The humorist George Mikes claimed in 1960 that ‘All advertisements – particularly television advertisements – are utterly and hopelessly un-English. They are too outspoken, too definite, too boastful.’ He suggested that instead of ‘slavishly imitating the American style of breathless superlatives’ the English should evolve their own style of advertising, recommending, ‘Try your luck on Bumpex Fruit Juice. Most people detest it. You may be an exception.’ as a suitably un-boastful English way of trying to sell a product.
This was clearly intended as a bit of comic exaggeration, a caricature of a stereotype, and yet, forty years on, the avoidance of breathless superlatives is now the norm in English advertising, and the makers of Marmite have produced a highly successful advertisement with precisely the same message as Mikes’ fictitious Bumpex brand. The resemblance is uncanny: the ad agency might have taken their brief directly from Mikes’ book. This suggests to me that his main point, that advertising itself is essentially un-English, and would have to be radically re-invented to comply with English rules of modesty and reserve, is also much more than just an amusing exaggeration. He was quite right, and spookily prophetic. Advertising, and by extension all forms of marketing and selling, is almost by definition boastful – and therefore fundamentally at odds with one of the guiding principles of English culture.
For once, however, our self-imposed constraints have had a positive effect: advertising does not fit our system of values, so, rather than abandon our unwritten rules, we have twisted and changed the rules of advertising, and developed a form of advertising that allows us to comply with the modesty rule. The witty, innovative advertising for which the English are, I am told by people in the trade, internationally renowned and much admired, is really just our way of trying to preserve our modesty.
We English can blow our own trumpet if we have to; we can put on displays of heartfelt, gushing enthusiasm for our products or services, but the anti-boasting and anti-earnestness rules mean that many of us find this unseemly and acutely embarrassing, and we tend therefore to be somewhat unconvincing. And this problem is not just a feature of the higher echelons of English work – I found that workers at the bottom of the social scale are no less squeamish or cynical about trumpet-blowing than the educated middle- and upper-middle classes.
THE POLITE PROCRASTINATION RULE
Although the rules governing initial workplace encounters allow us to sidestep the problems normally posed by the no-name rule and the handshake dilemma, that’s pretty much where the reassuring formality ends and the potential for embarrassment begins.
For a start, as soon as the initial introductions are completed, there is always an awkward period – usually lasting around five to ten minutes, but it can take up to twenty – in which all or some of the parties feel that it would be rude to start ‘talking business’ straight away, and everyone tries to pretend that this is really just a friendly social gathering. We procrastinate politely with the usual weather-speak, enquiries about journeys, the obligatory wryly humorous traffic-moan, courteous comments on the host’s excellent directions and rueful jokes about one’s own poor navigation skills, interminable fussing over tea and coffee – including the usual full complement of pleases and thank-yous, appreciative murmurs from the visitors and humorously self-deprecating apologies from the host, and so on, and on.
I always find it hard to keep a straight face during this ‘polite procrastination’ ritual, because I am reminded of images from wildlife documentaries in which we see birds and other creatures engaging in ‘displacement activity’ – turning aside and nervously pecking at the ground or grooming themselves when they are in the middle of a confrontation over territory or mating rights or something. In tense, hostile situations, animals often perform these meaningless ‘displacement’ routines, as a kind of coping mechanism. It is much the same with the English in business meetings: the whole process of doing business makes us uncomfortable and embarrassed, so we distract ourselves and attempt to delay things by performing a lot of irrelevant little rituals.
And woe betide anyone who dares to cut short our therapeutic pecking and fussing. A visiting Canadian businessman complained: ‘I wish someone had warned me about this earlier. I had a meeting the other day and they’d all been dithering and talking about the weather and making jokes about the M25 for what seemed like half an hour, so I suggested maybe we could get started on the contract and they all looked at me like I’d farted or something! Like, how could I be so crass?’ Another told me he had worked in Japan, and been invited to participate in tea ceremonies ‘but there you are either having a tea ceremony or you are doing business, they don’t try to pretend the business meeting is really a tea party, like you do here’.
