Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  Finally, the ‘road-rage’ issue sheds some new light on the question of English patriotism or, rather, our apparent lack of it. Can there be any other nation so resolutely unpatriotic, so prone to self-flagellation, so squeamishly reluctant to accept praise? This dearth of national amour-propre, this seemingly unshakeable conviction that our country has nothing much to recommend it and is in any case rapidly going to the dogs, must surely be one of the defining characteristics of the English. Although, having said that, I suspect that this trait is in fact a sub-category, a symptom or side effect of our modesty, moaning and humour rules (particularly the self-deprecation rule and the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule)79 rather than a defining characteristic in itself.

  In the 2004 edition of this book, I confidently predicted that, despite all my many critical comments on the English, I would be taken to task when the book came out for being too positive, for painting too flattering a portrait, for ignoring or glossing over our darker side – and so on and so gloomily forth. As predicted, I received no complaints over any of my critical observations on English behaviour (or at least not from English people; some foreigners thought I was too harsh) but there were a couple of reviews and some letters and emails from grouchy English readers, complaining that I had failed to do full justice to our many flaws and failings. To be fair, though, many English readers and reviewers offered unstinting praise for the way this book had made them ‘cringe with embarrassment’. Only in masochistic England would this be such a flattering compliment.

  65. The ‘sorries’ are a standard prefix to any question in this context – I explain this later in Bumping Experiments and the Reflex-apology Rule, page 234.

  66. This is not as improbable as it might sound: cows on the line are quite a frequent problem in this country. According to one Network Rail report, cows are the fifth most common reason for train delays and cancellations, causing 15 cancellations in just one month in 2011, for example, so many regular rail passengers will have heard a similar announcement at least once.

  67. If you are female, lone males may instead assume that you are chatting them up. They are therefore more than willing to break the denial rule and talk to you, but it can then be difficult to extricate yourself from the conversation. Even the ‘formal interview’ approach can be misinterpreted, so I tended to avoid speaking to unaccompanied males unless I was (a) surrounded by other passengers and (b) getting out at the next stop.

  68. Unless we are very lucky and happen to be in a tube-carriage where the London Underground’s ‘Poems on the Underground’ project displays poems on the advertising boards – a hugely popular initiative, prompting heartfelt thanks from commuters, who, although perhaps not as intellectually voracious as my American informant imagined, would much rather avoid eye contact by reading bits of Shakespeare, Byron and Donne than ads for insurance companies and internet providers.

  69. Yeah, I know, inhaling a bit of smoke and risking a renewal of my smoking addiction, even on freezing-cold rainy days, is hardly comparable with the risks and hardships endured by proper intrepid ethnographers.

  70. What should be the collective noun for smokers? I’ve heard ‘a billow of smokers’, and also a ‘cloud’, ‘wheeze’, ‘gasp’, etc.; ‘confraternity’ comes closest of those proposed, but I would suggest that ‘a defiance of smokers’ now seems most appropriate.

  71. I have since been told about a cross-cultural study of pedestrians, which showed that the Japanese are indeed much more skilled than other nations at avoiding bumping into each other in crowded public places – so this was not just my imagination.

  72. ‘’kyou’ is a particularly common abbreviation, hence the ‘Q’ in ‘Ps and Qs’.

  73. Or perhaps they read reports of an excellent study on civility in Britain by the Young Foundation, which confirmed that ‘Although subjectively civility is perceived to be deteriorating there is no objective evidence for this.’ The study even concluded that in some respects our behaviour is actually now better than a generation or two ago.

  74. A joke I remember from childhood.

  75. Or even, among the very class-secure, approval: I know one unquestionably upper-middle woman who actually drives a Mondeo, and says that she bought it precisely because of its Mondeo-Man association with salesmen. ‘If the big companies buy it for their travelling salesmen, it must be a reliable car that can take a lot of abuse,’ she argues. Such confidence and admirable disdain for the opinion of others is, however, quite rare.

  76. Cars purchased in large quantities (‘fleets’) by companies, generally for the use of travelling sales staff, area managers and other relatively low-grade employees.

  77. The exception being very wealthy members of the upper class, whose servants are responsible for their car care, and whose cars are therefore cleaned to impeccable upper-working-class standards.

  78. I have noticed that those on the political left tend to believe that we have always been awful and unpleasant (citing colonialism, Victorian hypocrisy, etc., etc.), while those on the right favour the ‘going to rack and ruin’ line, harking back to an earlier age when we still had manners, respect, dignity and hard-backed blue passports.

  79. As noted in Humour Rules (page 78), my recent national survey on patriotism confirmed this suspicion.

  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 unbusinesslike 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 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 (‘two nations divided by a common language’ and all that) 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,80 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.

  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 characterises the work-cultures of most other European countries. Our position is sort of somewhere in between these two extremes – a typically English exercise in compromise and moderation. Or a typically English muddle, depending on your point of view. But it is not an incomprehensible muddle; it is a rule-governed muddle, the 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 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 indignantly disapprove of those who avoid work – from rich aristocrats at the top of the social scale to the alleged ‘benefits scroungers’ at the bottom – but this reflects our strict, almost religious belief in fair play, rather than a belief in the sanctity of work itself (such people are seen as ‘getting away with’ idleness, while the rest of us, who would equally like to be idle, have to work, which is just not fair).

  •We often maintain that we would rather not work, but our personal and social identity is in fact very much bound up with work (either the mere fact of being ‘in work’, bringing home a wage, or, for those with more intrinsically interesting or prestigious jobs, the rewards and status attached to the 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 productive and effective work.

