We ended yesterday's class talking about how social media technologies can be a threat to established institutions. This leads me to want to spend a little bit of time delineating the difference between an institution and an organization. One of my favorite books is Douglass North's "Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance." He is an economic historian and a simplified way to think about institutions is to imagine a set of formal and informal constraints that help reduce the frictions of economic activity. So, at a meta level, institutions are one level higher than organizations.
So how would you categorize the following story? Fired for Complaining on Twitter, Employee Takes to Youtube. Is it Web 2.0 impacting an organization or this a precursor to something we can observe at the institutional level?
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