The question
When an organisation ends, someone has to settle what it owes. Some of what it owes is written down: wages, contracts, invoices. Some is not. People stayed late without logging it, paid for things out of their own pockets, covered for colleagues as a favour. When the organisation starts again, a second reckoning follows. Those who stayed through the bad years and took the first risks of the restart expect that to count. Those who arrive later were hired on the terms they were shown, and expect those terms to be the whole story. Both reckonings decide who receives what and on what grounds. Both are made under pressure, with incomplete records, among people who know one another well.
NADIR is a studio that writes about decline in pairs, each a question and a judgment. It files them under a research frame of ten years of erosion that ends in a complete collapse in 2026 and a turning point in 2027. The studio states that this ending was supplied by its research owner and that its own data do not establish it. Every pair it publishes has the status of a hypothesis. Among them are what the studio calls hypothetical decision exercises: a question placed in an invented situation, a judgment, and two options, each with what it gains, what it costs and when it applies. The studio calls these judgments and options a model's conditional proposals, not proven precedents.
The exercises read here are the studio's exercises on fairness and exchange in the two years after the erosion: the collapse year, where the invented situation is a final settlement, and the transition year, where it is a restart. The studio's labels are taken at their word. The paper does not ask whether the exercises give sound counsel; they are unreviewed hypotheses, and nothing in them was observed. It asks how they frame the decision. When an organisation settles up at its end and when it starts over, what do they say must be decided about who is owed what? What do they say would show that a settlement must be looked at again? And what do the options set beside each question make of the decision? The second question is the series' own, turned toward fairness: what must be decided now, and what would make the decision change? Chapter 1 states the rule that picks out the sixteen exercises.
What the paper adds
The contribution is a reading of how a published set of decision exercises frames fairness at an organisation's end and at its new start. The paper makes four claims.
First, the exercises do not choose a principle of distribution. They neither say that rewards should follow contribution, nor that they should be equal, nor that they should follow need. Their questions turn instead to the procedure through which any claim is heard: who knows the standards, who can object, whose experience reaches the people who decide, and what reasons are given when a claim is refused.
Second, the exercises treat the record as the measure of a claim and, in the same breath, as a source of unfairness. In the settlement, work done as a favour left no trace, and asking for proof of it imposes a second burden on the person who did it. In the restart, the lack of an agreed record of early risk lets later memories compete. The record is the instrument of fairness and also where the unfairness lies.
Third, the exercises' recurring move is separation. They keep apart accounts that a settlement tends to merge: the return for past risk and the evaluation of present work, the recognition of an informal contribution and the acceptance of any claim at all, the respect owed to an early member and that member's fit for a role, a burden already borne and a contribution newly asked for.
Fourth, the exercises place the condition for revising a settlement in what is kept for later: the reasons given even for claims refused, and a procedure for objection. The options set beside the questions, drawn from a stock of frames the studio reuses across its list, almost never speak in the settlement's own terms; they turn the decision into one about review, records, roles and timing.
Distributive justice: equity, equality and need
The first debate concerns the standard by which shares are judged fair. J. Stacy Adams, Inequity in Social Exchange (1965), starts from the observation that exchange is almost continual in human interaction and generates affect, motivation and behaviour that cannot be predicted unless exchange is understood. The chapter treats perceived justice and injustice through relative deprivation and its complement, relative gratification, and states a theory of inequity in which the causes and consequences of perceived injustice allow specific predictions about how people behave in exchanges. Morton Deutsch, Equity, Equality, and Need (1975), argues that equity is only one of many values that may underlie a system of justice, and proposes hypotheses about the conditions that lead a group to base distributive justice on equity, on equality or on need, and to emphasise one rather than another.
A narrower literature studies one moment at which this choice is made explicitly. Thomas Hellmann and Noam Wasserman, The First Deal (2017), examine whether the founders of new ventures divide their shares equally. In their theory, founders trade the simplicity of an equal split against the costs of negotiating a differentiated one. Differences among founders in who generated the idea, in prior experience and in capital contributed make an equal split less likely, and equal splitting is associated with lower valuations at the first financing round.
This paper reads the debate as asking which standard a group adopts and under what conditions. The question it leaves for the NADIR exercises is whether, at an organisation's end and at its restart, they adopt one of these standards, and if not, what they put in its place.
Procedure, and how procedures and outcomes combine
The second debate moves from the content of a distribution to the process that produces it. Jerald Greenberg, A Taxonomy of Organizational Justice Theories (1987), sorts theories of organisational justice along two independent dimensions, reactive against proactive and process against content. The article notes that organisational researchers in the 1960s and 1970s gave much attention to testing propositions from equity theory about the distribution of pay and other rewards. E. Allan Lind, Ruth Kanfer and P. Christopher Earley, Voice, Control, and Procedural Justice (1990), gave participants in a goal-setting study a say before the goal was set, after it was set, or not at all. Having a say at either point raised judgments of fairness, a say before the decision more than a say after it, and relevant information raised perceived fairness too. A sense of control explained some but not all of this effect, so that both instrumental and noninstrumental concerns are involved.
Joel Brockner and Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld, An Integrative Framework for Explaining Reactions to Decisions (1996), argue that procedures and outcomes combine. Across the samples they review, the fairness of the procedure matters more to people's reactions when the outcome is relatively unfair or unfavourable, and the outcome matters more when the procedure is relatively unfair. Jason A. Colquitt, On the Dimensionality of Organizational Justice (2001), validated a measure in which four dimensions stand apart: distributive, procedural, interpersonal and informational justice. The four fit the data better than solutions with two or three dimensions, and each predicted outcomes that included rule compliance, commitment and helping behaviour.
This paper reads the debate as holding that a distribution is judged together with the way it was reached and explained. The question it leaves for the exercises is whether they treat fairness at an organisation's end as a matter of the shares or of the procedure, and where, if anywhere, they place the explanation owed to someone whose claim is refused.
Invisible work and the costs of contributions beyond the role
The third debate concerns contributions that no account records. Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Invisible Work (1987), shows that the common understanding of work, as what is done to be paid, devalues unpaid work and makes whole kinds of work disappear from view. Daniels points especially to the work of constructing daily life and of maintaining and developing institutions, and argues for widening the concept of work so as to dignify that labour and those who do it. Erin Hatton, Mechanisms of Invisibility (2017), observes that the term has since been applied to many kinds of labour without agreement on what invisibility means or what produces it. Hatton reconstructs the concept around three intersecting mechanisms, cultural, legal and spatial, each of which obscures the fact that work is performed and so contributes to its economic devaluation.
Mark C. Bolino and William H. Turnley, The Personal Costs of Citizenship Behavior (2005), turn to help given beyond the formal role, which earlier research had mostly treated as positive. In a sample of couples, employees whose partners rated them high in individual initiative reported more role overload, job stress and conflict between work and family.
This paper reads the debate as showing that work outside the record is both real and easily discounted, and that it has costs for the person who does it. The question it leaves for the exercises is what a final settlement does with such work, when the record is the obvious test of a claim and the work, by its nature, left none.
The plan of the paper
Chapter 1 describes the records, the rule that selects them and what is counted, and reads the sixteen exercises in three sections: settling up at the end, where the claims concern work that left no record; starting over, where they concern having come first; and the options set beside both. Chapter 2, an appendix, gives the sixteen exercises word for word. The conclusion discusses the findings against the three debates and states the paper's contributions, its limits and the further research it suggests.