THE MONEY-TALK TABOO
‘But why?’ asked another mystified foreigner – an Iranian immigrant with whom I was discussing the ‘polite procrastination’ rituals. ‘You are right, this is exactly how they behave. It takes forever. It drives me crazy. But why do they do this? What is the matter with them? Why are they so reluctant to get down to business?’
Good question – to which I’m afraid there is no rational answer. The English find ‘doing business’ awkward and embarrassing at least partly because of a deep-seated but utterly irrational distaste for money-talk of any kind. At some stage, business-talk inevitably involves money-talk. We are comfortable enough, allowing for our usual social inhibitions, with most of the other aspects of business discussions. As long as boasting or earnestness are not required, we’ll talk reasonably happily about the details of the product or project, and pragmatic issues such as objectives, what needs to be done, how, where, by whom and so on. But when it comes to what we call ‘the sordid subject of money’, we tend to become tongue-tied and uncomfortable. Some cover their embarrassment by joking, some by adopting a blustering, forthright, even aggressive manner; some become flustered and hurried, others may be over-polite and apologetic, or prickly and defensive. You will not often see an English person entirely at ease when obliged to engage in money-talk. Some may appear brash and bullish, but this is often as much a symptom of dis-ease as the nervous joking or apologetic manner.
A frustrated American immigrant told me that she had ‘finally figured out that it is best to do all the financial negotiating in letters or emails. The English just can’t talk about money face to face, you have to do it in writing. In writing they’re fine – they don’t have to look you in the eye and they don’t have to say all those dirty words out loud’. As soon as she said this, I realised that this is exactly how I have always managed to get round the problem myself. I am typically, squeamishly English about money, and when negotiating fees for consultancy work or trying to get research funding I will always try to put all those dirty words – money, cost, price, fees, payment, etc. – in writing rather than say them face to face or even on the telephone. (To be honest, I don’t even like writing them, and usually try to cajole my long-suffering co-director into doing all the negotiating for me – with the feeble excuse that I am useless at maths.)
Being English, I had always rather taken it for granted that this avoidance of money-talk was normal, that everyone found it easier to discuss the taboo subject in writing, but my well-travelled informants were adamant that this is a peculiarly English problem. ‘I never get this anywhere else in Europe,’ said one. ‘Everywhere else you can be up-front about money. They’re not ashamed or embarrassed about it; you just talk normally, they don’t try to skirt round it or feel they have to apologise or make a joke out of it – that’s it, with the English you always get that sort of nervous laughter, someone always tries to make a joke out of it.’
The joking is of course another coping mechanism, our favourite way of dealing with anything we find frightening or uncomfortable or embarrassing. Even high-powered City bankers and brokers – people who have to talk about money all day long – are affected by the money-talk taboo. One merchant banker told me that some types of dealing and negotiating are OK because ‘it’s not real money’, but that when negotiating over his own fees he suffers from the same squeamish embarrassment as everyone else. Other City financiers echoed this, and explained that, like everyone else, money-men cope with embarrassment about money-talk by joking. When things go wrong, one of them told me, ‘you’ll say, “So, are we still on your Christmas-card list?”’
To be honest, I am somewhat puzzled by the money-talk taboo, despite my own instinctive adherence to it. Introspection does not really help me to figure out the origins of the English squeamishness about money-talk at work. Our distaste for money-talk in everyday social life is well established: you never ask what someone earns, or disclose your own income; you never ask what price someone paid for anything, nor do you announce the cost of any of your own possessions. In social contexts, there is a sort of ‘internal logic’ to the money-talk taboo, in that it can be explained, to some extent, with reference to other basic ‘rules of Englishness’ to do with modesty, privacy, polite egalitarianism and other forms of hypocrisy. But to extend the money-talk taboo to the world of work and business seems, to put it mildly, perverse. Surely this should be an exception to the rule – the one arena in which, for obvious practical reasons, we set aside or suspend our prissy distaste and ‘talk turkey’ like everyone else? But then, that would be expecting the English to behave rationally.
