Following an instruction to the letter in order to defeat its purpose, which is available precisely because the instruction was written and the purpose was not.
The form is common where a group cannot strike or object openly: every safety check performed, every form completed, every unpaid courtesy withdrawn. It is difficult to sanction because nothing has been breached, and it demonstrates how much organisational function depends on people exceeding what is written down.
In practice
- A work-to-rule halts an operation without a single rule being broken, which is what it was designed to show.
- A team told to document everything produces documentation that is complete, accurate and useless.
- Standing
- Theorised in American legal scholarship as uncivil obedience, the mirror of civil disobedience: the first breaks a rule openly, the second keeps it exactly.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline