Institutional Life-Cycles of Power: A Socio-Affective Governance Framework Grounded in AI Development and Generalizable Across Institutions

Description This document introduces a comprehensive governance model for understanding how institutions repeatedly respond to, resist, and eventually normalize emerging technological power. Synthesizing institutional theory, legitimacy research, socio-affective labor studies, platform governance, AI policy scholarship, and historical governance failure patterns, it proposes a 12-phase lifecycle capturing the recurring dynamics through which technologies scale faster than governance capacity, emotional and legitimacy burdens accumulate, institutions attempt symbolic stabilization, crises emerge, and bureaucratic routines ultimately replace living ethics. Rather than focusing solely on technical or legal risk, this framework explicitly incorporates: • legitimacy strain • hidden governance labor • emotional and cultural burden • symbolic ethics structures • power protection dynamics • normalization and ossification • recurring governance vacuums The model is intended as: • a thinking tool for policymakers • a conceptual framework for researchers • a diagnostic lens for civil society and labor • a strategic planning aid for governance institutions It does not claim perfection or finality. Instead, it asserts usefulness: a structured way to reason about institutional behavior under technological pressure, to identify early warning signals, and to design interventions before governance failure becomes a crisis. The model is exploratory and conceptual rather than diagnostic; it aims to provide structured clarity rather than assert crisis or blame. This work is intended for policymakers, AI governance practitioners, scholars in STS and sociology, institutional leaders, and civil society researchers. This artifact is versioned and citable to preserve intellectual lineage and conceptual clarity. Formalization of the Field This paper proposes Socio-Affective Governance as a distinct field of study, defines its conceptual infrastructure, and establishes a foundational lifecycle framework for institutional power metabolism. While adjacent work exists across sociology, organizational studies, feminist care ethics, STS, and AI governance, this framework integrates these strands into a single computable, recursive model. The intention is not to close inquiry, but to name a domain so it can be studied, debated, extended, and governed with greater clarity. This document treats the socio-affective metabolism of institutions as a distinct field of study and governance design. It offers language, diagrams, and formal models so others can refine, contest, and operationalize it. This work names and formalizes the field of Socio-Affective Governance Metabolism: the study of how institutions convert capability and pressure into structure, distribute emotional and legitimacy burdens across actors, stabilize themselves through visible and invisible governance labor, and recursively normalize these processes into policy, ritual, and memory.