Institutional Pathway Fragmentation in Queue-Forming Systems

This preprint develops Institutional Pathway Fragmentation (IPF) as a task-relative construct for analysing whether the pathway processing a common unresolved object is structurally integrated. Building on endpoint indeterminacy and process recoverability, IPF is defined as residual insufficiency in one or more necessary pathway relations after relevant formal and informal integrators have been considered. The framework distinguishes fragmentation from complexity, decentralisation, specialisation, stage multiplicity, coordination failure, and poor outcomes. It proposes a gated, hierarchical, formative-configurational measurement architecture covering representational continuity, authorisation-action coupling, transition-state continuity, and responsibility continuity. Required relations are classified as adequate, deficient, indeterminate, or not required rather than collapsed into a single scalar score. A documentary pilot demonstrates coding feasibility but does not establish reliability or validity. Independent reliability, content-validity, known-contrast, profile-stability, transportability, and falsification tests remain required before empirical release. This is Paper III in the research programme Fragmentation, Capacity, and Queue Formation in Complex Institutional Systems.