Information systems technology grounded on institutional facts - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 82

of customary practice is called background by Searle. Background is a significant aspect
of any context.
Institutional facts are a subclass of what Searle calls social facts . Social facts are informal,
while institutional facts are formal acts of formally constituted institutions. That my
nickname is 'Bob' is a social fact, but that my official name is 'Robert Michael Colomb'
is also an institutional fact. 'A is a friend of B' is a social fact, but 'A is the spouse of B'
is an institutional fact as well. 'A is influential' is a social fact, but 'A is prime minister'
is also an institutional fact. The institution or network of institutions that provides the
context for institutional facts is a complex system of social behaviour. Different institu-
tional environments have different informal patterns and norms of behaviour ( culture )
that are the background aspect of the context of the institutional facts it creates and
maintains.
One key characteristic of institutional facts, at least in our present society, is that they
are designed to be completely characterised by the classes to which they belong. Every
name is completely characterised by the speech act of registration with a birth certificate
as record of the institutional fact of having been named. Every purchase is completely
characterised by the various classes by which the supplier and purchaser do business.
Every student is completely characterised by the program and courses in which they
have enrolled. This is the defining feature of modern bureaucracy. This is the reason
people worry about 'being just a number'.
Nearly all information systems are used to store, retrieve, and now often create institu-
tional facts. Society agrees that nothing is relevant except that 'brute fact X counts as
institutional fact Y in context C'. There are a finite number of well-defined context types.
All contexts of the same type are the same, so all institutional facts resulting from these
contexts are the same. To make this work requires a highly disciplined form of behaviour,
and a rigorous enforcement of the framing rules defining the contexts. This is the reason
for the complex system of commercial law, standardisation of accounting rules, require-
ments for audit, and so on. But the standardisation also relies on the informal behaviour
patterns and norms constituting the background.
That institutional facts are completely characterised by the classes constituting the op-
erating rules for the institutions creating them corresponds exactly with the assumption
underlying logical databases, that their contents are completely characterised by the
classes of which they are instances. I submit that this is the reason for the overwhelming
dominance of logical database technology in information systems.
In the following we are going to need some perhaps unfamiliar terminology. An ontology
is a representation of the world with which a system is concerned. The rules of chess or
cricket are an ontology. For an information system, the ontology consists of its data
model, business rules, and a characterisation of the individuals with which the system
deals. An ontology is transcendent if it contains the constituting rules for the relevant
behavioural interactions, and the routine behavioural interactions cannot change their
constituting rules. The rules for chess or cricket or the grammars of programming lan-
guages are transcendent. An ontology is immanent if the routine behavioural interactions
can change the rules. Human natural language is an immanent ontology, since the
grammar rules are patterns abstracted from practice and practice can change them, albeit
slowly. The ontology of news topics in a newsfeed change as events happen in the world.
The ontology given by the directory structure of a person's personal computer is imman-
ent, because the user of the computer is free to change the directory structure.