Material, Epistemic, and Normative Institutional Orientations: A Common Vocabulary for Composing Social Theory

Integrating fragmented social theories requires a common vocabulary that is comprehensive, generatively irreducible, persistent, and configurable, so that theories can be mapped without distortion and composed across frameworks. This paper identifies Material (M), Epistemic (E), and Normative (N) institutional orientations as a triad that satisfy these requirements. These orientations arise through the coordination of actions motivated by actor-level drives, while remaining distinct from those drives. This paper develops configurational space and locates major types of social theory as projections of that space. A worked example connects Streeck’s deferral devices to Habermas’s instrumental rationality, demonstrating the framework’s compositional payoff.