Reconstructing Cumulative Causal Histories in Institutional Inquiries into Workplace Harassment

An internal workplace inquiry may accurately record a final incident while leaving a cumulative causal question unresolved. This paper develops a framework for reconstructing such histories in inquiries into alleged workplace harassment. The analysis separates occurrence, experienced effects, changed practical conditions, causal contrasts, evidential support, and actor-specific responsibility. A temporally ordered model makes the outcome, horizon, intervention, and available evidence explicit. Coherent interventions replace specified assignments and recompute subsequent events; they differ from deleting an entry in an otherwise fixed chronology. Constructed examples show how an incident can change the timing of an outcome while leaving its eventual occurrence unchanged, and how an enabling condition can alter the significance of a later event. A three-valued assessment across evidence-compatible models distinguishes supported, contradicted, and unresolved causal propositions, with inconsistency handled separately. A summary-sufficiency result identifies when a compressed incident record preserves a declared family of questions. Official Acas materials provide a bounded procedural setting, while ILO Convention No. 190 supplies a further countercheck against any universal claim that harassment is treated only as an isolated occurrence. The proposed inquiry protocol links provenance, competing reconstructions, proportionate evidence collection, and reassessment. The framework supplies analytic tools and research designs, with legal classification and empirical institutional effects requiring their own evidence and standards.