An honest accounting of the institutions whose design has most directly determined who I am and what I have been able to become.
The Accounting
The institutions that have most directly shaped who I am are, in roughly chronological order of their influence: the Kenyan educational system, which provided the analytical and communicative capabilities that everything subsequent has rested on; the Nairobi community and social institutions that provided the cultural formation and the relational networks that shaped the person the educational system was educating; the United States federal government, which provided the institutional context within which a career was built and within which the institutional knowledge that this blog has drawn on was accumulated; the American immigration system, which shaped fourteen years of diaspora experience and the specific institutional encounters that produced the CR-1 analysis; and the set of informal institutions — the relationships, the professional networks, the intellectual communities — through which the analytical framework that this blog has developed was built and tested.
Each of these institutions is both a constraint and an enabler — a set of rules and resources that closed some possibilities and opened others, whose design reflected specific governance choices that were not made with my specific development in mind but that shaped it anyway. The Kenyan educational system's examination-based structure constrained development in some dimensions and produced capabilities in others. The federal government's civil service architecture constrained the career in specific ways while providing the stability and the institutional access that the analytical work required. The American immigration system constrained family formation in ways that its design did not intend to constrain but did. In each case, the institution's design — the choices that produced its specific rules and structures — determined the specific possibilities and constraints that shaped the specific life.
The institutions that shaped me did not shape me with my development as their objective. They shaped me because I navigated them, and the specific design choices embedded in each shaped the specific choices available to me as I navigated them. This is the personal experience of the institutional analysis claim: that institutions shape everything, including the specific people who are trying to analyse them.
Discussion