While I’m being ruthlessly honest, I have to admit that saying there is an ‘internal logic’ to the money-talk taboo is a bit of a cop out. Yes, the taboo is clearly related, in a ‘grammatical’ sort of way, to the rules of privacy, modesty and polite egalitarianism, but this is how anthropologists always try to explain the more outlandishly irrational beliefs or grotesque practices of the tribes and societies they study. A belief or practice may seem irrational (or in some cases downright stupid or cruel), but, we argue, it makes sense in relation to other elements of the cultural system of beliefs and practices and values of the tribe or community in question. Using this clever little trick, we can find an ‘internal logic’ for all sorts of daft and apparently unintelligible notions and customs, from witchcraft and rain-dances to female circumcision. And yes, it does help to make them more intelligible, and it is important to understand why people do these things. But it doesn’t make them any less daft.
Not that I’m putting the English money-talk taboo on a par with female circumcision: I’m just saying that sometimes anthropologists should come clean and acknowledge that a particular native belief or practice is pretty bloody weird, and perhaps not entirely in the natives’ own best interest. At least in this case I can’t be accused of being ethnocentric or colonial or patronising (anthropological equivalents of blasphemy, for which one can be excommunicated) as the daft taboo I am denigrating is an unwritten rule of my own native culture, and one that I blindly and slavishly obey.
Variations and the Yorkshire Inversion
The money-talk taboo is a distinctively English behaviour code, but it is not universally observed. There are significant variations: southerners are generally more uncomfortable with money-talk than northerners, and the middle- and upper-classes tend to be more squeamish about it than the working classes. Indeed middle-class and upper-class children are often brought up to regard talking about money as ‘vulgar’ or ‘common’.
In the world of business, observance of the taboo increases with seniority: whatever their individual class or regional origins, higher-ranking people in English companies are more likely to be squeamish about money-talk. Those from working-class and/or northern backgrounds may start out with little or no ‘natural’ embarrassment about money-talk, but as they rise through the ranks they learn to be awkward and uncomfortable, to make apologetic jokes, to procrastinate and avoid the issue.
There are, however, pockets of stronger resistance to the money-talk taboo, particularly in Yorkshire, a county that prides itself on being forthright, blunt and plain-spoken, especially on matters that mincing, hesitant southerners find embarrassing, such as money. To illustrate this no-nonsense, no-frills attitude, Yorkshiremen describe a standard conversation between a Yorkshire travelling salesman and a Yorkshire shopkeeper as follows:
Salesman, entering shop: ‘Owt?’
Shopkeeper: ‘Nowt.’42
Salesman leaves.
This is a caricature, of course – most Yorkshire people are probably no more blunt than any other northerners – but it is a caricature with which a great many people from this area identify, and some actively do their best to live up to it. Far from beating about the bush, dithering and euphemising about money in the usual English manner, the proud-to-be-Yorkshire businessman will take a perverse pleasure in blatantly flouting the money-talk taboo – saying, directly and without jokes or preamble: ‘Right, and what’s all that going to cost me, then?’
But this is not an exception that invalidates or even questions the rule. It is a deliberate, dramatic inversion of the rule – something that can only occur where a rule is well established and understood. It is the flip side of the same coin, not a different and separate coin. Blunt Yorkshiremen know that they are turning the rules upside-down: they do it on purpose, they make jokes about it, they take pride in their maverick, iconoclastic status within English culture. In most other cultures, their directness about money would pass without notice: it would simply be normal behaviour. In England, it is remarked upon, joked about, recognized as an aberration.
