From Intent to Decision: Observing the Translation of Purpose in Institutional Decision Systems (Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Patagonia)

How do institutions act on abstract purposes such as “improving health” or “saving the planet”? This paper argues that they do not act on such purposes directly, but only on the representations into which those purposes are translated. As institutional intent moves across governance layers, it is reformulated into criteria, categories, and signals that make alternatives comparable and decisions executable. The analysis develops a representational account of institutional decision-making. Institutions are conceptualized as systems that depend on commensuration: heterogeneous aims must be rendered into comparable forms in order to support evaluation and allocation. This transformation is structurally necessary, but it also alters the meaning of the concepts being operationalized. Decisions are therefore made on representations of purpose rather than on purpose itself. Using a minimal and replicable traceability method, the paper reconstructs how institutional purpose is translated across publicly available governance artefacts in three cases: Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Patagonia. The analysis shows that as representations stabilize within decision systems, they become the effective objects of decision-making. This gives rise to a systematic divergence between originating intent and enacted criteria, referred to as translation drift. The paper contributes to social ontology and the philosophy of social science by identifying a structural condition of institutional action: what can be represented in decision-relevant form determines what can be selected. Institutional coherence is therefore not a property of outcomes or stated intentions, but of the relation between originating concepts and the representations through which decisions are made. By demonstrating that these transformations are empirically observable in governance artefacts, the paper connects philosophical accounts of representation and commensuration with the operational structure of real-world decision systems.