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\title{Commodity and Community: \\
  Institutional Design  for the Networked  University\footnote{To appear
  in Planning for Higher Education.}
  }


\author{Phil Agre\footnote{\texttt{http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/}}\\
  Department of Information Studies \\
  University of California, Los Angeles
  }

\date{2 September  2000\footnote{Please do not quote  from this version,
    which will probably change slightly in proof.}}

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\section{Introduction } 

 

Information technology and its uses unsettle the university as an institution.
Institutions are shaped by the practicalities of information, and they exist
largely to mitigate information problems (Melody 1987).  Now, however, we are
confronted with radically improved technologies of information.  It stands to
reason that the university as an institution will change.  But how?  Proposals
are strikingly diverse.  Some proposals treat the university as a purveyor of
human capital; they envision a micromarketplace in learning services.  Other
proposals treat the university as a site for the pooling of knowledge; they
envision the Internet as a tool to amplify this pooling on a global basis.
Each type of proposal isolates one feature of the university as we know it
today.  Call them the commodity model -- the university as a competitor in
a marketplace -- and the community model -- the university as an idealized
microcosm of society.  Despite the inherent tension between them, the
commodity and community models have always coexisted in the institutional
design of the university.  And no matter how radical the changes in technology
become, I will argue that the university must continue to manage this
tension. 

 

\section{The Commodity Model} 

 

The university is understood under the commodity model when people speak
of higher education as an "industry" (e.g., Duderstadt 1997), or of
the "competitive advantage" of universities (Daniel 1996: 67-85), or of
"just-in-time" education that can be consumed in increments anyplace a student
happens to be (Dolence and Norris 1995: 4, Halal and Liebowitz 1994: 22,
Perelman 1992: 22).  Educational services are the principal commodity, with
students as the customers.  But other commodities are involved as well, such
as the intellectual property generated by research.  In the university as we
know it, students actually purchase a large bundle of commodities: not just
years' worth of interconnected classes, but career counseling, athletic
facilities, library services, and much else.  Competition among universities
is already vigorous, but it is competition among bundles, and also to some
degree among choices within a bundle. 

 

If precedents from corporate banking and other industries are a guide,
however, Internet-mediated competition will lead to unbundling as competitors
arise to provide particular elements of the bundle more efficiently (Evans
and Wurster 2000).  A new market structure might emerge, segmented by some
combination of subject matter and educational philosophy.  Individual courses
might be purchased a la carte (Dolence and Norris 1995: 46), and complementary
services such as access to digital libraries might be purchased from separate
firms.  That, anyway, is the picture that emerges from a radicalization of the
commodity model. 

 

A radicalized commodity model would also surely hold consequences for the
higher education workforce, including professors (Neubauer 2000, Skolnik
2000).  Lectures, for example, are widely regarded as an endangered species
that can easily be replaced by video or interactive multimedia.  Faculty might
be deskilled in such a scenario, reduced effectively to the status of teaching
assistants who tutor students on the material in the video (Noble 1998).
Or their skills might be expanded, as they become responsible for managing
the ever more complex educational programs being pursued by the students they
advise (e.g., Dolence and Norris 1995, Halal and Liebowitz 1994: 23)\footnote{Many authors, such as Duderstadt (1999: 15) and Tsichritzis (1999: 97, 99)
imagine a division of labor between star teachers whose lectures are brought
into classrooms through technology and rank-and-file teachers who actually
interact with students.  "Universities need to decide the areas for which they
will be global content providers" (Tsichritzis 1999: 100).}. 

 

From a commodity perspective, the faculty's role is strictly a matter
of value added.  If well-produced multimedia content can find an audience
in the millions then it can be sold very cheaply (Agre 1999); as a result,
every increment of one-to-one interaction between students and teachers may
add a significant proportion to the overall cost of an education.  The most
appealing technology-intensive educational program that requires 10 hours
of student-teacher interaction might be quite different in its structure from
the most appealing such program that requires 20 hours.  But will students
pay the extra cost to get the virtues of the more labor-intensive program?
That is how the commodity model would frame the question. 

