Watching the English

by Kate Fox

Marmite is something one either loves or hates, but an advertising campaign focusing exclusively on the disgust some people feel for your product strikes many foreigners as somewhat perverse. ‘You couldn’t get away with that anywhere else,’ said an American informant. ‘I mean, yes, I get it. People either love Marmite or find it disgusting, and as you’re never going to convert the ones who find it disgusting, you might as well make a joke out of it. But an ad with the message “some people eat this stuff but a lot of people can’t even bear the smell of it”? Only in England!’

‘Try your luck on Bumpex fruit juice. Most people detest it. You may be an exception,’ as a suitably un-boastful

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.

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.

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.

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.

in the eye and they don’t have to say all those dirty words out loud.’

The joking is, of course, another coping mechanism, our favourite way of dealing with anything we find frightening or uncomfortable or embarrassing.

you never ask what someone earns, or disclose your own income; you never ask what price someone paid for anything, or announce the cost of any of your

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.

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.

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, recognised as an aberration.

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.

So, we may be a bit dull and excessively moderate, but perhaps, without wishing to come over all patriotic, we can still take a little bit of pride in this fair-play ideal. (And we do in my survey, ‘fair play’ came second only to ‘humour’ as the English quality of which we are most proud.)

The principal rule in this context is that work is, almost by definition, something to be moaned about.

There is a connection here with the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule, in that if you do not indulge in the customary convivial moaning about work, there is a danger that you will be seen as too keen and earnest, and labelled a ‘sad geek’, a sycophantic ‘suck’ or ‘brown nose’, or a self-important ‘pompous git’.

We all hate meetings, or at least loudly proclaim that we hate them. But we have to have a lot of them, because of the fair-play, moderation, compromise and polite-egalitarianism rules, which combine to ensure that few individuals can make decisions on their own: a host of others must always be consulted, and a consensus must be reached.

In fact, this is probably one of the most important ‘rules of moaning’: you must moan in a relatively good-humoured, light-hearted manner. However genuinely grumpy you may be feeling, this must be disguised as mock-grumpiness. The

difference is subtle, and may not be immediately obvious to the naked ear of an outsider, but the English all have a sixth sense for it, and can distinguish acceptable mock-moaning from real, serious complaining at twenty paces.

Serious moaning may take place in other contexts, such as heart-to-heart conversations with one’s closest friends, but it is regarded as unseemly and inappropriate in collective workplace moaning rituals. Here, if you become too obviously bitter or upset about your grievances, you will be labelled a ‘moaner’,...

Ritual moaning in the workplace is a form of social bonding, an opportunity to establish and reinforce common values by sharing a few gripes and groan...

It is worth a reminder here that in all English moaning rituals, there is a tacit understanding that nothing can or will be done abo...

We complain to each other, rather than tackling the real source of our discontent, and we neither expect nor want to find a solution to our problems – we just want to enjoy moaning about them. Our ritual moaning is purely therapeut...

This is sociable light entertainment, not heavy drama.

‘Typical!’ is also used in moaning rituals in many other contexts, such as on delayed trains or buses, in traffic jams, or indeed whenever anything goes wrong. Along

‘Of course bloody Al Qaeda had to pick the one day I really needed to get to work on time! Typical!’

‘Typical!’ It manages simultaneously to convey huffy indignation and a sense of passive, resigned acceptance,

an acknowledgement that things will invariably go wrong, that life is full of little frustrations and difficulties (and highly inconsiderat...

put up with it. In a way, ‘Typical!’ is a manifestation of what used to be called the English ‘stiff upper lip’: it is a complaint, but a complaint that also expresses a very English kind of grudging forbear...

Being a social scientist is a pretty thankless job, though, particularly among the ever-cynical English, who generally dismiss all of our findings as either obvious (when they accord with ‘common knowledge’) or rubbish (when they challenge some tenet of popular wisdom) or mumbo-jumbo (when it is not clear which sin has been committed, as the findings are couched in incomprehensible academic jargon). At the risk of falling into one or all of these categories, I will try to explain how the hidden rules of the after-work drinks ritual make it such an effective antidote to the stresses of the workplace.

