It seems here that Cushman makes the argument that these institutions derive their power from the ability to reuse. Ok, she doesn't say that exactly, but that is my interpretation. After reading Clay Shirkey's book, The Power of Organizing without Organizations, I have come to realize that institutions largely rely on how much capital it takes for them to operate. His basic argument is that institutions are so bureaucratic because it cost effective to be so. That only allows for so much variety. Shirkey argues that the obstacle of costs only allows for certain types of tasks and tools to be profitable. So institutions are designed to allow certain tasks and disallow others in order to operate efficiently. This mode of operation can be considered the least common denominator. When organizing a large group of something, like Welfare programs, an institution is the best plausible method since it functions at high levels efficiency at the lowest possible cost.
In the same way, the use of institutional language tools are prioritized by cost effectiveness. As when Lucy, the 42 year old African American woman with six kids, needed her daughter's birth certificate, but forgot it. The woman at the desk refused to go and get her other file across the building probably because it cost too much to do so. As in, she had other work that needed to be completed that was more important than this individual woman sitting before her (This is an optimistic interpreation).
However, this concept of institutions works both ways:
"While individuals had to be fluent in institutional language tools to gain status in this community, they could not become too immersed in the discursive convention of any one of wider society's institutions, or they would be stigmatized as 'selling out'. . ." (228).
Looking at greater American society as an institution, there are certain ways of acting that are prioritized simply because it is more cost effective to prioritize something (I'm not making the argument that they were prioritized because they were cost effective. I am making the argument that they remain prioritized because it costs too much to change). It allows for reuse and repetition; and recycling is never a bad thing. But, as we saw in last week's readings, these institutional cycles can spawn alternative discourses set in opposition to their prioritized tasks and tools. This dynamic is going on here.
So, how can we apply the concept of Cost to Institutions and to our study of community literacy?
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Shirky does work with Coase's notion of transaction costs in many of the ways that you outline. So one reason organizations exist is that they lower transaction costs. But social software is supposed to lower them to such an extent that new forms of organization (groups) and previously expensive forms of work are possible.
ReplyDeleteSo my question might be this: are there things that communities can now do that are left undone by institutions?