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\title{Information and Institutional Change}

\author{Phil Agre\footnote{\texttt{http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/}}}

\date{Spring 2000}

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Everybody knows that information technology is going to change the
world, but nobody knows how.  This class offers useful concepts about
the subject from computing, economics, law, politics, and management. 
 

Course assignments.  Your major assignment for the course is to apply
the concepts from the lectures and readings to some institution that
you know and care about -- for example, the institution where your
career plans will take you.  If you have no career plans, this would
be a good time to get some, at least provisionally.  I can help with
this.  Much of the course grade will derive from a single paper whose
purpose is simply to apply many of the course concepts to your chosen
institution in a way that lets you construct a coherent argument about
it.  Shorter writing exercises will be due every week as preparation
for this larger task. 
 

In addition to the readings that I have listed week-by-week below, I
will also be assigning a large number of newspaper articles.  Some of
these are included in the reading packet, and others will be handed
out in class.  I want to create a sense of our course as a breaking
news story, and I also want the real examples reported in the news
articles to be case studies and reality checks for the many theories
we will be considering.  I believe that you don't understand a theory
until you can apply it to cases, and that's why I want you to analyze
your own case in a sustained way from many angles, as well as a large
number of smaller cases as reported in the newspaper articles.  The
newspaper articles are listed at the bottom of this syllabus, and you
should read them all during the first few weeks of heavy theorizing. 
 


\section{Background.}
 


This week we will gather a variety of perspectives that might
motivate the project of understanding the place of information in
institutional change.  The readings will not have any particular
unity.  My hope, rather, is that everyone will find at least one
point of entry to the material.


Philip E. Agre, Yesterday's tomorrow, Times Literary Supplement, 3
July 1998, pages 2-3. 
 


This is a rapid sketch of at least one cluster of institutional
approaches to computing and its place in society.  It tries to get
beyond prevailing ideas that the Internet is a "cyberspace" separate
from the real world.  These ideas make sense in historical terms
and as misunderstandings of a temporary situation, but in the long
run it will be crucial to understand the Internet as something very
much embedded in, and coevolving with, social relationships as they
already exist.


Scott Shane, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet
Union, Chicago: Dee, 1995.  Chapter 4: The KGB, father of perestroika. 
 


A functioning modern society requires open information, and so open
information, it is said, caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While this story might be too simple, the place of information
in the actual functioning of Soviet society is fascinating.  This
chapter concerns the role of the Soviet secret police organization,
the KGB, which was the only organization in the whole country that
had a complete view of what was really going on.  This is why, most
counterintuitively, it was the KGB that set in motion the reform
process that led to the Soviet system's demise.


The Economist, Special section on electronic commerce, 26 February
2000. 
 


The big information story this month concerns "electronic commerce",
i.e., companies selling this to people on the Web.  This is a very
narrow view of what "electronic commerce" could possibly mean, but
nonetheless this bundle of articles on the topic from the Economist
is good enough that you will thankfully not have to read anything
else for a while.


Rob Kling and Suzanne Iacono, Computerization movements and the
mobilization of support for computing, in Jacques Berleur, Andrew
Clement, Richard Sizer, and Diane Whitehouse, eds, The Information
Society: Evolving Landscapes, Springer-Verlag, 1990. 
 


Where do computers come from?  In a shallow sense they come from
research labs and computer companies.  But in a deeper sense
they are shaped and proliferated by social movements that agitate
for computing by means of utopian ideologies that are remarkably
consistent both in their ideas and their detachment from reality.
This article, written before the craze for "virtual reality" and
"cyberspace", identifies the patterns in computerization movements.


\section{Basic economics of information technology.}
 


We will focus very hard this week on three closely interrelated
ideas that will recur endlessly in the weeks to come.  These ideas
are: economies of scale (the contrast, anomalous in the terms of
conventional economics, between the high fixed costs of producing
useful information goods and the low variable costs of reproducing
them), positive feedback (the patterns by which institutional
patterns, once established, tend to persist, so that the strong
get stronger and social arrangements hang around after they have
outlived their usefulness), and network effects (the distinctive
economic properties of goods such as telephones and operating
systems whose utility depends on the number of other people who
have them).


John Cassidy, The force of an idea, New Yorker, 12 January 1998, pages
32-37. 
 


This is a popular article about Brian Arthur's theory of positive
feedback through increasing returns, and how this theory led to,
among other things, the Microsoft antitrust trial.  The article
probably gives too much credit to Brian Arthur (through no fault
of his), but it's still an interesting story.


