The Morphology of Organizational Continuity: An Axiomatic Note on State, Relation, Transition and Time

Abstract

This note proposes a compact axiomatic morphology of organizational continuity. It defines a minimal vocabulary — organization, boundary, state, relation, transition, and embedded history — and specifies conditions under which a system may remain the same organization across change. The central claim concerns organizational order rather than causal mechanism: the productive question is not only how a result appears, but when an organization has acquired the relations required for its next admissible transition. The note formulates minimal axioms, continuity properties, a non-metric entry equation, and a proposed law of organizational continuity. Its empirical commitments are bound to preregistration: boundaries, nominated dependencies, failure modes, and measurement mappings must be fixed before outcomes are known. The framework is offered as a falsifiable structural vocabulary for organizational analysis, not as a universal physical law, a specific mechanism, or an obligatory ontology.