Abstract
Robert A. Heinlein did not simply tell stories; he built institutional worlds. His speculative societies expose how power, scarcity, technology, and culture collide to structure economic life, revealing institutional dynamics that continue to shape contemporary debates about governance and social resilience. This analysis situates Heinlein’s narrative experiments within the institutional frameworks developed by Veblen, Commons, Galbraith, Ayres, and Ostrom. Four recurring institutional world types emerge across the corpus: technocratic or militarized orders, frontier libertarian societies, utopian engineer systems, and crisis polities. Each world type reveals distinct mechanisms through which institutions structure rights, obligations, and coordination, and through which legitimacy erodes or is reproduced under stress. By contextualizing Heinlein’s fictional yet conceptually coherent societies within institutional theory, this article offers a creative perspective on how speculative narratives can illuminate the dynamics of power, legitimacy, scarcity, and technological change. These insights contribute to contemporary debates on governance, accountability, and institutional resilience.