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Voice, Silence And The Business Of Construction

Stream 10 – Silence and Voice in Organizational Life

Denise Fletcher and Tony Watson

The Nottingham Trent University

Nottingham Business School,

The Nottingham Trent University,

Burton Street,

Nottingham.

NG1 4BU

[e-mail]

;

[e-mail]

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Introduction

The building or construction business is a large and complex one, involving not only
some of the largest businesses in modern economies but also a vast number of small
enterprises. According to Briscoe et al. (2000) the construction industry comprises
approximately 160,000 small and medium sized enterprises and employs between 1.7 and
2 million workers. Compared to other construction industries across Europe and other
manufacturing sectors in the UK, this industry has always had a high percentage of
workers in self employment. Since the 1960’s, the numbers of self employed workers
have continued to increase but major changes in the tax regime for the Construction
Industry introduced in 1997 and ‘tightened up’ in 1999, signalled a major shift in the
power relations between self employed people and the contractor firms ‘employing’
them. The industry has always had its own distinctive employment practices and,
although these have been more closely regulated in recent years in the larger enterprises,
the way smaller business are constructed and run means that a great deal goes on that
neither the public nor the academic research literature might be fully aware of. It might
be said that there is something of a silence about some of the questionable practices that
occur with particular regard to the use of subcontracting labour.

Although, in theory self employed workers can use their ‘flexible’ status to earn higher
wages and negotiate better rates of pay from job to job and then set against these wages
against expense allowances, in practice many self employed workers don’t exploit this
flexibility. Instead, they have the worst of all worlds being neither employee nor fully
self employed. Using subcontracting labour enables financial savings to be made ove r
direct employment, avoidance of National Insurance contributions on gross wage
payments, reduced administrative costs on PAYE deductions, no liability for holiday,
sick pay or training costs and a competitive advantage in tendering for new contracts
(Briscoe et al. 2000). But our ethnographic research has found that small contractor firms
still continue to find ways of ‘working the system’ in order to lower their wages bill
further. We also found that, somewhat paradoxically, workers often unwittingly collude
in such improper working practices which enable the contractor firm to illegally retain
tax deductions to the detriment of the self employed workers who stay silent to protect
themselves and their future work. This collusion works most effectively where there are
strong family and/or social network relationships tie-ing together the workers and
business owners through bonds of mutual obligation, humour, loyalty and trust. We are
concerned here, then, with some very specific and sensitive matters that relate to some
small business practices and subcontractor relations in the construction industry. But also
we are concerned with more general matters of voice and silence in organisations.
This narrative is designed, therefore, to give valuable insights into the part played by both
voices and silences in the ongoing constructions of the reality – the negotiation of order -
that makes up the small construction business and the construction business with which,
through family relationships, it is linked.

The research we are drawing on to do these two things will be presented in a largely
narrative style and uses material from an ethnographic research project to throw light on

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both the ‘fine grain’ of day-to-day negotiation of order or ‘construction of reality’ in a
small construction business and on some major issues of employment practices and
inequalities in contemporary society. In the spirit of what Wright Mills (Mills 1970)
called the ‘sociological imagination’ we consider how these two dimensions of social life
relate to each other: how what he called people’s ‘personal troubles’ relate to ‘public
issues’. We begin our application of the sociological imagination with the first episode of
our ethnography-based narrative, The TopBarn Builders Story. This first episode of our
tale will be followed by consideration of methodological and theoretical matters. A
second episode of the narrative follows this and, after some analysis and commentary, we
come to the third and final part of the TopBarn Builders Story and to our final reflections
on the implications of the narrative we have created out of our fieldwork investigations.

The TopBarn Builders Story: Part One

‘Did you get your cheque on Friday, then, Pearcy?’
‘No, I bloody didn’t. Did you, Wollo?’
‘No. It’s unbelievable: I got cash again. It’s all very well but, at the end of the day, it’s
nice to have the cash in your pocket but…’
‘Yeah but it’s no good if you can’t pay it into the bank’.
‘Watch out, lads, ear plugs at the ready. Here comes the dragon.’
‘Bloody foghorn more like’.

Christel, the business and life-partner of Barry, the contractor who hires Pearcy, Wallo,
Phil, Reedy and Tich as ‘subbies’ (subcontractors) in his small construction business,
appears at the top of the steps of the office of her own business which, like Christel and
Barry’s house, shares the site of the builder’s yard where the subbies are gathering. They
are meeting in the yard, as they do every morning, to agree with Barry what the day’s
work is going to be.

‘Who’s parked that bloody van over there?,’ Christel shouts. ‘What’s that pile of bricks
doing in front of my office? And why, for God’s sake, is that bloody scaffolding all over
the place. I’ve got important visitors today and I don’t want this sort of mess in the yard.
I’ve got a business to run too’. ‘BARRY!’ she shouts at the top of her voice, ‘for
goodness sake, get this lot sorted out’.

