Edda Nwafor has submitted a doctoral thesis to the School of Continuous Improvement arguing that office workers dress for the most formal meeting in their calendar, and that the casualness of Friday has been drifting back into Thursday.
Edda Nwafor submits Friday Starts on Thursday to the School of Continuous Improvement after coding 212,406 arrivals at six office lift lobbies
Edda Nwafor’s doctoral thesis went to its examiners this week carrying a recommendation the School of Continuous Improvement had already put into practice. Friday Starts on Thursday argues that what office workers wear is less a matter of the day than of the diary: an outfit, in the thesis’s account, is its wearer’s forecast of the day’s most formal encounter.
For thirty weeks, trained observers stood in the lift lobbies of six office buildings and coded 212,406 arrivals against a seven-point formality scale. Formality fell steadily through the working week rather than at its end, and by the final ten weeks Thursday had moved most of the way to Friday. Dress diaries kept by 48 workers, read alongside their own calendars, matched the outfit to the day’s most formal scheduled meeting on 83 per cent of office days.
We asked six building managers for somewhere to stand and they gave us their lobbies. The School owes a great deal to the many thousands of people who stepped out of a lift over those thirty weeks and simply went to work.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter
The thesis was supervised by Dr Solberg, with Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, as associate supervisor. Its trial of weekday dress bands across 24 teams informed the Graded Week Standard, which now gives each weekday in the School its own band of formality and lowers a band each year once the observed week has settled below it. The School regards a thesis whose recommendation reached its own policy before the thesis reached its examiners as the proper order of events.
The full thesis is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7xrmf5.