System Collapse in Institutions as Admissibility Boundary Failure

Institutions coordinate collective behaviour across societies, organisations, and governance structures through rules, administrative procedures, and resource management systems. Traditional analyses of institutional collapse often focus on political instability, economic crisis, or organisational failure. This paper interprets institutional collapse through the admissibility framework of the Paton System. Within this interpretation, institutions remain viable only while their operational states remain within admissible structural limits defined by governance rules, information flows, resource constraints, and coordination mechanisms. When these constraints are exceeded, system trajectories may move beyond admissible operational regions, producing instability, cascading failures, and institutional breakdown. Institutional collapse therefore represents a failure of admissibility preservation within organisational systems. This framework clarifies how governance structures maintain stability, why collapse occurs when structural limits are exceeded, and how resilient institutions restore admissible operational conditions following disturbance. This work forms part of the Paton System — Tier-7 Domain Instantiation (Organisational Systems) series examining institutional stability, governance admissibility, economic system tolerance, supply chain resilience, decision structure stability, and systemic institutional collapse.