Society & Institutions

Human life unfolds within systems that organize rights, services, obligations, education, work, care, administration and civic participation. Participation requires interaction with institutions whose rules, interfaces and expectations often exist before the i

HUMAN CAPACITY

Society & Institutions

Participation in contemporary life requires interaction with community, civic and institutional systems.

a group of people walking down a sidewalk next to a body of water

This domain concerns navigating major life areas, services, rights and obligations, community participation and civic systems. The paper retains it provisionally at a higher contextual level because institutions vary enormously across cultures and societies.

That uncertainty is scientifically useful. It forces the website to distinguish the recurring requirement — participation in organized social systems — from the specific forms those systems take. It also creates a direct bridge to research on access, bureaucracy, rights, public services, institutional literacy, power and governance.

Established science already shows that institutions can impose functional demands. Administrative-burden research describes learning costs, compliance costs and psychological costs in citizen–state interactions, including digital services. That gives this domain an external measurement vocabulary for part of what the initiative calls institutional navigation.

Evidence & scientific lineage

World Health Organization. Social determinants of health. Conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including access to power, money and resources. WHO — Social determinants of health

Herd, P., DeLeire, T., Harvey, H., & Moynihan, D. P. (2013). Shifting Administrative Burden to the State: The Case of Medicaid Take-Up. Public Administration Review, 73, S69–S81. DOI: 10.1111/puar.12114

Christensen, J., Aarøe, L., Baekgaard, M., Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2020). Human Capital and Administrative Burden: The Role of Cognitive Resources in Citizen-State Interactions. Public Administration Review, 80(1), 127–136. DOI: 10.1111/puar.13134