The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Values Lab ~ Are some industries woke because they’re badly paid?
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Stonner Kebab from their Summer Sausage.
Values Labs are like buses, so after a bit of a gap, we bring you your second successive one in two short weeks. It asks whether certain values tribes choose different work sectors.
And of course, for transport fans, there’s Charlie’s Attic, where Clapham Omnibus Man meets Moron in a Hurry(a legal term, we assure you). Today’s Attic answers an eternal conundrum: ‘data is’ versus ‘data are’.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC– which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.
'Woke' job sectors
We enjoyed this Janan Ganesh article in the Financial Times. It argues that that conservative anger about ‘woke’ sectors derives from the fact that those on the right are unwilling to work in them because they’re less well paid. Ganesh points out “the impossibility of chasing money and fighting the culture wars” at the same time. He argues that those with ‘a conservative temper’ are “entitled to choose lucrative work over a life in the institutions that set the cultural weather. They are entitled to deplore the success of the left in bending those institutions to their dogma. What is neither honest nor becoming is to do both: to forfeit terrain and then seethe at its capture by hostile elements.”
This is an interesting argument. The industries accused of having become hotbeds of leftism – be it academia, publishing or the charitable sector – often come with higher status than they do pay. Using comedy as an example, Ganesh adds that:
“No one who is financially motivated would enter [the world of stand-up comedy]. Those who prioritise other things, such as creative expression or public exposure, might. And that – not the innate unfunniness of conservatives, not a liberal plot against them – is why comedy is a near-monopoly of the left.”
This is a fascinating topic from a values perspective. Pioneers, after all, differ from the other two tribes in that they are post-materialists, whose cornerstone belief is that it’s not all about money. The other two groups are more ‘materialist’, in the sense either of a focus on protecting material resources (among Settlers) or of an attraction to life’s finer things (among Prospectors).
The Values Modes heat map above shows the distribution of those who say it’s ‘important to be rich’. The statement in question is pretty blunt, and even some of those who enjoy the baubles of success might balk at agreeing with it. But it is nevertheless striking how fiercely the Pioneer corner rejects this statement. There is, almost literally, no one with this view in the Pioneer part of the map.
Pioneers are likely to be degree-educated, and to have voted Remain. They are the most socially liberal are and the earliest adopters of progressive social changes. They are gradually growing as a group. The ‘woke’ behaviours and ‘metropolitan elite’ attitudes which some conservative commentators rage against are, therefore, almost certainly emanating from this section of society.
Hence, Ganesh’s article flags an interesting structural point. As post-materialist or Pioneer values become more prevalent, you will have more and more people who exhibit both a high level of skills and education and a low appetite (comparatively) for making money. This group will continue to be drawn to roles which, whilst reasonably paid, are rewarding for their own sake. These tend to occur in organisations which carry cultural importance (e.g. museums and publishing) or social importance (e.g. teaching, health and civil society). The accusation that our public, civic and arts sectors are disproportionately progressive will therefore continue to carry weight. And the culture war tensions which this creates will continue.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the part of the bulletin which is always ‘better than money’:
