Work-to-rule and holidays, and police officers refusing to issue citations. Refusal to work overtime, travel on duty, or sign up to other tasks requiring employee assent are other manifestations of using work-to-rule as industrial action. It was described by Sir John Donaldson as a decision to "Give the rules a meaning which no reasonable man could give them and work to that." Sometimes the term "rule-book slowdown" is used in a slightly different sense than "work-to-rule": the former involves applying to-the-letter rules that are normally set aside or interpreted less literally to increase efficiency; the latter, refraining from activities which are
Institutional work in governance systems. In later work, Lawrence et al. (2011, pp. 52–53) specified the interest of institutional work in “the myriad, day-to-day equivocal instances of agency that, although aimed at affecting the institutional order, represent a complex mélange of forms of agency—successful and not, simultaneously radical and conservative, strategic and emotional, full of compromises, and rife with unintended consequences. Institutional work Created by Thomas Lawrence and Roy Suddaby (2006, pp. 217), the concept of institutional work refers to “the broad category of purposive action aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions.” The focus of institutional work shifts away from more