Abstract
Cleaning is among the most morally valued and least analytically examined acts in domestic life. It is experienced as a service, performed as a contribution, and recognized as evidence of responsibility and care. This paper argues that cleaning, and particularly the subset of cleaning that involves the disposal, displacement, or reorganization of shared objects, is also an authority act — a low-visibility exercise of governance power that makes binding decisions about shared resources without explicit authorization from those affected by those decisions. The paper develops this argument through five analytical movements. First, it establishes why cleanup functions as governance while being experienced as service: the mechanisms by which a morally positively coded act acquires the structural properties of an authority exercise. Second, it examines disposal as a power act — the specific features of disposal decisions that constitute them as exercises of institutional authority rather than merely practical acts of tidiness. Third, it develops the concept of moral licensing through tidiness: the way in which the virtue associated with cleanup activity insulates cleanup decisions from scrutiny and accountability in ways that no other class of authority decision enjoys. Fourth, it analyzes the role of conflict avoidance as a driver of irreversible unilateral action, arguing that cleanup is frequently performed not despite its authority character but because of it — because unilateral action avoids the negotiation that shared decision-making would require. Fifth, it develops a diagnostic reframing of cleanup decisions as authority decisions, with the structural and practical implications that follow from that reframing. The paper draws on institutional theory, the sociology of domestic space, the analysis of power in everyday life, and the analyses developed in preceding papers of this suite, particularly the treatments of tacit norm formation, irreversibility, and the post-hoc moralization of domestic action.
1. Introduction: The Governance Hidden in the Tidying
A household is being cleaned. Surfaces are cleared, objects are relocated, accumulated material is sorted, and items that appear to have no current use are discarded. The person doing this work is tired; they have been managing the household’s accumulated disorder for what feels like too long; the shared space has reached a threshold of clutter that they find functionally and aesthetically intolerable. Their cleaning is an act of service — they are not cleaning for themselves alone but for the household, maintaining the shared environment that all members depend on. When the cleaning is done, the household will be more functional, more comfortable, and more ordered. The act is recognized, when it is recognized at all, as an expression of care and responsibility.
Now consider what has actually occurred. The person cleaning has made a series of decisions — about which objects belong in which locations, about which objects are needed and which are not, about which arrangements serve the household’s purposes and which are clutter — that are binding on all household members because the decisions are irreversible. The object that was discarded is gone. The arrangement that was reorganized has been replaced by a different arrangement. The project materials that were cleared from the workspace are no longer where their owner left them. These decisions were not submitted for shared deliberation; they were not authorized by the household members affected by them; they were not accompanied by any process of consultation, documentation, or review. They were made unilaterally by the cleaning actor, under the authority of the cleaning role, and they are irreversible.
This paper is concerned with the governance character of that authority — with the mechanisms by which cleanup activity acquires the structural properties of an authority exercise while retaining the moral coding of a service act, and with the consequences of this combination for domestic institutional life. The central argument is that cleanup is a form of governance that is systematically misclassified as a form of service, and that this misclassification has specific and consequential institutional effects: it concentrates authority over shared resources in whoever performs cleanup work, insulates that authority from scrutiny through the moral cover of tidiness, enables the irreversible resolution of coordination disputes through unilateral action under the moral cover of household maintenance, and produces recurring conflicts that cannot be resolved at the level of values because the authority dimension of the act that produced them has not been recognized.
The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 examines why cleanup feels like virtue while functioning like governance, developing an account of the specific mechanisms that produce this combination. Section 3 develops the analysis of disposal as a power act, examining the specific features of disposal decisions that constitute them as authority exercises. Section 4 analyzes moral licensing through tidiness — the way in which the virtue code associated with cleanup insulates its authority dimension from accountability. Section 5 examines the role of conflict avoidance as an independent driver of cleanup-as-authority, arguing that unilateral action frequently substitutes for negotiation in ways that are structurally generated rather than personally chosen. Section 6 develops the diagnostic reframing of cleanup decisions as authority decisions and examines its practical implications. Section 7 presents case material from shared workspace governance, object disposition conflicts, and the reorganization of shared storage before a conclusion draws out the broader implications for the suite.
2. Why Cleanup Feels Like Virtue and Functions Like Governance
The experience of cleanup as a virtuous act and the structural reality of cleanup as a governance act are not in tension by accident. They are in tension because the virtuous framing of cleanup is, in significant part, a structural outcome of the household’s tacit norm environment — an environment that, as Paper 1 established, lacks any mechanism for making its own governance operations visible. In this environment, governance acts that are accomplished through morally coded activities acquire a double invisibility: they are invisible as governance because they are visible as service, and the visibility of the service functions as a screen that prevents the governance character from being examined.
The virtuous coding of cleanup has deep cultural roots. Order, cleanliness, and the maintenance of shared domestic space have been associated with moral responsibility across a wide range of cultural and historical contexts in ways that are sufficiently robust to constitute something close to a cultural universal, even as the specific content of what counts as clean and ordered varies significantly across contexts.¹ These associations are not arbitrary; they reflect the genuine functional value of order maintenance in shared living environments, the real contribution that cleanup work makes to the household’s collective wellbeing, and the legitimate recognition that the person who maintains shared spaces is providing a service that benefits everyone. The problem is not that cleanup is incorrectly valued as a contribution but that the virtuous coding of the contribution operates to insulate the governance dimension of the act from the scrutiny that governance ordinarily requires.
