Governing Social Practice: Technology Versus Institutions

This paper claims that technology and institutions both epitomize the construction of artificial orders through which a primary reality is shaped to something other than it is by logical operations that share essential affinities. Drawing on this, we work our way to showing how technology operates as governing regime and how tasks and operations that are carried out by the human enactment of expert rules and procedures can considerably be embodied onto technological sequences with which human experts have limited and severely structured interaction. These ideas are illustrated by reference to cultural memory organizations (e.g. libraries, archives, museums) and the ways the deepening infiltration of their operations by computing technologies redefines their goals and the skills, practices and arrangements through which these goals have traditionally been pursued.