Narrative, ethnography and fiction science

The narrative which we have now opened, and will continue later, focuses on activities at
the level of interpersonal relations and how they are involved in the negotiation of a
particular organisational order. This is an order which nevertheless has to be understood
as a dimension of the wider structural and cultural order of which it is a part – something
that we will be strongly emphasising in our later analysis. By using ethnographic research
and a narrative style of presenting that research we can look at the detailed processes
whereby the voices and the silences of particular and individ ual actors operate, albeit
within a wider social and cultural context, to bring about particular events and distinctive
local manifestations of power and advantage. Most basically, narratives are accounts of
the human world which follow a basic sequence of ‘this, then that, then that’. When this
basic form of account is applied to human affairs it tends to take on a more developed

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story-based form which involves the interactions of characters with particular interests,
motives, emotions and moralities. Narrative (especially, we would say, when it takes the
more developed story-like form), as Richardson says, ‘displays the goals and intentions
of human actors; it makes individuals, cultures, societies, and historical epochs
comprehensible as wholes, it humanizes time, and it allows us to contemplate the effects
of our actions to alter the directions of our lives’ (1995, p .200). Through narrative we
weaving together and make connections between events, giving them meanings but also
trying to create new meanings (Polkinghorne 1988). So narrative becomes central to our
lives because it is the means through which we hear, dream, imagine, shape, construct
and communicate meaning (Josselson and Lieblich, 1995). In short, narrating and story-
telling are specific forms of reality construction (Steyaert and Bouwen, 2000) and are
especially helpful to our learning about the world given that they are more likely to be
registered in the human mind, and remembered, than items of ‘propositional knowledge’
(Tsoukas 1998).

The main narrative presented here: an episode within the negotiation of order of TopBarn
Builders has been constructed from ethnographic fieldwork. It is informed by close and
detailed observation of everyday organisational activities and interpersonal ac tions and,
especially, by close listening to what people say and the way they say what they say. But
this investigation has taken the researchers into immensely sensitive areas of the lives of
the people studied. And it has produced ‘data’ which could be equally sensitive in
business terms. The authors have chosen to reshape or mould the story that emerged
directly from their fieldwork into something that protects confidentiality at both a
personal and an organisational level. Faced with this situation in ethnographic writing
generally, a degree of ‘creative writing’ (Watson 1995) or ‘fictionalising’ can become
necessary and expedient. Although this might seem like a radical departure from the
normal rigours of social science analysis, it has been increasingly recognised that, as
Geertz (1973) puts it, all ethnographies are fictios or ‘made things’ and, as Van Maanen
(1979) points out, fiction is ‘a fact’ in organisational ethnographies.

Although there are various shapes that ethnographic narratives take, they inevitably
involve story-telling (Van Maanen 1988). The ethnographer is thus much more than a
reporter, holding up a social scientific mirror to nature (Rorty 1980). And this being
‘more than a reporter’ can be exploited to go beyond utilising fiction-writing techniques
for the expedient motive of protecting personal and business confidentiality. It becomes
possible, for example, to compress or extend events, simplify the detail of complexities or
amalgamate one character into another, sharpen the dramatic nature of key turning points,
and so on, – to ‘point up’ theoretically important aspects of what ‘actually occurred’ or
was observed. The story of TopBarn Builders is thus told here within the principles of
ethnographic fiction science - a genre of research-based writing which engages with and
‘narrativises’ fieldwork in this way, all the time working within pragmatist (as opposed to
correspondence or plausibility criteria of truthfulness/ validity). This approach is fully
explained and epistemologically justified elsewhere (Watson 2000) and can be seen
applied to organisational strategy- making in a small business context (Watson 2003) and
to the emergence of human resourcing strategies (Watson 2004). Ethnographic fiction
science bridges the creative writing the social science reporting genres. Creative writing

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techniques are utilised insofar as ‘the story is made or put together using the
researcher/writer’s fieldwork experience together with other inputs from their whole life
experience and wider knowledge’ (Watson 2000 p. 254). But it is also scientific in two
respects; first because it is partly shaped by the writer’s knowledge of social science
theories and concepts and research studies and, second, because the author is ‘a self-
conscious researcher using skills of observation, interview, documentary analysis and so
on’ (Ibid 524).

Voice, silence and power

The story of TopBarn Builders is clearly one in which ‘voice’ plays an important part.
We noticed in the first episode of the narrative presented earlier that Christel is a figure
whom the other actors significantly characterise in terms of her loud voice (a ‘dragon’
with ‘foghorn voice’). But in the intellectual and political realm, the notion of ‘voice’ has
come to mean much more than the sounds that are emitted from people’s throats. The
concept of voice has become increasingly popular as a way of highlighting the presence
or the lack of power and representation of particular individuals and groups in society and
organisations. It is often assumed that someone who is ‘without voice’ is therefore
without a ‘say’ and is unable to assert themselves in the context in which they are silent.
And if one is unable to assert oneself, one is unlikely to become powerful. Yet, on
reflection, we realise that the re are nevertheless people from whom we hear very little but
who wield power over those who are visible and audible onstage or who, alternatively,
assert themselves against power through their silence. As Tannen (1994) points out,
using, as is going to be done in the present paper, both social science and fictional texts
as illustrations, ‘Silence alone…is not a self- evident sign of powerlessness, nor volubility
a self-evident sign of domination’ (p. 36). ‘Silence and volubility’, she recognises,
‘cannot always be taken to “mean” power or powerlessness, domination or subjugation.
Rather, both may imply either power or solidarity, depending on the dynamics…’ (Ibid
p.39). So things are more complicated than at first they seem. Silence and power can go
together as much as voice and power. This insight is quite consistent with contemporary
social scientific thinking about the nature of power.

