Before Signals Become Issues: A Cross Literature Map of Organizational Perception Before Interpretation

Organizations are widely studied for how they interpret situations, decide, and act, and a large body of work explains how cues are noticed, made sense of, voiced, and attended to. This article maps a stage that lies before all of these: the threshold at which a possible signal becomes examinable at all. It synthesizes nine bodies of research that each touch this threshold, namely signal detection, interoception and affective neuroscience, interpersonal perception, situation awareness, professional vision, weak-signal theory, the attention-based view, sensemaking, voice and silence, and work on collective mind, and it locates each on a common coordinate system: the four layers of perceptual admittance, which are availability, standing, differentiation, and wiring. Reading the field through these coordinates produces a clear and uncomfortable finding. The perception literatures crowd the availability layer, where detection and noticing live; they treat standing comparatively lightly; and neither they nor the organization-design literatures that study routing say much about how embodied, relational, and normative signals reach a site capable of response. The map also makes the threshold predictive by naming admittance burden, the uneven difficulty different signals face in becoming examinable, and the translation tax that this burden levies at the standing layer. The contribution is a cartography of pre-interpretive perception: a shared vocabulary, a coordinate system on which scattered literatures can be placed, and a visible account of where the field has concentrated and where it has left white space. A companion paper builds on this coordinate system to develop one cross-layer phenomenon, the decoupling of the layers' visible markers from their functions, and drives it into a single case; the present paper supplies the territory that phenomenon moves through.