Culture as a collective conscience providing for the needs of the workforce – who decides the needs – are they free agents or is it a matter of choosing under circumstances they don’t control?
Work in progress on culture
Reference in the text as –(Baigent 2009)
Reference in the bibliography as- Baigent, D. (2009) Work in progress on Culture, available at accessed on *****
Last updated 10-3-09
Contents
Work in progress on culture
Contents
Introduction
What is culture: a broad understanding
A simple view
Resistance
Work cultures
Culture a catchall phrase
Uniformed public services: Police and Fire Service.
A gap emerges
The police as an example
The fire service provides an example.
What does this mean
Can an informal culture take on its own dynamic – an unintended consequence or conscious but hidden outcome
The fire service
One culture
NHS
Natural attributes - hardly
In training establishments there is little room for choice – people comply or they leave.
Fitting-in
Cultural power
To be continued – work in progress
Collective Conscience
Family
Social Relations
Joining groups
Voluntarily joining a culture
Micro example
Work cultures
Bibliography
Introduction
This is work ‘in progress’. That is to say it is still developing and will be adjusted over time – your comments would be welcome to
Culture has no physical presence, it is not hands on and cannot be seen, touched or smelt. Thomas (1909) would understand the argument that “culture is a phenomenon, existing only in the mind of those individuals who believe in it.” He would equally accept that in our socially constructed world cultures guide the way we act out our social relations. The following attempts to provide some light on a paradoxical argument that suggestson the one hand culture does not actually exist, but also argues that culture has power over individuals.
The debate about culture that follows will increasingly focus on public servants and their work cultures. The intention is to whet the appetite so that you dig deeper into the literature for wider and more sophisticated views. I am convinced that currently very few Public Services managers have any real understanding of the way that public service cultures operate. This lack of understanding can in turn inhibit the way they try to manage their organisations, and in particular reduce the effectiveness of modernisation[1].
This argument is based around primaryresearch (Baigent 2001b; 2003; 2004a; b; 2005; 2006a; Baigent, O'Connor and Evans 2007a; b) and this extensively sociological view is now supported by a host of academic debates. At the end are a series of boxes containing notes that at a later date may be included in the text or discarded. Read on, hopefully enjoy and send back comments on areas you enjoyed or find hard to understand.
What is culture: a broad understanding
As has already been suggested, ‘Culture has no physical presence, it is not hands on and cannot be seen, touched or smelt.’ Culture is a phenomenon, existing only in the mind of those individuals who believe in it. However, once believed culture has power (Thomas 1909). It would be a mistake to understand any power that culture has as if it were a physical restraint (Giddens 1979: 51). People are capable of breaking free of cultural ties, but they may find this difficult. When people try to join a culture they may have to prove that they belong. This can take time and could involve individuals in practising practice (O'Connor 2007)until they gain the expertise to actually practice culture (Calhourn and Sennett 2007). Achieving the expertise to operate successfully in a culture could be seen in similar terms to obtaining a skill – something you learn about and get better at. At times individuals who are part of a culture may fail to recognise if they have any choice at all: an example of this could be the way that people act out an ethnicity as if it were God given. This combination of human action and structure to reproduce culture is similar to ‘structuration:’ “how the system uses rules and resources to reproduce itself in interaction” (Giddens 1979: 66).
The accidental pun in the phrase “practicing culture” is meaningful: it is both something one does and something one learns to do better by doing it. As Practice, culture is neither Bagehot’s “hard cake of custom” nor the realm of pure creativity idealized in notions of genus, It is made and remade in almost imperceptible small ways as well as occasional large bursts of innovation. As practice, culture is an achievement, not simply an environment. But it is an achievement of large-scale collective participation as well as an always incomplete, never entirely systematic weaving of achievements together. It is work. It is play. It is projects by which people try to persuade, entertain, lead, deceive, and arouse the passions of others. Because it exists in projects, it exists also in struggles – to get ahead, to redefine beauty, to promote morality, to resist ideological hegemony. Culture, as E. P. Thompson famously said of class, is “happening.” It isn’t just there. It isn’t our conscious control and creative choices. It is made, but neither under conditions of our own choosing nor by individuals alone. We might have called this book “doing culture” instead of “practicing culture” but it would have made culture seem much easier to do than it really is. It takes practice.(Calhourn and Sennett 2007: 7)
A simple view
One way to understand how culture works would be to recognise that groups of people who come together regularly start to organise patterns of acceptable behaviour. Perhaps these patterns are best understood as a series of norms and values that the group have or develop in common. Over time these understandings become a framework: a guide as to what it means to be a member of their group. The whole framework once accepted by the group then becomes a requirement for membership and acceptable behaviour: the group’s culture. People who are new to the group will watch for clues on how to act (Goffman 1959) and moderate their behaviour according to cultural rules. Although the organisation of culture is far more complicated when you consider how it influences larger groups the process is very similar. People come together, they adopt norms, values and rules which become shared beliefs that guide (and to a certain extent control) their behaviour – what Durkheim (1964) would call a ‘collective conscience.’ Bourdieu(1992: 10) argues that “culture mediates all human behaviour” and that most people recognise how this is done - they are not ‘cultural dopes.’