Brian Arthur, Increasing returns and the new world of business,
Harvard Business Review, July 1996, pages 100-109. 
 


In this article, also relatively nontechnical, Brian Arthur applies
his theory of positive feedback to business strategy.  Competition
has very distinctive dynamics in markets that exhibit increasing
returns.  Because the market tends to pick a single winner and the
lock in that winner's position almost irreversibly, it pays to be
lucky or to make a huge up-front investment.


Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide
to the Network Economy, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998.
Chapter 7: Networks and positive feedback. 
 


This is a long chapter about the economic dynamics of technical
standards and some of their consequences for competition.  When
products need to be compatible with one another, consumers will want
to get what everyone else is getting.  As a result, it can be hard
to sell anything at first (everyone is waiting to see what everyone
else will get).  But once a critical mass emerges, the market will
change dramatically overnight.  The chapter ends with some extended
case studies from familiar technologies such as video recorders.


Marc Pesce, The great leap downward, Feed, February 1997. 
 


A brief, humorous article about the author's attempt to establish
a standard for online "immersive environments" called VRML.  In
retrospect VRML was just a bad idea because the technology was not
yet powerful to do anything very interesting with it.  But Pesce
wanted to avoid a proliferation of incompatible standards later on,
and so he engaged in endless politics to prevent major vendors from
creating their own proprietary alternatives.  The machinations that
ensue are instructive and sometimes hilarious.  Observe especially
the interaction between political and economic processes.


\section{Institutions.}
 


Now we get to the central analytical category of the course, the
concept of an institution.  An institution is a persistent form of
relationships among people, and examples of institutions include
horseracing, the medical system, greeting rituals, the university,
the stock market, management consulting, Christmas, the family,
the common law, and the nation-state.  Institutions can vary across
history and between different societies, yet they are remarkable
for their ability to remain very similar for hundreds of years
at a time.  This persistence is a bad thing when the institutions
themselves are unjust or outdated, but it is a good thing when
they enable people to predict the future, focus their attention,
and compel others to keep their promises.


Robert E. Goodin, Institutions and their design, in Robert E. Goodin,
ed, The Theory of Institutional Design, Cambridge University Press,
1996. 
 


This is a difficult chapter that surveys ideas about institutions in
various social scientific field.  The background is that the design
of institutions became a hot topic after the fall of the Soviet
Union, when literally dozens of countries were faced with rebuilding
and reinventing social institutions that were no longer legitimate,
and that in most cases no longer worked.  The story of American
"experts" flying in to offer their advice is not entirely savory
one, not least because the experts, never having lived in a society
with dysfunctional institutions, had only a superficial idea of how
institutions really worked.  Nonetheless, a fair amount of valuable
theorizing and scholarship was done during this period, and this is
a good enough place to begin.


Douglass North, Institutions, Journal of Economic Perspectives 5(1),
1991, pages 97-112. 
 


This is an only slightly less difficult article about the evolution
of economic institutions.  North believes that history is a great
evolutionary march toward the kind of idealizing market institutions
that were first imagined in England in the 18th century, and he
tries to explain this march in terms of the successive increments by
which people reform their market institutions to be more efficient.
He is smart enough to know that this theory is wholly implausible
in a world of politics and power, and so this is a snapshot of his
attempt to define a theory of institutional change that accommodates
his overall picture to the inconvenient reality.


\section{Organizations.}
 


Institutional theorists make a big point of distinguishing between
organizations, which come and go, and the persistent institutions
within which those organizations are embedded.  One distinguishes,
thus, between the institution of the university and particular
universities, or between the institution of broadcast journalism
and particular news stations.  Having established what institutions
are and what's to be gained by analyzing them, we can look with
fresh eyes at the place of information -- and information technology
-- in organizations.  Although organizations include government
agencies, nonprofits, and civic associations, by "organizations"
here we will mostly mean "companies".  That's because most of the
money, and thus most of the useful literature, has been focused in
that area.


James Brian Quinn, Intelligent Enterprise: A Knowledge and Service
Based Paradigm for Industry, New York: Free Press, 1992.  Chapter 4:
Revolutionizing organizational strategies. 
 


Quinn's book surveys the revolution in service industries that (he
thinks) information technology makes possible.  A key idea is that
communications networks and detailed computerized tracking of work
activities make middle managers much less necessary.  Extrapolating
from this idea, Quinn describes a family of organizational forms
that reduce work to its "least replicable units" and then network
it into "flat" organizations with a minimum of centralized overhead.
The point is not that freedom and democracy reign in the corporate
world, but rather that control is immanent in the work processes
themselves, for example through thoroughgoing measurement of the
outcomes of work.


