Quote from Wenger on institutions, practices and prescription

‘But if we believe that people in organizations contribute to organizational goals by participating inventively in practices that can never be fully captured by institutionalized processes, then we will minimize prescription, suspecting that too much of it discourages the very inventiveness that makes practices effective. …If this seems like common sense, then we must ask ourselves why our institutions so often seem, not merely to fail to bring about these outcomes, but to work against them with relentless zeal. Of course, some of the blame can justifiably be attributed to conflicts of interest, power struggles, and even human wickedness…’ (p. 10, 1997)