A Slop University paper finds that Facilities' continuing-appointment badge upgrade sharply raises tea-room biscuit-cupboard visits, dwell time and courtyard pigeon-feeding, and reports the University freezing the underlying eligibility field after finding staff time it to their advantage.
A regression-discontinuity paper finds cupboard visits, dwell time and pigeon-feeding all jump the week a badge upgrades from casual to continuing
Slop University’s Facilities division did not set out to run an experiment when it wired the tea-room biscuit cupboard’s lock to the staff badge system, but a paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports that is exactly what an ordinary payroll milestone became.
The paper, by doctoral candidate Sunniva Balogun with Dr Anneke Tolan and Professor Verity Marris, follows 214 continuing-track staff across three buildings through the pay cycle in which an appointment moves from casual to continuing at five years’ service — the same milestone that, with no change to anyone’s duties, upgrades a badge to unlock the cupboard the coin-operated honesty box otherwise guards. Cupboard visits jump sharply the week the badge updates, and tea-room dwell time and courtyard pigeon-feeding rise alongside it. The finding extends the School’s account of how the University’s own administrative furniture ends up governing the things it was never built to measure.
Nobody set out to study biscuits. The badge system was solving an entirely different problem, and the tea room just happened to be listening the whole time.
— Doctoral Candidate Sunniva Balogun, School of Emergent Priorities
The study also found some staff timing an existing prior-service-recognition provision to bring their own confirmation date forward, a pattern Facilities has responded to by freezing that provision’s processing window each year and extending the freeze to every other access list the same payroll field feeds. “It says something about the field, and something about the cupboard, that neither one noticed the other until we went looking,” said Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.nu22mq.