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:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Three Christs of Ypsilanti from one another.
Our politics section today looks at swearing in the workplace. Is this now acceptable? And if so then what’s the lesson for our political class?
And, with Valentine’s Day passing earlier this week, we offer you a more scientific (and, perhaps as a result, unromantic) approach to love. Charlie’s Attic includes a game theorist’s guide to dating, an AI love poetry quiz, and polling on whether it’s just a creation of the card companies.
Bloody politicians
A judge ruled last month that swearing in a workplace had become normalised. Concluding at a tribunal, the judge pronounced that the F-word is now “fairly commonplace” in the office, and “does not carry the shock value [it] might have done in another time.”
The case prompted the Guardian to ask ‘Is swearing still taboo?’. Their article touched on the use of swearwords by – and about – politicians, with the Westminster bubble appearing to be particularly fruity in its use of language. Indeed, it’s now fairly common to hear MPs quoted, off the record, as making profanity-laden judgements about colleagues or opponents – with many appearing to take The Thick Of It as a style-guide rather than a TV programme.
Is there a serious point about our politics to be found here? If so then we reckon it relates, indirectly, to the growing desire for leaders who are authentic and informal. A US book on this topic, The Politics of Authenticity in Presidential Campaigns, 1976-2008, described a growing expectation, over the timespan covered, that “public life would become more personal, speech patterns would become less formal and artificial, [and] the structures of public debate would become reshaped.”
Where once MPs needed to be upright and teacherly, in other words, they must now show that they’re down with the kids. And swearing is perhaps, whether consciously or not, an easy shortcut to doing this. David Cameron’s 2009 proclamation that “too many Tweets makes you a Tw*t” could be read, in this light, as an extension of his preference for rolled up shirtsleeves and speeches without notes. And the populist wave of the late 2010s can be seen as a further extension of the process, with Corbyn’s crumpled suit and Boris’s non-PC language going head-to-head in 2019.
One of the problems here is that the line between what is acceptable and what is not becomes very hard to tread. Whereas there are only a small number of ways of dressing up, there are many more ways of dressing down – including some which even the most relaxed office or electorate won’t tolerate. The same goes for swearing. Overstep the mark, and you could end up looking a bit too authentic and losing your job.
Amol Rajan’s excellent BBC documentary ‘How to break into the elite’ (screened in 2019, if you can find a way of watching it) broached exactly this topic. It showed working-class graduates struggling at job interviews in sectors like TV and the arts, because they weren’t sure how to negotiate the casual patterns of dress and behaviour of those interviewing them.
The removal of formal codes can lead, in other words, to their replacement with informal codes. And these can, in themselves, be pretty elitist. How do you work out whether the word ‘sh*t’ is acceptable on your first day at a cool advertising company, for example? Do you look like the office square by insisting on ‘sugar’ or ‘shucks’, or show your edginess (and risk being handed your P45) by turning the air blue? Only those already familiar with these environments will feel confident navigating such a question.
Is swearing in the office still taboo? Probably not. But we suspect that the move this represents – away from stuffy formality and towards rolled up shirtsleeves – may create issues of its own.
And finally this week, a Valentines-themed Charlie’s Attic. The heart-shaped box below contains our romantic (and unromantic) offerings to get you started:
And of course, if you’re as sceptical as the rest of the UK about Valentines, then here’s your usual Charlie’s Attic, stripped of schmaltz and mushiness:
Prepare your local govt comms team for a change of administration this spring – with this advice by Dan Slee.
Self-actualise – with this book from Scott Barry Kaufman. And learn to spot misinformation – with this book by Sander van der Linden (more on the book here).
