Organizations that measure knowledge work with Key Performance Indicatorssystematically transfer epistemic authority from practitioners with direct sys-tem knowledge to administrators who can only access official representationsof it. This paper formalizes that process as a five-stage mechanism — positionalblindness, legibility compression, channel degradation, ritual capture, reformresistance — synthesizing thirteen theoretical traditions across eighty yearsof scholarship. It derives two computable instruments from the mechanism:V(m, O, t), a structured metric validity score grounded in information theory andcybernetics, and RD(m, t), a linguistically computable proxy for ritual capturederived from the ratio of metric-referential to system-referential language inorganizational documents. The paper extends the original four-stage accountby adding Stage 5 — Reform Resistance — grounded in Hirschman (1970)’sexit/voice/loyalty framework and Bourdieu (1984)’s theory of field heterodoxy.This extension is motivated by the empirical discovery in Paper II of the RE-FORMER agent class: practitioners who have already detected ritual captureand can be identified from organizational documents before Stage 5 suppressioncompletes. The theoretical implication is that any organization that can iden-tify its REFORMERs before they exit or become cynics has identified the practi-tioners with the tacit knowledge and motivation required to reverse epistemictransfer. The formal model is validated in Paper II: Pearson r(V, RD) = 0.973,Spearman ρ = 0.800, Mann-Whitney U = 0 (large effect), with triple convergenceconfirmed against LLM pragmatic classification at r = 0.958.