Governing social practice

Abstract

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