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# System prepended metadata

title: Toward An Extitutional Vocabulary

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# Toward An Extitutional Vocabulary

Governance in practice is messy. It’s difficult to observe all the forces that influence a given instance of the exercise of governance authority. Polycentricity was an early recognition of this messiness, in detailing how many overlapping, nested, and distinct spheres of governance authority tend to influence outcomes in a given moment. Separating the formally articulated rules, institutions, from less formal yet undeniably important influences in social ordering like norms and culture is another move in this direction. Institutions are now well-recognized as major influences of social outcomes, alongside these other long-studied softer forms of governance. In great part because of their tractability to ex-post identification, institutions have been subject to an extensive variety of analytical and empirical interrogation of their effect on social outcomes of interest. But while institutional scholarship has a robust vocabulary surrounding the means by which organizations constitute themselves and then institute rules to which their members are subject, there is no cohesive terminology that captures the many ways in which governance outcomes are shaped by less formal social groups. To give a single example, within any organization, there are sub-groups that while not formalized as a subsidiary unit, greatly shape outcomes. Moreover, many informal social groups external to a given organization nonetheless influence outcomes internal to the organization. 

If norms and culture do not behave according to institutional axioms, then there is a need for a different vocabulary to better characterize the less formalized relationships that are so important for social ordering in practice. Put most directly, from what do norms and culture emerge? This substrate is the essence of human interpersonal activity. All humans belong to social groups that greatly shape their identity, and exert governance force on them even though no formally constituted bond of governance authority exists. A norm in a particular instance emerges from the individually held preferences for others’ behavior among those who happen to be present when an instance of behavior that could trigger a normative response occurs. A cultural tendency toward individualism or collectivism is similarly an expression of something deeper that is producing that cultural tendency. It is this substrate that we deem extitutional. 

Extitutions are the sets of social groups defined by shared identity with respect to some central referential external to any one of those individuals. Sports and music fans, aficionados of fine wine, and cryptocurrency advocates (to give but a few examples among many) all share an intense passion that unifies them in ways that are orthogonal to the organizations of which these same individuals are members. Extitutions are thus deeply entangled with institutions in any social situation involving the exercise of governance authority. This means to understand governance, we need to understand both institutions and extitutions, and as crucially, the complex way in which the two interact to influence outcomes in any given social context.