 

\section{The Community Model } 

 

The university has also been viewed as a community.  It is through the
community model that the university upholds norms of collegiality, provides
a forum of debate, and maintains structures of democratic governance.  From
this perspective the university is not an artificial bundle but an organic
whole that refracts the tensions and controversies of the larger society. 

 

It is unclear, and usefully so, where the boundaries of the university
community lie.  Is each university a community unto itself, or do communities
form along disciplinary lines, or do the universities of the world form a
single cosmopolitan community?  All are clearly true to some degree, and
the institution is designed to manage this multiplicity.  Universities and
disciplines recognize one another's degrees, at least ritually.  Research
disciplines are global communities, the famous invisible colleges that cut
across the boundaries of universities (Crane 1972), and Alpert (1985: 253)
remarks on "the power exercised by the national disciplinary communities
in setting the standards and scholarly goals of American universities".
University governance deliberately assembles committees from faculty who work
in entirely different fields.  Visiting speakers from other universities are
accorded ritual deference.  Students are positioned as probationary members
of the community, with graduation paradoxically a ritual assumption of full
membership and a rite of departure at the same time. 

 

When students do graduate, most of them will join professions that form
communities of their own.  Some professions have stronger senses of community
than others, as evidenced by strong collective identities, active professional
societies, involvement in political activities, meaningful accreditation of
professional programs, and requirements for continuing education (Abbott 1988,
Derber 1982, Larson 1977).  From the perspective of information technology
and institutional design, the linkages between the university and these larger
communities are crucial. 

 

Brown and Duguid's (1998a) community-of-practice framework generalizes these
ideas, and suggests that the Internet will be used to make the communities
stronger and, in a sense, more real.  Communities of practice correspond
to disciplines, occupations, and professions: experimental physicists are a
community of practice, and so are urban planners, cardiologists, and social
historians.  But communities of practice also arise spontaneously whenever
people have common concerns and a way to share their knowledge (Orr 1996).
As the name suggests, a community of practice shares not simply a body of
knowledge but a complex of practices: ways of working, writing, speaking,
teaching, learning, organizing, and pursuing a career (Toulmin 1972).  To join
a community of practice is not simply to learn something; it is also to become
someone.  In addition to acquire knowledge, one acquires an identity (Lave and
Wenger 1991, Wenger 1998).  Learning, on this view, is a matter of immigration
and acculturation. 

 

Brown and Duguid (1998a: 46) call communities of practice the "essential and
inevitable building blocks of society", and the community-of-practice theory
makes numerous predictions about the institutional dynamics of knowledge.
Because knowledge is bound up with practices, knowledge can be transferred
more efficiently within a community than across the boundaries of different
communities (Brown and Duguid 2000).  This transfer of knowledge does not
happen automatically; most communities of practice have institutions, both
formal and informal, for producing and sharing knowledge.  By facilitating
these institutions, the Internet helps communities of practice to develop
more robust mechanisms of collective cognition (Agre 1998).  It becomes easier
to pursue professional relationships and collaboration at a distance (Finholt
and Olson 1997, Wulf 1993; cf. Star and Ruhleder 1996).  This development
will have both positive and negative consequences.  The benefits are clear
enough in the efficiency of knowledge production.  But as communities of
practice grow closer, they may become insular, or they may tear apart the
cross-disciplinary bonds within local university communities (Agre in press).


