Within constituencies, institutional interaction may be competitive, collaborative or a combination of both. In addition, this interaction may involve institutions of the same type (e.g., schools) or of different types (e.g. schools, governments and companies). It may take place at local, national or international level. Mechanisms of collaboration may include virtual networks, business alliances, or others, but there might be constituencies with no such arrangements. The balance between collaborative or competitive interaction will fundamentally affect the evolution and dynamism of the resulting sociotechnical constituency. For example, competitive interaction between companies may stimulate technological dynamism by injecting a sense of urgency and threat. It may simultaneously lead to fragmentation of resources – and discourage constituents from addressing problems (often long-term) which are perceived as being beyond the resources of each individual constituent. On the other hand, collaboration may counteract this harmful fragmentation of resources, but it demands a careful approach; each institution and even individual is likely to have different interests, imperatives and expectations, dictated by its history, its current activities, and possibly by its ethical stance as well as by idiosyncratic practices. It is possible to regard institutional interaction as the interaction of a number of micro-cultures.
In this analysis, the extent to which any given technology such as ICT is diffused and successfully implemented is conditional upon the relative success or failure of the sociotechnicalconstituency creating and promoting it. The success or failure of the sociotechnical constituency in turn depends largely on the ability of the constituents to strike a balance between theirindividual interests and the development of the constituency as a whole.