The Quest for Coherence between Institutions and Technologies in Infrastructures
By M. Finger, Jos Groenewegen, R. Künneke. 2005
145 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article elaborates on the possible interrelations between the technical and institutional coordination of infrastructures. There is indeed a need for coherence between both in order to safeguard a satisfactory functioning in terms of economic performance, guarantee of public values and technical system integrity. It is argued that the ongoing discussion on the liberalization of various infrastructures focuses very much on institutional changes, including market restructuring towards competition and privatization. The technical repercussions of these institutional changes are often neglected. On the other hand, technological change might also have very fundamental consequences for organizations and institutions. Building on the idea of a co-evolution between institutions and technologies, we define very simplified technical and institutional coordination mechanisms. By comparing both, we are able to determine their coherence and relate this to infrastructure performance. In this way, we provide a novel attempt to relate institutional arrangements to the technical network-specificities of infrastructures. This offers a different perspective on the organization of these sectors and a new explanation of their performance. We illustrate our arguments by way of cases from the electricity and air transport sectors. Implications for theory and policy conclude this article.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Media Technology, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48ab7fee8a62f37a85d511cb7eb974598b91a7b9
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In Economics and Econometrics
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Transformation of Infrastructures: Sector Characteristics and Implications for Fundamental Change (2011, background): “In infrastructure sectors, technical components are often highly interrelated and a proper coordination and functioning of the systems requires organizational and institutional structures that take these particularities into account (Finger et al. 2005; Künneke et al. 2010).”
- Infrastructure transformation as a socio-technical process — Implications for the governance of energy distribution networks in the UK (2015, unknown): “In the specific case of infrastructure based sectors such as energy distribution, but also including transport and water, we must also consider a number of specific techno-economic characteristics [26,55] which mean that these sectors in particular ‘typically evolve gradually and with only increment”