Thomas H. Davenport, Saving IT's soul: Human-centered information
management, Harvard Business Review, March 1994, pages 119-131. 
 


An old view of information treated it as an industrial material like
steel, and traditional information systems design automated already-
rationalized flows of documents without wondering what the documents
meant.  This view has reached the end of the line as organizations
have regained awareness of information as a political football to
be hoarded, filtered, and spun.  Davenport describes a wide variety
of these human phenomena around information and sketches their
consequences for the design of organizations and technologies alike.


Wanda J. Orlikowski, Learning from Notes: Organizational issues
in groupware implementation, in Rob Kling, ed, Computerization and
Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, second edition,
Academic Press, 1996. 
 


In this celebrated case study, Orlikowski watched a major consulting
firm adopt a "groupware" tool called Lotus Notes.  The company's
chief technology manager decided that simply installing Notes would
touch off a revolution in the way the company operated.  It didn't
happen, and Orlikowski explained why.  One problem was cognitive:
nobody explained the supposed vision for the technology, and so the
people used it in the same way that they had used earlier, familiar
technologies like e-mail.  Another problem concerned incentives:
consultants' promotions depended on their building a distinctive
practice, and this made sharing information a bad idea.  The major
lesson is simple enough in retrospect: the software has to fit with
the culture.


John L. King, Where are the payoffs from computerization? Technology,
learning, and organizational change, in Rob Kling, ed, Computerization
and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, second edition,
Academic Press, 1996. 
 


This is an introduction to the "productivity paradox": despite the
huge investments in information technology over the last decades, it
is hard to demonstrate a net payoff in terms of increased efficiency
in industry.  The problem may partly be one of measurement -- how do
you measure increases in quality as opposed to quantitative increases
in output?  But another likely answer is that the real benefits of
information technology do not come until institutions have changed,
and institutions only change slowly.


\section{Market structure.}
 


Last week we looked at organizations in isolation, and now we look
at the interfaces between them.  In other words, we look at the ways
that companies buy and sell goods among themselves.  Why are the
boundaries between organizations located where they are?  How does
the business at those boundaries get transacted?  And how do the
boundaries change when the technologies underlying those transactions
changes as dramatically as it is changing right now?


Friedrich A. Hayek, The use of knowledge in society, in Individualism
and Economic Order, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. 
 


Hayek was to capitalism was Marx was to communism: not its inventor,
but its most influential modern intellectual/activist.  And where
Marx foresaw that a fragmented market without central coordination
would tear itself apart, Hayek argued that central coordination
was impossible because no centralized body could possible gather
and integrate the vast quantities of local information that market
participants took into account every day.  A building full of Linux
supercomputers might have kept the Soviet Union running a couple of
decades longer, but Hayek would be unimpressed.


Ronald H. Coase, The nature of the firm, Economica NS 4, 1937, pages
385-405.  Reprinted in Oliver E. Williamson and Sidney G. Winter,
The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991. 
 


If the market is so great, and if hierarchies are so bad, why is so
much of the economy coordinated by big hierarchical corporations?
If trade between individuals in the market is the most efficient way
to run an economy, why do companies exist at all?  Coase's immensely
influential argument is that companies would not exist if market
mechanisms were costless to operate, but that markets require (what
later came to be called) "transaction costs" such as searching for
goods, negotiating contracts, handling money, monitoring to make
sure that contractors do what they're supposed to, and if necessary
fighting about the matter in court.  Other things being equal, a
reduction in transaction costs -- especially the kind that results
from new information and communication technologies -- predicts that
companies will break into parts.  It turns out that other things are
almost never equal, but it's a productive argument anyway.


Mark Casson, Economic perspectives on business information, in Lisa
Bud-Frierman, ed, Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of
Knowledge in Modern Business, London: Routledge, 1994. 
 


Market transactions require large amounts of information, and many
institutions can be understood as responses to information problems.
Trading customs, for example, can give way to localized negotiation
as information about traders and their goods becomes cheaper to
acquire and process.  Casson's chapter surveys the startling number
and variety of consequences that follow from this basic argument.


Daniel F. Spulber, The Market Makers: How Leading Companies Create and
Win Markets, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998.  Chapter 5: Intermediation. 
 


