Here’s what I mean by “low-diligence”: Of the five cultures I’ve lived in as an adult, the American, Japanese, Korean and Finnish in addition to that of the British Isles, the UK is on the lower end of the scale in terms of the care and attention to detail people bring to bear on everyday tasks. As we’ve discussed before, this is true across classes, backgrounds and occupational sectors here. It’s true in the NHS, in the academy, in the trades and above all in business. I can’t explain it –
I only observe it. People you rely on for important things lose critical documents. A task that you’d expect to be done right the first time needs to be redone and then redone again. The wrong kind of emulsion is specified, or the financial support is deposited in someone else’s account, or the wrong form is filed, or the referral is lost in the mail. (These are all real examples from the past year of my life.) And when you layer brittle, overspecified and inflexible digital processes over this
rather slapdash comedy of errors, the result is not improved accuracy or streamlined process flow. It’s a new and supervening set of faulty readings, with its own particular kind of plausibility and authority, that people must somehow summon the energy to challenge and counter. Occasionally, this has literally lethal effects - if you do not live in the UK, prepare to be shocked speechless by the Post Office/Fujitsu scandal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Sure, some of this can be accounted for by the deskilling, outsourcing, shoddy lowest-bidder automation and responsibilization that are part and parcel of neoliberal governance/management/governmentality. But much of it feels deep to the culture, in a way that absconds from awareness or visibility. And I don’t, actually, want to bellyache about this state of affairs: I would like to find some ways for us to do something about it together. But it’s daunting, “vaster than empires and more slow.”
Heya! I’m really grateful for your interest in the question of a diligence spectrum, but for those of you who have asked or suggested, I’m afraid there’s no real way one could quantify the appearance of this quality in a culture – other, I suppose, than doing the kind of thing that brash and overconfident management consultants do, i.e. collating a few proxy statistics, and calling it a finding. These are simply anecdotal and partial observations, drawn from my own experience.
@adamgreenfield I would link it to what i see as the thickness of social buffers in the different cultures. In the UK banter, irony and grumbling form social buffers where unhappiness with diligence can be attenuated. In Sweden there is zero buffer and people either communicate or cooperate with total precision or not at all, because the consequences are totally unbuffered.
@Loukas I think that’s absolutely correct. It’s a stretch, but I wouldn’t be surprised either if some everyday solidaristic institutions here (and here I’m thinking primarily of pubs) derive some of their motive power from the fact that they offer a platform for commiseration and low-key mutual aid in the face of it.
@adamgreenfield the classic explanation for pubs was they were a place for working class men to escape from the unhappiness of married life. So much so that women used to, and sometimes still do, face violence if they go to a pub, because jer like you say, it's a designated male grumble zone
@sarajw I am sorry, I didn’t want to be one of those insufferable “everything’s better in the States” people. If it makes you feel any better, we’ve thrown in our lot here. We’re on Shite Island for good!
@adamgreenfield lol it's OK, I have a Swedish side and a naturalised German side too - I'm not really insulted - just gritting my teeth at the truth of it!
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