The data at present are unable to indicate whether the associations have any biological basis or are shaped by cultural factors such as folklore, literature, cultural norms, role models or any other.
This is congruent with recent research showing that factors such as workplace norms, role clarity, staffing resources, team communication and training opportunities have independent predictive value beyond the job-related variables of the Karasek model [ 21- 23].
Given the complexity of weight management in the primary care context, the approach is well suited when attempting to understand institutional norms, role expectations, and ideals of individuals working in the PC setting at the VA.
Norms, roles, and institutions are all components of the social structure on different levels of complexity.
Social institutions need to be distinguished from less complex social forms such as conventions, rules, social norms, roles and rituals.
One could identify with any subset of gender norms, roles, and traits ascribed to the gender of which one sees oneself as a member, while repudiating others.
Importantly, there are many interpretations of social capital, but one useful definition was made by Ostrom: "…the shared knowledge, understandings, norms, roles, and expectations about patterns of interactions that groups of individuals bring to a current activity…" (Ostrom, [1999]:176).
Gender, a social construct, includes cultural norms, roles, and behaviors shaped by relations among women and men and among girls and boys (Krieger 2003).
It has really importance to the identity of the place, capable for norm, roles and policy and standard for the construction of the territory and the city.
Further, holistic accounts of institutions lay great stress on institutional roles defined in large part by social norms; institutional roles are supposedly largely, or even wholly, constitutive of the identity of the individual human agents who occupy these roles.
The approach in the paper is that institutions matter, i.e. perceptions, norms, values, role patterns and organisations that shape conduct.
