Gregory's ServerHeya! 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.
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 @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. @Loukas And that, in turn, reminds me of a passage from “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/507105-he-meditated-resentfully-on-the-physical-texture-of-life-had  @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 And the point of sharing that experience is not to cast blame or judgment. Given the *massive* amounts of waste and redundant effort that are involved in repairing or working around low diligence in the UK – like, in all seriousness, I would not be at all surprised if it approached something like 15% of GDP – my interest lay in wondering whether it might somehow offer a point of ecological intervention. But it’s not a low-hanging fruit, not at all. It may actually be intractable. |
@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.