“[T]he values, customs and acceptable modes of behaviour that characterize a society or social groups within a society … that are learned and internalized by people rather than being genetically transmitted” (Marsh and Keating 2006:20).“The emphasis on culture, rather than biological instinct, as the key to understanding human behaviour implies that learning plays an essential part in creating social beings. In sociology, the term given to the process by which we learn the norms, values and roles approved by our society is 'socialization'. The survival of children into adulthood and the future of culture itself depend on a society's successful organization of this process.” (Marsh and Keating 2006:23)
Resistance
On occasions, a group member may find difficulty in complying with an accepted norm, value or rule. At this point, the individual has two choices: they can choose to comply or they can resist. More often, the individual will choose to comply. They make a choice to compromise – to give up some of their free will in order to remain in the group: a choice that on occasions is made in circumstances not of their own choosing(Marx 2001). For example, when group membership is important, say a belonging need (Maslow 1987) the individual may well judge that compliance is better than risking exclusion from the group.
Culture however, can and does change. Culture is a combination of tradition and the way individuals in the group currently think - therefore change is always possible because through culture is first made then remade through human action. On a micro scale, if an individual chooses not to accept a cultural arrangement then the group can sanction the individual or change their understandings to accommodate them. On the macro scale cultures will change to reflect changes in the wider society. For example until late in 2008 the culture of the Western World could be seen as reflecting neo liberal capitalism. Then suddenly an overextended banking system collapsed and the world went into recession – the culture of capital had changed almost overnight.
The view of culture here is that it is a social phenomenon: a combination of norms, values and rules based on tradition and current practice that help people to provide order in a given social group – Because it takes human action to enact culture, it can change but will only do so within the conservative restraint that each generation holds the culture in trust for the next.Put simply this means that:
- Culture has power because it is believed
- Culture is a framework of norms, values and rules that guide people towards appropriate behaviour in a given group
- Culture does not physically restrain people – it only has power because people believe in it
- Cultural understandings are passed down from generation to generation
- Culture can change – but is resistant to change
- Culture can provide identity
- Culture can indicate the ‘other’ – those who are not part of the culture
By developing their understanding of ‘culture,’ public service students will be far better placed to study uniformed public services.
Culture a catchall phrase
Everywhere in society that groups form up they develop around a framework of norms, values and rules and in the longer term this framework can be identified as a culture (Marsh 2006). There are for example religious, ethnic, national, regional, women’s, men’s, lesbian, heterosexual and gay cultures the list is almost endless. And when people recognise a culture, it is common for them to speak about that culture as if it were a controlling feature. In these circumstances, rather than seeing individuals as responsible for their own behaviour, many people will simply argue “it’s the/our culture.” Those that use the term ‘culture’ in such a ‘deterministic way are in danger of losing sight of the probability that group behaviour is something about which individuals could have some choice. People can choose to follow cultural values or not, it is up to them. However, the conditions under which people make those choices can be limiting, particularly if the culture that is being talked about is religious or ethnic. The same too may be argued for the amount of choice people have in regard to work cultures.
Work cultures
Having introduced the argument that choices may be limited when individuals want to join a group, it is then possible to recognise the potential power that a group/culture has over the individual. If this happens in the groups that we join voluntarily for friendship or in groups that we are born into, it is necessary to identify if a similar process also operates at work. Workplaces too have cultures. At first glance, a similar process occurs in the development of work cultures, but it is not the same. Work cultures are slightly different from those that exist in wider society, because they are not necessarily the product of the collective thoughts of the employees (as in the case of social groups); they are more likely to represent the views of the employers. At work then culture could be seen as something that was imposed: a contractual arrangement. However, because the culture is imposed on individuals, despite their apparent acceptance of a contract, outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Even the most rigid bureaucracies are not always the iron cage that Weber imagined(Weber 1978)
The first view is that workplace cultures develop to represent how the organisation will achieve its product. In most workplaces the prime motivations is to make money (Braverman 1974) and capitalist organisations develop a work culture that will deliver the maximum profit. Taking a Taylorist view (Taylor 1947), any suggestion that work culture is something that people chose to participate in appears flawed because the choice is very limited - people either chose to work within the rules or they will lose their job. However, whenever you are dealing with individuals, things can get a lot more complicated. Individuals have agency and for many employees their motivation is not simply about money as Taylor (1947) may have thought/wished. Nor are employees slaves. Therefore whilst a workplace culture may not be democratic, ever since Mayo (1949), the cultural intent of making an organisation more efficient has benefited from taking account of worker’s needs in a wider sense. This may be simply to avoid alienation (and anomie) caused by the division of labour (de-skilling) that could drive production down. Nonetheless this does involve an acceptance of the authority of groups at work (see Mayo 1949; Durkheim 1964; Baigent 2007).Perhaps the ideal is a workplace culture that colonises both employers’ and employees’ needs and in looking at this possibility the public services may provide an interesting example.