The governance character of cleanup arises from a specific structural feature of cleanup decisions that distinguishes them from other classes of domestic act: cleanup decisions are binding and irreversible decisions about shared resources, made by one household member on behalf of all household members, without explicit authorization. This is the definition of a governance act in any institutional context: a decision that is binding on the members of an institution, about resources that are shared among those members, made by an actor who has authority to make such decisions. The question that the analysis of cleanup forces is: where does the cleanup actor’s authority come from, and is it adequate to the decisions it is being exercised over?²
In formal institutions, authority over shared resources is allocated through explicit authorization processes — role definitions, delegated responsibilities, formal decision procedures. The person who can make binding decisions about shared institutional resources has that authority because it has been formally granted, within defined limits, by a process that the institution’s members recognize as legitimate. The cleanup actor in a domestic setting has no equivalent formal authorization. Their authority to make binding decisions about shared resources — to dispose, relocate, and reorganize without consent from those affected — rests entirely on the tacit norms of domestic life, which, as Paper 1 established, are invisible, unchosen, and unavailable for explicit examination and contestation. The authority is real in its consequences; it is not real in the sense of having been explicitly granted by the household members over whose resources it is exercised.³
The mechanisms by which cleanup activity acquires governance authority despite lacking explicit authorization are several. The first is the authority of presence: the person who is present in the shared space at the moment of mess threshold is, by default, the person who manages the threshold. Their presence gives them access to the shared space, their assessment of the threshold gives them the decision to clean, and their cleaning gives them the power to decide what the cleaned state looks like. The authority of presence is implicit and unreflected, but it is operative: the person who is present when the mess reaches the cleaning threshold has a kind of first-mover governance authority that is not available to the person who is absent.⁴
The second mechanism is the authority of effort. The person who expends the effort of cleaning has a recognized claim — again, tacit rather than explicit — to determine how the cleaned space is organized. This claim is an instance of the broader norm of effort-linked authority that appears across a wide range of social contexts: the person who does the work has a claim to some control over the outcome. In the cleanup context, this norm means that the cleaning actor’s organizational decisions are implicitly authorized by the fact that they did the work of cleaning — not by any assessment of whether their organizational decisions are correct, appropriate, or agreed to by other household members.⁵
The third mechanism is the authority of aesthetic judgment. Cleanup decisions require assessments of what is clutter and what is not, what belongs and what does not, what arrangement serves the household’s purposes and what arrangement does not. These assessments draw on the cleaning actor’s aesthetic preferences and functional values, which are not universal and are not necessarily shared by other household members. But because these assessments are embedded in a cleanup act that is coded as service and maintenance, they are insulated from the challenge they would receive if they were presented as simple expressions of preference. The cleaning actor is not imposing their aesthetic preferences on the shared space; they are maintaining the shared space. The distinction collapses in practice because the maintenance is accomplished through decisions that express the aesthetic preferences, but the collapse is invisible because the virtue code of maintenance screens it.⁶
3. Disposal as a Power Act
Among the decisions that cleanup actors make, disposal decisions are the most consequential and the least scrutinized. To dispose of an object from a shared domestic space — to discard it, to remove it from the household’s inventory, to take an action that cannot be undone — is to exercise a power that goes beyond the authority of presence, effort, or aesthetic judgment. It is to make a permanent, unilateral, and binding decision about a shared resource that forecloses all future decisions about that resource by eliminating it. This is not merely an authority act; it is the most final authority act available within domestic institutional life, and it is accomplished under the moral cover of tidiness on a continuous and largely unremarked basis in most households.
The power character of disposal decisions becomes visible when the analytical frame of Paper 3’s irreversibility analysis is applied. Paper 3 established that the asymmetry between reversible and irreversible actions requires that irreversible actions be held to higher justification thresholds than reversible ones, because irreversible actions eliminate options whose value may only become apparent after the fact. The disposal decision is the paradigm case of irreversible domestic action: an object, once discarded, cannot be recovered; an arrangement, once dismantled, cannot be reconstructed without effort that may exceed the value of what was recovered; a project, once cleared, may not be resumed at all. The authority embedded in these decisions is therefore not a modest everyday authority over trivial matters of household organization; it is an authority to make permanent decisions about shared resources that cannot be revisited, appealed, or reversed.⁷
The power character of disposal is further illuminated by considering what would be required for the same decision to be made legitimately in any formal institutional context. If a manager in a formal organization were to dispose of resources that belonged to other members of the organization — discarding materials that belonged to a colleague’s project, reorganizing a shared workspace according to their own judgment, eliminating institutional records they judged to be unnecessary — the act would be recognized as an authority exercise and would require explicit authorization from appropriate governance structures. The disposal would need to be authorized, documented, and in many cases reversible through a process of appeal. The absence of equivalent authorization requirements in the domestic context is not evidence that domestic disposal decisions are less consequential than organizational disposal decisions; it is evidence that the household’s governance structure does not recognize them as governance acts at all.⁸
The power of disposal is not merely the power to eliminate a specific object. It is the power to define what the household’s inventory is — to determine, through the accumulation of individual disposal decisions, what the household has and does not have, what is preserved and what is discarded, what the shared space contains and what it does not. This inventory-defining power is a governance power of a quite fundamental kind: it determines the material basis of the household’s operations in ways that shape what projects are possible, what preparations can be made, what resources are available for future use. The person who consistently makes disposal decisions in a household is, in effect, the curator of the household’s material culture — and this curatorial power is exercised without explicit authorization, without accountability to the household members affected by it, and under the moral cover of a service act that insulates it from the scrutiny that curation ordinarily requires.⁹
The relationship between disposal power and resource ownership is a further dimension of the power analysis that the domestic context makes particularly complex. In most formal institutional contexts, the authority to dispose of a resource is contingent on ownership or delegated custodianship: you may dispose of your own resources, and you may dispose of shared resources if you have been explicitly authorized to do so. In domestic settings, the ownership structure of shared resources is rarely explicit, and the authority to dispose of household objects is rarely derived from explicit ownership or delegation. Instead, it is derived from the same tacit norm structure that governs all domestic authority — from precedent, from role concentration, from the authority of presence and effort. The result is that disposal authority in domestic settings is routinely exercised over objects whose ownership and disposition authority have never been explicitly assigned, and the exercise of that authority is invisible as an authority exercise because the underlying ownership and authorization questions have never been made explicit.¹⁰
4. Moral Licensing Through Tidiness
The concept of moral licensing, developed in the social psychology literature, refers to the phenomenon by which a prior act of moral virtue licenses subsequent behavior that would otherwise be subject to moral scrutiny. A person who has done something good feels entitled to act on other preferences or motivations that they would normally constrain; the moral credit generated by the virtuous act effectively purchases a degree of exemption from subsequent accountability. The present paper argues that cleanup activity generates a specific and potent form of moral licensing that operates not merely on the cleanup actor’s subsequent behavior but on the cleanup decisions themselves — that the virtue of performing the cleanup act licenses the authority decisions embedded within it in ways that insulate those decisions from challenge before, during, and after the cleanup event.¹¹