Class and the Vestigial Trade-prejudice Rule
Without attempting to defend or justify the money-talk taboo, I can see that there might be historical explanations for this peculiar practice, as well as the rather circular ‘grammatical’ ones. I mentioned earlier that we still suffer from vestigial traces of a prejudice against ‘trade’, left over from the days when the aristocracy and landed gentry – and indeed anyone wishing to call himself a gentleman – lived off the rents from their land and estates, and did not engage in anything so vulgar as the making and selling of goods. Trade was low-class, and those who made their fortune by commerce were always quick to purchase a country estate and attempt to conceal all evidence of their former undesirable ‘connections’. In other words, the upper-class prejudice against trade was in fact shared by the lower social ranks, including those who were themselves engaged in trade.
Every English school pupil’s essay on Jane Austen notes that while she pokes gentle fun at the snobbish prejudices against trade of her time, she does not seriously question them – but schoolchildren are not told that residual, subconscious traces of the same snobberies are still implicit in English attitudes towards work and behaviour in the workplace. These prejudices are strongest among the upper classes, the upper-middle professional classes (that’s ‘professional’ in the old sense, meaning those belonging to one of the traditionally respectable professions, such as the law, medicine, the church or the military) and the intelligentsia or chattering classes.
These classes have a particularly ingrained distaste for the ‘bourgeois businessman’, but the stigmatisation of anyone involved in ‘sales’ is widespread. Even the makes of car associated with either wealthy businessmen (Mercedes) or sales representatives (Mondeo) are sneered at by the socially insecure of all classes – and remember the near-universal contempt for another breed of salesman, the estate agent.
These examples indicate that the English prejudice against trade, as well as being eroded (though not eradicated) has shifted slightly since Austen’s time, in that the making of goods has become significantly more acceptable than the selling of them. Although of course the two are often inextricably connected, it seems to be the pushy, undignified, money-focused selling of things that we find most distasteful, and most untrustworthy. There is an unwritten rule – a truth universally acknowledged, even – to the effect that anyone selling anything is not to be trusted. Distrust of salesmen is clearly not a uniquely English trait, but our suspicion and scepticism, and above all our contemptuous distaste, seem to be more acute and more deep-seated than other cultures’. The English are less litigious than the Americans when we feel cheated or dissatisfied with what we are sold (our tendency is still to complain indignantly to each other, rather than tackling the source of our discontent) but our more marked mistrust and dislike of salesmen means that we tend to be considerably less gullible in the first place.
In other cultures, salesmen may not be trusted, but they are somehow socially accepted in a way that they are not among the English. In other parts of the world, selling things is regarded as a legitimate way of earning a living, and successful businessmen who have made their fortune by doing so are accorded a degree of respect. In England, money will buy you a lot of things, including access to power and influence, but it will not buy you any respect – quite the opposite, in fact: there seems to be almost as much of a taboo on making money as there is on talking about it. When the English describe someone as ‘rich’ or ‘wealthy’, we almost always do so with a slight sneer, and those who can be so described will rarely use these terms of themselves: they will admit, reluctantly, to being ‘quite well off, I suppose’. We may well be, as Orwell said, the most class-ridden country under the sun, but I think it is safe to say that in no other country is social class so completely independent of material wealth. And social acceptability in the wider sense is if anything inversely related to financial prosperity – there may be some surface sycophancy, but ‘fat cats’ are objects of contempt and derision, if not to their faces, then certainly behind their backs. If you do have the misfortune to be financially successful, it is bad manners to draw attention to the fact. You must play down your success, and appear ashamed of your wealth.
It has been said that the main difference between the English system of social status based on class (that is, birth) and the American ‘meritocracy’ is that under the latter, because the rich and powerful believe that they deserve their wealth and power, they are more complacent, while under the former they tend to have a greater sense of social responsibility, more compassion towards those less privileged than themselves. I’m grossly oversimplifying the arguments – whole books have been written on this – but it may be that the English embarrassment about money and lack of respect for business success have something to do with this tradition.
Having said that, it is clear that much of all this English squeamishness about money is sheer hypocrisy. The English are no less naturally ambitious, greedy, selfish or avaricious than any other nation – we just have more and stricter rules requiring us to hide, deny and repress these tendencies. Our modesty rules and rules of polite egalitarianism – which I believe are the ‘grammatical laws’ or ‘cultural DNA’ behind the money-talk taboo and the prejudice against business success – are a veneer, an exercise in collective self-delusion. The modesty we display is generally false, and our apparent reluctance to emphasize status differences conceals an acute consciousness of these differences. But hey, at least we value these virtuous qualities, and obey the rules despite their often deleterious effect on our business dealings.
THE MODERATION RULE
The phrase ‘work hard, play hard’ became popular in England in the 1980s, and you will still quite often hear people use it to describe their exciting lifestyle and their dynamic approach to work and leisure. They are almost always lying. The English, on the whole, do not ‘work hard and play hard’: we do both, and most other things, in moderation. Of course, ‘work moderately, play moderately’ does not have quite the same ring to it, but I’m afraid it is a far more accurate description of typical English work and leisure habits. We work fairly diligently, and have a modest amount of fun in our free time.
I will not be thanked for this rather dull portrait, so I should make it clear that it is not just an impression or subjective judgement: these are the findings not only of SIRC’s own quite extensive research on work habits and attitudes, but also of every other study I could find on this subject. Nor are these rather staid, conventional, conservative habits confined to the middle-aged or middle-class. Contrary to popular opinion, the ‘youth of today’ are not feckless, irresponsible, thrill-seeking hedonists. If anything, both our own research and other surveys and studies have found that the young of all classes are more sensible, industrious, moderate and cautious than their parents’ generation. I find this rather worrying, as it suggests that, unless our younger generation grows out of these middle-aged attitudes as they get older (which seems somewhat unlikely), the English will as a nation become even more ploddingly moderate than we are now.
If you think I’m exaggerating either the extent or the dangers of English youthful moderation, a few examples from the SIRC research might help to convince you:
Safe, Sensible, Bourgeois Aspirations
In our survey, when asked where they would like to be in ten years time, nearly three quarters (72 per cent) of young people chose the safe, sensible options of being ‘settled down’ or ‘successful at work’, compared with just 38 per cent of the older generation. Only 20 per cent of 16–24 year olds chose the more adventurous option of ‘travelling the world/living abroad’, compared with 28 per cent of 45–54 year olds. The older age group was also twice as likely as the youngsters to want to be ‘footloose and fancy-free’. In focus groups and informal interviews, when we asked about their aspirations in life, almost all young working people wanted to be ‘financially secure and stable’. Home ownership was a long-term goal.
Future Stability More Important Than Fun
Gosh, what a dull lot, I thought, when these results first came in. In the hope of finding some more imaginative and rebellious attitudes, I turned to the questions on ‘fun’. I was disappointed to find that on the issue of ‘having fun now vs thinking about the future’, where one might expect the younger generation to be at least a bit less mature and responsible, the views of young people and their elders were more or less identical. Only 14 per cent of 16–24 year olds felt that ‘at my age it’s more important to have fun than to think too much about the future’ – and about the same minority of 45–54s were also carefree fun-lovers.
Our focus-group and interview findings indicated that young working people’s only major ‘fun’ indulgence is going out to pubs and clubs on Friday and Saturday nights, or perhaps a clothes-shopping spree. Many of our focus-group participants tried to make all this sound as ‘wild’ as possible, one proudly announcing that ‘I spend most of my money abusing my body, really – going out to pubs and clubs, smoking’ but essentially it boiled down to a quite tame routine of weekend drinking, dancing and shopping.
Industrious, Diligent and Cautious with Money
I was not much cheered by the next lot of findings, which showed that young people also seem to be more industrious than their parents’ generation: 70 per cent of 16–24s believe that ‘getting ahead in life is down to hard work and dedication’. Only 53 per cent of the older generation share this diligent attitude, with 41 per cent adopting the more laid-back view that success is a matter of luck, contacts or ‘the right breaks’.
