Same Meaning, Different Prose: Spine Preservation and Rendering Equivalence in Organizational Knowledge Work

Abstract

This paper empirically demonstrates Zharnikov's (2026ao) Proposition P4 – rendering-equivalence under spine-preservation – in management theory. The paper extends the companion theory's Heisenberg–Schrödinger historical existence proof into contemporary strategy research via structural extractions of two independently-authored pairs: a dynamic-capabilities pair (Eisenhardt and Martin 2000 + Zollo and Winter 2002) and a knowledge-based-view pair from the SMJ Winter 1996 Special Issue (Grant 1996 + Liebeskind 1996). The recombination metric Rec returns 4 linked propositions with preserved antecedents on each pair. A random-graph null baseline shows Pr(Rec ≥ 3 by chance) ≈ .000 across 1,000 size-matched shadows. Three additional renderings of substrates already in the corpus — a practitioner-register rendering of the paper's own structure, a third rendering of the focal-pair shared substrate, and a cross-paper rendering of the companion theory's full theoretical apparatus – preserve 11/14, 4/4, and 12/15 items strictly; 14/14, 4/4, and 15/15 semantically; zero contradictions. A bibliographic-hallucination audit of twelve AI-suggested anchors finds two verified and ten negative findings. Secondary β/δ estimates satisfy the cost-asymmetry ordering. Cross-language demonstrations span Russian renderings across multiple LLMs (including Russian-native GigaChat Rec = 12 and YandexGPT Rec = 11) and Chinese renderings across five LLMs from three training-corpus families including an open-weights model running locally on a single Mac mini (DeepSeek Rec = 12, Claude Opus Rec = 11, Qwen3.6:27b Rec = 12), with cross-extractor robustness (DeepSeek's Chinese rendering re-extracted by Qwen3.6 instead of GPT-4o: Rec = 12). Inter-coder reliability tests are pre-registered for a future release. The paper engages recombinant-search and knowledge-representation scholarship as theoretical antecedents. Includes paper.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) – a machine-readable specification of the paper's claims, assumptions, and dependencies. See https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard.