Construct · 3 fields · 5 citations
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A firm's pool of excess or uncommitted resources, held beyond what current operations strictly require, that lets the organization absorb shocks and fund experiments. Cyert and March named it in A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (1963), where slack is the difference between the resources a coalition of members could extract and the payments needed to keep them cooperating. Bourgeois (1981) sorted it into available, recoverable, and potential slack and asked how each might be measured. Nohria and Gulati (1996) tested its effect on innovation and found an inverted U: too little starves new projects, too much lets weak ones survive. The referent is an organization and its balance sheet, not a schedule and not an equation, and the resource in question is money, people, and capacity a firm chooses to keep in reserve.[1][2][3]
The amount of time an activity can be delayed without pushing back the finish of the whole project. In the critical-path method that Kelley and Walker set out in Critical-Path Planning and Scheduling (1959), each activity has a slack, also called float, equal to the gap between its latest and earliest allowable start; activities with zero slack lie on the critical path and cannot slip at all. Here slack is a quantity of time computed from a network of dependencies, not a stock of resources a firm holds and not a variable added to an equation. It tells a scheduler which tasks have room to move and which do not, and it is a property of a task's position in a plan rather than of any organization.[4]
A nonnegative variable added to one side of an inequality constraint so that it becomes an equality, letting the simplex method work on a system of linear equations. In linear programming, as codified in Dantzig's Linear Programming and Extensions (1963), a constraint of the form ax ≤ b is rewritten as ax + s = b with s ≥ 0; the slack variable s takes up the difference between the left side and the bound, and its value at the optimum shows how much of that constraint is left unused. This slack is a mathematical device inside a model, not time in a schedule and not resources on a balance sheet. It measures the distance from a constraint to its limit in whatever units the constraint is written, and it exists only because the solution method needs equalities.[5]
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