Some work places are not there to provide a profit but to provide a service. Most of these organisations are in the public sector and their cultures are more likely to be associated with service delivery than profit. So for example the fire, ambulance and police service’s product is public safety. Therefore they have developed a culture around a public service ethos: to deliver an efficient service to the public. Public service employees also recognise this. Indeed many if not all public service workers could be seen as giving up the opportunity to earn more money in the private sector because they recognise a dividend that comes from working for the community.
Uniformed public services: Police and Fire Service.
Police officers, firefighters and soldiers belong to a uniformed (and presumed disciplined) service. For example, a police or fire officer may be seen by the wider society as having little or no choice about how they do their work. Choice appears to be severely limited by the formal bureaucracy that employees accept when they put on the uniform. But people in uniform do make choices. First, they decided that they want to join a public service. They are also at the forefront of people who will argue that they chose their service because “they want to serve.” That is to say, that they believe in and accept the public service ethos, which is about helping people. This common understanding amongst those serving in uniformmore often leads to individuals believing that service at point of need is their number one priority: it is, or appears to be,a collective conscience or culture.
Because they have chosen to serve the public, emergency worker’s employment provides for more than a financial need. Whilst a regular income serves uniformed workers’ physiological and safety needs, the possibility that the workgroup can be seen as a family also supports their belonging needs, the recognition they gain from doing their job provides self-esteem and it is possible to argue that self-actualisation is possible when the public service ethos is achieved (Maslow 1987; Baigent 2006b).Given the general belief and support for the public service ethos, then it may be entirely reasonable to expect the entire workforce to belong to one work culture. If only it were that simple. What may appear as a business guru’s dream, a willing workforce eager to serve, and a clear mission statement that public servants, government and the public all sign up to, may be threatened as changes introduced by successive governments have become increasingly radical (Miller and Rose 2008). The resultant transformational changes that have been required may result in public service employees, who in earlier times were able to agree a common objective with managers,increasingly disagreeing about how their public service ethos is best achieved. Instead of joining together under one cultural umbrella to deliver their service, the result could be the development of two separate cultures, which sometimes operate as one but at other times have different agendas and provide for different outcomes.
A gap emerges
So how could this separationbe explained? Could it be that the term ‘efficiency’ now has different meanings depending on who is using the word? Prior to the modernisation agendas the term ‘efficiency’ related to a public service’s ability to respond to an emergency. There was little argument between the government, local authority, Chief Officers and emergency workers that this meant aiming resources at point of delivery. Whilst it would be difficult to put an exact time on when a gap developed between the strategic management of public services and emergency workers, but this gap has become increasingly apparent from the 1960’s. Since that time, strategic leaders of the public services have come under increasing pressure from government to be more accountable. At the start this mostly took the traditional form of restricting budgets and this provided for some difficult discussions about pay. Then around the 1980’s the Thatcher government shifted the focus. More radical changes were introduced that tried to increase public service efficiency through the use of Hayek style reforms involving market forces and neo-liberalism. Some of these changes involved the hiving off of in-house jobs such as cleaning to the private sector, but this became more radical as New Public Management (NPM)approaches were introduced and some jobs were ‘civilianised.’ New Labour’s modernisation agendas not only involved a more market based approach, there has been an increasing attempt to treat the cause rather than the symptom. Although this has yet to develop fully, the aim is to make citizens more responsible for their own safety (Seifert and Sibley 2005; Miller and Rose 2008) and in so doing reduce the cost of crime and fires. The consequence has been an increase in police staff, a move to improve crime and fire prevention (the latter involving a reduction in firefighters). Racism and sexism have been given a particular focusand this has resulted in attempts to create a more diverse workforce to support a greater involvement with the community.