In our culture, and a number of others, alcohol is a suitable symbolic vehicle for the work-to-play transition because it is associated exclusively with play – with recreation, fun, festivity, spontaneity and relaxation – and regarded as antithetical to work.85.

that all drinking-places, in all cultures, have their own ‘social microclimate’.

They are ‘liminal zones’ in which there is a degree of ‘cultural remission’ – a temporary relaxation or suspension of normal social controls and restraints. They are

also egalitarian environments, or at least places in which status distinctions are based on different criteria from those operating in the outside world. And, perhaps most important, both drinking and drinkin...

So, the English after-work drinks ritual functions as an effective de-stressor partly because, by these universal ‘laws’, the hierarchies and pressures of the workplace are soluble in alcohol, particularly alcohol con...

The funny thing is that the after-work drinks ritual in the local pub has much the same stress-reduction effect even if one is drinking only Coke or fruit juice. The symbolic power of the pub itself is often enough to induce an immediate sense of relaxa...

discussion of work-related matters is permitted – indeed, after-work drinks sessions are often where the most important decisions get made – but both the anti-earnestness rules and the rules of polite egalitarianism are much more rigorously applied than they are in the workplace.

The anti-earnestness rules state that you can talk with colleagues or work-mates about an important project or problem in the pub, but pompous, self-important or boring speeches are not allowed. You may, if you are senior enough, get away with these in workplace meetings (although you will not be popular), but in the pub, if you become too long-winded, too serious or too ‘up yourself’, you will be summarily told to ‘come off it’ or ‘put a sock in it’.

The polite-egalitarianism rules prescribe not exactly a dissolution of workplace hierarchies, but a much more jocular, irrevere...

After-work drinks sessions are often conducted by small groups of colleagues of roughly the same status, but where a mixing of ranks does occur, any deference that might be shown in the workplace is replaced in the pub by ironic mock-deference. Managers who go for after-work drinks with their ‘team’ may be addressed ...

become equals in the pub, but we have a licence to poke fun at workplace hierarchies, to show that we do not take them too seriously. The rules of after-work drinks, and of pub-talk generally, are deeply ingrained in the English psyche. If you ever find that a business discussion or interview you are conducting with an English person is somewhat stilted, over-formal or heavy going, ask the person to ‘just talk as though we were in the pub,’ or ‘tell me about it as you would if we were in the pub’. Ev...

particularly the annual Christmas party, an established ritual, now invariably associated with ‘drunken debauchery’ and various other forms of misbehaviour.

The answer is that we misbehave because misbehaviour is what office Christmas parties are all about: misbehaviour is written into the unwritten rules governing these events; misbehaviour is expected, it is customary. By ‘misbehaviour’, however, I do

not mean anything particularly depraved or wicked – just a higher degree of disinhibition than is normally permitted among the English.

We also found that flirting, ‘snogging’, telling rude jokes and ‘making a fool of yourself’ are standard features of the office Christmas party.

But even the most outlandish office-party misbehaviours tend to be more silly than sinful.

In my more casual interviews with English workers, when I asked general questions about ‘what people get up to at the office Christmas party’, my informants often mentioned the custom of photocopying one’s bottom (or sometimes breasts) on the office photocopier. I’m not sure how often this actually occurs, but the fact that it has become one of the national standing jokes about office parties gives you an idea of how these events are regarded, the expectations and unwritten rules involved – and how the English behave under conditions of ‘cultural remission’.

English workers like to talk about their annual office parties as though they were wild Roman orgies, but this is largely titillation or wishful thinking.

The reality, for most of us, is that our debauchery consists mainly of eating and drinking rather too much; singing and dancing in a more flamboyant manner than we are accustomed to; wearing skirts cut a bit too high and tops cut a bit too low; indulging in a little flirtation and maybe an illicit kiss or fumble; speaking to our colleagues with rather less restraint than usual, and to our bosses with rather less deference – and perhaps, if we are feeling really wanton and dissolute, photocopying our bottoms.