Theorists of power increasingly recognise the different levels at which power operates.
They tend to identify a variety of ‘dimensions’ in which power operates in social
relations. In the final analysis, power is about the ways in which members of societies go
about gaining access to scarce resources. Power can be defined as ‘the capacity of an
individual or group to affect the outcome of any situation so that access is achieved to
whatever resources are scarce and desired within a society of a part of that society’
(Watson 2002, p.323). But these ‘capacities’ are not simply the outcomes of the ways in
which one person gains advantages by pushing another person into a less advantaged
position. They also have to do with the way social life is organised. Lukes (1974) pointed
out that in addition to the ‘decision-making’ dimension of power in which we see people
getting others to do what they would not otherwise do, we have the dimension in which
biases are ‘mobilised’ to ensure that decision- making only occurs with reference to
politically ‘safe’ issues. In addition to this, we have the dimension whereby people’s
perceptions and values are shaped so that they come to see the social and political order
as natural or generally beneficial and therefore unchallengeable. Insofar as such a

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political hegemony (Gramsci 1971) prevails, there will be little need for particularly loud
‘voices of power’ to be heard. Power, in effect, can be silent and will tend to be
accompanied by the silent complicity of those with less power. Silence can also go along
with power in the second and third dimensions of power that Hardy (1994) identifies.
These are the ‘power of meaning’ dimension, where symbols give legitimacy to patterns
of advantage and the ‘power of the system level’ whereby power is ‘embedded’ in social
systems through the unconscious acceptance of values, traditions and social
arrangements. It is within these broader structural and cultural dimensions of power that
interpersonal aspects of power-related behaviours are to be understood: the ‘ways in
which some people are able to get other people to do things that they would not otherwise
do’ (Watson ibid, p.322).

To emphasise the impact and the value of a narrative approach to these matters, and
before turning to our social-science oriented story-telling, it is helpful to look at a famous
piece of fictional narrative - which forcefully shows just how subtle the relationship
between voice, silence and power can be. The world of opera is ideal for this because,
here, we have a narrative form in which voice, in a literal sense, is a key matter, as well
as being metaphorically significant.

Voice, power and silence are crucial to Puccini’s Turandot. In this early twentieth
century opera, we see one of the most powerful figures imaginable, Turandot herself, the
Ice Princess, not just singing with her powerful soprano voice, but wielding the power of
life and death over suitors, all of whom who are powerful men in their own right. Her
voice sentences unsuitable suitors to death. It would also appear that she intimidates her
own father – a mere Emperor of China. In fact, she terrifies all around her. In Calaf’s
singing of Nessun Dorma is the implication that the whole of Peking cannot sleep
because, potentially, the whole population might be put to the sword if no-one comes
forward to reveal the identity of the mysterious prince. Calaf’s tenor voice, his love for
and attraction to the Principessa di Mori, the Principessa di Gelo, challenges Turandot’s
dominant voice and, in the end, their voices are brought into harmony. But perhaps the
most powerful intervention in all of this is the silence of Liu, the slave girl. At first sight,
here is the most powerless figure in the opera; a slave girl and a foreigner to China. But it
is her silence and her refusal, even after torture and on the pain of death, to give Calaf’s
name to Turandot that defeats the ice princess. Liu teaches the princess a lesson about
love which, together with Calaf’s success in solving the riddles, melts the ice and allows
the power of loving sacrifice to overcome the most terrifying type of power and
intimidation that we can imagine.

This operatic narrative looks at matters of power, voice and silence at an almost cosmic
level. But it establishes the importance of considering the contribution that the
characteristics and the distinctive voices of particular individuals make to the patterning
of social relations. Turandot and the rest of Puccini’s dramatis personae may be larger
than life characters, but the point that we wish to make here applies equally to the much
more ‘everyday’ and prosaic patterns of activity and interpersonal interplay that occur in
the ordinary small business context. We will shortly return to look at the lives and
activities of the people involved in TopBarn Builders. And from focusing on one of the

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most powerful and terrifying women in the world of literature and opera we move to
consider Christel, her business and life partner Barry, and the subcontractors who work
for the business – and one these, Phil, especially. We also shift away from a literary
criticism style of analysis to a social scientific one – one that consciously concerns itself
with generalisations of a theoretical, as well as a narrative, nature.