 

From the community-of-practice perspective, "the central thrust of any
attempt to retool the education system must involve expanding direct access
to communities, not simply to credentials" (Brown and Duguid 1998a: 46).
The natural consequence of this approach to education is that the university
will take advantage of the distance-spanning capacities of the Internet to
negotiate closer relationships with the various professions.  As new forms
of community interaction become possible, each profession's ongoing community
life might become more integrated with lifelong learning at the university.
The point is not that individual students will take continuing education
courses at a distance, though that will surely happen.  The point, rather,
is that the profession's very institutions (conferences, journals, social
networks, everyday information-seeking and collaboration) may grow together
with the disciplinary community of practice of the university.  This already
happens in engineering fields where practitioners attend research conferences,
and when those conferences are organized by professional societies rather than
societies devoted specifically to research.  But the process can be deepened
through shared libraries and new structures of consulting.  Universities
can develop new forms of instruction in which students learn in an organized
way while immersed in their own work settings, and professional institutions
of publication and peer review can be extended to occupations that have not
historically organized their own conferences and journals. 

 

\section{How the Models Complement one Another } 

 

The commodity and community models complement one another, and the university
has always combined them in complicated ways.  In many early universities,
individual scholars attracted students based on their own reputations, and
were paid accordingly.  Scholars with ill-attended lectures could starve.
To this day, competition helps to maintain standards and encourages programs
to communicate a coherent philosophy.  Students vote with their feet, and
everyone has an interest in affiliating with the programs that have the
best people.  Competition in the academic labor market is a force for high
intellectual standards.  On a more basic level, university communities consume
many commodities in their daily operation: pencils and computers, janitorial
services and online services.  But the community also supports the market: the
most basic mechanism of academic community is peer review, and the magazine
reputation rankings that increasingly drive the agendas of professional
schools (e.g., Alpert 1985: 255) are (in part) a kind of peer review.  The
professional networks that communities cultivate also facilitate competition
by spreading reliable information about the quality of individuals and
programs.  Requirements to publish in the research literature obligate
teachers to remain current in their fields; peer review within a discipline
also provides each university with an efficient way to evaluate the research
work of its faculty.  In each case, the research community reduces the need
for an administrative hierarchy. 

 

The balance between commodity and community, however, is not uniform.  For
freshmen, the main priority is socialization into the university community
as a whole, not into a particular disciplinary community.  This is one reason
why it makes more sense to outsource introductory major courses (that is,
contracting with an outside firm to offer Chemistry 101 and Sociology 101
on a distance basis using multimedia courseware packages) than to outsource
freshman core courses or major courses at the senior level -- assuming
that it makes any sense at all.  (Other reasons include the low level
of faculty interest in such courses and the potential for economies of
scale.)  Working professionals, on the other hand, are already socialized
into their discipline, and so their continuing education can presuppose that
socialization.  This is one reason why distance education makes more sense
for continuing education than for entry-level professional degree programs.
(Other reasons include working professionals' greater access to computing
equipment and lesser ability to travel.)  The community model makes more
sense when students are being socialized into a community of practice, and
the commodity model makes more sense when they are not. 

 

The commodity and community models also play complementary roles in the
university's production and use of intellectual property.  Intellectual
property law does not give authors absolute control over their writings,
or inventors absolute control over their inventions.  Intellectual property
protections are limited in part because certain aspects of a writing or
invention simply cannot be turned into a commodity.  Copyright law can
protect a text against unauthorized copying, but it cannot protect the ideas
in the text against unauthorized thinking.  Patent law, likewise, provides an
inventor with legal tools to prevent unauthorized persons from practicing the
invention, but it cannot prevent anyone from being inspired by the invention
to create a different invention.  Indeed patents are made public precisely to
promote that downstream inspiration.  In economic terms, these non-commodity
aspects of intellectual products are called public goods: everybody can use
them, and nobody can be prevented from using them once they know about them.
The commodity model thus provides incentives for creative work, but it does
not provide incentives for the production of public goods.  Fortunately, the
community model does provide such incentives: whereas the commodity model
rewards the creation of texts and inventions with money, the community model
rewards the creation of ideas with credit in the literature (Latour and
Woolgar 1986, Merton 1957).  Where the commodity model provides its rewards
through the market, the community model provides them through peer review
and the obligation to cite prior relevant work.  Both models, commodity and
community, must function correctly for the university system to work. 

