English integrated edition · v003
Chapter 17. Institutionalization: How Differences Are Formatted, Judged, and Connected to Consequences That Can Be Put into Effect
The processing involved in institutionalization cannot be separated from specific people, materials, rules, and procedures. Household registration, social insurance, rental filings, medical records, labor contracts, IOUs, and application forms, together with the people and procedures involved in submission, review, supplementation and correction, determination, and implementation, connect previously scattered differences in life to processing chains within which they can be extracted repeatedly. Different procedures have their own processing sequences. The steps they may involve include someone submitting materials, someone preserving and checking them, someone acting under authorization to request additional documents or explanations, and someone making a determination under the procedure, followed by schools, workplaces, courts, communities, or administrative stages connecting the results to the corresponding arrangements. School enrollment, work-related injuries, assistance, debt recovery, and loans each require different materials to be extracted at different times. Materials do not have the same operative weight in concrete events. Whether materials corroborate one another, whether applicants can supplement them, how handlers explain their reasons, and whether opportunities for review or complaint exist all affect whether a relational chain continues, pauses, or opens up again.
A child's school enrollment, recognition of a worker's injury as work-related, or debt recovery does not stop at facts that have already occurred in life. The materials different institutions require, the formats they recognize, and the people entitled to make judgments determine which differences can enter processing and which remain outside its scope for the time being. The same matter may also be treated as different problems at different processing stages: residence can become enrollment materials, an injury can become medical records and responsibility for a work-related injury, and a loan can become evidence and an application for enforcement. On the basis of material requirements, rules, and procedures, handlers determine which parts of life can be verified, interpreted, and connected to consequences in the current event. Life itself has not disappeared in these transformations.
Institutions are concretely distributed across nodes that carry, pass on, and process differences; they cannot be treated as scenery standing outside social activity. Household registers, medical records, contracts, attendance records, rental filings, community certificates, IOUs, and written judgments are not kept in the same place or by the same people. Institutional nodes are precisely the places where these storage locations, handlers, and rules are connected. Schools, hospitals, workplaces, courts, communities, and administrative departments are not the same kind of node. They differ in how they preserve and check materials, in the procedures they can initiate, and in the consequences to which they can connect.
A child reaching school age does not mean that any school can allocate a place directly on the basis of age. School personnel examine enrollment materials, handle application verification and the allocation of places, and establish student registration records after initial enrollment or update them during subsequent transfers. Depending on local admission policy, the year, and the category of admission, the applicable materials concerning household registration, proof of residence, the parents' relevant social insurance, and rental filings must be checked by the corresponding personnel within the prescribed time. Available admission places are a concrete condition of these arrangements, not materials to be submitted. Existing student registration materials can be provided in applicable situations such as progression to the next level of schooling or school transfers; they are not a prerequisite for every initial enrollment. The facts of the parents' work and residence are thereby brought into the same processing chain.
Other forms of processing likewise depend on the division of work among specific nodes. Workplaces preserve attendance records; court personnel handling debts encounter evidence, judgments, and enforcement applications; community personnel issue or do not issue certificates. A worker's pain after an injury is real, but work-injury processing also requires medical personnel to produce medical records, diagnoses, and materials concerning the injury, and workplace personnel to explain attendance, the labor relation, and the course of the accident. The social insurance administrative department verifies the labor relation, the time and place of the injury, and testimony, and determines whether the injury is work-related. When the conditions are met, a work-capacity appraisal committee then determines the grade of functional impairment on the basis of expert opinions. Whether the different nodes connect affects subsequent arrangements for responsibility, compensation, and recuperation. [F01]
Understanding institutions as a system of nodes does not mean that nodes act on their own. Every act of registration, verification, explanation, review, or implementation requires specific people to handle matters under authorization, material requirements, and procedural conditions. Even within the same institution, there may be different departments, different opinions, and differing scope for supplementation and correction. After materials are preserved, handlers must still identify their form, time, who or what they concern, and their use according to the rules. Schools, hospitals, workplaces, courts, communities, administrative departments, and appraisal bodies do not draw on materials in the same way. Their respective scopes of authorization also mean that the same material may be assigned different meanings at different nodes. Tracing these concrete positions shows how differences are passed on and avoids treating institutions as an autonomous force detached from people and materials.
Institutionalization is the process in which differences in life are preserved and formatted by institutional nodes, undergo rule-governed extraction, authorized interpretation, weight assignment through eligibility, exclusion through thresholds, and procedural determination, and are connected to consequences that can be put into effect and to institutional write-back. This process first gives residence, labor, injury, borrowing, care, or hardship in life a place in materials that can be preserved. Household registers, student files, medical records, social insurance records, contracts, attendance sheets, IOUs, written judgments, and community certificates are all concrete positions that carry differences, rather than the facts of life themselves.
Preservation, formatting, extraction, interpretation, eligibility, thresholds, determination, implementation, and write-back each occupy an irreplaceable place. Preservation allows materials to remain for later use; formatting determines the shape in which materials are identified; extraction occurs in a particular event; interpretation is limited by authorization and evidence; eligibility and thresholds concern, respectively, the opening and cutoff of channels; and determination and implementation decide whether processing can enter actual arrangements. Only by distinguishing them can we see which link changed the consequences.
Institutionalization does not mean covering life with rules. After materials are preserved, they must still fit the occasion of use; after they meet the format, authorized personnel must still explain them under the rules; and after a determination is formed, whether it can connect to school places, assistance, compensation, penalties, or enforcement remains to be seen. Only after differences in life undergo formatting, authorized interpretation, weight assignment through eligibility, and procedural determination do they connect to consequences that can be put into effect. The chain of institutionalization is neither a one-way straight line nor a fate fixed as soon as something is registered. Registration may open an eligibility channel, while a gap in materials may halt an application. Supplementation and correction, investigation, arbitration, review, appeal, or reconsideration may subject an earlier judgment to renewed examination against materials and rules. This is a process of continual connection across multiple nodes that may also reopen.
Before facts of life enter institutional processing, they often have to be written, substantiated, or recorded as materials that can be submitted. Long-term residence, continuous work, bodily pain, family hardship, and acquaintances' knowledge do not automatically enter school, hospital, court, or assistance procedures in the same way. A family has lived in a city for years, with the parents working locally and the child growing up there; these experiences can be real. Yet when the family applies for school enrollment, depending on local admission policy, the year, and the category of admission, some materials concerning household registration, residence, social insurance, rental filings, or existing student registration may be checked together. Review personnel usually need this information to process the application under existing requirements.
Materials form at particular times. Rent, work, injury, borrowing, and care may occur continuously in life. Parents preserve rental information; workplaces retain attendance records; hospitals create medical records; coworkers provide testimony; community personnel issue statements about residence or hardship. These materials may not be complete when the facts of life occur, yet existing records are often required only when an enrollment, work-injury, assistance, or litigation event arrives. Whether those concerned can retrieve, supplement, or explain materials later affects whether their lived experience can enter a procedure. But materials arriving later do not erase the facts of residence, labor, injury, or debt that already existed. Materials supplied afterward do not rewrite life as it has already happened, but they may change whether handlers can verify, compare, and make determinations about the relevant differences.
Institutionalization begins with the formation of procedural material. Differences in residence are carried by rental filings, proof of residence, community materials, and the like; circumstances of poverty are carried by proof of income, information on household members, records of property status, and assistance applications; and educational experience is carried by student registration records, grades, disciplinary measures, transfer records, and records of determinations of eligibility for progression to the next level of schooling.
Labor and injury each have their own material carriers in institutional processing. Labor becomes labor contracts, social insurance records, attendance sheets, and wage-payment records; injury becomes medical records, diagnoses, examination reports, and appraisal materials. After a worker is injured, medical records and diagnoses can preserve a record of the injury. Labor contracts, attendance records, the time of injury, the workplace location, coworkers' testimony, and appraisal materials may separately carry the labor relation, the circumstances at the scene, and the determination of responsibility. The absence of any one of them does not mean that the injury never happened.