Voice and silence in the negation of order

At the heart of the research work from which the present narrative and analysis derives is
an interest in the relationships between the personal life projects of individuals and
organisational emergence. To help appreciate this we apply process-relational thinking to
our subject (Hosking and Morley, 1991; Hosking, Dachler and Gergen,1995; Watson
2002). This encourages us to be relationally responsive as we explore how fragments of
individuals’ lives, conversations, memories, experiences, interactions, exchanges and
emotions become constructed, related and interwoven into patchworks of meaning that
then shape and coordinate how people go on relating in future dialogues, exchanges and
negotiations (Fletcher 2004). Within this, notions of voice and silence are seen as central
to processes of negotiation and reality construction. And organisations themselves are
conceptualised as negotiated orders; as arrangements which involve continually
emergent patterns of activity and understanding arising from the interplay of individual
and group interests, ideas, initiatives and reactions - these interests and differences
reflecting patterns of power and inequality applying in the society and economy of which
the organisation is a part. Such a view of organisations differs from the standard way of
looking at organisations as structures that, primarily, are designed and directed by
managers or owners who try to run the organisation according to an organisational
‘blueprint’. Managers and organisational ‘designers’ clearly influence the shape of
structures and activities but they necessarily do this in negotiation both with each other
(given that members of management or of business-owning families have varied interests
and priorities) and with other people who work within and otherwise make a contribution
to the enterprise (all of whom have their own interests to pursue and particular meanings
or orientations that they bring into their organisational involvement).

Although the earlier formulation of the negotiated order way of looking at organisations
(Strauss et al 1963) was open to the criticism that the interactional processes it focused
upon were insufficiently grounded in their wider structural and historical context (Day
and Day 1977), Strauss (1978) modified the analysis to show how the negotiation of
everyday organisational realities needs to be related to conflicts whic h are ‘endemic, or
essential to relations between or among negotiating parties’. The importance of this will
become apparent when we analyse the negotiation of order in TopBarn Builders.

Into the field – or ‘into the yard’

We now turn to the story we have constructed out of our fieldwork to look at the inter-
relationship between the voices and silences in Christel and Barry’s construction and
reconstruction of their two small businesses and their personal relationship, recognising
that the ongoing interweaving, negotiation and construction of patchworks of meaning in
the personal and the business lives of these two people can only be understood in the light
of their relationship with the group of men who work in the construction business and

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that this relationship, in turn, can only be understood in the light of the economic, power
and gender relations that form the structural context of the activities that the research
narrative covers.

In the spirit of reflexive research writing, it is important to emphasise that the basic
analysis here is very much an emergent one which took shape both in the course of the
fieldwork and the reflection upon the observational work. Early on when making sense of
what they were observing, the researchers were tempted to focus on the dyadic
relationship between Christel and Barry, seeing them each as possessing a pair of ‘masks’
- one being a silent persona and other a voiced persona - which they each switch about
between. This direction was prompted by a symbolic ‘cue’ in Chr istel’s office: a framed
print of Man Ray’s famous image ‘Noire and Blanche’ (which shows a pale mask- like
woman’s face resting horizontally on a plain surface alongside a dark and solid looking
mask which she is holding up vertically). But it soon became clear that the mask imagery
was imposing limitations on the analysis and attention turned to the ‘multi- voicedness’ of
each character and a recognition that each of them simultaneously carries silence and
voice, loudness, quietness, dissent, assent, presence and absence. And, as Barry and
Christel were seen interacting each day with the workers, especially as they all came
together each morning at the builder’s yard, it became clear that issues of voice and
silence went beyond the relationship between the two business owners and permeated the
relationships across the whole negotiated order of this small organisation. Relational
processes were increasingly seen as involving a negotiated interplay of strong, quiet,
loud, soft voices with voice/silence producing inclusivity or connection on the one hand,
and self-other distance, on the other.

The TopBarn Builders Story: Part Two

We return to the builder’s yard, where Christel has just shouted at Barry to ‘get this lot
sorted out’ – leaving it unclear as to whether she is talking about the building materials
in the yard or the workmen waiting for Barry to arrive.

Pearcy, speaking quietly so that Christel doesn’t hear, comments, ‘“This lot” she calls us.
Bloody “this lot”, indeed. Without us Barry wouldn’t have a business.’

‘And what’s more,’ adds Wollo, ‘She wouldn’t have her fancy office either. She knows
damn well that she got it on the cheap. Her so-called consultancy business rides on the
back of Barry’s business’.

‘And whose backs does Barry ride on?’

‘Exactly: our bloody backs’.

‘And the bugger still has the nerve to pay us in cash, when what we need is a proper
cheque to pay into the bank’.

At this point, Barry arrives on the scene; ‘Ay up. I heard that, Reedy. My missus is
making more bloody money than we are. £500 a day - I wish I could charge out at that.
Bloody women have no idea what we are up against in the building game.’

‘But your missus used to do the books for you, didn’t she, Barry?’

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‘Yeah, but I could do without her sticking her nose in these days. Let’s face it, her own
business - whatever we blokes might think of it - keeps her off our backs. If she didn’t
have the business, we’d soon bloody well know about it. The old dragon would be
nagging us all the time. And that bloody foghorn voice…

As loudly as he can Barry screams; ‘Piercy, get that fucking scaffold shifted. Come on
we’ve got a barn roof to get on today’. Then quickly lowering his voice, ‘Watch out, the
dragon’s back.’

Christel appears again at her office door, ‘Why does nobody listen to me. For the last
time, will someone get that van out my bloody way?’ With a stamp of her foot, she turns
her back on the yard and walks into the office of the consultancy business which she set
up when she left her school teaching career after becoming dissatisfied and unfulfilled
working in schools.

