section_path: In society/Institutions
section_name: Institutions
paragraph_text: Institutions
  
  The need for planning and coordination extends beyond individual organizations to society as a whole too. Every successful work project requires effective resource allocation to provide necessities, materials, and investment (such as equipment and facilities). In smaller, traditional societies, these aspects can be mostly regulated through custom, though as societies grow, more extensive methods become necessary.
  
  These complex institutions, however, still have roots in common human activities. Even the free markets of modern capitalist societies rely fundamentally on trade, while command economies, such as in many communist states during the 20th century, rely on a highly bureaucratic and hierarchical form of redistribution.
  
  Other institutions can affect workers even more directly by delimiting practical day-to-day life or basic legal rights. For example, a caste system may restrict families to a narrow range of jobs, inherited from parent to child. In serfdom, a peasant has more rights than a slave but is attached to a specific piece of land and largely under the power of the landholder, even requiring permission to physically travel outside the land-holding. How institutions play out in individual workers' lives can be complex too; in most societies where wage-labor predominates, workers possess equal rights by law and mobility in theory. Without social support or other resources, however, the necessity of earning a livelihood may force a worker to cede some rights and freedoms in fact.