# Thesis finds casual Friday now starts on Thursday

> 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'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.