In debt processing, debt must be rendered as procedural material. Acquaintances knowing that a loan occurred may not be sufficient for court proceedings to move directly into enforcement. IOUs, transfer records, chat logs, witness testimony, materials for filing suit, judgments, and enforcement applications are extracted and examined at different procedural stages. [F03]
The formation of procedural material does not mean that facts of life are preserved unchanged. Institutions segment facts of life into formats that allow registration, verification, comparison, and determination. Different kinds of material, including registration forms, certificates, medical records, applications, and files, require the corresponding fields, times, parties concerned, addresses, numbers, or attachments according to their respective formats. Only then can reviewers confirm who provided the materials, when they were formed, and whether they corroborate one another, and bring different applications into the same procedure for verification and comparison.
A format makes materials comparable while also drawing the boundaries of comparison. Rental filings can record an address, a term, and the registered relation, yet may not present the full course of a family's long-term shared life. Medical records can present a diagnosis and the condition of an injury, yet may not fully present work arrangements, workplace responsibility, and pressures at the time of injury. A format is not wholly a distortion, nor is the content preserved through it the whole of life. Its necessity and its selectivity jointly constitute the conditions of institutional processing; neither can be concealed.
Formatting segments reality. It makes some differences clear while leaving others without a voice. Family relations, a landlord's attitude, pressures on coworkers, difficulties after illness, and local evaluations may not enter fields on a form with equal fullness. Situations in which a landlord is unwilling to cooperate, community personnel do not issue certificates, coworkers are afraid to testify, a borrower cannot repay because of illness or unpaid wages, or a student experiences exclusion before being disciplined may affect circumstances in life. Yet these situations may not fit the fields that a particular form can immediately record and verify. Not having been formatted does not mean that they never happened.
Handlers do not extract all materials under the rules every day with the same intensity. A family ordinarily rents housing, works, shops for groceries, and pays water and electricity bills; these facts can continue to exist. When school enrollment arrives, whether the family can connect to the school's processing chain still depends on whether the materials required by the rules have been preserved, submitted, and recognized in time. Depending on local admission policy, the year, and the category of admission, some materials concerning household registration, rental filings, residence, social insurance, or existing student registration may be checked together.
Different events open different windows onto materials. Once the determination of a work-related injury begins, medical records, materials concerning the labor relation, attendance records, proof concerning the scene, testimony, or materials on occupational-disease diagnosis and appraisal enter the processing chain according to the relevant issues in dispute and procedures. Work-capacity appraisal, conducted when its conditions are met, follows a separate procedure. A court proceeds to enforcement on the basis of legally enforceable documents, such as judgments, rulings, and mediation documents that have taken legal effect, and the statutory conditions for initiating enforcement. An enforcement application must be submitted under the corresponding procedure. Property leads supplied by the applicant help identify property available for enforcement, and the court also has statutory powers to make inquiries. The applicant's prior possession of property leads cannot be made a necessary threshold for initiating enforcement in every case.
For assistance applications such as reviews for the minimum subsistence guarantee, household members living together, household income, and household property status must be investigated and checked. Villagers' or residents' committees may assist with investigation and explanation in accordance with the law, but a community certificate cannot be made a universally required threshold. Materials obtainable through government service platforms must not be required to be submitted again. In loan processing, handlers may retrieve records of real property, credit history, income, marital status, and debt.
What institutions recognize is not all differences, but differences extracted from materials by specific handlers according to rules on prescribed occasions. When a difference gains weight depends on the event, the time when materials are submitted, the handlers' responsibilities, and procedural requirements, rather than on a particular material naturally dominating all of life.
Rule-governed extraction does not pass a total judgment on what is true or false in life; it only defines which materials can be processed at that moment within a particular procedure. Differences that are not extracted do not thereby disappear, nor do the materials extracted amount to reality in full.
