Organizations possess many mechanisms that touch on quality and control: quality-management systems, enterprise-architecture frameworks, balanced scorecards, business-process conformance checking, requirements engineering, and cybernetic control. Each verifies process conformance or lagging outcomes. None makes a machine-checkable, ex-ante acceptance contract at the experience layer with backward traceability a structural invariant of the specification. This paper develops Organizational Schema Theory (OST), a design-science artifact that supplies this property through a six-level specification cascade in which stakeholder-experience contracts function as acceptance tests, signal requirements as integration tests, and process contracts as unit tests, with executor-invariance and continuous validation. The artifact is stated as five design principles, four mechanisms, and five boundary conditions, and formalized as a typed directed acyclic justification graph on which traceability, waste, and cascade-compression are decidable properties; a smallest-sufficient model gives a compression-impossibility sketch. Following the design-science evaluation taxonomy, the artifact is evaluated analytically, through independent industry convergence, and through a public demonstration corpus, with no controlled-outcome claim. The contribution is nascent design theory: acceptance testing operationalized as a tool-checkable invariant of organizational specification. Includes zharnikov-2026i-ost.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper's claims, assumptions, and dependencies. See https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard. This PDF is generated programmatically from that machine-first source under a research-as-repository model.
Dmitry Zharnikov (Mon,) studied this question.
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