 

Intellectual property disputes map the boundary between commodity and
community.  The complementarity between the two models is always being
renegotiated, and it can shift.  Thus, many observers have expressed concern
about the commodity model's steady invasion of the institutions of research
as proprietary interests shape research agendas and hinder the publication
of research results (Press and Washburn 2000, Slaughter and Leslie 1997).
Many university faculty, particularly in scientific and technical subjects,
establish parallel lives, using commodity institutions to extract monetary
capital from their research and community institutions to extract academic
capital -- credit and stature in their field.  Universities have sought
to manage the tensions that these arrangements inevitably bring, not least
by formalizing the university's relationships with industrial firms that
collaborate on research projects.  The obvious danger is that the commodity
logic of the market will undermine the community institutions of research.
The integrity of those community institutions ought to provide a clear
test for the admissibility of proposed extensions of the commodity model.
In particular, it is a fallacy to argue that wealth is always increased
by strengthening intellectual property rights, since the wealth created by
intellectual property is equal to the sum of its value as a commodity and
its value as a public good (cf. Cohen 1998).  An intellectual property regime
that interferes with the institutions that create public goods would probably
decrease wealth rather than increasing it. 

 

If the commodity model can invade the university community, the boundary
can also move in the other direction.  Open source software employs a peer
review model similar to that of academic research.  Open source products such
as Apache already have a strong position in the Internet server market, and
the open-source operating system Linux is a credible competitor to Microsoft
in some market niches.  This development may seem paradoxical from the
perspective of the commodity model: if nobody owns the code, where is the
incentive to create it?  Raymond (1999) argues that the paradox dissolves
once one understands that, even with a huge industry selling powerful
software packages, the vast majority of code is actually written by user
organizations for their own in-house purposes of integration and maintenance.
This code would be hard to sell, but it is easy to share.  The institutions
of open-source software facilitate this sharing by providing quality control
through peer review.  Organizations that have similar software needs thereby
form themselves into a community to provide those needs on a cooperative
basis, and companies such as Cygnus and Red Hat arise to provide complementary
services on a commodity basis.  Just as the commodity model is limited in
its spread by the inherent limits of commoditization (new technologies make
it easier to install toll booths on formerly public roads, but any attempt
to turn ideas into commodities would be impossible to administer in practice),
the open-source community model is limited to those niches where incentives
are structured to encourage sharing. 

 

\section{The Models Compared } 

 

To understand how the relationship between the commodity and community models
may evolve, it is also helpful to compare them. 

 

The commodity and community models are both challenged by diversity.  For
the commodity model, the issue is economies of scale.  When customers are
homogeneous, fewer fixed costs are required to produce goods that everyone
wants.  When consumers are heterogeneous, businesses and industries must
find ways to segment the market to achieve economies of scale within each
segment while still approximating each consumer's wants.  With information
goods like multimedia courseware, the payoffs from a one-size-fits-all
product are enormous.  Small market segments are likely to be ill-served:
the fixed costs of production can be distributed among so few customers that
prices are likely to be high\footnote{It is true, as Evans and Wurster (2000) among others have observed,
that interactive multimedia can alleviate this problem by adapting itself
to the needs of particular students.  But this extensibility only goes so far.
Interactive multimedia courseware to teach papyrology will always be a niche
market, if it is economically feasible at all.  Even when courseware products
can be designed to accommodate a variety of learning styles, the resulting
code and content will be more complex.  The incremental costs of providing
this additional complexity must themselves be recovered somehow, and a
competing product could be produced and sold more cheaply by focusing more
tightly on the largest market segments. 
}.  Present-day universities cross-subsidize
less remunerative areas of study in the name of human knowledge as a whole,
but a radical unbundling of university teaching would eliminate these
cross-subsidies and the beneficial side-effects they produce. 