The same material serves different uses on different occasions. Medical records preserve diagnoses in a hospital. In work-injury determination, they are checked together with proof of the labor relation, materials concerning the scene, and the like according to the issues in dispute; when the conditions for appraisal are met, they are separately used for work-capacity appraisal. Proof of income may bear on family hardship in an assistance application, while in loan processing it may be placed within another set of eligibility criteria. The current event, rules, handlers' responsibilities, and subsequent procedures jointly delimit the meaning of materials; the document itself cannot determine it once and for all.
Materials do not arrange consequences on their own, and institutions are not materials speaking for themselves. Only when medical records, contracts, community certificates, IOUs, and rental filings are placed within concrete review or determination procedures, and authorized actors interpret and explain their meaning under the rules, can they possibly connect to eligibility, responsibility, or enforcement. Specifically, school personnel interpret enrollment materials; medical personnel interpret medical records; social insurance administrative departments judge the connection to work and other matters involved in work-injury determination; work-capacity appraisal committees assess the degree of impairment in work-related functioning and in the ability to care for oneself on the basis of expert opinions; workplace personnel explain attendance and labor relations; judges and relevant court personnel examine evidence; and community and administrative personnel handle residence, hardship, and eligibility conditions. These responsibilities are not distributed equally.
Community personnel may understand the same material concerning long-term residence as proof of stable residence, while school reviewers may still regard it as incomplete. The same medical records can preserve information about an injury. The employer's account of the accident and its connection to work may differ from the social insurance administrative department's determination, while the work-capacity appraisal committee separately assesses functional impairment within the scope of the recognized work-related injury. The difference lies not only in the content of materials, but also in positions of authorization and procedural standards.
People authorized to interpret materials are also limited by their responsibilities. School personnel cannot replace judges in handling debt evidence; court personnel cannot replace medical and appraisal personnel in forming judgments about injuries; and community personnel's statements about residence or hardship cannot unconditionally replace materials required by other procedures. This division of work produces unequal interpretive authority, while also showing that no single actor can fully determine the entire meaning of facts of life solely through their own opinion. A division of authorized responsibilities does not mean that interpretation can proceed arbitrarily. Institutions differ in the materials they can process, the determinations they can make, and the procedures they must follow. When different accounts conflict, the dispute must be brought back to materials and reasons through such routes as supplementary documents, investigation, arbitration, review, appeal, reconsideration, or complaint, in accordance with their respective scopes of application and procedures. These routes do not replace one another and do not guarantee a changed conclusion. This prevents interpretive authority from being misrepresented as unrestricted subjective opinion. Authorized interpretation makes institutionalization more than a matter of materials: whoever has interpretive authority can affect eligibility, thresholds, and the consequences put into effect. [F01a]
Differences that have been preserved, extracted, interpreted, and judged may become eligibility to enter a particular channel. Household registration, proof of residence, continuity of social insurance, educational credentials, medical records, judgments, real property, and proof of income can each open the corresponding entrance only under particular rules and procedures. Eligibility is not the automatic manifestation of a natural right. It is a channel opened after institutions recognize certain differences.
Eligibility channels often depend on several kinds of material jointly establishing eligibility. When a child applies for school enrollment, depending on local admission policy, the year, and the category of admission, some of the following may enter review: age, household registration, residence, social insurance, rental filings, parental materials, and available school places. In applications for the minimum subsistence guarantee, by contrast, household members living together, income, property, and the household's economic circumstances are checked under the rules governing that guarantee. Different bodies handle the two procedures under different rules; they do not constitute one and the same list of materials. In concrete review, no link can be assumed in advance to be necessarily sufficient; a child's enrollment is not determined by age alone. The intersection of these conditions shows that eligibility is a conditional arrangement within a particular channel, not the natural effect of a single piece of proof, nor a total judgment on a person's entire life or value.
