What Synthetic Models of Organizational Maturity Do-and Do Not-Establish: A Retrospective Methodological Audit

What Synthetic Models of Organizational Maturity Do-and Do Not-Establish: A Retrospective Methodological Audit This paper presents a retrospective methodological audit of fourteen exploratory studies investigating organizational development, functional interdependence, adaptive regulation, historical contingency, and reorganization in synthetic computational systems. Rather than claiming the discovery of a new principle of artificial intelligence or autonomous agency, the study critically examines the limits of inference from apparently successful simulations. Three detailed case studies demonstrate why causally useful components do not necessarily establish endogenous normative criteria, why newly evolved pathways need not outperform simpler alternatives, and why sensitivity to structural disruption does not prove historical irreplaceability. The paper introduces a multidimensional analytical framework distinguishing organizational causality, constraint maintenance, recoverability, historical contingency, and prospective accessibility. It also proposes a falsifiable experimental protocol for investigating whether different developmental histories influence the probability of recovering viable organizations under matched resource and search constraints. The accompanying reproducibility package preserves sixteen original computational archives, provides checksum verification, and includes an independent aggregation script checking 22 selected descriptive results from the archived data. These checks do not constitute a complete independent replication of the simulations. The principal contribution is methodological: establishing clearer evidential boundaries, identifying necessary causal controls, and providing a more rigorous foundation for future research on historically acquired reorganization capacity. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23675686