The operation of moral licensing through tidiness can be analyzed at three stages. Before the cleanup, the moral coding of cleanup activity as service and maintenance creates a presumption in favor of the cleanup act: the person who is going to clean is doing something good for the household, and challenging or constraining that act requires overcoming this presumption. A household member who wishes to prevent specific disposal decisions from being made — because their objects are in the space about to be cleaned, because their project materials are at risk, because their reserved items are in the storage environment about to be reorganized — must make an explicit claim that their interests should constrain the cleaning actor’s authority. This claim requires articulating an opposition to a good act, which is socially costly in the domestic context in ways that make it difficult to make.¹²
During the cleanup, the moral license operates as a real-time authorization: the cleaning actor is doing something good, their judgment about what constitutes clutter and what does not is embedded in a virtuous act, and challenging specific disposal or reorganization decisions in the moment of cleanup requires interrupting a service act to contest specific judgments. The social cost of this interruption is high: it is experienced as micromanagement, as distrust, as an unwillingness to accept help, and as the imposition of the challenged member’s preferences on someone who is doing work for the household. Even household members who are aware that their objects or arrangements are at risk typically find this challenge difficult to make while the cleanup is in progress, and so they do not make it, and the cleanup proceeds under the license that the virtue of the act provides.¹³
After the cleanup, the moral license operates in the retrospective framing of any conflict that arises from the disposal or reorganization decisions made during it. The cleanup actor cleaned; their act was a contribution; the loss or disruption experienced by the affected household member is the consequence not of the cleanup actor’s authority exercise but of the affected member’s failure to protect their interests before or during the cleanup. As Paper 3 established in the analysis of post-hoc moralization, this retrospective framing is not typically disingenuous — it reflects the genuine operating logic of the household’s tacit norm environment, in which the absence of explicit protection signals constitutes a form of authorization for the cleanup actor’s decisions. But the framing systematically attributes the cost of an authority exercise to the inadequacy of the person who bore the cost, rather than to the authority exercise itself, and this attribution forecloses the structural analysis that would identify the cleanup actor’s unilateral authority as the appropriate focus of examination.¹⁴
The moral licensing of cleanup authority through tidiness is particularly potent because it is compounded by the normative authority of the space-use standards that the cleanup actor is enforcing. The person who cleans is not merely performing a service; they are enforcing a standard — a conception of what the shared space should look like, how objects should be organized, what constitutes appropriate use of shared areas. This standard is not neutral; it reflects the cleanup actor’s preferences, values, and functional priorities. But because it is enforced through a virtue act, the standard acquires a moral authority that it would not have if it were presented as a simple preference. The cleanup actor is not imposing their standards on the household; they are maintaining the household. The distinction is, again, one that collapses in practice — the maintenance is accomplished through the enforcement of specific standards — but the collapse is concealed by the virtue framing.¹⁵
A further dimension of moral licensing that is specific to domestic cleanup is the relationship between cleaning work and the recognition of domestic contribution. In households where cleanup work is asymmetrically distributed — where one member performs significantly more cleanup than others — the cleanup actor accumulates a moral credit that extends beyond the specific act of cleaning into a broader account of domestic contribution. The member who cleans more has done more for the household; their judgment about the household’s organization is therefore more authoritative; their decisions about what constitutes clutter and what constitutes a necessary object are entitled to greater weight. This moral credit is not without basis — the member who does more cleanup work has a legitimate claim to recognition — but it operates to extend the authority license beyond the specific cleanup act into a general authority over the household’s material organization that is not explicitly granted and is not subject to explicit limits.¹⁶
5. Conflict Avoidance as a Driver of Irreversibility
A dimension of cleanup-as-authority that the preceding analysis has not fully developed is the role of cleanup as a mechanism for resolving domestic disputes without negotiation. This is not a peripheral feature of cleanup behavior; it is, this paper argues, one of its primary structural functions in households where the costs of explicit conflict are high and the mechanisms for legitimate dispute resolution are absent. Cleanup, understood as a conflict avoidance mechanism, is not merely an authority exercise that happens to avoid conflict; it is often an authority exercise performed specifically because it avoids conflict — because unilateral action under the cover of household maintenance resolves a dispute without requiring the parties to the dispute to negotiate it explicitly.
The disputes that cleanup resolves through unilateral action are primarily disputes about the use of shared space: disputes about which objects belong in shared areas, disputes about what constitutes appropriate organization of shared resources, disputes about how the material environment of the household should be maintained. These disputes are among the most difficult to negotiate explicitly in domestic settings, for reasons that the preceding papers of this suite have established. They involve tacit norms that are invisible and contested; they implicate aesthetic preferences that are experienced as natural rather than chosen and are therefore difficult to subject to rational deliberation; they engage questions of authority and resource ownership that have never been explicitly assigned and are therefore not available for explicit contestation; and they carry a social cost of explicit conflict that most household members experience as disproportionate to the practical stakes of the dispute.¹⁷
In this context, cleanup is a mechanism that resolves the dispute without requiring it to be conducted. The member who finds the shared space arranged in a way they find intolerable — who experiences a colleague’s project materials on the shared surface, a partner’s accumulated items in the shared storage, or a child’s possessions in the shared living area as a claim on shared space that they wish to contest — has several options. They can raise the dispute explicitly, which requires conducting a negotiation that is socially costly, uncertain in outcome, and likely to produce the relational friction that domestic conflict generates. They can tolerate the intolerable arrangement, which requires suppressing a preference strong enough to have registered as intolerable. Or they can clean — resolving the disputed arrangement in favor of their own preferences, under the moral cover of household maintenance, without the social costs of explicit conflict and with the moral credit of a service act.¹⁸
The conflict avoidance function of cleanup is not unique to cleanup; it is a specific instance of a broader pattern of unilateral action as a substitute for negotiation that appears throughout domestic institutional life. What is specific to cleanup is the moral insulation that the virtue coding of cleanup provides. Other forms of unilateral domestic action — taking a shared resource without asking, making a shared decision without consultation, reorganizing a shared arrangement without notice — are recognizable as authority exercises and generate proportional resistance. Cleanup is distinguished by the fact that the same authority exercise, accomplished through the cleanup act, is not recognizable as an authority exercise at all — and therefore generates resistance only after the fact, when the irreversible consequences of the cleanup have already been produced and the moral credit of the act has already been accumulated.¹⁹
The specific mechanism by which conflict avoidance drives irreversibility is worth making explicit. The cleanup actor who is resolving a dispute through unilateral action must make the resolution permanent in order for it to work as a conflict avoidance mechanism. A temporary relocation of contested objects — moving them without disposing of them — leaves the dispute open: the objects can be returned, the arrangement can be re-contested, the negotiation that the cleanup was designed to avoid remains available. Disposal closes the dispute permanently: the object is gone, the arrangement is resolved, and the alternative outcome — the one that would have been available if the dispute had been negotiated — is no longer available. The irreversibility of disposal is therefore not a side effect of conflict-avoidance cleanup but a feature of it: the cleanup actor who wants to resolve a dispute through unilateral action has a structural incentive to choose the most irreversible available resolution.²⁰
This analysis has a disturbing implication that must be confronted directly. If conflict avoidance is a driver of irreversible cleanup decisions, then the household members who most consistently perform cleanup work are not merely providing a service; they are, in cases where the conflict avoidance motive is operative, accumulating governance power through the unilateral resolution of domestic disputes in favor of their own preferences. This accumulation is invisible because it is accomplished through a virtue act, but it is real in its consequences: the household’s material environment is progressively organized according to the cleanup actor’s preferences and functional priorities, at the expense of the preferences and priorities of household members who do not perform cleanup work. The asymmetric distribution of cleanup work that Paper 5 analyzed as a burden distribution problem is therefore also an asymmetric distribution of governance power — and the governance power dimension compounds the burden distribution inequity in ways that have not been adequately analyzed.
