Escalating Indecision: Between Reification and Strategic Ambiguity
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines an organizational pathology that we label “escalating indecision”—where people find themselves driven to invest time and energy in activities and decision processes aimed at resolving an issue of common concern, but where closure appears elusive. The phenomenon is illustrated through a case history in which a strategic orientation decision involving the configuration of a group of large teaching hospitals was continually made, unmade, and remade, producing little concrete strategic action over many years before achieving more tangible moves toward implementation. The paper introduces the notion of a “network of indecision” in which participants have become sufficiently attached to a common project to continue working together to move it forward, but their divergent conceptions of what this involves prevent them from materializing it in a tangible form. The paper suggests that networks of indecision are dialectically constituted through a set of practices of reification and practices of strategic ambiguity. The phenomenon is strongly associated with pluralistic settings characterized by diffuse power and divergent interests, and its prevalence is likely to be greater in situations of reactive leadership, uncertain resource availabilities, and long time horizons.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it