Work-injury processing likewise does not guarantee compensation as soon as medical records appear. The fact of injury is presented through medical records and other materials, while a contract or other proof of a de facto labor relation is used to verify the employment relationship. Proof concerning the scene and coworkers' testimony are checked according to the issues in dispute, and the social insurance administrative department determines whether the injury is work-related. When the conditions are met, the work-capacity appraisal committee conducts a separate appraisal, whose conclusion bears on the corresponding disability benefits. Recuperation, medical treatment for a work-related injury, suspension of work with continued pay, and disability compensation each have their own conditions. Completion of disability grading cannot be treated as a common prerequisite for all these channels. Weight assignment through eligibility is conditional. Complete materials, consistent explanations, and procedural continuation may open a channel; supplementation and correction of materials, renewed investigation, or review may also change the direction of earlier handling. It does not fix a person's position permanently.
The other side of an eligibility channel is a threshold. When materials are incomplete, records interrupted, the parties concerned mismatched, formats wrong, proof insufficient, or recognition refused, differences already present in life may be unable to enter the corresponding procedure, and the chain of consequences then stops at a node. A threshold is not a wall outside institutions. It is a cutoff formed when differences have not been preserved, extracted, and recognized in the institutional format.
When a threshold appears, we must ask where the break occurs. Has no rental filing been made? Has a community certificate not been issued? Has the workplace refused to recognize the labor relation? Have attendance records and materials from the scene not been preserved? Or has the application not been received within the prescribed procedure? Describing all of these as an abstract wall obscures specific responsibility and wrongly reduces difficulties in life to a single problem of the applicant as an individual.
A family of nonlocal workers has lived in a city for years; the parents work, the child lives there, and the neighbors know about them. These may all be real circumstances. In a setting where the relevant local rules for that year and category of admission do require this material, if no rental filing has been made and school reviewers can process matters only through prescribed materials, the enrollment chain may halt at the material node; this does not mean that lived experience is denied. A worker really was injured at work, and medical records can explain the bodily harm. If the workplace denies the labor relation, attendance records are incomplete, and materials from the scene are lacking, medical records may not be sufficient on their own to connect to responsibility for a work-related injury. This shows that different materials carry different links.
A threshold is not an immovable conclusion. Only by clarifying the point of cutoff can we identify whether there is subsequent room for completing a missing filing, supplementary checks, investigation, arbitration, or a new explanation. Completing a missing filing, checking social insurance records further, supplementing testimony, investigating the scene, or confirming the labor relation through arbitration may give a previously broken relational chain another opportunity to continue. Whether it continues still depends on specific materials, authorization, and procedures.
V. Procedural Determination: How Institutions Allow Supplementation and Correction, Dispute, and Room for Adjustment
Procedures connect materials, interpretation, eligibility, and consequences. Application, review, supplementation and correction, investigation, appraisal, hearing, judgment, enforcement, reconsideration, and complaint are not formalities appended to a determination from the outside, but concrete paths through which handlers re-examine materials and reasons. They determine whether differences can be supplemented and corrected, reinterpreted, recognized, or excluded again. Procedures turn disputes into steps that can be handled and also constrain arbitrary changes of conclusion. Supplementation and correction involve submitting specified additional materials under the corresponding procedure; investigation involves rechecking the scene or testimony within the relevant authority. Labor arbitration, renewed appraisal or review of work capacity, appeals in litigation, administrative reconsideration, and other complaints belong to different procedures. Each has its own handlers, deadlines, grounds, and legal effects; they do not constitute one interchangeable set of remedies. [F06]
Within concrete procedures, retrieval of student registration materials, supplementary checks of social insurance, reissuance of community certificates, investigation of materials from the scene, and supplementation of coworkers' testimony each show where procedures leave room for adjustment. So do renewed work-capacity appraisals or reviews sought when the corresponding conditions are met.
Within their respective procedural conditions and time limits, rental filings can be completed later, labor relations can be confirmed through arbitration, and court proceedings allow supplementary evidence, appeals, or new property leads. In assistance applications, proof of income and household-member materials can also be supplemented and corrected, while community investigations may explain hardship anew. These paths make it possible for differences that were not adequately handled before to re-enter determination, preserving an opportunity for reinterpretation.