 

Communities, for their part, thrive on commonality.  Shared worldviews and
customs facilitate communication, coordination, and solidarity.  But just for
that reason, communities can become exclusionary.  Even when a discipline does
not overtly discriminate, its culture can be biased.  A strong disciplinary
culture might provide a ritual foundation for working together and sharing
knowledge, but it also makes life harder for people whose personality does
not fit the norm.  It is also likely to close off avenues of research that do
not fit in symbolic terms with the culture.  For example, a cultural emphasis
on abstraction is useful when it provides a common theoretical language, but
a field can be impoverished if it discounts more concrete styles of thought.
What is more, an excessive degree of integration within a disciplinary
community can suppress diversity of philosophy and organization among the
different university departments in the field (Alpert 1985: 269).  Every
community needs ongoing critical reflection about whether its culture and
practices are based on shared values that are legitimate, or whether they are
outdated or arbitrary. 

 

The commodity and community models suggest different ideas about knowledge
and therefore about lifelong learning.  Whereas the commodity model regards
knowledge as a "thing" that can be bought and sold in discrete units,
the community model regards knowledge as a provisional turn in a dialog.
Commodities are modules of capital, but communities shape the identities
of their participants and encourage emotional investments.  Commodities are
acquired in zero-sum transactions, but communities depend on lasting bonds of
reciprocity.  Each view has its elements of descriptive and normative truth.
Neither view is adequate. 

 

The commodity and community models each include self-regulatory mechanisms,
and these mechanisms have complementary strengths and limitations.  The
commodity model regulates itself through competition, but this self-regulatory
mechanism fails when consumers cannot readily obtain enough information about
the commodities and their sellers.  Asymmetrical information about the goods
can lead to situations of adverse selection, a type of market failure whereby
low-quality goods push out high-quality goods because consumers cannot
tell the difference until it is too late (Akerlof 1970).  The community
model regulates itself through peer review, but this mechanism fails when
narrow circles of like-minded peers are allowed to review one another for
extended periods.  The institutions of research are therefore designed to
provide several types of peer review, some of them more wide-ranging than
others.  (Examples include journal and conference refereeing, promotion
and tenure reviews, program planning at funding agencies, and articles
that senior scholars write about neighboring fields.)  Despite their surface
dissimilarities, each of these self-regulatory mechanisms has an internal
structure into which individuals must be socialized.  Both market cultures
(Smelser and Swedberg 1994) and research cultures (Humphreys 1997) vary across
national traditions. 

 

Both models present dangers of monopoly in a networked world.  Although the
Internet is often described as the herald of Adam Smith's idealized market,
globalization of both political economy and computer networks interact to
increase economies of scale.  The Internet makes it easier to coordinate
activity in a large global firm, and the increasing worldwide homogeneity of
language, law, and technology rewards firms that can distribute their fixed
costs on a global basis.  Other things being equal, the likely consequence is
increasing concentration in a variety of industries (Bryan, Fraser, Oppenheim,
and Rall 1999).  In the case of higher education, an organization such as
the Open University that is equipped to distribute educational services on
a global basis could emerge as a natural monopoly -- probably not for higher
education as a whole, but certainly for the segments where its greatest
competence lies, and where economies of scale are greatest.  (On the Open
University see Daniel (1996).) 

 

The community model can lead to monopoly because of the economic virtues
of enclosing a community of practice in a single organizational framework
(Brown and Duguid 1998b).  In a fragmented world, organizations that promote
innovation and learning do not capture the full value of their investment
because researchers in other organizations can benefit from the ideas as
they they become publicly known.  But if all of the world's geneticists (for
example) worked for a single organization, then only that organization would
be capable of benefitting from most of the public goods that the geneticists
create.  Thus, as communities of practice become more integrated through
real-time network connections, they may become increasingly distinct in
organizational terms as well. 