6. Diagnostic Reframing: Cleanup Decisions as Authority Decisions
The diagnostic reframing proposed in this section is not a claim that cleanup is illegitimate or that household members should not clean. It is a claim that the authority decisions embedded within cleanup activity should be recognized as authority decisions — should be subjected to the same standards of accountability, authorization, and reversibility that authority decisions over shared resources require in any institutional context — and that this recognition has specific practical implications for how domestic conflict around cleanup should be understood and addressed.
The first implication of the diagnostic reframing is that cleanup decisions should be evaluated against an authorization standard rather than a virtue standard. The appropriate question is not “was the cleanup actor being responsible and caring?” — to which the answer is typically yes — but “was the cleanup actor authorized to make the specific disposal and reorganization decisions they made?” This authorization question is almost never asked in domestic contexts, because the virtue framing of cleanup insulates the authority dimension from scrutiny. But it is the right question if the goal is to understand what produced the coordination failure, whose authority was being exercised, over whose resources, and under what constraints. Asking the authorization question does not impugn the cleanup actor’s motives; it simply subjects their authority exercise to the scrutiny that all authority exercises over shared resources require.²¹
The second implication is that the irreversibility threshold analysis developed in Paper 3 should be applied to cleanup decisions explicitly. Because disposal decisions are irreversible, they require higher justification thresholds than reversible cleanup decisions — the same higher threshold that Paper 3 established for all irreversible domestic actions, and that institutional contexts enforce through confirmation requirements, double-authorization procedures, and appeal mechanisms for consequential irreversible decisions. The practical translation of this principle into domestic cleanup behavior is not the imposition of bureaucratic procedures onto everyday domestic life; it is the development of a shared norm that irreversible cleanup decisions — disposal, as distinct from relocation — are a distinct and more consequential category of cleanup act that requires a higher level of confidence about authorization than reversible cleanup decisions. The object that can be returned to its owner if they want it back is categorically different from the object that has been discarded, and this categorical difference should be reflected in the decision standard applied to each.²²
The third implication is that the conflict avoidance function of cleanup should be recognized and interrupted. If cleanup is being used as a mechanism for resolving domestic disputes through unilateral action rather than negotiation, the solution is not to prohibit cleanup but to create conditions under which the disputes that cleanup is being used to avoid can be conducted explicitly and at lower social cost. This requires the diagnostic vocabulary analyzed throughout this suite — language that can name domestic disputes as structural rather than personal, that can address the question of shared space use without triggering the relational friction that personal conflict generates, and that can distinguish between the legitimate service dimension of cleanup activity and the authority dimension that is embedded within it. The development of this vocabulary is one of the primary practical aims of the suite, and the cleanup case is its most demanding test: if the diagnostic framework cannot address cleanup-as-authority without triggering the moral defensiveness that the virtue framing of cleanup generates, the framework is inadequate for the full range of domestic institutional failure.²³
The fourth implication is that the asymmetric distribution of cleanup work and cleanup authority should be analyzed together. Paper 5 established that the asymmetric distribution of domestic labor creates indispensability vulnerabilities; this paper establishes that the same asymmetric distribution creates governance power asymmetries. The household member who performs most of the cleanup work holds, in effect, most of the household’s governance authority over shared material resources. This authority accumulation is a structural consequence of the labor distribution, not a personal failing of anyone involved — but it is a structural consequence with significant institutional implications, because it means that the governance of the household’s shared material environment is concentrated in the same member who bears the disproportionate labor burden. The reform of the labor distribution and the reform of the authority distribution are therefore not merely complementary; they are structurally linked, and reform of one without the other is likely to be incomplete in its effects.²⁴
The fifth implication returns to the legibility problem that Paper 1 identified as the central challenge of domestic institutional reform. The diagnostic reframing of cleanup as authority is subject to the legibility trap: making the authority dimension of cleanup visible is likely to generate resistance from the cleanup actor, because it implies that their virtuous service acts have been exercising unacknowledged power — an implication that is experienced as accusatory regardless of how carefully it is formulated. The resistance is not irrational; the implication is uncomfortable and the social cost of acknowledging it is real. But the discomfort of the acknowledgment is itself diagnostic: it reveals the degree to which the authority dimension of cleanup has been concealed by its virtue framing, and the degree to which making it visible requires confronting something that the household’s tacit norm structure has been working to keep invisible.
The appropriate response to this resistance is not to abandon the diagnostic reframing but to understand it as evidence that the reframing is doing the analytical work it is designed to do. A reframing that generates no resistance is probably not addressing the structural feature of the phenomenon that produces the failures; a reframing that generates resistance has made something visible that was previously invisible, which is the precondition for addressing it. The goal of the diagnostic framework is not comfort but accuracy, and the accurate analysis of cleanup as authority — uncomfortable as that analysis is — is the precondition for the structural interventions that might reduce the rate of irreversible domestic loss, the accumulation of governance power through virtue acts, and the recurring conflicts that are produced by unilateral authority exercises that are not recognized as authority exercises at all.
7. Case Material: Shared Workspace Governance, Object Disposition Conflicts, and the Reorganization of Shared Storage
Shared workspace governance is the domain in which the authority character of cleanup is most directly consequential and most clearly distinguishable from its service character. A shared workspace — a surface, a room, or a designated area of the household that is used for work, projects, or ongoing activities by one or more household members — is a shared resource whose organization is governed by whatever tacit norms have accumulated around its use. When a cleanup actor clears a shared workspace, they are not merely removing disorder from a shared space; they are making governance decisions about the use and organization of a shared resource that is serving ongoing functional purposes for its users.