She sits down at her desk and reflects on how things have worked out for her since she
decided to leave teaching and, in effect, ‘re-train’ by studying for a diploma in marketing
at the local business school. ‘And then, of all things, while the business was getting
under way I found I was pregnant. Having a child at 41 was not what I had planned. It
wasn’t easy. But I am sure I was right to continue with the studies, not just for the
diploma and for the valuable information but for the contacts I was making - with other
marketing managers for instance. And I quite liked being pregnant, didn’t I? I seemed to
have extra energy and it gave me a glow to be aware of this small embryo growing inside
me at the same time as the business was emerging and growing. I was rather taken with
the analogy between the life cycle theory of business growth I’d been studying and the
baby growing in me. First there was the seed of an idea. This came to me at a dinner
party with friends who had their own business. At that point I decided I wanted my own
business. I want to become a millionaire. But it was Barry who really got me going with
it. I learned a lot about running a business from him. And, of course, he set up his first
wife in a catering business when they split up.’

‘So, it was my idea to start a marketing consultancy business. But it was Barry who came
up with the idea of specialised consultancy for the construction industry. Barry is good
like that. He has lots of ideas and knows what will work. He knows a lot of people and
is good at getting new business. People seem to warm to him. But he exasperates me
much of the time. I wish he was more systematic about things. I’m always trying to get
him to put procedures and systems in place. It’s all a bloody mess.’

We turn now to Phil Mason. Phil is one of the 8 regular subcontractors who works for
Barry and he has worked there for a number of years. In TopBarn builders, only five of
the men are employed ‘on the books’. TopBarn Builders are located in a rural location
on the edge of an old coal- mining region and so Barry is able to widely and easily from a
pool of labour in the area. Also, Barry is well connected through personal networks and
the builders merchants to other builders, architects, and local estate agents. As he was
driving back from work that night, Phil found himself reflecting on the chaotic aspects of
Barry’s business:

‘In spite of all the chaos I quite like this work. Last week I was working on a church roof,
this week I am back on the barn conversions. Barry really has found a niche there –
buying up old derelict farms and converting the buildings into contemporary but

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farmhouse or barn-style houses. There seems to be a real market there. It’s interesting
working with people like English Heritage trying to restore the original ‘listed’ features
of the building. I like the work and I like Barry as a person. But working with Barry is a
nightmare. At least now Barry has employed the new quantity surveyor to look after the
money side, we don’t have to face the dragon every Friday. God, all the lads are
frightened of Christel. I’ve seen men quaking in their boots if they have to see Christel
about anything. You should hear her. I mean Barry has got a loud voice. Wherever you
are on site, you can hear him. He is just one of those people who is loud and noisy. Mind
you, he is knowledgeable, what he doesn’t know about the building industry, well...

‘Barry wheels and deals and can get around anything. But you should hear Christel
having a go at him. He’s a bit forgetful as well but he has a lot on his mind with running
the construction business. But, Christel, well everybody, including Barry, calls her the
‘dragon’. They’ve been to gether a long time though, funny really you would not think
they were a good match in some ways. But then in others, like the way they treat people,
they are identical. You know sometimes I am trying to talk to Barry about a job and he is
walking away from me as I am speaking. And Christel, well sometimes she will be all
nice and say ‘good morning Phil’, really bright and chirpy. And then another day, she
will just completely ignore you. I think it depends if they have had a row but I would not
let my wife speak to me the way she does to him. They’re not married though although
they have a son. Nobody likes her. She is joint managing director of the business and
when she used to do the books, she tried to run it like a military operation, which in
construction just does not work. But what she forgets is that we blokes are mostly
working for a wage, on many jobs just providing labour only, so we do not earn a profit
on the job like Barry does when he sells one of his barns for £250,000. And there sho uld
be good-will involved in running a small business. They need our skills to get the jobs
done but they do nothing to keep us loyal to make us want to stay working with them. I
know loads of the lads are fed up, the electrician has said he will never work for Barry
again. I like the work and it’s all local. But it’s a shame about all this subcontracting
legislation nonsense. It’s like we are at the end of the chain and nobody cares about us.’

Commentary and analysis: voice, solidarity and power

As the story of TopBarn Builders unfolds we hear not just a variety of voices and
associated silences contributing to the negotiation of order in this small business setting,
we also hear the interplay of relatively loud and relatively quiet voices. The story opened
with the very loud voice of Christel. She has the right and the power to dictate to others,
not least because she is the joint managing director of the building business. Christel’s
loud voice does not, however, go unchallenged. But the challenge is a very quiet one.
From what Christel hears of it, it is effectively a silent challenge. We hear Piercy
protesting at her reference to the workers as ‘this lot’. But he spoke at a level which
meant Christel would not hear his comments. There is protest here but it is a quiet protest.
Its significance to the negotiation of order might be understood as a form of worker
adjustment to the way they are exploited in the employment situation. At the centre of
the perceived unfairness of their situation is an apparent grievance about the men being
currently being paid in cash, rather than by the normal cheques. We do not learn,
however, the nature of the difficulties that this is creating for the men. The discussion is
cut-off by the arrival of Barry who acknowledges that he has heard what they are talking

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about with ‘I heard that, Reedy’. Barry quickly changes the subject, not only to defend
and indeed to praise Christel’s business, but also to make a generally derogative comment
about ‘bloody women’.

