Virtual Institutions

New information technologies have created new possibilities in resolving long-standing debates in social organization. The debates involving buying versus leasing, business versus government, and markets versus hierarchies captured intellectual imagination, and dominated public consciousness for centuries. All of these debates involve a dichotomy of stability versus flexibility. Three sets of new information technologies have the potential to resolve these debates through new design architectures for social institutions that combine the advantages of both extremes without the disadvantages of either. The technologies are electronic services, service semantics, and ontologies, sensors and sensor networks, and modular design and virtual organization. The resulting architecture is a multi-dimensional and inter-organizational hierarchy, with machine-readable and machine searchable semantics for components, with a modular design that contains compatible and substitutable components at all levels, and with organizational components that are automatically tracked, measured, and evaluated against detailed inter-organizational constraints, plans, and goals