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| COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Elinor Ostrom: Understanding Institutional Diversity is published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 2005, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. Follow links for Class Use and other Permissions. For more information send email to: permissions@pupress.princeton.edu
One Understanding the Diversity of Structured Human Interactions TO UNDERSTAND institutions one needs to know what they are, how and why they are crafted and sustained, and what consequences they generate in diverse settings. Understanding anything is a process of learning what it does, how and why it works, how to create or modify it, and eventually how to convey that knowledge to others. Broadly defined, institutions are the prescriptions that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions including those within families, neighborhoods, markets, firms, sports leagues, churches, private associations, and govern- ments at all scales. Individuals interacting within rule-structured situa- tions face choices regarding the actions and strategies they take, leading to consequences for themselves and for others. The opportunities and constraints individuals face in any particular situation, the information they obtain, the benefits they obtain or are ex- cluded from, and how they reason about the situation are all affected by the rules or absence of rules that structure the situation. Further, the rules affecting one situation are themselves crafted by individuals interacting in deeper-level situations. For example, the rules we use when driving to work every day were themselves crafted by officials acting within the collective-choice rules used to structure their deliberations and decisions. If the individuals who are crafting and modifying rules do not understand how particular combinations of rules affect actions and outcomes in a particular ecological and cultural environment, rule changes may produce unexpected and, at times, disastrous outcomes. Thus, understanding institutions is a serious endeavor. It is an endeavor that colleagues and I at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Anal- ysis have been struggling with for at least three decades. 1 After designing multiple research projects; writing numerous articles; developing ideas in the classroom; learning from eminent scholars in the field, from students, and from colleagues; and making diverse attacks on this problem, it is time to try to put thoughts on this subject together within the covers of a book, even though I am still not fully satisfied with my own understand- ing. Consider this a progress report on a long-term project that will be continued, I hope, by many others into the future.
4 C H A P T E R O N E Diversity: A Core Problem in Understanding Institutions A major problem in understanding institutions relates to the diversity of situations of contemporary life. As we go about our everyday life, we interact in a wide diversity of complex situations. Many of us face a morn- ing and evening commute where we expect that others, who are traveling at great speeds, will observe the rules of the road. Our very lives depend on these expectations. Others depend on our own driving behavior con- forming in general to locally enforced rules about speeding, changing lanes, and turn-taking behavior at intersections. Those of us who work in large organizations—universities, research centers, business firms, gov- ernment offices—participate in a variety of team efforts. In order to do our own work well, we are dependent on others to do their work cre- atively, energetically, and predictably, and vice versa. Many of us play sports at noontime, in the early evening, or on the weekends. Here again, we need to learn the basic rules of each of the games we play as well as find colleagues with whom we can repeatedly engage in this activity. Dur- ing the average week, we will undertake activities in various types of mar- ket settings—ranging from buying our everyday food and necessities to investing funds in various types of financial instruments. And we will spend some hours each week with family and friends in a variety of activi- ties that may involve worship, helping children with homework, taking care of our homes and gardens, and a long list of other activities under- taken with family and friends. Somehow as individuals we implicitly make sense of most of these di- verse and complex situations. We do so even today, with all of the new opportunities and risks that were not even conceivable a few generations ago. We now expect to watch the Olympic games and other international competitions as they happen, no matter where they are located or where we are in the world. We have become accustomed to buying bananas, oranges, and kiwi fruit at any time of the year in almost any market we enter around the globe. Not only do millions of us drive to work regularly, many of us also fly to other parts of the globe on a regular basis, trusting our lives to the knowledge and skills of pilots to know and utilize the many do’s and don’ts of flying airplanes. If we are considered to be adults and sane, we are expected to be able to reason about, learn, and eventually know what to do in many diverse situations that we confront in today’s world. We know that when we are shopping in a supermarket that we can take a huge variety of goods off the shelf and put them in a pushcart. Before we put these same goods in our car, however, we need to line up at a counter and arrange to pay for them using cash or a credit card (something else that was not so widely available a few years ago). When we are shopping in an open bazaar in Yüklə 168,91 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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