Discussion
This study asked where GAEKJU's synthetic scenes of holding back place the cost and the cause, and what that placing does to the question whether holding back is a person's flaw. The answer, for these thirteen written scenes, is that the cost is placed first and on a named receiver, the cause is placed next and mostly on an arrangement, and the person is placed last, in the condition that would turn the judgment.
That order is a stance in the debate set out in the introduction. The work on social loafing, in Latané, Williams and Harkins's Many Hands Make Light the Work (1979) and Karau and Williams's Social Loafing (1993), begins with the person whose effort falls in a group and lists the conditions that move it. GAEKJU's scenes begin elsewhere, with the person whose work rises. The two starting points need not conflict; Karau and Williams's own moderators include evaluation potential and expectations of co-workers, which are features of an arrangement. But they lead to different questions. A loafing question asks how to restore the effort that fell. The scenes ask where the fallen work went and who now carries it, and they ask it before anything else.
The scenes stand nearest to the critique of measures in Smith's On the Unintended Consequences of Publishing Performance Data in the Public Sector (1995), Bevan and Hood's What's Measured Is What Matters (2006) and Ordóñez and colleagues' Goals Gone Wild (2009). Four scenes put a way of paying or counting at the centre: a rate per area torn down, a count of tickets, a share of cells filled, an acceptance rate. In each, the holding back a colleague might call slipping off or passing work off is read as what the count makes cheapest. The scenes add something the measurement critique, as its notes here describe it, does not dwell on: the social life of the count. A rate paid by area turns into hard looks at the worker who stopped; an acceptance rate turns into the newest rider's rainy afternoons. The cost of a narrow measure, in these written cases, is paid by a person, and the scenes give that person a line.
The literature on invisible work, in Daniels's Invisible Work (1987) and Hatton's Mechanisms of Invisibility (2017), fits the scenes at one point and not at another. It fits where the scenes make covering work visible: the clerk alone at the queue, the colleague who sorted the alerts, the hours of three reboots that, in the helpdesk scene, remain only in the caller's day. It fits less well where the scenes' concern is not that work is unseen but that it is unevenly borne in plain sight, as with the three deep divers whose load the scene states in plain words. Bolino and Turnley's The Personal Costs of Citizenship Behavior (2005) and Bergeron's The Potential Paradox of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (2007) fit that second concern better: the finder in the laboratory pays with the finder's own work in the way Bergeron proposes, though the scene says nothing about careers and should not be read as evidence about them.
The scenes do not excuse holding back. Two of them say it did harm, and four keep a person's motive in reserve in the counter-condition. What they decline to do is begin with the motive. That is the framing decision this study found, and it is a decision a reader may weigh differently. A reader who thinks the person should be addressed first will find the scenes slow to do it; a reader who thinks the arrangement should be addressed first will find them consistent. This study does not choose between those readers.
Contributions
The study makes three contributions. It shows that GAEKJU's scenes of holding back are written from the side of the receiver, and that twelve of the thirteen name the received work as a load, a share, a burden, a cost or a price. It shows that eleven of the thirteen judgments set a person's motive aside for an arrangement, and that the person returns as a residue in the counter-conditions of four. And it sets the scenes in a debate they do not cite, between loafing, measurement and invisible work, and shows which strand each scene's form is nearest to and where each fits badly.
Limits
The scenes are synthetic. Nothing here is evidence about any trade, any workplace or any person. The thirteen were chosen by a rule about digits in two fields; a rule about another feature would have chosen other scenes, and the forty-six scenes of the same kind left out may frame holding back differently. The tests the script applied to the Korean are word lists; they find what they are told to find, and a scene that makes the same move in other words would be missed. The translation is this study's own, made for reading the form, and a different translator would choose different English for the Korean name of the kind. The works are read through their abstracts only, and the study says of them no more than those allow.
Further research
Three lines of work would test what this study found. The first would read the scenes of the same kind that the rule left out, to see whether those that carry digits frame holding back from the receiver's side as these do. The second would set the scenes of holding back beside the scenes of other kinds of talk, to see whether the move from person to arrangement is particular to this kind or is GAEKJU's habit in every kind. The third, and the one the scenes themselves keep pointing to, would need records no written scene can hold: the stop entries beside the near-miss reports, the repeat queries by the same person and equipment, the reporters and retests before and after a rule changed. Each scene names such a record in its counter-condition. Whether any of them would bear out the scene is a question for the people who keep them.