The specific failure pattern in shared workspace governance follows the structure established in Papers 2 and 3: the workspace contains in-process materials whose status is not explicitly signaled; the cleanup actor, operating under the default-to-available convention and the default-to-disposal bias under constraint, treats the workspace’s contents as available for clearing; the clearing is accomplished under the moral cover of household maintenance; and the workspace user returns to find their work interrupted, their materials displaced or discarded, and their project damaged in ways that cannot be remedied without significant re-investment of time and effort. The conflict that follows is conducted in terms of consideration, respect, and the distribution of domestic responsibility rather than in terms of governance authority, resource ownership, and the authorization of irreversible decisions — and because it is conducted in the wrong terms, it cannot produce a structural correction.²⁵
The governance analysis adds a dimension to this failure that the signaling and irreversibility analyses alone do not capture: the cleanup actor’s workspace clearing is not merely a misreading of object status or an instance of the default-to-disposal bias. It is also a governance act — a decision that the shared space should serve the cleanup actor’s conception of its proper use, accomplished through the authority that cleanup work provides. The workspace user’s claim to maintain an ongoing project in the shared space is a claim on shared space that competes with the cleanup actor’s claim to maintain the shared space according to their standards of order. This is a genuine governance dispute, and it requires a governance resolution — an agreed norm about how shared workspace use is governed — rather than a behavioral resolution, which is what appeals to consideration and communication generate.
The governance resolution requires making explicit what the tacit norm environment keeps implicit: that shared workspaces are shared resources governed by tacit norms that distribute use rights in ways that may not be equitable or functional, and that the distribution of use rights should be explicitly addressed rather than left to the de facto governance of cleanup authority. This means developing an agreed norm about what constitutes a protected in-process use of shared workspace, what signaling is required to establish and maintain that protection, and what the authority limits of cleanup activity are when it encounters signaled in-process uses. These are governance questions whose answers are not self-evident but whose explicit address is more likely to produce durable coordination than the repeated cycling through conflict and relational repair that the current tacit norm structure generates.²⁶
Object disposition conflicts are the class of domestic conflict in which the power character of disposal decisions is most visible in retrospect and most difficult to address structurally, because the object that produced the conflict is gone — the disposal that generated the conflict is irreversible — and the conflict therefore cannot be resolved by restoring the status quo ante. The conflict is conducted entirely in retrospect, about an act that cannot be undone, and the parties to it have no shared framework for understanding what kind of act the disposal was. The person who disposed understands it as a service; the person who lost the object understands it as a violation. Neither understanding is structurally adequate: the service understanding conceals the authority dimension; the violation understanding personalizes what is structurally generated.
The characteristic structure of an object disposition conflict is the asymmetry of information and authorization analyzed throughout this suite. The disposing actor made the disposal decision without full information about the object’s status, purpose, or value to its owner — because that information was not communicated, as Paper 2 established, and because the compressed decision window of constrained cleanup, as Paper 3 established, did not permit the inquiry that might have obtained it. The owner of the object had not explicitly signaled its protected status — because the household’s default convention does not require such signaling for objects in shared storage, as Paper 2 also established. The disposal therefore occurred at the intersection of an information deficit and an authorization ambiguity, producing an irreversible outcome that neither party specifically intended.
The diagnostic reframing of the object disposition conflict requires addressing this intersection explicitly. The question is not “was the disposal actor being inconsiderate?” — to which the answer is “not necessarily” — but “does the household have an authorization standard for disposal decisions that is adequate to distinguish protected from unprotected objects?” The answer, in most households, is no: the household has only the default-to-available convention, which treats objects in shared storage as available for disposal in the absence of explicit contrary signals, and this convention is not adequate for the full range of objects that occupy shared storage and the full range of purposes they are serving. The correction is the development of a more adequate authorization standard — the minimal signaling protocol sketched in Paper 2, extended by the disposal authority analysis developed here — rather than a behavioral correction to either party’s actions within the current inadequate standard.²⁷
The reorganization of shared storage is a domain that extends the authority analysis beyond disposal to the broader class of cleanup decisions that involve the reorganization of shared material environments without disposal. Reorganization — the relocation of objects, the restructuring of storage systems, the imposition of a new organizational logic on a shared space — is less irreversible than disposal in that the objects remain in the household, but it is irreversible in a different and often equally consequential sense: the organizational logic that the reorganizing actor has imposed on the shared space replaces the organizational logic of the person who originally organized it, and the original organization — which was calibrated to that person’s cognitive and functional needs, which embodied the sensory access knowledge analyzed in Paper 5, and which may have been the product of significant organizational investment — is destroyed.
The authority exercise involved in shared storage reorganization is structurally similar to the authority exercise involved in disposal: it is a binding, unilateral decision about a shared resource that is made without explicit authorization and that produces consequences that are irreversible in the practical sense that restoring the original organization requires effort that may exceed the value of the restoration. The moral license that covers the reorganization is the same as the moral license that covers disposal — the cleanup actor is maintaining the shared space, improving its organization, providing a service to the household — and it is equally effective in insulating the authority exercise from scrutiny.
What is specific to reorganization, as distinct from disposal, is the relationship between the organizational logic imposed and the sensory access knowledge it disrupts. As Paper 5 established, the managing member of a household domain develops sensory access knowledge — locational knowledge, condition-assessment knowledge, procedural sensory knowledge — that is calibrated to the specific organizational logic of the domain as they have structured it. When that organizational logic is replaced by a different logic, the managing member’s sensory access knowledge is disrupted: they no longer know where things are, because the person who reorganized the space has placed them according to a different logic. The disruption of sensory access knowledge through reorganization is a form of coordination cost that is not visible as a cost at the moment of reorganization — the space looks better, the cleanup actor has provided a service — but that emerges over time as the domain manager repeatedly encounters the absence of objects where their sensory access knowledge expects them to be.²⁸
The governance analysis of shared storage reorganization thus identifies a class of cleanup-as-authority decisions whose costs are systematically underrecognized because they are distributed over time rather than concentrated in a single visible loss event. The object that is disposed of generates an immediate and visible loss; the sensory access knowledge disrupted by reorganization generates a diffuse and ongoing coordination cost that is less visible, less attributable to a specific decision, and therefore less available as a basis for a claim about the authority exercise that produced it. This diffuse cost is nonetheless real, and its structural source — the unilateral imposition of a new organizational logic on a shared space used by a domain manager with established sensory access knowledge — is identifiable and addressable through the governance framework developed in this paper.
8. Conclusion
Cleanup is a governance act. This paper has established this claim through the analysis of how cleanup acquires the structural properties of an authority exercise while retaining the moral coding of a service act, through the examination of disposal as the paradigm case of a power act over shared domestic resources, through the analysis of how moral licensing through tidiness insulates cleanup authority from accountability, through the identification of conflict avoidance as an independent driver of irreversible unilateral cleanup action, and through the development of a diagnostic reframing that subjects cleanup decisions to the authorization scrutiny that all authority exercises over shared resources require.
The practical implications of this analysis are not that households should clean less or that cleanup actors should be held personally responsible for the structural conditions that make cleanup a governance act. The practical implications are structural. Cleanup authority needs to be recognized as authority — made legible in the household’s tacit norm structure rather than concealed beneath the virtue framing of service. The authorization standard for disposal decisions needs to be higher than the current default-to-available convention provides, and it needs to be explicitly shared among household members rather than assumed from the absence of contrary signals. The conflict avoidance function of cleanup needs to be addressed through the creation of lower-cost mechanisms for explicit dispute resolution rather than through the suppression of the disputes themselves. And the governance dimension of cleanup needs to be decoupled from the service dimension — so that the person who does the work of cleaning does not, by virtue of doing that work, acquire unilateral authority over the shared resources that the cleaning touches.
These are ambitious structural goals, and their achievement requires the degree of domestic institutional legibility that Papers 1 through 5 have argued is the central challenge and the central requirement of the reform project this suite represents. But the cleanup case is, in one respect, more tractable than the earlier cases in the suite: it is a domain in which the consequences of structural failure are sufficiently immediate, sufficiently concrete, and sufficiently recurring that the motivation for structural analysis is real and present in most households. The recurring conflicts around cleanup — the lost objects, the disrupted projects, the imposed organizational standards, the retrospective accusations of inconsideration and carelessness — are among the most common and most persistent sources of domestic friction, and the households that experience them are typically motivated to address them. The obstacle has been the absence of a structural framework adequate to the analysis. This paper, together with the preceding papers of the suite, aims to provide that framework.
Notes
¹ The cultural universality of the association between cleanliness and moral virtue, and the range of specific cultural expressions of this association, is documented across anthropological and historical literature. Douglas (1966) provides the foundational analysis: her central argument is that what counts as dirty is not defined by physical properties but by its relationship to classificatory systems — dirt is matter out of place — and that the removal of dirt is therefore an act of classification and ordering that carries moral significance independently of its hygienic consequences. Shove (2003) extends Douglas’s analysis to the contemporary domestic context, documenting how the standards for cleanliness and order have shifted historically in ways that reflect changing cultural norms about domestic virtue, household identity, and the relationship between domestic order and social respectability. The moral coding of cleanliness analyzed in this paper draws on both traditions while extending them to encompass the governance dimension that neither tradition fully develops.
² The characterization of cleanup as a governance act draws on Weber’s (1978) analysis of authority as the legitimate exercise of power over the action of others — legitimate in the sense that those subject to it accept it as valid. Weber distinguished between three types of legitimate authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal. The cleanup actor’s authority in domestic settings is primarily traditional in Weber’s sense: it derives from the established custom that the person who performs cleanup work has the right to make the decisions that cleanup work involves. The analysis here does not dispute the sociological reality of this traditional authority but subjects it to the institutional critique that traditional authority resists: traditional authority is legitimate by virtue of its customary character, but customary legitimacy does not entail that the authority is adequately scoped, appropriately checked, or equitably distributed.
³ The analysis of domestic cleanup authority as lacking explicit authorization draws on the broader theory of authority and legitimacy in institutional contexts. Hurd (1999) develops an analysis of legitimacy that distinguishes between compliance based on self-interest, compliance based on coercion, and compliance based on the internalized belief that an authority is legitimate. In domestic settings, the cleanup actor’s authority is not coercive, and it is not based on explicit consent; it is based on the internalized acceptance of tacit norms that constitute the cleanup actor’s authority as legitimate in a diffuse and unreflective way. The challenge identified in this paper is not that the authority is illegitimate in this diffuse sense but that its tacit and unreflective character makes it unavailable for the explicit examination and limitation that the exercise of authority over shared resources requires.
⁴ The authority of presence as a mechanism of first-mover governance is analyzed in the economic literature on first-mover advantages, particularly in the context of resource contestation. Barzel (1989) develops an account of how the costs of enforcing property rights determine who effectively exercises control over contested resources; the person who is present at the moment of resource contestation bears lower enforcement costs and therefore exercises more effective control. In the domestic context, the person present at the moment of mess threshold bears lower costs for exercising cleanup authority than the person who is absent — not enforcement costs in the economic sense but rather the social costs of contesting the cleanup after the fact rather than preventing it before the fact.
⁵ The authority of effort in domestic contexts is related to Locke’s (1689/1980) labor theory of property, which grounds property rights in the investment of labor in a resource. The domestic application of this principle — that the person who invests labor in cleaning a shared space acquires a degree of authority over how that space is organized — is not Locke’s argument but it draws on the same moral intuition: that labor investment is a basis for legitimate claims over the product of that labor. The analysis here does not dispute the intuition but questions whether the authority it grounds is adequately limited: the effort of cleaning does not, in most institutional contexts, authorize the cleanup actor to make permanent and irreversible decisions about shared resources that belong to other members of the institution.
⁶ The concealment of aesthetic preference enforcement within virtue-coded service acts is related to what Bourdieu (1984) analyzed as the conversion of economic or social capital into symbolic capital: the transformation of advantages that are contingent and contestable into advantages that are experienced as natural and legitimate. The cleanup actor’s enforcement of their organizational and aesthetic standards through cleanup work is a form of this conversion: the contingent advantage of their presence and their cleanup labor is converted into the apparently legitimate authority to determine how the shared space should look. Bourdieu’s analysis was directed at class relations and cultural distinction; the domestic application developed here is not specifically about class but draws on the same underlying mechanism of naturalization through symbolic encoding.
⁷ The characterization of disposal as the paradigm case of irreversible domestic action draws on the broader irreversibility analysis developed in Paper 3, and specifically on Arrow and Fisher’s (1974) concept of option value: the additional cost of irreversible decisions that is not captured by standard cost-benefit analysis because it consists in the elimination of options whose value may only become apparent after the decision. The disposal decision eliminates not merely the object but all future options involving that object, and the authority to make that elimination is therefore the authority to foreclose all such options — which is, in option-value terms, an authority over the full range of future possibilities that the object represented.
⁸ The contrast between the authorization requirements for disposal decisions in formal institutional contexts and the absence of equivalent requirements in domestic contexts is not merely a rhetorical observation; it reflects a structural difference in how authority is constituted in formal and informal institutions. In formal institutions, authority over shared resources is constituted through explicit delegation within a governance structure that is itself explicitly constituted; in domestic institutions, authority over shared resources is constituted through the tacit norm structure analyzed in Paper 1, which is invisible, unchosen, and unavailable for explicit examination. The absence of explicit authorization requirements for domestic disposal decisions is therefore a consequence of the household’s institutional structure rather than a specific policy choice, and it cannot be corrected by individual behavior change without modifications to the institutional structure that generates it.
⁹ The analysis of the cleanup actor’s disposal authority as a curatorial power over the household’s material culture draws on the broader literature on material culture and domestic space. Miller (2010) develops an account of the material culture of domestic life that emphasizes the ways in which household objects constitute and reflect the identities, histories, and relationships of household members. The cleanup actor who makes disposal decisions about these objects is not merely making practical resource management decisions; they are making decisions about the household’s material self-representation — about which objects the household preserves as part of its identity and history and which it discards. This curatorial dimension of disposal authority extends the governance analysis beyond resource management into the domain of identity and memory, where the authority of unilateral disposal is particularly consequential.
¹⁰ The complexity of resource ownership in domestic settings — the absence of explicit ownership assignments for most household objects and the derivation of disposal authority from tacit norms rather than explicit ownership — is related to Ellickson’s (1991) analysis of how informal norms govern property rights in close-knit communities. Ellickson found that neighbors in his study communities resolved property disputes according to informal norms that frequently diverged from formal legal property rights, and that these informal norms were adapted to the specific social and economic conditions of the community. The domestic equivalent is the tacit norm structure that governs household resource ownership and disposal authority — a structure that is adapted to the conditions of domestic life but that generates the authority ambiguities and coordination failures analyzed in this paper.
¹¹ The concept of moral licensing is developed empirically in Merritt, Effron, and Monin (2010), who provide a comprehensive review of the experimental evidence for the phenomenon and develop a theoretical account of the mechanism by which prior virtue acts license subsequent behavior that would otherwise be constrained. Their analysis identifies several mechanisms through which licensing operates, including the accumulation of moral credit, the establishment of a virtuous self-image that persists into subsequent decisions, and the licensing of behavior that expresses preferences suppressed by moral norms. The application of moral licensing to cleanup authority developed in this paper is original; it draws on the mechanism of moral credit accumulation but extends it to encompass the licensing of authority decisions embedded within the virtue act itself rather than merely subsequent to it.
¹² The social cost of challenging or constraining a virtue act is a specific instance of the broader phenomenon analyzed in the social psychology literature as moral standing: the social requirement that challenges to others’ behavior be authorized by the challenger’s own prior behavior. Jordan, Mullen, and Murnighan (2011) document how the perception that a challenger lacks moral standing — because they have engaged in the behavior they are challenging, or because they have not met some behavioral threshold that would entitle them to challenge — reduces the social acceptance of the challenge. In the domestic cleanup context, the household member who wants to constrain the cleanup actor’s disposal authority faces a moral standing problem: their objection to the cleanup actor’s decisions may be heard as an expression of their preference for disorder, which the cleanup actor’s virtue act implicitly criticizes, and the challenge to the cleanup actor’s authority is therefore heard as the objection of someone who lacks the standing to make it.
¹³ The high social cost of contesting specific disposal decisions during an ongoing cleanup act is related to the broader literature on the dynamics of in-progress social acts and the social norms that govern their interruption. Goffman (1967) analyzes the face-threat involved in interrupting a social performance — the challenge to the performer’s self-presentation that interruption constitutes — and the social norms that require interruption to be justified in terms that acknowledge the face-threat and manage it appropriately. Interrupting an ongoing cleanup to contest specific disposal decisions is a face-threatening act of this kind, and the norm of face-management in close social relationships significantly raises the social cost of making it.
¹⁴ The retrospective moral framing of cleanup-generated loss — in which the cleanup actor’s act was a contribution and the affected member’s loss was a consequence of their failure to protect their interests — is the cleanup-specific instance of the post-hoc moralization analyzed in Paper 3. The specific dynamic in the cleanup context is that the post-hoc moralization is reinforced by the moral licensing analyzed in the preceding sections: the cleanup actor has performed a virtue act, which entitles them to retrospective defense of the decisions made within it, while the affected member’s objection to those decisions is heard as a challenge to the virtue act and therefore as an objection that requires moral standing the objector may not be perceived as having.
¹⁵ The normative authority of the space-use standards enforced through cleanup is analyzed in the domestic context by Gregson, Metcalfe, and Crewe (2007), who examine how domestic order is produced through practices that enforce specific conceptions of what a household space should look like and how household objects should be organized. Their analysis identifies the enforcement of domestic order standards as a practice that is simultaneously practical, aesthetic, and normative — simultaneously maintaining the space, expressing a conception of appropriate domestic life, and enforcing a standard that other household members are expected to conform to. The authority dimension of this enforcement, developed in the present paper, extends their analysis to encompass the governance implications of the normative enforcement that cleanup practice accomplishes.
¹⁶ The accumulation of governance authority through asymmetric cleanup labor is structurally parallel to what Lukes (1974) identified as the third face of power: the power to shape preferences and values in ways that prevent the emergence of grievances. Lukes argued that the most consequential form of power is not the power to coerce (first face) or to set the agenda (second face) but the power to determine what people want and what they experience as normal, which prevents the development of preferences and grievances that would otherwise challenge the existing distribution of power. The cleanup actor who consistently makes disposal and reorganization decisions in a household shapes the household’s material environment in ways that gradually normalize their preferences as the household’s standards — which is a form of preference shaping that operates through the accumulated effect of individual authority exercises rather than through any explicit imposition of preference.
¹⁷ The difficulty of negotiating shared space use disputes explicitly in domestic settings draws on the analysis of negotiation in close-relationship contexts developed by Mnookin and Kornhauser (1979) in the context of divorce settlements and by Pruitt and Kim (2004) in the broader negotiation literature. Both analyses establish that negotiation in ongoing close relationships is subject to constraints — the requirement to maintain the relationship, the social cost of explicit conflict, the asymmetric power dynamics that shape the agenda — that make it significantly more difficult than negotiation in arm’s-length transactional contexts. The development of lower-cost mechanisms for domestic dispute resolution is the practical implication of this analysis, and it is one of the central aims of the diagnostic and instrument volumes of this suite.
