The original title of this article was “Meetings serve a purpose”, but that focused too much on one side of the equation. I have often had my attention drawn to the cultural divide between white collar and blue collar workplaces. While there is a long list of differences in norms, a lot of the small details can be glossed over as facilitating the purpose of the culture in the first place. Well, what do I mean by that. To start the illustration, I’m going to share something I heard thirdhand that thus counts as little more than an anecdote since I can’t point to the data anymore. Purportedly there was a study where the participants were split into two groups and given a task to complete within a deadline. Unknown to the participants, they’d been sorted into people from blue collar families and people from white collar families. Since these participants were all students, they didn’t have a great deal of real-world experience to fall back on. The blue collar group selected a leader who kept the rest on task while the white collar team spent so much time consensus building that they didn’t finish the original task. I don’t know if this study every happened, but it rang true to my mind and made me ask the obvious question – why?

I sorted out the Blue Collar cultural structure quite quickly. It was a task-based organizational structure found throughout human history. It formed into a work gang/squad/hunting party with a designated boss/sergeant/chief who made sure the team stayed on task. While efficient at completing the defined task, Blue Collar culture exhibits a very strong ingroup preference. If you are not one of the guys, you will be largely shut out until you have earned your place. This reinforces the norms of the group, and silently informs the newcomer of what to expect if they do something against the rest of the team. It is a very strong structure that is very effective at getting things done.

So why is the managerial culture so radically different?

After mulling it over, I came to the conclusion that white collar culture emerged as a means of interfacing with outgroups. There are a lot of social niceties, false pleasantries and polite fuck yous that lack much of the directness you’ll find in blue collar communications. While those in the white collar world have no more preference for the outgroup than their blue collar brethren, they have to work with them far, far more often. Whether it’s negotiating with vendors, customers, other divisions of the same company, or government regulators, deal with the other is the white collar bread and butter. The floor workers can focus on getting shit done, and largely deal with the same people, including the same representatives of the outgroup. They get their regular delivery drivers, the same management representatives, and so on. These people develop a liminal status of “Not one of the guys but we can work with them”. This same liminal status is something the white collar folks are trying to cultivate with people why infrequently interface with. And they’re doing it all the time.

When you can’t rely on sharing a common boss to enforce decisions, and are dealing with people who can walk away from the table if things go south, what’s left? Endless consensus building. You get together in a room (or these days on a teleconference) and you talk, and you talk, and you talk… Eventually, if things go right, you walk away with some measure of agreement, even if there are things left undecided. It is more important to know that they will come back to that room again rather than resolve every outstanding question. The reputation of “someone we can work with” is the foundation to getting anything done. It does, however, lead to a lot of spinning wheels and pointless meetings from people who don’t grasp the real purpose of meeting in the first place.

White collar people are not more fundamentally agreeable, far from it, but the cultural differences emerge from the role being performed. Look around and you’ll still see the ingroup and the outgroup and no shortage of hatreds and rivalries, but in a functional office, they don the mask of geniality and make-believe they get along.