Much recent research has emphasised the role of institutions in promoting various forms of economic development. Institutions include organizations like governments and companies, but also abstract guides to human interaction such as laws and moral codes.
Institutions describe something that is intangible, relates to human interaction, and does not have an obvious causal effect on the outcomes with which it is linked. So modelling them can be difficult. An approach used in the research paper here (on page 11) is to attribute to them one of the characteristics of technologies (themselves definable as the information about and organization of resources used to produce goods). The approach presents institutions as containing embedded knowledge, so that people do not have to find out how to operate with other people every time they want to interact.
The approach may be extended to identify institutions more closely as technologies with people as the resources. It is appealing because it gives a precise representation of the quite loose idea of institutions, and institutional analysts can use the tools of technological analysis.
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