Markets do not happen by magic; they are human, social processes
that have an economics of their own.  Spulber makes abstruse
economic theories of such things, and this is a chapter from a book
that he wrote to explain the strategic consequences of his theories
for the companies that actually make markets.  The chapter concerns
intermediaries: companies that bring buyers and sellers together.
The Internet is often said to eliminate the need for intermediaries
by enabling buyers and sellers to deal with one another directly.
This idea turns out to be wildly false, but it does at least draw
our attention to the diverse bundles of roles that intermediaries
can play.  Those roles almost always get redefined in the context
of new communications technologies like the Internet, and Spulber
provides a taxonomy of the roles that helps us to make predictions.


\section{Libraries.}
 


Now that we've established some theory, this week begins a series
of case studies of particular institutions.  A recurring futurology
of the Internet imagines that institutions will simply disappear
-- that libraries, for example, will turn into big online databases.
Such things are easy to say, but they fail to reckon with the full
complexity of documents and the roles they play in institutional
life.  These readings survey some of the issues.  Even though they
are framed in terms of libraries, their lessons apply more widely.


J. C. R. Licklider, Excerpt from Libraries of the Future, in Mark
Stefik, ed, Internet Dreams, MIT Press, 1996. 
 


Licklider was one of the visionaries who saw modern information
technologies coming, and during his time at ARPA he was able to fund
some of them.  In these excerpts from his 1965 book about "libraries
of the future", he offers a long series of predictions.  Many of
them, including the rise of the networked personal computer, were
strikingly correct.  In fact close study reveals a pattern: all of
his predictions that computers would exhibit any intelligence at all
proved completely wrong, and all of his other predictions were not
optimistic enough.


David M. Levy and Catherine C. Marshall, Going digital: A look at
assumptions underlying digital libraries, Communications of the ACM
38(4), 1995, pages 77-84. 
 


Because viewing digital libraries as big databases is too limiting,
Levy and Marshall explore how digital libraries can be understood
as components of larger patterns of activity.  They suggest that
digital libraries will only be useful if they are designed with a
full awareness of the interactions among documents, technology, and
work.


Andrew Blau, Floods don't build bridges: Rich networks, poor citizens
and the role of public libraries, in Sally Criddle, Lorcan Dempsey,
and Richard Heseltine, eds, Information Landscapes for a Learning
Society, London: Library Association, 1999. 
 


Blau looks critically at the received idea that big collections
of digital information will improve democracy by giving everyone
access.  This scenario ignores the social mechanisms by which
people can evaluate information.  When information flows in stable
institutional channels, for example associations with their settled
relationships and professions with their claims to expertise, each
channel can develop a track record.  New technologies will not help
democracy if they lead to the chaotic rise and fall of communities
that create no lasting social bonds.  Blau argues, therefore, that
libraries retain an important role in keeping the public sphere
glued together, for example by cultivating communities of common
information.


Pamela Samuelson, Encoding the law into digital libraries,
Communications of the ACM, 41(4), 1998, pages 13-18. 
 


This is a preview of a theme that will be central in the last week
of the class: the ways in which information technologies encode
rules.  Even though a legislature might establish intellectual
property rules, software and hardware can be designed to enforce a
different set of rules.  In particular, the "fair use" provisions
that limit copyright holders' control over individuals' uses of
their materials can be undermined if digital libraries and other
networked applications require users to authenticate themselves
and then track and regulate what the users do with the information.


\section{University.}
 


Our next case study is the university, whose demise the futurology
of the Internet also predicts.  Universities are all about the
life of the mind, aren't they?, and so it stands to reason that
the bricks and mortar campus can be replaced by big online databases
and large-scale groupware applications.  Although true in bits and
pieces, this idea is wildly simplistic, and our goal will be to
locate the dividing line between the physical world and the online.
As in the case of libraries, this analysis will be applicable to a
variety of other institutions.


Philip E. Agre, The distances of education, Academe 85(5), 1999, pages
37-41. 
 


The standard story about distance education is that instructional
delivery, quote-unquote, should exhibit vast economies of scale.
Studies assembling their educations over the Internet will have
an infinite variety of inexpensive online courses to choose from.
This vision is appealing, but it doesn't make sense: economies of
scale in higher education through information technology can only
be achieved by increasing uniformity and decreasing choice.  That
doesn't mean that information technology has no potential uses in
higher education, but it does require us to back up and ask what
real problems we want the techology to solve.  One of these problems
is surely the tension between the liberal arts and vocational models
of education.


John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, Universities in the digital age, in
Brian L. Hawkins and Patricia Battin, eds, The Mirage of Continuity:
Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century,
Washington, DC: Council on Library Resources, 1998. 
 


