This book addresses the question of how societies empower and control individuals to behave in a ‘correct’ way.

It describes installations in which, even though they are creatures of free will, humans are induced to behave in an overall predictable and standardized manner. Restaurants, escalators, shoe shops, cinemas, family dinners, basketball matches, toilets, voting booths, intensive care units and open-plan offices are some examples of installations. They have a momentum of their own. They elicit, frame, channel and control individual behaviour. The chapters show how to analyse installations, how they work, how they are constructed, how they evolve and how to change them.

Installations have been partly described in social science under various names: behavioural settings, ‘dispositif’, frame, etc. Installation theory is their first systematic analysis from the pragmatic perspective of design and intervention.

The book provides a simple and robust framework, grounded in extensive empirical analyses of real cases.

This first chapter introduces the problem with some simple examples (air travel, road traffic). It then clarifies our research questions (how humans manage to accomplish complex tasks in society, how social regulation is implemented in practice). It also provides an overview of the book’s content and an outline of each chapter.