Bureaucratic Domestication and Abstraction Paralysis: How High-Context Corporate Socialization Inhibits Low-Context AI Prompting

Abstract

Despite the rapid enterprise adoption and technological democratization of generative artificialintelligence (AI), organizations encounter severe operational bottlenecks characterized by poor promptquality and low employee engagement. Standard managerial discourse attributes this failure to digitalliteracy deficits or inadequate software training. This paper proposes a structural explanation grounded inorganizational sociology and cognitive psychology: Abstraction Paralysis. We argue that corporatebureaucracy systematically socializes workers into specialized, reactive roles, transforming explicitproblem-structuring abilities into tacit, high-context relational intuition. When confronted withgenerative AI—which requires low-context, explicit, and proactive problem structuring—employeesexperience cognitive paralysis. We conceptualize the friction between corporate domestication andmachine logic, demonstrating that enterprise AI adoption is fundamentally a governance andsocialization challenge rather than a technical learning barrier.