Institutional Failure as Surprise | Samo Burja

Despite their obvious faults, the industrial age institutions Illich targeted in his scathing critiques proved to be more resilient than he anticipated, and not necessarily because they were, in fact, useful, just, and sustainable enterprises. Rather, Illich came to the conclusion that we remained locked into these inevitably self-destructive insti... See more

Core argument: This paper argues that the formal structures of many organizations in postindustrial society (Bell 1973) dramatically reflect the myths of their institutional environments instead of the demands of their work activities. Societal / institutional complexity has added to the core activities needed to perform a productive act of labour.... See more

Where the production organisation has strong output controls and depends on managing relational networks, the institutionalised organisation has ambiguous outputs and depends on confidence and stability it achieve by following the rules of its environment—conforming both to the opinions of external constituents as well as the demands on internal st... See more

some institutions that seem “stagnant” are actually powerful forces for generating legitimacy. It being slow is the point, much in the same way that a song isn’t played as one chord. Music isn’t played to be finished. Much of the importance of modern institutions is to act as lightning rods for negotiation and conversation. If you are *only* a tech... See more

The fact that needed to be explained, however, was failure: the painfully visible gap between the institutions’ claims of competence and their actual performance. The gap, I maintain, was a function of the limits of human knowledge. It had always been there. What changed was the public’s awareness of it.

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L. M. Sacasas

Solving a crisis by escalation seems not to have gone out of fashion. It signals, of course, a failure of imagination, but also an institutional imperative. What can an institution possibly offer you except more of itself? For example, the one remedy for the problems it has unleashed that Facebook cannot contemplate is suspending oper... See more

A world with failing institutions may be survivable by the strong-willed, but a better world will always be one where strong institutions exist.

Organizational structures are created and made more elaborate with the rise of institutionalized myths, and, in highly institutionalized contexts, organizational action must support these myths. But an organization must also attend to practical activity. The two requirements are at odds. A stable solution is to maintain the organization in a loosel... See more