  •But despite all this, we seem to muddle through somehow, and some of our work is not bad, considering.

  It is from these principles that many of the specific rules governing behaviour at work are formed or derived.

  The Parable of the Biscuit Chief

  One of my encounters with an English businessman provides a real-life illustration of some of these principles, and a starting point for talking about the more specific rules. My colleague Peter Marsh and I once went with our begging bowl to try to persuade the chief executive of a large British company – a biscuit manufacturer – to provide funding for some of our research. We went through the usual polite preliminaries: slightly awkward handshakes and mumbled introductions; some wryly humorous comments about the weather; enquiries about our journey and apologies for the place being a bit difficult to find; comments on the compensating pleasantness of the view; offers of tea or coffee, fussing over milk and sugar; a few jokes about the proffered biscuits, and so on – the whole ritual taking the customary full fifteen minutes.

  When we were finally settled, and had run out of excuses for avoiding discussion of business, the distinguished CEO said, ‘So, well, where should we start?’ One of us tentatively suggested that as he knew a bit about us and the Social Issues Research Centre from our letter, perhaps he could tell us a bit about himself and his company. ‘Right,’ said the CEO. ‘Um, well, I’ve been running this company for the past eight years . . .’ he paused for a fraction of a second before adding ‘. . . badly.’ We laughed, but he protested, with a rueful expression, ‘No, it’s true, really – you only have to look at the figures.’ Another pause, then he smiled broadly and added, ‘But you can tell by looking at me [patting his ample stomach cheerfully] that I’m very fond of biscuits.’ Having reassured us that his mismanagement of the company was not due to any personal antipathy towards its products, he seemed to feel that he had said more than enough about himself, and steered the conversation back to SIRC and our proposed research projects, for which he later generously agreed to provide some of the necessary funds.

  Later, out of curiosity, we did ‘look at the figures’, and found that the company had indeed experienced something of a slump, to put it mildly, under his leadership. He later moved on to be chairman of an even bigger, multinational firm, which also promptly started going downhill. His appointment to this post provoked some grumbles in the City about his poor track-record, and the fact that he had no experience or knowledge whatsoever of the industry sector he was going to, but we could see why he had been chosen: he was such a nice, affable, amusing, unpretentious chap – and so disarmingly candid about his failings that one had the feeling he must be concealing great talents.

  His is perhaps not an entirely typical English business story – but neither is it in any way atypical. In the course of our many encounters with people at all levels in English companies large and small, from shop-floor and front-line workers to managing directors and chairmen, we found that the most successful people – those most likely to be promoted or given plum jobs, that is – were not the most competent, or the most hard-working, or the most ‘businesslike’ or ‘professional’, but tended to have other, less tangible, qualities, particularly the self-deprecating humour exhibited by our biscuit chief. Of course, incompetent-but-charming people get promoted in other countries, too, but generally because they use their charm to distract attention away from their poor performance – not because they cheerfully tell everyone what a terrible job they are doing, and show them the results to prove it.

  HUMOUR RULES

  Spend a day in any English workplace, from a street-market to a merchant bank, and you will notice that one of the most striking features of English working life is the undercurrent of humour. I do not mean that all English workers and businessmen spend their time telling raucous, thigh-slapping jokes, or that we are ‘good-humoured’ in the sense of happy or cheerful: I am talking about the more subtle forms of humour – wit, irony, understatement, banter, teasing, pomposity-pricking – which are an integral part of almost all English social interaction.

  Actually, I lied in that first sentence: if you are English, you could easily spend a day among English workers and business people without noticing the omnipresent humour – in fact, you probably do this every day. Even now that I’ve prompted you to be conscious of it, the humour in your workplace interactions will be so familiar, so normal, so ingrained that you may find it hard to ‘stand back’ far enough to see it. Foreigners, on the other hand, tend to notice it straight away – or, rather, to notice something, not always immediately identifiable as humour, which they find baffling. In my discussions with immigrants and other foreign informants, I found that the English sense of humour, in various guises, was one of the most common causes of misunderstanding and confusion in their dealings with the English at work. All of the unwritten rules of English humour contributed in some measure to this confusion, but the biggest stumbling blocks appeared to be the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule and the rules of irony.

  The Importance of Not Being Earnest Rule

  Our acute sensitivity to the
distinction between seriousness and solemnity, between sincerity and earnestness, is not always fully understood or appreciated by foreign visitors, whose cultures tend to allow rather more blurring of these boundaries than is permitted among the English. In most other cultures, taking oneself too seriously may be a fault, but it is not a sin: a bit of self-important pomposity or over-zealous earnestness is tolerated, perhaps even expected, in discussion of important work or business matters. In the English workplace, however, the hand-on-heart gusher and the pompous pontificator are mercilessly ridiculed – if not to their faces, then certainly behind their backs. There are such people, of course, and the higher their status, the less likely they are to be made aware of their errors, but the English in general tend to be subconsciously sensitive to these taboos, and usually avoid overstepping the invisible lines.

  The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule is implicit in our whole attitude to work. The first ‘guiding principle’ I mentioned was that we take work seriously, but not too seriously. If your work is interesting, you are allowed to be interested in it – even to the point of being ‘a bit of a workaholic’; but if you are too much of a workaholic, or over-zealous about an intrinsically uninteresting job, you will be regarded as ‘sad’ and pathetic and it will be suggested that you should ‘get a life’. It is not done to be too keen.