Institutional Innovation

We are thinking about representing the Institutional Innovation community visually. But, why?

There are many images that could be drawn. Lawrie, Craig and I all think a three-dimensional representation of the programme would be useful. Well, it may be pretty, or pretty impressive, or pretty silly, but what’s it for? Knowing the answer to this question might help make the model that has useful explanatory power.

My 3D model took as its axes:

• the projects
• emergent themes
• given themes

Lawrie’s model takes as its axes:

• micro
• macro
• tools

Craig’s is:

• What?
• Why?
• How?

But what does this tell us? Craig’s and Lawrie’s models can be resolved. All three models have at least one common axis, which could be labelled: micro, what or emergent themes. These are the local concerns of the project and what their immediate world is throwing at them. The given themes are more or less the macro concerns: Craig’s “Why”. These are the broader issues of concern to the wider sector (world), of which the local “what” is but an instance. The third dimension can also be resolved, but there are more questions. Craig’s “How” might be answered by either, “Tools”. Or, “Projects”. In more traditional JISC thinking, projects produced tools, or applied or tested tools. Many still do. But, projects are also change-agents in their own right. Many projects are not producing tools as their artefacts, except in the most abstract understanding of what a tool might be. There is not much software development going on in the Institutional Innovation Programme.

Nevertheless, I think the three models of three dimensions are commensurate:

• micro, what, emergent themes
• macro, why: pragmatics and policy
• the projects, their tools and practices; the agency of change.

So, having said this, and beginning to undertake some cluster analysis, what are the questions we are trying to answer?

Is any one axis dominant? Or, can any axis be explained by the two others? Does it matter where we start? Does why trump what? To these ends we are engaged in some theory building. But are we codifying and aggregating accumulated observation: looking at all the micro “whats” and building an explanation. Or, are we starting with the framework?Or, the tools?

In a talk to the Berkman Centre for Internet, Law and Society at Harvard,Peter Gailson takes a similar approach to understanding the sub-cultures of science through the 19th and 20th centuries as the disjuncture between theory, experiment and instrument making. He illustrates this in the field of physics, showing that at different times different perspectives dominated and that this was influenced by things like war (atomic bomb, radar) and other less crude power plays.

Gailson’s approach maps onto the one I have been suggesting. But, as we might expect all these models show the boundaries between the axes as fuzzy. His, “What” is the experimentalist, inductivist, suggesting emergent properties of the world based on observation. Gailson’s “Why” is the theorist, the deductivist, given framework that evolves with a different periodicity to that of the experimentalist. And, his “How” is the project, the tool maker.

These are the epiphenomenal threads that hold the Institutional Innovation programme together. But, I still wonder what the question is?