People participate in families, friendships, partnerships, workplaces, schools, healthcare systems, communities, markets, governments and other institutions. These systems create opportunities, obligations, expectations, responsibilities, consequences and sources of support.

This section is not meant to catalogue institutions by sector. Its object is the relationship between the person and the people and systems around them.

Who is available? Who can be trusted? Who has expertise? Who has authority? Who controls a resource? Who carries responsibility? Which institution can solve the problem? Which one can create it? What happens when the person needs help? What happens when they refuse? Who absorbs the consequence?

These questions change human functioning because participation is relational. Capacity can only be expressed through the structures that permit, demand, reward, constrain or substitute for action.

This section can be grounded in two mature literatures. Social-determinants research shows that access to power, money and resources affects health and opportunity; ICF includes support, relationships, services, systems and policies among environmental factors. The project’s added value is to organize these features around what they change in the person’s functional demands and available support.

Because functioning is distributed, social and institutional position matters. Access, authority, dependency and exposure to consequences affect what a person can realistically do and what they must carry personally.

Position within social and institutional systems can shape access to resources, opportunities, authority and support.

Position describes where a person sits within relational, institutional, economic and developmental structures.

It shapes what they can access, what they are expected to carry, what they can influence and what happens when something goes wrong.

A senior employee and an entry-level worker may enter the same organization but have radically different authority, information, flexibility and exposure. Two patients may have the same diagnosis but different insurance, transport, family support and ability to negotiate care. Two parents may face the same childcare need but have different networks and resources.

Position is not a trait. It is relational.

That makes it essential to any serious analysis of capacity. Ignoring position can result in structurally different lives as though they presented identical demands.

The general claim is strongly supported: social position and access to resources structure exposure, options and outcomes. What remains programme-specific is the proposed ‘position’ architecture combining responsibility, authority, dependency and consequence exposure. Those components should be operationalized separately before being treated as one validated construct.

Responsibility, authority and dependency should be assessed separately because they do not always align.

Human functioning takes place inside asymmetries.

Children depend on adults. Employees depend on organizations. Patients depend on professionals and systems. Citizens depend on public institutions. Caregivers may depend on services they cannot control. People can have high responsibility and low authority, or substantial authority with limited personal consequence.

These arrangements matter because capacity cannot be deployed where action is prohibited, permission is withheld or resources are controlled elsewhere.

A science of human capacity therefore needs to represent authority and dependency explicitly. Otherwise, analysis can treat non-action as incapacity when the person did not have the power to act.

The strongest external support comes from structural and social-determinants science: power and resource distribution change people’s options and exposure. The exact claim that responsibility–authority mismatch constitutes a distinct human-capacity burden is plausible but needs direct empirical testing.