Not only that, but we found that young people are just as likely as their elders to be careful and responsible with money – in fact, the 16–24s put a larger proportion of their income into savings than the 45–54s. Our survey showed that young people are significantly less likely to get themselves into debt than the older group: only 44 per cent owe money on credit cards and store cards, compared with 66 per cent of their parents’ generation.
The Dangers of Excessive Moderation
I felt like saying, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, lighten up! Live a little! Rebel a bit! Whatever happened to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”?’ All right, I did and still do, realize that many people will find these results reassuring. Even some of my colleagues felt that I was making rather an unnecessary fuss. ‘Surely it is a good thing that most young people are being diligent, prudent and responsible?’ they said. ‘Why do you find this so depressing?’
My concern is that these largely commendable tendencies are also symptoms of a wider and more worrying trend: our findings indicated that young people are increasingly affected by the culture of fear, and the risk-aversion and obsession with safety that have become defining features of contemporary society. This trend, described by one sociologist as a ‘cultural climate of pervasive anxiety’, is associated with the stunted aspirations, cautiousness, conformism and lack of adventurous spirit that were evident among many of the young people in our survey and focus groups.
There has always, of course, been a significant degree of exaggeration and even invention in the standard laments and outcries about ‘the youth of today’, their fecklessness and irresponsibility. So perhaps our findings merely showed what has always been the case: that young people are rather more conventional and responsible than they are cracked up to be. Well, yes. And in their adherence to the moderation rule, the young people we studied were to some extent just ‘being English’. Whether I like it or not, we are a deeply conservative, moderate people. But what worried me was that these young people were more conservative, moderate and conformist than their parents’ generation, that there seemed to be a trend towards even greater excesses of moderation (if one can say such a thing). And although I am in many ways very English, I can only take so much moderation. Moderation is all very well, but only in moderation.
THE FAIR-PLAY RULE
But to be fair, there were plenty of more positive findings in our research on English workers as well, not least to do with fairness. Although I often use the terms interchangeably, I have chosen the term ‘fair-play rule’ rather than ‘fairness rule’ for the title of this section, as I feel that ‘fair play’ conveys a wider and somewhat less rigidly egalitarian concept that more accurately reflects the English values I am trying to describe. ‘Fair play’, with its sporting overtones, suggests that everyone should be given an equal chance, that no-one should have an unfair advantage or handicap, and that people should conduct themselves honourably, observe the rules and not cheat or shirk their responsibilities. At the same time, ‘fair play’ allows for differences in ability and accepts that there will be winners and losers – while maintaining that playing well and fairly is more important than winning. Some would claim that this last element is archaic and no longer applied, but my research has convinced me that it is still a rule in the sense of an ideal standard to which the English aspire, even if it is not often achieved.
In some respects, the fair-play rule serves us well in the world of work and business. While we undoubtedly have our share of rogues and cheats, and the rest of us are by no means saints, the English are generally still regarded, with some justification, as relatively fair and straight in their conduct of business – and there is certainly less blatant tolerance of bribery, corruption and cheating here than in most other countries. When we hear of such incidents, most of us do not shrug in a knowing, worldly manner, as if to say ‘Well, yes, what do you expect?’ We are shocked, outraged, righteously indignant. This may be partly because the English take great pleasure in being shocked and outraged, and righteous indignation is one of our favourite national pastimes, but the feelings expressed are nonetheless genuine.
When asked to compare English working and business practices with those of other cultures, all of my foreign and immigrant informants commented on the English sense of fair play, and specifically on our respect for the law and our relative freedom from the corruption they felt was endemic and tacitly accepted (albeit in varying degrees) in other parts of the world. Many felt that we were not sufficiently aware or appreciative of this fact. ‘You just take it for granted,’ a Polish immigrant complained. ‘You assume that people will play fair, and you are shocked and upset when they do not. In other countries there is not that assumption.’
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