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Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to make a critical analysis of the views put forward by Claudio Gnoli (2018) in this paper concerning philosophical problems in library and information science (LIS).

The paper presents the basic ideas in Gnoli (2018) and discusses the set of basic assumptions, concepts and conclusions put forward.

It is argued that the idea of the theory of levels is basically sound, but we do not need to consider the material world, the mental world (minds) and the world of mentefacts as three different worlds. They represent different levels with different kinds of emergent properties in the world. Further, although the concepts of artifacts and mentefacts are useful, there are other terms within LIS, such as document, work and object that have been influential and should be discussed in this context. It is also argued that subjective vs objective knowledge is often confused with private vs public knowledge, which is problematic. Finally, it is claimed that the cognitive view and the “sociological view” are not about two different levels of reality but are competing views about the same reality.

The paper clarifies some aspects of the analytical framework of domain analysis and adds to the developments of the philosophical dimensions of information within LIS.