¹⁸ The analysis of cleanup as a conflict avoidance mechanism is related to the broader literature on the avoidance of direct confrontation in close relationships. Gottman (1994) identifies conflict avoidance as one of the primary patterns of dysfunctional communication in close relationships, arguing that conflicts that are avoided rather than engaged do not resolve but accumulate, and that the accumulation of unresolved conflicts is more damaging to relationship quality than the direct engagement of individual conflicts. The domestic cleanup case is consistent with Gottman’s analysis: the disputes resolved through unilateral cleanup action are not resolved but suppressed, and the suppression — because it is accomplished through an irreversible act rather than through explicit avoidance — forecloses the possibility of retrospective engagement that explicit avoidance preserves.
¹⁹ The structural distinction between cleanup and other forms of unilateral domestic action — the moral insulation that virtue coding provides — is the specific feature of cleanup that makes it a more consequential governance mechanism than other forms of unilateral action. Hirschman’s (1970) analysis of exit, voice, and loyalty in institutional contexts is relevant here: cleanup-as-authority is a form of unilateral action that combines the finality of exit (the object is gone, the arrangement is resolved) with the legitimacy of loyalty (the cleanup actor is maintaining the household), in a way that pre-empts the voice mechanism (the negotiation of the dispute) without the social costs that exit typically carries. This combination is what makes cleanup-as-authority so structurally powerful and so difficult to address.
²⁰ The argument that conflict avoidance drives irreversibility — that the cleanup actor who resolves a dispute through unilateral action has a structural incentive to choose the most irreversible available resolution — is a specific application of the general principle that irreversible actions are preferred to reversible ones when the goal is to foreclose future contestation. Dixit and Pindyck’s (1994) option value analysis established the general point that irreversibility forecloses options; applied here, the point is inverted: the cleanup actor seeking to foreclose contestation benefits from irreversibility, because irreversible disposal forecloses the option of the alternative outcome that negotiation might have produced.
²¹ The distinction between the virtue standard and the authorization standard for evaluating cleanup decisions is a specific instance of the broader distinction between consequentialist and procedural evaluations of governance acts. Rawls (1971) argues that the justice of an institutional arrangement cannot be assessed solely by evaluating its outcomes but must also be assessed by evaluating the procedures through which those outcomes were produced. The application to domestic cleanup is direct: the cleanup act cannot be evaluated solely by whether it produced a more orderly household but must also be evaluated by whether the authority exercised within it was appropriately authorized — which is a procedural question that the virtue standard cannot address.
²² The application of the irreversibility threshold principle to domestic cleanup decisions — the requirement that disposal decisions be held to a higher justification standard than reversible cleanup decisions — is the cleanup-specific instance of the general principle developed in Paper 3. The institutional parallels noted in Paper 3 — confirmation requirements before file deletion, double-authorization for large financial transactions — suggest the practical form that this threshold principle might take in domestic cleanup contexts: a shared norm that disposal decisions, unlike relocation decisions, require positive rather than default authorization from the person whose objects are being disposed of, or from a shared household decision process, rather than deriving authorization from the absence of contrary signals.
²³ The development of lower-cost mechanisms for explicit dispute resolution as an alternative to conflict-avoidance cleanup draws on the broader literature on alternative dispute resolution and its potential for application in close-relationship contexts. Bush and Folger (1994) develop a transformative approach to mediation that is specifically adapted to close-relationship disputes, emphasizing the restoration of communication and recognition between parties rather than the achievement of specific settlement outcomes. The application to domestic governance disputes is not direct — most domestic disputes do not require formal mediation — but the underlying principle that disputes are better addressed through processes that restore the parties’ capacity for communication than through processes that resolve the specific dispute while leaving the communication deficit intact is directly relevant.
²⁴ The structural linkage between the distribution of cleanup labor and the distribution of governance authority over shared material resources is a dimension of the domestic labor literature that has not been fully developed. Bianchi, Milkie, Sayer, and Robinson (2000) document the asymmetric distribution of domestic labor but do not develop its governance implications; Hochschild (1989) identifies the emotional and relational costs of asymmetric domestic labor but does not analyze its authority dimension. The analysis developed in this paper extends both traditions by establishing that the governance dimension of cleanup work is a structural consequence of the labor distribution rather than an incidental feature, and that reform of the labor distribution is therefore simultaneously a reform of the governance distribution.
²⁵ The characterization of shared workspace governance failure as a governance dispute rather than a behavioral failure draws on the organizational literature on territorial behavior in shared workspaces. Brown, Lawrence, and Robinson (2005) analyze how organizational members assert claims over shared workspace resources through territorial marking, through the performance of expertise, and through the exercise of role authority, and how conflicts over territorial claims are structured by organizational governance norms that determine whose claims take precedence. The domestic equivalent — the conflict between the workspace user’s claim to maintain an in-process arrangement and the cleanup actor’s claim to maintain the shared space according to their standards — is a territorial dispute whose resolution depends on the governance norms that determine whose claim takes precedence, which in most households are tacit, invisible, and skewed toward the cleanup actor by the moral authority of the maintenance role.
²⁶ The development of explicit norms about shared workspace use and the limits of cleanup authority is the governance equivalent of the object-status signaling protocol developed in Paper 2 and the preparation lead-time accounting developed in Paper 4. All three are instances of the general requirement that domestic institutions develop shared, explicit, and accessible conventions for the coordination domains where tacit conventions are producing recurring failures — not full bureaucratic formalization but minimal legibility adequate to prevent the most consequential failures and to create the conditions under which disputes can be conducted in structural rather than personal terms.
²⁷ The proposal that object disposition conflicts be addressed by developing a more adequate authorization standard for disposal decisions — rather than by behavioral correction within the current inadequate standard — is the cleanup-specific application of the general principle that structural failures require structural responses. The minimal signaling protocol of Paper 2 and the diagnostic taxonomy of Volume 8 provide the analytical basis for such a standard; the present paper establishes the governance analysis that explains why an authorization standard is the appropriate structural response to the failure that object disposition conflicts represent.
²⁸ The analysis of how shared storage reorganization disrupts the sensory access knowledge of the domain manager — the locational, condition-assessment, and procedural sensory knowledge analyzed in Paper 5 — extends the dependency analysis of that paper into the authority domain of the present paper. The reorganization of shared storage is simultaneously a form of cleanup authority exercise (the cleanup actor is imposing their organizational logic on a shared space) and a form of dependency disruption (the reorganization displaces the sensory access knowledge through which the domain manager navigates the space). The combination of authority exercise and dependency disruption in a single cleanup act whose governance dimension is invisible is a particularly concentrated instance of the structural failures that this suite has been analyzing throughout.
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