 

The institutions of commodities and communities are both decentralized in
many ways.  Markets operate through the interactions of numerous buyers and
sellers within a framework of legal rules and customs, and the overall result
of those interactions would be impossible to predict or design (Hayek 1963,
North 1990).  Academic communities can likewise operate with little central
coordination because of the incentives that peer review creates.  But in
each case, the picture is more complex than it seems.  Economies of scale
produce great concentrations of economic power, and one excellent example
is the small number of textbooks that dominate lower-division undergraduate
courses.  Network effects -- tendencies toward homogeneity that derive
from customers' needs for compatibility -- also produce concentrations of
economic power (Shapiro and Varian 1998).  Examples in the realm of market
commodities include stock exchanges, which thanks to the Internet are rapidly
consolidating on a global basis (Varian 2000), and standards for information
technology such as Microsoft Windows.  Examples in the realm of academic
communities include theoretical languages such as that of Michel Foucault,
which apart from their intellectual virtues become widely used because
they provide a lingua franca for researchers investigating diverse topics.
Both the commodity model and the community model, then, reflect a continuing
tension between forces for centralization and decentralization. 

 

Finally, the commodity and community models are similar in the considerable
incentive-shaping role of government.  The legal system, for example, sets
rules for markets, not only in the form of controversial regulations but also
in the historical development of commercial law.  Government research funding
is likewise a powerful force in the development of academic communities.  The
internal politics of civilian and military funding agencies obviously shapes
the research agenda, but more subtly the policy of awarding research grants
directly to researchers strengthens the role of academic departments at the
expense of the university administration (Alpert 1985). 

 

\section{Institutional Design } 

 

The institutional design of the university, then, has always combined elements
of the commodity and community models in complex ways.  Yet most of the
visionary proposals for the information-age university emphasize one model or
the other, or they mention both models without a clear plan for integrating
them.  Perelman (1992: 205-214), for example, advocates a radically
commoditized vision of education based on "microvouchers" for the purchase
of small increments of learning services.  Along the way, he also endorses
the community-of-practice theory (1992: 142-146).  Yet apprenticeship within
a community is a lasting commitment, not something that can be purchased in
increments.  Starting from the community-of-practice theory, Brown and Duguid
(1998a) envision competition among a plurality of "degree granting bodies"
(DGB's).  These DGB's occupy the entire spectrum from modern-day research
universities with physical campuses to distributed organizations with no
geographic locality, physical facilities, or permanent instructional staff.
Yet Brown and Duguid's proposal, in its generality, abstracts away from nearly
every question about the institutional relationship between commodity and
community in the new order.  It is not even clear that diverse institutional
forms can coexist (DiMaggio and Powell 1991). 

 

How will the university manage the tension between commodity and community
in a time of dramatic technological change?  It is too early to tell, but
we can do a thorough job of asking the question.  To start with, information
technology creates little that is new in the world.  Instead, applications
of information technology tend to amplify existing forces (Danziger, Dutton,
Kling, and Kraemer 1982).  People shape the technology to let them do more of
what they already have incentives to do.  The Internet is already being used
to amplify both the commodity and community aspects of the university.  These
trends will continue, and the two models of university life will need to find
some new accommodation. 

 

The shape of this new dispensation, however, is not foretold.  Many scenarios
are possible.  Marxists and capitalists, at least of the cruder varieties,
imagine progress as an inexorable march of commoditization.  Both ideologies
imagine that the endpoint of commoditization is utopia, and they both advocate
revolutions to that end, even if they disagree on the details.  The university
might undergo radical commoditization in many ways.  Here are four possible
scenarios: 

 

Political.  Legislatures may be persuaded that the commodity and community
models are opposites, that the community model represents the collectivist
past, and that the commodity model represents the libertarian future.  Any
number of government policies could help make this invidious tilt toward the
commodity model into a self-fulfilling prophesy. 

