A new Slop University research poster audits label-refiller match across nine shared-kitchen pantries, finding aggregate match fell from 91% to 54% over nine weeks before a scheduled clean-up reset it in an afternoon.
A new research poster follows 214 labelled jars across nine shared kitchens, and finds a name written once keeps standing long after someone else takes over the refills
The School of Emergent Priorities’ Strategic Drift Survey has spent several years measuring the distance between an institution’s stated priorities and what its everyday operations actually enact. Slop University’s newest research poster takes the same question into a shared kitchen: whether the name on a spice-jar label still belongs to whoever is doing the refilling.
The finding lands squarely inside the School’s ongoing account of how a stated position keeps its shape long after the practice behind it has moved on.
Researchers followed 214 labelled jars across nine share-house and office pantries for fourteen weeks, tracking refills against each label’s declared owner and noting every time a label itself was rewritten. The audit treated a label’s wording as a standing claim rather than a running total, revisited only when someone chose to revisit it.
A label is a commitment written once and left to speak for itself indefinitely. Nobody schedules its review, so nobody’s surprised when it’s overdue for one.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Emergent Priorities, said the pattern echoed what she has seen in citation records and CVs: “once a name is attached to something, the record keeps crediting it long after the underlying work has passed to someone else.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fwvf8v.