The muddle rules

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.

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, LatinAmerican, 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).

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 workculture, which are ‘indigenous’ and quite independent of the cultural perspective from which they are viewed.

THE MUDDLE RULES

The French writer Philippe Daudy remarked that ‘Continentals are always disconcerted by the English attitude to work. They appear neither to view it as a heavy burden imposed by fate, nor to embrace it as a sacred obligation.’ In other words, our attitude to work does not conform to either the Catholic-fatalist or the Protestant-work-ethic model, one or the other of which characterizes the work-cultures of most other Europeancountries. Our position is sort of somewhere in between these two extremes – a typically English exercise in compromise and moderation. Or a typically English muddle неразбериха, depending on your point of view.

guiding principles of which are as follows:

We are serious about work, but not too serious.

We believe that work is a duty, but we wouldn’t go so far as to call it a ‘sacred’ duty, and we also believe it is a bit of a fag тяж работа and a nuisance, imposed by practical necessity, though, rather than by some mystical‘fate’.

We constantly moan and complain about work, but we also take a kind of stoical pride in ‘getting on with it’ and ‘doing our best’.

We often maintain that we would rather not work, but our personal and social identity is in fact very much bound up with work

We find the whole subject of money distasteful, and there are still vestiges of a deep-seated prejudice

against ‘trade’ or ‘business’, which can make ‘doing business’ a rather awkward business.

We also have vestigial traces of a ‘culture of amateurism’, involving an instinctive mistrust of

‘professionalism’ and businesslike efficiency, which again can be a handicap when trying to run professional, efficient businesses.

Finally, we carry into the workplace all the familiar English rules of humour, embarrassment, inhibition, privacy, modesty, moaning, courtesy, fairness, etc. – most of which are also incompatible with productiveand effective work.