From Emotional Utterances to Institutional Norms: Translational Authority and the Formation of Organizational Ethics

This preprint proposes a conceptual model for understanding how emotional utterances become institutionalized as norms, guidelines, and evaluative frameworks within organizations. Rather than treating emotions as direct drivers of institutional outcomes, it argues that institutionalization occurs through translational authority: the capacity of particular actors to convert situated affect into neutralized, moralized, or procedural language that institutions can absorb. The paper develops a phase-based analytical framework and a structural case simulation to clarify how emotional expressions function as raw material rather than causal agents, and how authority over translation shapes normative fixation. It reframes institutional ethics not as the downstream effect of affective intensity, but as the outcome of authorized translation, institutional legibility, portability, and normative fixation. This is a theoretical and conceptual preprint, not an empirical study. This preprint was developed with editorial and drafting assistance from ChatGPT; the author takes full responsibility for the text, claims, and interpretations.