Institutions rarely move on argument alone. They move when decisions are recognized, repeated, staged, documented, and absorbed into a shared sense of what now counts as authorized. That is one reason ritual theory remains useful far outside religion.
In governance work, a policy is not fully real because it exists in a folder. It becomes real when people know how it is invoked, who can cite it, when it interrupts action, and what symbolic threshold it marks. Approval chains, review rituals, incident escalations, and sign-off moments are not merely procedural. They are ceremonial forms of legitimacy.
This is one of the through-lines of Martin Lepage’s portfolio: the same person can study ritual communities, critique media fantasies of power, and design governance systems because each domain is fundamentally about authorization.