When the System Misreads the Working Caregiver: The Caring Elasticity Index and the Governance of Participation Under Constraint

Organizations increasingly use digitally captured behavioral traces to infer engagement, performance, and participation. Yet visible activity is an imperfect proxy for underlying capability, particularly when structural constraints reorganize when and how participation occurs. Using working multigenerational caregivers as a theoretically revealing case, this paper develops a governance-centered account of how constraint-shaped participation variance in presence, timing, and pacing may be misclassified as disengagement within proxy-based organizational systems. We theorize this failure as a self-reinforcing control loop in which misclassification activates penalty-centered responses that further disrupt participation and contribute to capability-flow leakage. To address this inference-to-action failure, we specify the Caring Elasticity Index (CEI) as an interpretable, privacy-preserving decision-support framework. A visibility shortfall combined with sufficient output-conditioned performance–visibility divergence pauses automatic visibility-based escalation and routes the case to accountable review; continuity volatility and deadline friction guide review questions and bounded responses. The composite CEI summarizes these signals for reporting and routing but does not determine gate eligibility; its incremental value remains an empirical question. The framework extends organizational measurement, algorithmic governance, and human resource development theory by locating elasticity within the measurement-to-governance architecture itself and specifying how organizations can preserve capability flow without sacrificing accountability.