Barry’s move towards a general attack on women can be interpreted as an attempt to
create some gender-based solidarity with the men (‘we blokes’). But his subsequent
move shifts the attack back on to Christel specifically - ‘the old dragon’ with the ‘foghorn
voice’. Whether or not he is aware of the irony, Barry demonstrates the volume and
power of his own voice, echoing Christel’s earlier foghorn blast by screaming at the men
to move the scaffolding. In effect, he is acting out her instructions. As muc h as he might
adopt a position of anti-Christel solidarity with the men, the reality is one of the
economic and domestic solidarity between Christel and Barry. On the surface, he puts
himself across as irritated by her dictatorial manner and loud voice. But underlying this
surface irritation, on the basis of close observation over time, the researchers’ judge that
the relationship between the couple is one of strong mutual respect. Barry nevertheless
persists with implying to the men that he sympathises with their reservations about
Christel. He lowers his voice to warn them that’ the dragon’s back’.

Christel is only briefly back on the scene. We see her temporarily retreating into her
office where she reflects on her life and her working career. She is clearly an ambitious
person who connects her business ambitions to her femininity and indeed to her being a
mother. She has a powerful sense of self but at the same time acknowledges her debt to
Barry and recognises his support of her. She nevertheles s reveals a tension that exists
between them over the ‘messy’ way he runs the building business. Whether or not this
criticism is justified, it is one that she shares with Phil, the worker who is the closest to
Barry and Christel. In Phil’s reflections on his work situation and relationship with the
couple, we hear that whilst he likes Barry he also finds working with him something of ‘a
nightmare’. He speaks of liking Barry. But he talks of hating Christel. Yet, at the same
time he sees them ‘as identical’ in the way that they ‘treat people’. When it comes to how
the business is managed from day to day, Phil is somewhat equivocal. He shows a degree
of regard for Christel by sympathising with her concern about the ‘messiness’ in the way
the business is run. Yet he sympathises with Barry in the latter’s unwillingness to run the
business ‘like a military operation’. But on the matter of the employment relations in the
business, Phil is far from equivocal. He contrasts the men’s dependence on wages with
Barry’s ability to make significant profits. He notes that the business is dependent on the
workers’ skills but raises the question of why Barry does so little to keep the workers
‘loyal’. We leave Phil expressing more equivocality, however. He tells us that he likes
the work itself and appreciates the fact that it is ‘local’. But he is aggrieved that when it
comes to Barry and Christel’s attitudes to the workers ‘nobody cares about us’. He has a
particular concern about the effects of the recent changes in tax legislation with regard to
self employed subcontractors. This is an issue we shall shortly see arising again when
Phil discusses his situation at home with his wife. At this stage, however, we return to
Phil as he drives home at the end of a working day.

12

The TopBarn Builders Story: Part Three

At the end of his drive along the country roads between the barn conversion site and his
home, Phil walks through the front door of his cottage with his thoughts about the chaos
of Barry’s business still on his mind. As soon as he sees his wife, Karen, he launches into
complaints about his day.

‘You won’t believe what happened today. I am not being funny, like, but that bloody
Barry thinks he knows everything. It’s unbelievable. After all the years I’ve worked on
kitchens and bathrooms, he still thinks he can still tell me how to grout and…’

‘Oh no, here we go again,’ Karen cuts in, ‘How many times have I got to listen to you
moaning on about Barry? Why don’t you actually do something about it all? You don’t
have to go on working for him for the rest of your life, you know.’

‘Just tell me what I can do, then. There’s no way me and the blokes can get him sorted
out, you know… He knows we quite like him really. Perhaps that’s the problem. And he
knows we all get a good laugh working with him. Take today, at dinner time in the snap
cabin. It was the usual thing, it drives me mad.

‘Yeah and it drive me mad hearing the same old stories time and time again. Sorry, go on,
if you have to’.

‘Well, it started off with everyone taking the piss out of Wollo’s mobile phone. He walks
round with this fancy phone and, you know what, nobody every rings him on it. And, of
course, he’s too mean to ring anyone himself.

‘Yes, I know that. So?’

‘As you know, we all take the piss out of him. But at the end of the day he’s Barry’s
favourite. That really winds me up. You know what a lazy bastard he is. He’s always the
first to stop for a break and the last to get back to work. He complains about Barry like
the rest of us but he’s the one who always puts the kibosh on any idea that we might
challenge Barry about what he is really up to, paying us in cash for so many weeks of
every year. Let’s face it; because we have a good laugh in the snap cabin and we like
Barry, we just leave it at that. At the end of the day, we think, “Well we’re in work and
that’s all that matters”. Yeah, but I am sure there is something not quite right about all of
this. But I can’t quite put my finger on what it is’.

