God”, or the nation, whatever. In our time the order has been reversed and the institutions of reproduction are subordinated to the institutions of production. This is very clearly seen in the relationship between education and industry, today.

Now to change my direction, from thinking about institutions to thinking briefly about the means by which institutions are governed: the “estates” of society. It is a historical thing again. In the past they wrote about _bellatores_ (those who fight), _oratores_ (those who prey), and _laboratores_ (those who labour, work, toil). These categories became the aristocracy or nobility (Lords temporal), the priesthood (Lords spiritual), and the commons (everyone else, some rich, most poor). The institutions of cultural reproduction were always in the hands of the aristocracy and the priesthood who let the peasants operate the institutions of production for the benefit of the Lords.

The history of the modern age has been that of the commons gaining control of the means of production and slowly bringing production to dominate (cultural) reproduction. (And, then, buying into the aristocracy, but that is another story.)

Notice there are 3 estates: Lords, Bishops, Commons. This is how the British Parliament is ordered. At the time of the French Revolution there appeared a “Fourth Estate”: writers, the press. We still refer to newspapers as the fourth estate. Bill Dutton, head of the Oxford Internet Institute now adds a Fifth estate (Dutton 2008): to keep it simple, web-heads, bloggers, open source hackers, etc, etc. BUT, I DON’T LIKE THIS. Fourth estate? Fifth estate? Where will it end? And what happens to the poor old commons? Forever doomed with more and more estates privileged above. Most of what Dutton says is right about connectivity and new political movements. I just prefer to think of it as the “connected commons”, tied together with creative commons licenses, open APIs, open educational resources, open archives, open source, open access, and so on. (No more estates of the realm, please. My dream?) Coleman and Dyer-Witheford (2007) describe another commons, the participatory culture of the interactive gaming community, where, “in aggregate they create patterns of voluntary creation and shared use that deeply complicate and sometimes sharply challenge market logic.” (936)

So where does this get us? Thinking about institutions of society and the estates that order them. Institutional innovation takes place in the wider context of the institutions of society. Institutions are powerful, persistent and emergent. At this level it is the connected commons (= learners in the 21st century) gaining a purchase on the great institution of cultural reproduction that is education, or that lesser part that is British HE.

According to Umpleby et al (2009)

The strategy a university chooses will depend on its conception of itself. Most universities think of themselves as brick and mortar institutions with a physical campus. Photographs of buildings are even more common self-descriptions than lists of degrees offered. However, a university could see itself as a global change agent, acting through teaching, research, and public service. Or a university could try to be known as an institutional improvement facilitator—for businesses, government agencies, NGOs, and other universities.

References