All collectively functioning social environments work along an operationally handy, and definitive, set of mental-constructs (eg, values, associative perspectives, ideas of relations between things), which hides the underlying absurdity (psychologically-speaking), and keeps it going. That is, it is the means by which it identifies itself as existing - an operationalizing principle that directs its efforts in a cogent and coordinated way. (That is the necessity of philosophy & ethics, to units in a social system). It defines action as (necessarily, presuming reflexivity & teleology) reaction, and reaction as progress, according to metaphysical and epistemic ideals.
Underlying cause-effect conditions serve as common convergences of values, but the terms by which they are endogenously interpreted by these perspectives are non-systematic - by virtue of the subject/object gap. Because this systemic complexity, they are more arbitrary, even idealistic-chaotic (ie, animal spirits), than the presence of institutions seem to suggest - for they direct them, not the other way round. Because values are themselves changing, and difficult to profile collectively, the role of information constraints are much less binding, than in systems of exchange of information with well-defined ends.
The point to note is that these definitions of (social science) real are wildly inaccurate depictions of reality, which is dynamic and indefinable. (Think of it as a consciousness.) They are used because they 1) create statistically modellable coherences of references to so-called reality along the broadest distinctions, made possible by sample sizes, and testable, 2) allow sub-units of a social system to cohere, but many important causal facts are themselves determined not through an individualist perspective, which is endogenous within the system (and therefore determines its coherence, and the well-working of parts) but collectively, as a system, or as layers of quickly forming and dissoluting systems, in reaction to external causes upon the system, one of which is individuality itself.
