Institutional Traps of Digitalization: Hybridization of Bureaucratic Practices and New Technologies in Universities

The article analyzes the institutional traps that emerge during the digital transformation of Russian public universities. In contrast to the technocratic discourse that views digitalization as a linear enhancement of operational efficiency, this study proposes an economic-sociological framework integrating V.M. Polterovich’s concept of institutional traps, M. Granovetter’s principle of embeddedness, P. Bourdieu’s theory of fields and habitus, and the Schumpeterian model of innovation dynamics. The central thesis is that forced digitalization, when superimposed on the persistent patterns of the Soviet bureaucratic model – centralization, formalism, prioritizing accountability over substance, and the closed nature of personnel procedures – results not in transformation but in hybridization. A stable institutional trap of “digital bureaucratism” is formed: new technological tools do not overcome old dysfunctions but, being embedded in the previous logic of governance, paradoxically strengthen and legitimize informal hierarchies, masking them as objective algorithmic procedures. Methodologically, the work is theoretical and conceptual in nature. Empirical materials – studies on academic inbreeding, precarity, the faculty labor market etc. – are used not as an independent basis for statistical hypothesis testing, but in an illustrative and verificatory function, to support and specify the proposed theoretical constructs regarding the mechanisms of the trap. Based on such secondary analysis, the key mechanisms are revealed: the construction of inflated requirements, the ritualization of procedures, the effect of “digital inbreeding”, and the blockage of practitioners’ inflow. Particular attention is paid to the conflict among three types of rationality – instrumental-algorithmic, professional-expert, and bureaucratic. It is shown that in the Russian academic field, bureaucratic rationality systematically suppresses alternative logics, using digital tools to strengthen rather than dismantle established hierarchies, and possesses systemic advantages for this: institutional embeddedness, resource control, coordination effects, and mimetic capacity. The article concludes that the digital transformation of Russian universities is not a technical but a profound socio-political process, the stakes of which are control over access to the academic profession and the distribution of power resources within the university field.