 

Technological.  Although quantitative improvements in information technology
are predictable, in qualitative terms the technology is exceedingly malleable.
The architecture of future educational technologies will be affected by the
interplay of many institutional factors.  The design of the wired university
is, in other words, political.  "Reinforcement politics" (Danziger, Dutton,
Kling, and Kraemer 1982) is the process by which the dominant political
coalition in an organization inscribes its interests into the workings of new
information technologies, and new technologies of higher education could be
shaped the same way. 

 

Economic.  For-profit education companies distribute commodities based on
public goods (namely, ideas) that were developed by universities that combine
the commodity and community models.  If these new competitors manage to
impose the commodity model on higher education as a whole, they will undermine
the mechanisms that produce the public goods.  The new competitors would be
parasitic upon the public goods without cross-subsidizing them. 

 

Cultural.  Many students, especially those who grew up in working-class
environments where discrete job skills put food on the table, may only be able
to imagine the commodity model.  This emphasis on vocational job skills is
strong among undergraduates even at public research universities.  If higher
education companies arise solely on commodity-model lines, then students who
do not understand the community aspects of their career -- being socialized
into a profession's ways, joining professional networks, participating in
collective processes for generating and propagating new knowledge -- may make
bad market choices that, taken in aggregate, destroy the hybrid institutions
of the university. 

 

Despite these fourfold dangers, however, the community model will not die,
for the simple reason that knowledge lives in communities.  Communities of
practice are spontaneous results of commonalities in people's lives.  They
are increasingly valued by industry (Wenger and Snyder 2000), and many of them
are well-institutionalized.  Research will continue to be organized around
them.  If the commodity and community models become disarticulated then severe
institutional pathologies may result, but it is hard to imagine either side
disappearing altogether. 

 

Indeed, a serious recommitment to the community model may address the hardest
problems of institutional transition.  The same peer-review mechanisms that
create powerful incentives to conduct original research might also be employed
to repair the university's oft-alleged bias against teaching (Cuban 1999).
The university community might found a "teaching literature" that operates
using the same principles as the research literature, with refereed teaching
journals to which any teacher can submit articles.  Different journals
would arise to reflect different philosophies of teaching, but each would
encourage faculty to design each course as a research project in itself,
thereby formalizing what Boyer (1990) has famously called "the scholarship of
teaching".  Promotion and tenure could based on the sum of one's teaching and
research productivity as measured by the journals, or even by their product,
as well as peer review of the individual's record as a whole. 

 

That said, institutional design is almost a contradiction in terms.  Social
theorists have increasingly come to see institutions as emergent phenomena
that sustain themselves and evolve over long periods through processes that
transcend the consciousness of any individual (e.g., Hodgson 1999, Powell
and DiMaggio 1991: 8-9).  New institutions do not take hold unless they are
congruent with the underlying culture, and institutional change projects face
a culture that has long been reinforced by the existing institutions (Offe
1996).  This is one reason why institutions often remain stable for centuries.
Old institutions can be discredited when their values collapse, or when they
cease to deliver practical benefits to their participants (Offe 1996).  But
new institutions require a broad consensus, and this consensus must run deep:
not just shared ideas but a shared way of life. 

 

New institutions evolve in various ways, but ultimately they are shaped
by contending interests.  A pure commodity model would suit many organized
interests, and a pure community model would no doubt suit many others.  Every
institution is a routinized accommodation among interests (Knight 1992), and
the institutional design of the networked university will arise in the same
way.  But interests can be misunderstood.  Those who wish the university to
survive will uphold the values of community against the invasion of commodity,
but they will also manage the tension rather than trying to eliminate it. 

 
\paragraph{Acknowledgements} 
I appreciate helpful comments by Paul Duguid and Camille Kirk. 

\appendix 

\section{Bibliography} 

 

Andrew Abbott, {\it The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of
Expert Labor}, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 

 

Philip E. Agre, Designing genres for new media, in Steven G. Jones, ed,
{\it CyberSociety 2.0: Revisiting CMC and Community}, Newbury Park, CA: Sage,
1998. 

 

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

 

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