Literature Positioning and Residual Gap

The manuscript positions Cognitive Integrity as an integrative extension of existing theory rather than as a replacement for prior work.

Organizational cognition provides the general foundation for studying organizations as cognitive systems (March and Simon, 1958; Hutchins, 1995; Weick, 1995). It establishes that organizations develop shared interpretations, cognitive frames, routines, and knowledge structures. Cognitive Integrity builds on this foundation but narrows the focus to represented cognition: the portion of organizational cognition that becomes persistent, related, revised, remembered, or acted upon through organizational representations. (March and Simon, 1958; Hutchins, 1995; Weick, 1995)

Organizational information processing explains how organizations reduce uncertainty and equivocality through information structures and processing capacity. Cognitive Integrity differs by focusing not only on information flow or processing capacity, but on whether relationships among representations remain coherent and traceable over time. An organization may process large volumes of information while its represented cognition fragments. (Galbraith, 1974; Daft and Lengel, 1986)

Distributed cognition explains cognition distributed across people, artifacts, tools, and environments. This is foundational for Cognitive Integrity because it legitimates artifacts and systems as parts of cognitive activity. However, distribution alone does not explain preservation. Cognitive Integrity asks whether distributed representations continue to correspond with one another. (Hutchins, 1995; Orlikowski, 2007)

Organizational learning explains change in knowledge, routines, and behavior through experience. Cognitive Integrity complements learning by asking whether learning remains connected to intent, decisions, outcomes, and future action. Local learning can occur while organization-level cognition becomes inconsistent. (Argyris and Schon, 1978; March, 1991; Crossan et al., 1999)

Organizational memory explains persistence, storage, retrieval, and reuse of prior knowledge. Cognitive Integrity depends on memory but is not reducible to it. Memory can be extensive yet fragmented, obsolete, duplicated, or disconnected from current decisions and outcomes. (Walsh and Ungson, 1991; Wegner, 1987)

Knowledge management explains knowledge creation, codification, sharing, and reuse. Cognitive Integrity differs by emphasizing relational coherence among knowledge representations rather than the existence or movement of knowledge assets alone. (Nonaka, 1994; Grant, 1996; Alavi and Leidner, 2001)

Sensemaking explains how actors interpret ambiguous situations and construct meaning. Cognitive Integrity extends beyond interpretation by asking whether interpreted meanings remain connected across the representation network after interpretation occurs. (Weick, 1995)

Alignment and strategic coherence explain fit among goals, strategies, structures, systems, or actions. Cognitive Integrity overlaps with these concerns but is not identical to them. Alignment may exist at a point in time; Cognitive Integrity concerns the sustained traceability and coherence of represented cognition across changing human and AI actors. (Venkatraman, 1989; Henderson and Venkatraman, 1993)

Coordination theory explains interdependent action. Cognitive Integrity may support coordination, but it is not coordination quality. Organizations can coordinate efficiently around degraded representations, and coordination mechanisms can operate without preserving cognitive correspondence. (Malone and Crowston, 1994)

Dynamic capabilities and organizational resilience explain adaptation, transformation, and recovery. Cognitive Integrity is not itself a capability or recovery outcome. It is a cognitive state that may support adaptive capacity and resilience when organizations face disruption. (Teece et al., 1997; March, 1991)

Digital organization, sociomateriality, algorithmic management, AI governance, human-AI collaboration, digital twins, and enterprise architecture provide essential contemporary foundations. These literatures explain how digital artifacts, algorithms, AI systems, and technical architectures shape organizing. Cognitive Integrity connects these concerns at the organization level by asking whether human- and AI-mediated representations preserve coherent organizational cognition over time. (Trist and Bamforth, 1951; Bharadwaj et al., 2013; Orlikowski, 2007; Vial, 2019; Kellogg et al., 2020; Amershi et al., 2019; Floridi and Cowls, 2019; Jobin et al., 2019; National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2023; Ross et al., 2006; Lankhorst, 2017)

The residual gap is therefore specific: existing theories explain cognition, information processing, distribution, learning, memory, knowledge, meaning, coordination, adaptation, resilience, and digital governance, but they do not center the preservation of coherent represented organizational cognition across human and AI actors as an emergent organizational state.