Yet the existence of room for adjustment does not guarantee that every application will change the conclusion, nor that any difficulty in life can immediately rewrite an existing result. When supplementation and correction fail, a request for administrative reconsideration is not upheld, an injury is not recognized as work-related, or a work-capacity appraisal does not support the claimed degree of disability, the earlier cutoff may remain in effect. Conditionality is precisely an important part of procedural determination: it means neither that conclusions may be reversed at will nor that a channel is closed forever after a single refusal.
Community members can spread word about people's reputations, relatives can say that someone does not keep their word, and specific people in local society can refuse to lend money. These consequences are important. Kinship, neighborhood, and local relations depend on long-term exchanges, memory, recognition, and responsibility, and affect borrowing, testimony, care, local recognition, and family evaluations. Yet the consequences of local reputation usually depend on ongoing exchanges, memory, and concrete relations. On the basis of reputation within community relations alone, one cannot directly implement statutory asset freezes or recovery measures, or cancel institutional eligibility.
Institutional consequences and the consequences of local reputation may affect a family at the same time. Local reputation may affect whether neighbors are willing to testify, relatives are willing to provide support, or others are willing to lend money. School enrollment, work-injury processing, assistance, court enforcement, and administrative processing may connect determinations to school places, compensation, accounts, files, and eligibility arrangements. The two may affect each other, but they cannot be treated as the same mechanism merely because both produce consequences. The consequences of local reputation and institutional consequences rely on different carriers. Institutional consequences depend on materials, authorization, accounts, files, judgments, and actual implementation within schools, workplaces, courts, and administrative procedures. Local proof can sometimes enter an application, but community reputation does not thereby automatically replace procedural determination. Only by distinguishing the two can we preserve the weight of community consequences and the hardness of institutional consequences.
The strength of institutionalization lies in its ability not only to judge differences but also to form consequences under concrete procedures. Approval or refusal of school enrollment may change a child's educational path. A determination of work-related injury affects work-injury benefits and subsequent handling; whether the injury is recognized affects compensation, recuperation, responsibility, and income. Once a court judgment enters enforcement, it may connect to freezing assets, recovery, or restrictions on consumption. Confirmation or nonconfirmation of eligibility for the minimum subsistence guarantee or medical assistance may change a family's channels for obtaining the corresponding support. Assistance, loans, and administrative processing likewise change a family's concrete channels. Each of these consequences has its own statutory conditions; they cannot be merged into one general form of processing. [F10]
Consequences that can be put into effect must still be brought back to specific people, accounts, files, schools, workplaces, courts, and administrative procedures. Forms do not punish on their own, and records do not change life on their own. Only when handlers, acting under authorization, connect determinations to the corresponding arrangements do consequences actually occur.
The results of institutional processing do not necessarily disappear when an event ends. Write-back forms when institutional personnel or procedures preserve processing results as institutional differences that can be extracted again in the future. Only when specific people or procedures retrieve, interpret, or assign weight to those differences anew in subsequent judgments does the content of write-back take effect again.
After an application, determination, refusal, supplementation and correction, penalty, or enforcement has concluded, application materials, statements of missing material, determination results, judgments, penalty records, and records of interruptions in social insurance may all be preserved at nodes from which they can still be extracted later. A failed enrollment application may leave material gaps and application records; failure to obtain recognition of a work-related injury may leave administrative results, workplace explanations, and materials concerning the dispute; court enforcement may leave judgments, enforcement records, and traces relating to credit. Handlers may extract these materials again in school transfers, job searches, loans, assistance, litigation, or mediation.
Materials left by write-back can be extracted anew and take effect again in later events, later relational fields, or later processing stages within the same continuing relational field. The content of write-back is not limited to unfavorable records. A filing successfully completed later, testimony accepted after supplementation, an explanation formed through renewed investigation, or a conclusion changed after review may also become material for later use. What nodes preserve are differences available for renewed extraction left by particular processing results, not eternally fixed identities or conclusions that continue automatically. New events can change the conditions under which materials are extracted.
Looking further, procedures themselves may also permit supplementary materials, renewed investigation, or challenges to an earlier interpretation. Suppose that a handler accepts a supplementary piece of material at a particular stage and enters it in the file. This indicates a change in the state of the differences recorded. In subsequent processing, however, the operative weight of the material at that time may still change through supplementary materials, renewed investigation, or interpretation under different procedures. Allowing a challenge or accepting supplementation and correction does not mean that subsequent judgments have thereby been automatically settled. Write-back therefore should not be written as the past automatically governing the present.
Write-back explains the continuity of institutional processing while also preserving the conditions for reinterpretation. Old records do not necessarily determine a person's fate. Family, local, and community relations beyond those records may still affect subsequent processing.
Institutionalization does not mean applying external rules to a person. In concrete institutional processing, whether someone is eligible to apply, whether they can provide proof, whether they are registered, whether they are penalized, whether they are subject to enforcement, and whether they can enter a channel all change or maintain that person's actual position in the social network and differentiation position in the current relational field through eligibility, thresholds, procedures, and consequences put into effect. Materials that are recognized or not recognized are not abstract labels. They affect whether people can enter school, obtain compensation, apply for assistance, pursue recovery, or maintain residential arrangements.
The same child may enter different educational paths depending on whether the applicable materials concerning household registration, proof of residence, rental filings, the parents' relevant social insurance, and schooling are recognized under local policy for the relevant year and category. The same worker may face different arrangements for recuperation, compensation, responsibility, and income depending on whether the labor relation is confirmed. These consequences of institutional processing for positions also appear in debt relations: the same debtor will occupy different positions of credit and action depending on whether the case enters court enforcement or remains a dispute among acquaintances. The difference lies not in a name itself, but in whether materials, interpretation, procedures, and implementation connect them to actual consequences.
Changes in differentiation positions can be seen in individuals and also travel along relational chains to families and localities, unfolding among concrete people. Recognition of a child's enrollment materials may stabilize the parents' work and residential arrangements; blocked enrollment may affect the parents' work, renting, and whether the family stays or leaves. Confirmation of responsibility for a work-related injury may change recuperation, income, debt, and kinship support; failure to obtain recognition of a work-related injury may affect family income, debt, workplace relations, and kinship support.
If a debt enters enforcement arrangements, the creditor, guarantors, relatives, and local reputation may all be affected. These consequences must all be observed by following relational chains back to concrete materials and procedures. They are not driven by abstract concepts acting on their own, nor should they be reduced to abstract positions moving of their own accord.
Institutionalization is not the endpoint. Labor contracts, social insurance records, wages, jobs, housing, debt, educational credentials, and enrollment eligibility are, in concrete processing, distinct differences and the materials that carry them, yet may affect one another through long-term relations of work, residence, education, and domination. For families whose actual continuity of contributions is affected by changes in work, unstable work may interrupt social insurance. Where the relevant rules do select this condition, interrupted social insurance may affect a child's enrollment and urban eligibility. Falling income affects rent, debt, and household expenditure, while unstable housing also affects educational paths and community recognition. What must be traced here is how concrete differences connect across different nodes and relational chains.
Labor, property, income, housing, education, debt, and relations of domination exert a strong pull in certain events precisely because contracts, wages, social insurance, housing, educational credentials, enrollment eligibility, and debt records are preserved, extracted, compared, and connected to consequences over time. What institutionalization can explain is how these differences are preserved and connected to concrete consequences, but this real connection does not in itself automatically generate a class image. It is interpreters using class theory who select a set of high-weight differences from these relations, project them onto axes of economy, labor, property, and domination, and give them a name.
Institutionalization therefore cannot be equated with class-image formation. Still less can a class image be treated as an explanation already completed, reducing labor, housing, education, debt, family, local reputation, and community relations to the same thing. Labor contracts, social insurance, wages, housing, debt, educational credentials, and enrollment eligibility each have different sources, different handlers, and different consequences. Family care, local reputation, and community recognition still operate within their respective relational chains as well. Only by preserving these differences can we avoid prematurely compressing multiple chains into a single image. To understand concrete differentiation positions, we must still unpack the compressed labor, property, income, housing, debt, education, and relations of domination back into concrete materials, handlers, procedures, families, urban eligibility, schools, local reputation, and community networks.
