Referential Displacement and Ritual Capture in Organizational KPIs: A Five-Stage Unified Framework for Measuring Epistemic Transfer, KPI Validity Degradation, and Organizational Reform Capacity

Organizations that measure knowledge work with Key Performance Indicatorssystematically transfer epistemic authority from practitioners with direct sys-tem knowledge to administrators who can only access official representationsof it. This paper formalizes that process as a five-stage mechanism — positionalblindness, legibility compression, channel degradation, ritual capture, reformresistance — synthesizing thirteen theoretical traditions across eighty yearsof scholarship. It derives two computable instruments from the mechanism:V(m, O, t), a structured metric validity score grounded in information theory andcybernetics, and RD(m, t), a linguistically computable proxy for ritual capturederived from the ratio of metric-referential to system-referential language inorganizational documents. The paper extends the original four-stage accountby adding Stage 5 — Reform Resistance — grounded in Hirschman (1970)’sexit/voice/loyalty framework and Bourdieu (1984)’s theory of field heterodoxy.This extension is motivated by the empirical discovery in Paper II of the RE-FORMER agent class: practitioners who have already detected ritual captureand can be identified from organizational documents before Stage 5 suppressioncompletes. The theoretical implication is that any organization that can iden-tify its REFORMERs before they exit or become cynics has identified the practi-tioners with the tacit knowledge and motivation required to reverse epistemictransfer. The formal model is validated in Paper II: Pearson r(V, RD) = 0.973,Spearman ρ = 0.800, Mann-Whitney U = 0 (large effect), with triple convergenceconfirmed against LLM pragmatic classification at r = 0.958.