A teaching case on one supermarket's limit tickets leads the School of Emergent Priorities to cap every allocation it administers at four per person per round, with no exceptions.
A suburban supermarket's shelf-edge limit ticket becomes the School's standing cap on seminar places, desk slots and loan laptops
A small card clipped to a supermarket shelf has become the model for how the School of Emergent Priorities hands out its own scarce things. In The Limit-Four Ticket as Rationing Instrument, a paper released today by Dr Ingrid Vasseur with Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist and Dr Petra Umbile, the School sets out a teaching case drawn from one suburban store.
A good rule is one you can hold in a hand, and this one arrives with its own card.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
The case follows 41 shelf tickets across 23 lines over nineteen weeks, and 37,914 till-linked purchases, and asks where the printed number came from and whom it reached. The School’s Horizon Register now carries a standing Four-Per-Person entry on the strength of the answer. Seminar places in Futures in Committee, desk-booking slots and loan-laptop days are each capped at four per person per round, the cap is printed on a ticket at the point of allocation, and no officer holds the authority to grant an exception.
Associate Professor Lindqvist said the School had “found that the number does its work wherever it comes from”, and the School expects the arrangement to settle questions that previously reopened each round. The release reflects the School’s continuing interest in the small cards, signs and slips by which an institution tells people how much is enough. The case is also written up as a teaching note, and has been taught once in Futures in Committee.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.4lne3q.