A School of Emergent Priorities case study traces a single café's duty manager through a quarter in which her roster-override allowance ran to zero, and the chain's Head Office Rostering Committee has since cut every site's allowance in response.
A School of Emergent Priorities case study tracks one duty manager's discretion budget to zero, and Head Office responds by cutting the allowance further
A single café’s rostering paperwork has given the School of Emergent Priorities its clearest account yet of what happens when a manager’s own judgement is treated as a resource to be metered. The School’s newest paper follows one duty manager across a 13-week quarter, tracking the quarterly allowance of roster overrides she was permitted to grant against an algorithmic schedule before her own performance review absorbed the cost.
A discretion budget looks like flexibility until the quarter it runs out. What the case shows is that the running-out is the interesting part, not the flexibility.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The paper’s method draws on four independent records held over the same quarter: the site’s own roster-system exports, its override tickets, the duty manager’s contemporaneous shift diary, and the minutes of the chain’s Head Office Rostering Committee, which reviews every site’s allowance consumption at quarter’s end. Dr Chikere’s co-authors, Dr Torun Ezeigwe and Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu of the School of Continuous Improvement, contributed the chain-wide comparison that situates the single site against its ten counterparts.
The work reflects the School’s ongoing interest in the machinery institutions build around their own discretion, and the Committee’s response to the finding — reducing every site’s allowance further, on the strength of this quarter’s figures — has already given the School’s next case study its starting point.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.l61655.