Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Memorial Prize-winning work on “the analysis of economic governance, especially the commons” scaffolds an argument for an institutional approach to computational social creativity. Several Ostrom-inspired “creativity design principles” are explored and exemplified to illustrate the computational and institutional structures that are employed in current and potential comput...

We propose an evolutionary theory of institutional persistence and change. Many institutional changes are decentralized, with a large number of private actors informally adopting new practices that are later confirmed by changes in formal governance structures. For example, land tenure norms, conventional crop shares, inheritance practices, and traditional property rights all are informal insti...

were invaluable. Comments from two anonymous referees were very helpful in revising the paper.

More than a decade has passed since Herbrand’s theorem was first generalized to arbitrary institutions, enabling in this way the development of the logic-programming paradigm over formalisms beyond the conventional framework of relational first-order logic. Despite the mild assumptions of the original theory, recent developments have shown that the institution-based approach cannot capture cons...

In this paper we discuss how institutional ethnography, a feminist materialist method of inquiry, can be use to study the social institution of housing. We begin providing a brief description of institutional ethnography and then recount how we are applying this approach in a study of changes in housing in the United States in the twentieth century. For purposes of illustration, we summarize tw...

Theories with hidden sorts provide a setting to study the idea of behaviour and behavioural equivalence of elements. But there are variants on the notion of theory: many sorted algebras, order sorted algebras and so on; we would like to use the theory of institutions to develop ideas of some generality. We formulate the notion of behavioural equivalence in a more abstract and categorical way, a...

The paper considers problems and possibilities connected with governing and realising the ―transition to sustainability‖—or at least to a more deeply resilient energy system. Conceptually its focus is on neo-institutional analysis and critical discourse analysis and the development of a discourse-institutional perspective. The first strand of the paper outlines the limitations of and potential ...