Facing the Inevitable?

This contribution aims at showing some of the advantages of taking a novel, broad and systemic view on constitutive rules based on a failure oriented analysis, relying on the notion of impasse. Basically, impasses can descend by two main kinds of causes: either a mismatch between rules (how things should be done) and facts (how things are actually done), or an internal contradiction among rules. Given the definitional character of constitutive rules, one could say that they set a new “logical space” for action, and that impasses (both mismatches and internal contradictions) push the action out of such space, thus threatening the identity of the regulated interaction and coordination. It is fairly clear that constitutive impasses may endanger the life of an institution, on the other hand, in a lot of other situations similar issues can arise in systems of constitutive rules that are not fatal to them. The main claim here is that, in order to understand such situations, an analysis of the dynamic evolution of impasses from definitional to institutional, in social settings is necessary. What the proposed analysis will show is a stepwise process towards the “institutionalization” of the impasse. Both definitional and institutional impasses can be said to be ontological, though each in a different sense. What makes definitional impasse ontological are the rules of the institution, while what