We study the excited baryon states for an arbitrary number of colors N c from the perspective of the permutation group S N of N objects. Classifying the transformation properties of states and quark-quark interaction operators under S N allows a general analysis of the spin-flavor structure of the mass operator of these states, in terms of a few unknown constants parameterizing the unknown spatial structure. We explain how to perform the matching calculation of a general twobody quark-quark interaction onto the operators of the 1/N c expansion. The inclusion of core and excited quark operators is shown to be necessary. Considering the case of the negative parity L = 1 states transforming in the M S of S N , we discuss the matching of the one-gluon and the Goldstone-boson exchange interactions.