Brown and Duguid apply to higher education the valuable concept of
a "community of practice": shared culture and activity among people
who have a kind of knowledge in common.  On this theory, learning
something isn't just acquiring knowledge or skills, but is also a
matter of acquiring an identity and joining a community.  This idea
suggests a new way to organize universities in terms of communities
of practice that keep in touch over the Internet and administer
their own training and accreditation mechanisms.  This approach
usefully connects educational institutions to the professions that
students hope to join.


David Noble, Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher
education, October 1997. 
 


Noble is a critic of the hidden control agendas in automation, and
he views the digital university as simply one more chapter in a
long history of workplace conflict over technology.  The point is
not that the machinery itself is inherently bad, but rather that
the machinery tends to be shaped and promoted as part of a larger
package of changes drive by those in power.  In this article, he
raises warnings based on his analysis of technology initiatives at
UCLA that he believes can result in faculty losing control over the
classroom materials that they have worked to create.  Noble's essay
is accompanied by a long commentary of my own that seeks to head
off some frequent misunderstandings about the relationship between
technology and institutions.


M. M. Scott, Intellectual property rights: A ticking time bomb in
academia, Academia 84(3), 1998, pages 22-26. 
 


The university is an ancient institution still largely driven by
ancient customs, but the Internet often forces institutions to
revisit issues that have received little attention in living memory.
One of those issues is intellectual property.  So long as professors
prepare their lectures and other classroom materials using common
resources like the library and cheap technologies such as desktop
computers, nobody needs to worry about who owns the materials that
result.  But if economies of scale lead to elaborately produced
courseware that requires a huge drain on university resources, the
spectre arises of complex wrangling over copyright and other kinds
of intellectual property control.  Such issues should not be faced
reactively at the last minute, or in quiet committees that spring
faits accomplis on faculty whose attention is ususally buried in
their own teaching and research topics.


\section{Local communities.}
 


The word "community" carries a lot of warm fuzzies, and accordingly
it also carries many definitions.  Myths of an ideal community since
lost are central to several traditions, including the academic field
of sociology and the historical memory of the United States.  It
is only by recovering from these myths that we can investigate how
local geographic communities change in the context of the Internet
and other new information and communication technologies.  A local
geographic community is not itself an institution, but it includes
many specific institutions and its members are also wrapped up in a
global network of institutions that intersect in every household and
main street.


Gary Chapman and Lodis Rhodes, Nurturing neighborhood nets, Technology
Review, October 1997, pages 48-54. 
 


Community groups have tried to promote economic development and
other good things by providing poor communities with access to the
Internet.  "Access" here is not just keyboard time: it also includes
training and social support.  This article describes one such
project in Austin, Texas.


Willard Uncapher, Electronic homesteading on the rural frontier: Big
Sky Telegraph and its community, in Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock,
eds, Communities in Cyberspace, Routledge, 1999. 
 


This remarkable study traces the rise and fall of an early network
for rural schools in Montana, placing the technology in the context
of rural society and its place in a global economy.  Despite our
stereotypes of rural people, the people that Uncapher studied were
quite aware of their place in a global economy and the symbolic and
practical roles that information technology could play.


Jan A. English-Lueck, Technology and social change: The effects on
family and community, Paper presented at the COSSA Congressional
Seminar, 19 June 1998. 
 


This is a brief speech based on the author's ethnographic studies of
the early-adopter culture of Silicon Valley.  How does family life
change when technology enables boundaries between work and home to
break down, and when family members are joined together continuously
by those same technologies?  Some of the changes are obvious and
logistical, but others are cultural -- in conceptions of oneself,
others, and work.


Philip E. Agre, Building an Internet culture, Telematics and
Informatics 15(3), 1998, pages 231-234. 
 


Policies for promoting a networked society often focus on technology
to the exclusion of all other issues.  This brief essay gathers
several useful ideas about how to develop a culturally appropriate
policy for encouraging adoption of the Internet.  One idea is to
start with existing social networks, because people mostly want to
communicate with the people they are already know.  Another is to
build institutional capacity by trying experiments, publicizing the
ones that work, and waiting for the technology to become cheaper.
Adopting the Internet means building an Internet culture, and that
ultimately is the same as building a healthy society of decentralized
power and initiative.


Elfreda A. Chatman, The impoverished life-world of outsiders, Journal
of the American Society for Information Science 47(3), 1996, pages
193-206. 
 


People who have established positions within a set of institutions
(as student, voter, bank account holder, driver, and so on) cannot
usually understand what it is like to be located "outside" of those
institutions, clueless to their workings and cut out of their flows
of information.  Chatman describes this situation among many of the
poor, and draws conclusions about the kinds of information services
that would be required to solve the problem.


\section{Code and law.}
 


In our final week, we will investigate the interactions between
information technology and law.  Information technology is shaped
and regulated by law to some degree, and so is the industry that
produces it.  Computer databases are used heavily in the legal
profession, and computer networks are a powerful tool for organizing
to change the law.  Information technology also, as I've mentioned
above, serves as a kind of law.  Electronic mail, for example, works
in some ways and not others.  This implicit law of technology can
supplement the law of courts and legislatures, or it can supplant it.


Batya Friedman and Helen Nissenbaum, Bias in computer systems, in
Batya Friedman, ed, Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology,
Cambridge University Press, 1997. 
 


No technology is neutral, but information technology is especially
non-neutral.  The point is not that information technology as such
has any opinions; in fact it is singularly malleable.  The point,
rather, is that every piece of software and hardware, and every
data format and communications protocol, embodies ideas about people
and their lives.  And these ideas can be biased.  A technology can
encode discriminatory rules, or its functioning may discriminate
against those who cannot understand it.  Friedman and Nissenbaum are
ethical philosophers, and they provide a taxonomy for understanding
the different kinds of bias that computers can embody.


Joel R. Reidenberg, Lex Informatica: The formulation of information
policy rules through technology, Texas Law Review 76(3), 1998, pages
553-593. 
 


Reidenberg is a law professor who sees the intrinsic law of the
Internet as a modern equivalent of the "lex mercatoria" by which
far-flung networks of medieval merchants regulated their dealings
across borders and without recourse to governments and their courts.
Lex informatica, as he calls it, is a sort of self-regulation by
which information technology also orders human dealings across
borders without the need for laws and lawsuits.  He explores how
lex informatica might be consciously design to complement formal
law as a means of regulating technologically mediated activities.


Lawrence Lessig, The path of cyberlaw, Yale Law Journal 104, 1995,
pages 1743-1755. 
 


Lessig is also a law professor whose background is in constitutional
law.  He sees the implict rules of technology as a constitution of
"cyberspace", and in this brief paper he explores what attitude we
should take to the evolution of law in a world of rapid technical
change.  Should the law change rapidly as well?  He argues not, on
the grounds that the English system of common law (also used in the
United States) works by discovering order slowly through experience
with particular disputes.


David G. Post, Governing cyberspace, Wayne Law Review 43, 1996, pages
155-171. 
 


Post presents yet one more view of the proper relationship between
information technology and law.  For Post, the problem with law is
that there is typically too much of it, and he wants to generalize
the system by which governments are disciplined through the freedom
of their people to vote with their feet.  If you don't like the
laws in California, you can move to Oregon.  In cyberspace, if such
a thing could be said to exist, rule-setting could be regulated
through the ability of people to choose which rules they want to
live by.  The ideal, in Post's view, is a highly decentralized
system in which order emerges from people's local interactions and
choices, rather than from a centralized authority.


Newspaper articles: 
 

Lee Berton, Many firms cut staff in accounts payable and pay a steep
price, Wall Street Journal, 5 September 1996, pages A1, A6. 
 

Douglas A. Blackmon, In the new economy, who are the hunters and who
the hunted?, Wall Street Journal, 12 April 2000, pages A1, A16. 
 

Michael A. Cusumano, That's some fine mess you've made, Mr. Gates,
Wall Street Journal, 5 April 2000, page A26. 
 

Yochi J. Dreason, It's great all being connected; until, that is,
something goes wrong, Wall Street Journal, 1 January 2000, page R38. 
 

Yochi J. Dreason, Student, teach thyself, Wall Street Journal, 1
January 2000, page R46. 
 

Terzah Ewing and Silvia Ascarelli, One world, how many stock
exchanges?, Wall Street Journal, 15 May 2000, pages C1, C20. 
 

Steven Greenhouse, E-mail lessens the drudgery for secretaries, New
York Times, 24 April 1996, pages B1, B6. 
 

Saul Hansell, Hackers' bazaar: Online auction services put haggling
back into sales, New York Times, 2 April 1998. 
 

Saul Hansell, Clash of technologies in merger, New York Times, 13
April 1998, page C4. 
 

Alexandra Harney, Up close but impersonal, Financial Times, 10 March
2000, page 16. 
 

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\end{document}