‘Well I know what it is, Phil. He’s shafting you. You won’t have it but he is, you know.
You lot are too gullible. He pays you in cash for so many weeks of every year so that he
can tell the authorities that you really are self employed subcontractors. That’s suits you
because you want to be self employed. But he has the best of all worlds. He can retain
you as almost permanent labour whilst keeping the freedom to lay you off at any time –
as well as avoiding giving holiday pay and all the other benefits proper employees are
entitled to. And, what is more, you say that the cash he pays you is “after tax”. But if you
are honest with yourselves, you know very well that it is not “after tax” at all. He is
simply paying you a lower wage and leaving the onus on you subbies to declare the cash
as income in your books. And that leaves you liable for the tax on this cash you’ve had in
hand.

13

‘Yes, although the tax amount has been deducted, to do things properly, I should declare
this cash income in my books. But this would mean I would be liable for a tax deduction
again because I don’t have a tax voucher to say I have paid it. But if I do declare it, it
means that Barry has made me take a pay cut. And if I don’t declare it, Barry has made
me into a tax dodger. Either way, he wins. Either way, we lose. I suppose that’s what
you call being a good business man. Whatever Christel and me say about Barry running
things in a messy way, at the end of the day he really knows what he is doing, doesn’t he.
He’s got all the advantages of being an employer with none of the disadvantages. And on
top of all of that, he gets away with paying us a lower rate for the ten weeks we are on the
cash- in-hand payment. He’s got us over a barrel. Even if I could get the lads to see this, I
don’t see what we could do about it.’

Well, I do, Phil. I’ve got an idea. I am not sure if you are going to like this, but hear me
out. My sister has told me about this bloke who is in the village. He’s a researcher for
one of those investigative television programmes. He’s doing something on builders and
how they use subbies and how they rip off…’

‘Hang on, Karen, that’s the sort of thing your sister would go for. But we’re not that type
of…’

‘What do you mean “type”. You’re the type who shuts up just too much. You just take all
the crap that’s going. And it’s got nothing to do with my sister. I want you to fight back,
you know, speak up.’

‘You what?’

‘I want you to meet this chap and give him the low down on the sort of thing that Barry
does.’

‘I’d never be able live around here if I did that, let alone get any more work’.

‘Exactly. I think it’s time we moved out of this poky little place and went to live at the
coast, like we’ve always said we’d do. All you need to do is to explain to these television
people – you wouldn’t need to go on the programme – how Barry insists on paying you
cash for ten weeks of every year, so that he can pretend that you are not really working
for him as many weeks of the year as you really are. And you can tell them how he takes
what would normally be the tax deduction and bloody pockets it for himself’.

‘Steady on Karen.’

Karen chooses not to ‘go steady’, however. She continues her criticisms of Barry. And
she attacks Phil and his fellow subbies for what she calls their cowardice – their
willingness endlessly to complain over their lunchtime sandwiches in the ‘snap cabin’,
without really challenging Barry on how he is treating them. The argument continues
over the evening meal and, eventually, Phil takes the dog for a walk, promising he will
think ove r everything Karen has been saying.

After one of the longest walks the dog has ever had, Phil returns home. He promises
Karen that he has taken seriously everything she has said to him. But, he explains, ‘I just
can’t do it, Karen. If someone blows the whistle on Barry, then the publicity would ruin
both him and Christel.’

14

‘For goodness sake, Phil, I know you quite like Barry. But you owe him nothing.
Builders like him – all over the country – need sorting out. And you can’t stand Christel.
Sometimes, from the way you talk about her, I think you hate her.’

‘Maybe I do,’ Phil concedes and he insists on closing off the whole discussion: ‘However
horrible Christel is - the dragon with the foghorn voice we all go on about – she has
worked hard to build up that business. I respect that. And I can’t help remembering when
the kid was born and how she struggled to balance things at home and at work. I even got
quite fond of the kid. I still am, I suppose, in spite of what his mother is like. How could I
ruin the life Christel and Barry have made for themselves – even if so much of it is off
the backs of us subbies? It would be Christel’s business, though, that would be totally
buggered by bad publicity from the television thing. And there are the kid’s school fees to
pay. If I did ruin things for them, I could just hear Christel saying… Well, I don’t know
what she would say. But she’d probably say, “That bloody Phil, what a little shit, he is.” I
think she’d be right. I am not doing it, Karen.’

Commentary and analysis: voice, silence and collusion

From Karen’s ‘here we go again’ reaction to Phil as he begins to voice his complaints
about Barry’s interference in areas of Phil’s work expertise that a regular end-of-the-day
ritual is being played out. Karen wants this to end. She wants some action rather than
empty talk, it would appear. But Phil suggests that there is nothing that he and ‘the
blokes’ can do about Barry. Yet he once again reveals to us his equivocal position about
Barry and about his own job. He adds to his earlier talk of ‘liking’ Barry, reference to his
enjoyment of the informal aspects of working in the business – the ‘piss takes’ that go on
in the snap cabin (the temporary shed that the men use for lunch and other break times).
Yet he slips from talkin g of Wollo, the victim of some of these jests, as simply a ‘lazy
bastard’ to a semi-explicit criticism of this man as an agent of Barry who ‘puts the
Kibosh on’ (stops) any challenges to Barry on the way he pays the men. But Phil soon
shifts back to a mood of resignation with the idea that having a job is ‘all that matters’ at
the ‘end of the day’. Even so, the equivocality is not wholly abandoned. He knows that
something is ‘not quite right’ about Barry’s employment practices, but he is not all clear
just what is wrong.

