When someone at work holds back, the work they put down does not vanish; someone else picks it up. This short study asks where a scene written for comparison places the cost and the cause of holding back, and what that placing does to the question whether holding back is a person's flaw. It reads the thirteen synthetic scenes that GAEKJU, a studio of the RISCON family, files under the kind of talk it calls "Holding back" and whose evidence and readings hold no digit. Every scene is synthetic: written, in GAEKJU's words, for comparison and not as testimony from its trade, so the study draws no fact about any trade from them and reads only their form.
The study finds three things. Each scene writes into its talk the person who receives what another holds back, and names the received work as a load or a share. Eleven of the thirteen judgments set a person's motive or character aside and blame an arrangement instead: a rate paid by area, a count of tickets, a fill rate, an acceptance rate, a rule, a missing tool or authority. The person comes back only in the counter-conditions, as what would remain once the arrangement is mended. Read beside the debates on social loafing, on the side effects of performance measures and on invisible work, the scenes treat holding back as a question about where the load lands before it is a question about who holds back.