Organizations invest heavily in systems meant to ensure fairness—competency models, structured interviews, standardized performance reviews, and carefully crafted criteria for promotion.
Yet anyone who has spent time inside a workplace knows that decisions rarely follow the prescribed rules. A candidate isn’t quite the “right fit.” An employee “lacks presence.” A manager can’t quite “see” someone in a leadership role. These intuitive, seemingly harmless phrases reveal something deeper about how advantage is sustained.
In a recent article, I argue that groups may maintain power not through rigid barriers but through strategic ambiguity—tools that are intentionally flexible and selectively applied. I call these “fuzzy boundaries.” They include vague membership criteria, indefinite evaluative categories, and moralized descriptors that groups use to quietly shape who is admitted, who is sidelined, and who is recognized as an insider.
Their influence lies precisely in their imprecision: Fuzzy boundaries shift in response to context, threat, or competition, which allows groups to enforce norms while appearing neutral.
The effectiveness of fuzzy boundaries becomes clearer when we look at how they operate in everyday decision-making. Criteria like “fit,” “judgment,” or “readiness” rarely function as fixed standards; instead, they are activated selectively, often after formal requirements have already been met. The same job description can justify exclusion in one case and be quietly set aside in another. Because these judgments are framed as intuitive and situational rather than rule-based, they are difficult to contest and even harder to audit. This is precisely how fuzzy boundaries preserve discretion while avoiding the kind of scrutiny that clearer rules tend to invite.
This should alarm those who are committed to equity. Even with fair processes in place, advantage seeps through soft spaces. Organizations often justify fuzzy boundaries as essential for evaluating judgment, character, or cultural alignment. But as my study shows, ambiguous tools give powerful groups room to exercise discretion while sidestepping explicit rules that might constrain them.
Sociologists have long studied how authority and advantage are organized through formal rules and professional control. Classic work on professions emphasizes jurisdiction, autonomy, and closure, while studies of elite institutions highlight how discretion and opacity operate once formal standards are met. What fuzzy boundaries add to this conversation is a focus on ambiguity itself—not as a byproduct of complex systems, but as a strategically constructed feature of membership criteria that allows powerful groups to adapt, defend their position, and avoid scrutiny.
An historical case central to professional practice provides vivid and telling illustration. It begins shortly after American independence, when states drafted their first licensing laws for lawyers. These statutes laid out concrete requirements, including apprenticeships, examinations, and citizenship. But they also introduced an open-ended condition: Applicants must possess “good moral character.”
Lawmakers never defined what “good moral character” meant or how it should be evaluated. And even as they revised nearly every other part of the licensing regime during the populist reforms of the Jacksonian era, they left this moral clause intact. It survived because it looked fair. Who, after all, would oppose admitting only “moral” people to a profession?
This case is so instructive not because of the language itself but because of the mechanism it reveals. Ambiguity offered elite lawyers a resource that clear rules could not: control. When a criterion has no fixed meaning, those who interpret it hold extraordinary power to decide how it applies in each case.
In the nineteenth century, private bar associations—exclusive groups of elite practitioners—slowly gained influence over admissions and wielded this ambiguous tool to shape the profession to their advantage. Sometimes they invoked it to block lower-status practitioners. Sometimes they used it to discipline rivals or protect market share. And sometimes they ignored it entirely.
The boundary moved depending on what elites needed it to accomplish.
The point is not that “moral character” was uniquely problematic. Rather, ambiguous tools, once institutionalized, become extraordinarily effective levers of advantage. They feel legitimate, can be applied flexibly, and often evade legal or political scrutiny. Their strength lies in their softness; their durability lies in their familiarity.
If this feels distant from contemporary workplaces, it shouldn’t. Modern organizations rely on a sprawling vocabulary of ambiguous tools that function similarly.
- Hiring committees acknowledge that after all the structured assessments, the final decision often comes down to “fit.”
- Leadership teams claim to promote based on “potential,” a category that feels intuitive but remains undefined.
- Performance reviews reward “drive,” “communication style,” or “impact,” concepts that shift depending on who is being evaluated.
These tools mimic the architecture of fuzzy boundaries: They create space for selective interpretation, help decision-makers reconcile competing goals, and maintain continuity in organizational hierarchies without ever stating this explicitly.
Ambiguity itself is not inherently malicious. Organizations operate in complex environments, and some degree of judgment is unavoidable. But ambiguous tools become powerful precisely because they are difficult to contest.
A formal requirement can be appealed; a technical score can be reviewed. But how does an employee rebut a manager’s intuition that they “don’t seem ready”? How does a job candidate disprove the impression that they “didn’t quite click”? The looseness of these categories makes them resistant to scrutiny while still carrying enormous weight.
The nineteenth-century bar shows how this process unfolds. Elite lawyers did not maintain their position solely through formal rules. They did so by preserving the ambiguity of their evaluative tools. They resisted attempts to define vague criteria, lobbied lawmakers, persuaded judges, and constructed norms that placed interpretive authority in the hands of a select few.
What looked like a neutral standard was actually a mechanism of flexibility—one that let them respond to challenges without ever admitting that the rules were shifting.
Modern organizations do similar work, even though it might be unintentional. When criteria remain fuzzy, interpretation tends to flow toward existing power. Leaders rely on instinct. Teams gravitate toward those who feel familiar. Ambiguous evaluations become a mechanism for continuity disguised as meritocracy. And because the standards are soft, they adapt easily to new pressures—economic shifts, cultural changes, political demands—without requiring organizations to formally revise their rules.
The case study illustrates an important pattern: Ambiguous tools are attractive because they are strategically useful. They allow organizations to appear fair while preserving the autonomy of those already in authority. They smooth over internal conflict by offering shared language that means different things to different people. They shield decision-makers from scrutiny because their meanings can always be reframed. And they render boundaries more malleable than any rigid rule could.
The challenge for organizations is not to eliminate ambiguity—an impossible task—but to understand how ambiguous tools function.
When a criterion has no definition, it becomes a site where advantage can quietly enter. When a category can stretch or contract, it becomes a vehicle for bias, even without intent. When an evaluation relies on “gut instinct,” it almost always reflects familiar patterns rather than objective merit.
Organizational actors can learn from these historical lessons. They can examine where their criteria are flexible and ask who benefits from that flexibility. They can scrutinize when soft standards are invoked and when they are ignored. They can require decision-makers to explain how ambiguous tools were applied rather than letting those tools operate silently.
And they can challenge the assumption that fairness comes from having formal systems at all.
Fairness comes from understanding where those systems end—and where discretion begins.
Read More
Alex, H. (2025). “Fuzzy Boundaries: A Mechanism for Group Accumulation of Advantage.” Sociological Theory, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751251378516
Author
Heba Alex is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Heba’s research focuses on topics related to evaluation, differentiation, and morality in diverse institutional contexts such as lower courts, rights, and occupational organizations.