Positive Sociology understands that well-functioning institutions are necessary to a happy society

Point Four of my seven-point Positive Sociology Manifesto.

Other points are here: 1, 2, 3.

Happy individuals are not enough to make a happy society. 

Social institutions provide the structures that foster, or hinder, a happily functioning society – including the environments in which individuals can live more or less happily.

Of social institutions, the ones that seem to have the greatest impact on people working together to do meaningful work are families, religious communities, and voluntary associations.  Happiness, and the virtues that conduce to it, seem to depend more on the institutions of soft power than on the hard power of the political economy.

In a larger view, though, the good interaction of all institutions is necessary to a happy society.  Which takes us from the meso to the macro.