Work to rule

To identify and analyse the behaviour codes of the English at work is a huge, complex and difficult task – so daunting that most other recent books on the English either simply ignore the subject of work altogether, or gloss over it with a few brief mentions. At least, I’m assuming that this aspect of English life and culture is neglected because it is too difficult, as it seems to me that it cannot be regarded as either irrelevant or uninteresting. Perhaps I am being supremely arrogant in even attempting to tackle this subject. My direct personal experience of the English world of work and business is somewhat unorthodox, as almost all of my own working life has been spent in a tiny, struggling, independent research organisation, the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), run by two very un-businesslike social scientists (myself and my Co-Director Dr Peter Marsh, a social psychologist). But while SIRC itself may not be a typical workplace, the work we do has taken us into a varied and reasonably representative sample of working environments across the country (and in other countries as well, providing at least some basis for cross-cultural comparison).

During the research for this book, almost all of the foreigners I spoke to were somewhat perplexed and confused by English attitudes to work and behaviour at work; they all seemed to feel that there was a ‘problem’, but they found it hard to pin down or express exactly what the problem was. To some extent, the differing opinions I encountered reflected my informants’ own cultural backgrounds – those from Mediterranean, Latin American, Caribbean and some African cultures tended to see the English as rather rigid adherents of the Protestant work ethic, while many Indians, Pakistanis, Japanese and northern Europeans saw us as lazy, feckless and irresponsible (the Asians and Japanese usually tried to put this politely, although their meaning was clear enough; the Germans, Swedes and Swiss were more blunt).

But some of the contradictions seemed inherently English: the same people often expressed admiration for our inventiveness and innovation while deploring our stuffy, pig-headed traditionalism. Americans, supposedly our closest cultural relations, seemed if anything to be the most mystified and disoriented (not to mention irritated) by the anomalies and oddities of English work-culture. This may be partly because they have higher expectations of compatibility and mutual understanding, and are therefore more surprised and unsettled when they find themselves dealing with an ‘alien’ culture, but even English observers find English attitudes to work confusing. In a textbook entitled British Cultural Identities, the authors claim on one page that ‘the dominant British view is that work is a treadmill from which people dream of escaping’ and on the next that ‘The work ethic is very strong in the UK’. Quite apart from their apparent uncertainty as to which country or countries they are talking about, this contradiction indicates that there are a number of elusive and entangled inconsistencies in English work-culture, which are ‘indigenous’ and quite independent of the cultural perspective from which they are viewed. I will now try to identify and untangle them.