W. Richard Scott

W. Richard Scott is an American sociologist and a foundational figure in institutional theory, whose work examines how organizations conform to and shape the institutional environments in which they operate. His most influential book, Institutions and Organizations (1995), proposes that institutions rest on three pillars — the regulative (rules and laws), the normative (social norms and expectations), and the cultural-cognitive (shared beliefs and categories) — that together constrain and enable social action. Scott's framework moves beyond early institutional theory's focus on cultural isomorphism to include the coercive and mimetic pressures that drive organizations to become similar.

Scott's work is particularly relevant to the analysis of algorithmic institutions because his three-pillar framework can be extended to algorithmic governance. The regulative pillar corresponds to the formal rules encoded in algorithmic systems; the normative pillar corresponds to the industry standards and best practices that guide algorithmic design; and the cultural-cognitive pillar corresponds to the taken-for-granted assumptions about what algorithms can and should do. The shift from human to algorithmic institutions does not eliminate these pillars; it transforms them. The regulative pillar becomes opaque, the normative pillar becomes proprietary, and the cultural-cognitive pillar becomes naturalized through the rhetoric of neutrality and optimization.