Karen and Barry then, between them, go on to produce an analysis of how Barry is in
effect exploiting the subcontractors in two main ways. First he is taking advantage of
their desire to be self-employed subcontractors (as opposed to emplo yees) to be free of
employment rights obligations, whilst he is nevertheless managing or supervising them
from day-to-day exactly is if they were his employees. And, second, one of the devices he
uses to maintain an official definition of the subbies as se lf-employed – a device
involving his paying them cash- in-hand rather than invoice-related cheques – is enabling
him to save on labour costs. The UK law (since 1999) requires him to pay tax on the
subcontractors’ behalf when the men are officially ‘on the books’ as subcontractors. But
for those several weeks of the year in which he pays cash- in-hand (at the same level he
pays when he is deducting tax) he is reducing his wages costs. Because tax has not
actually been paid on these payments (it is not ‘after tax’ at all, Karen points out), the
men are forced into a position whereby they take either an effective pay cut (and pay their

15

own tax on the cash received) or they, illegally, fail to declare income to the tax
authorities.

Karen challenges Phil very hard on the effective silence (or the ‘quiet voicing’) that the
subbies have maintained with regard to these exploitative practices. She accuses Phil of
being ‘a type who shuts up too much’ and invites him to take the opportunity of
‘speaking up’ by talking to the television researcher. The implication of the position that
Karen is adopting is that Phil and his fellow subcontractors are being complicit in their
own exploitation. In effect, their silence or the ‘quiet voicing’ of their grievances leads
them to collude in the employment and payment practices out of which Barry and
Christel benefit to a wholly disproportionate degree. And Karen’s challenge to Phil is one
that would have him striking a blow for building workers everywhere – using the medium
of investigative television to attack structural inequalities in effect: builders ‘all over the
country’ need ‘sorting out’ she says.

Phil is unable to take up the challenge to use the television contact to give a ‘loud voice’
to all those building workers who stay silent or who stay complicit in their own
exploitation through speaking only in ‘quiet voices’. In spite of his dislike of Christel, he
has respect for her and clearly has affections for her and Barry’s child. And, when finally
telling Karen that he will not go along with her plan, he invokes an imagined voice – the
voice of Christel writing off Phil as a ‘little shit’. He concedes to the power of that voice.

Conclusions

It might be said that any good story is one that speaks for itself. Each reader will relate in
their own way to the characters and the events that have been presented to them. The
reader of the TopBarn Builders story does not have to have been involved in the
construction industry to find issues that relate to aspects of their own lives or to their
views of the society in which they live, any more than the opera goer needs to have lived
in Imperial China to find aspects of Turandot resonating with aspects of their own lives
or their political sentiments. However, the TopBarn narrative has been constructed from
the building blocks of actually observed and related-to characters and events to do more
than engage readers in what Bruner (1986) calls the narrative form of reasoning (or
‘narrative human cognition mode’). Our narrative has been interwoven with social
science analysis which invites reasoning in what Bruner calls the logico-scientific mode.

The main theoretical analysis of this article has been reiterated at various points: matters
of voice and silence at an interpersonal level within organisations have a complex and
interpenetrative relationship with patterns of power and advantage that operate both at the
level of the organisational negotiated order and at the level of the wider economy and
society. TopBarn Builders (along with the consultancy business with which it is linked) is
not to be understood as an organisation that operates according to the blueprint drawn up
by its owner- managers. It is a negotiated order, a social, economic and political reality
that is constructed and reconstructed out of the interplay of a range of individuals and
groups with different interests and orientations and with voices of varying levels of
loudness and impact.

16

The actions and the ‘loud voices’ of the small-business owner managers powerfully
contribute to the shaping of the activities of the construction company and the outcomes
and rewards that result from the way it functions. But the actions, the silences and the
quiet voices of the subcontractors are also vital shapers of organisational activities and
outcomes. All of this becomes startlingly clear in the narrative when an opportunity arises
for Phil to become a ‘loud voice’ and to challenge the pattern of exploitation in which he
and his colleagues have been colluding, wittingly or unwittingly. Yet the hegemonic
pattern of domination which prevails generally in the employment relations of industrial
capitalist societies and specifically in the relations between subcontractors and
construction companies is left undamaged at the end of our na rrative. Our ethnographic
narrative covers just one instance of the ways in which structural patterns of power and
advantage are lived out and are lived through in the lives of particular people in specific
settings. But in showing some of the fine-grained detail of the interactions of Christel,
Barry, Karen, Phil and the other subbies working for TopBarn Builders, we hope we have
significantly deepened both narrative and propositional knowledge of an aspect of life in
modern societies which directly affects the lives of large numbers of people involved in
the construction industry and indirectly affects the lives of all of us as citizens of these
societies.

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