[F01] School admissions and student registration, work-injury determination and work-capacity appraisal, and civil litigation and enforcement in mainland China belong to different procedures. Relevant personnel receive, examine, or preserve the corresponding materials only within their respective responsibilities and authority. For enrollment and student registration, see the Compulsory Education Law of the People's Republic of China and Articles 3–7 of the Measures for the Administration of Student Registration in Primary and Secondary Schools, Ministry of Education, Jiao Ji [2025] No. 1. For work-injury determination, see Articles 4–25 of the Measures for the Determination of Work-Related Injuries (Order No. 8 of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, effective in 2011). For the division of responsibilities between work-injury determination and work-capacity appraisal, and for benefits, see Articles 17–25 and 30–37 of the Regulations on Work-Related Injury Insurance (revised in 2010), and Articles 2, 4, and 7–16 of the Measures for the Administration of Work-Capacity Appraisal (Order No. 55 of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the National Health Commission, effective July 1, 2025). For debt evidence and enforcement, see Articles 66–75, 235, 247, and 250–255 of the Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China (amended in 2023). Each source establishes only the corresponding procedure; it does not establish that the materials are kept by the same institution.
[F03] Articles 66–75 of the Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China (amended in 2023) provide for documentary evidence, electronic data, witness testimony, and other evidence, and for their examination. Articles 235 and 247 concern the enforcement of legal documents that have taken effect; Articles 250–255 concern the time limit for applying for enforcement, enforcement notices, property reporting and inquiries, and enforcement measures. The evidentiary weight of chat logs or transfer records in an individual case must still be examined in conjunction with that case. Judicial interpretations concerning labor disputes are not used to establish ordinary debt relations.
[F01a] See note F01. The reference here is used only within the jurisdiction, period, procedures, and scope of materials expressly stated in that note.
[F06] The following procedures are handled separately under the corresponding legal sources in mainland China and cannot replace one another. For work-injury determination and remedies against such determinations, see Articles 4–23 of the Measures for the Determination of Work-Related Injuries. For the procedures for initial work-capacity appraisal, renewed appraisal, and review, see Articles 2, 4, 5, and 7–23 of the Measures for the Administration of Work-Capacity Appraisal (Order No. 55 of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the National Health Commission, effective July 1, 2025). For routes for handling labor disputes, the provision of evidence, and enforcement of documents that have taken legal effect, see Articles 2, 4–6, 9, and 27–51 of the Labor Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law of the People's Republic of China. For appeals and enforcement in civil litigation, see Articles 171–182, 235, 247, and 250–255 of the Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China (amended in 2023). For acceptance, supplementation and correction, evidence collection, and decisions in administrative reconsideration, see Articles 30–35, 44–47, and 61–79 of the Administrative Reconsideration Law of the People's Republic of China (revised in 2023, effective January 1, 2024). The handlers, time limits, grounds, routes of access to remedies, and legal effects of each procedure must be judged under its own rules. These sources cannot jointly establish the authority of every service counter or of other complaint procedures.
[F10] The consequences of school enrollment, work-related injuries, enforcement, and assistance fall under different rules. See the Compulsory Education Law of the People's Republic of China; the Regulations on Work-Related Injury Insurance and the Measures for the Determination of Work-Related Injuries; the enforcement part of the Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China and Articles 1 and 3–6 of the Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on Restricting High Consumption and Certain Other Consumption by Persons Subject to Enforcement. For confirmation and payment of the minimum subsistence guarantee, see Articles 2 and 19–25 of the Measures for Review and Confirmation of the Minimum Subsistence Guarantee (Min Fa [2021] No. 57). For the recipients, coverage, and administration of medical assistance, see Sections II–V and VII–VIII of Guo Ban Fa [2021] No. 42. For distinctions among assistance materials and procedures, see also F08. The sources above each support the corresponding consequences and cannot be used interchangeably.