Vertical Frame Alignment and Organizational Drift

This preprint develops a structural account of how organisations may become progressively closed without relying on formal censorship, explicit exclusion, or deliberate suppression. The central mechanism is vertical frame alignment: the reproduction of similar interpretive and evaluative reference frames across organisational levels. As passage conditions become increasingly predictable, actors adapt concerns and proposals before they are fully articulated. Selection therefore shifts from the formal point of decision to the prior threshold of formulation. The paper derives a mechanism sequence linking vertical frame alignment, predictive selection, anticipatory adaptation, formulation filtering, reduced carried variance, weakened problem detection, narrowed corrective capacity, stagnation, and organisational drift. A central distinction is made between formal access and carried access. Organisations may retain consultation channels, reporting systems, diversity initiatives, and formal rights of participation while becoming less capable of carrying dissonant information upward in consequential form. The argument does not reduce organisational closure to individual motive or demographic homogeneity. Demographic variation may coexist with strong interpretive homogeneity where the same passage conditions determine which perspectives become organisationally serious, translatable, and consequential. The paper functions as a support and bridge text within the Society, Democracy, Organisation, and Education Research Programme. It provides a mechanism-level link between organisational corrigibility, access circulation, recognition, recruitment, responsibility diffusion, and structural drift.