Institutional Authority and Governance Dynamics (IAGD): Toward a Dynamic Theory of Authority Formation, Recognition, Drift, Recovery, Preservation, and Continuity

Institutions frequently retain formal authority while practical influence, decision rights, governance control, and accountability evolve through time. Existing scholarship explains important aspects of legitimacy, institutional development, governance arrangements, authority distribution, and power relations. Less attention has been devoted to the dynamic processes through which authority is formed, recognized, exercised, displaced, recovered, preserved, and sustained within institutions across time. Institutional Authority and Governance Dynamics (IAGD) provides an integrative architecture for analyzing authority across the institutional lifecycle. The framework synthesizes authority formation, legitimacy generation, authority recognition, governance control, authority displacement, recovery constraints, preservation mechanisms, and institutional continuity into a unified authority-centered model. IAGD serves as the architectural foundation connecting a broader governance research program and identifies the dynamic relationships among Narrative Legitimacy, the Governance Drift Curve, the Governance Recovery Constraint Model, Institutional Layer Separation, and Institutional Boundary Enforcement. The framework provides a conceptual foundation for future empirical research on authority dynamics, governance resilience, institutional continuity, authority preservation, and multilevel governance across public, private, nonprofit, and hybrid institutional environments. This publication is released as a Research Program Architecture Record and Conceptual Integration Framework intended to organize and connect a broader research program on institutional authority dynamics.