Geeks vs grandees: A transnational comparison of dress codes in American and British federal technology agencies

Abstract

This comparative transnational history informed by discourse analysis examines the US and UK news coverage of two new ‘federal startups’ created in the early 2010s: The United States Digital Service and Government Digital Service. These agencies were designed to renovate federal infrastructures and institutions by integrating technologies and technologists into the federal government. Early coverage of these agencies in both countries focused on the integration of casual dress norms common in technology industries into federal offices dominated by suits. In the United States, those norms were embraced, often with amusement. But in the United Kingdom, they were met with hostility. This article explains why dress code was a focus in both countries and why it was covered differently in each. Ultimately, this study argues workplace attire is emblematic of the differing ways in which industry and government partnerships function in these countries. Dress code norm differences offer a window into how nationally specific cultural values remained about technology and government in each country. Ultimately, these findings suggest the extent to which values prioritized by technology industries became those prioritized by the US government, and the extent to which the United Kingdom retained separation between those arenas.

Keywords

Fashion government technology industry United Kingdom United States

In the early 2010s, both the United States and the United Kingdom created ‘federal startups’ – the United States Digital Service (USDS) and United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service (GDS) – new federal agencies created to apply technology industry techniques and methods to renovate federal infrastructures and institutions (Schulte, 2018). These agencies integrated industry technologists into federal agencies. As this article shows, this integration occurred differently in the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular, in regard to workplace attire. In both countries, technologists brought casual dress norms common in global technology industries into federal office buildings filled with suits. In the United States, those norms were embraced, but in the United Kingdom, they were met with hostility. While this may seem trivial at first blush, this article argues that workplace attire is emblematic of the differing ways in which industry and government partnerships function in each place, offering a window into how nationally specific cultural values about technology and government remain.

To make this argument, this article traces how casual dress in general, and the hoodie in particular, became a marker for technology industries, a marker that embodied particular workplace norms and values. Because casual dress norms originated in the United States in and through the American companies that rose to dominate global technology markets, casual dress became symbolic of a particularly American technology ethos. The American norm quickly spread around the world alongside the technological products emerging out of its industries. But those meanings were not always embraced abroad. Thus, this article builds on the research that traces the hoodie phenomenon (Casanova and Webb, 2017; Nguyen, 2015; Ross, 2003) to show how the phenomenon played out differently in the United States and the United Kingdom when it met federal institutions and confronted new national cultural and political dynamics.

The text that follows first explains my methodological approach to this comparative transnational history of federal startups. Second, it traces the historical arc of casual work dress codes in general and hoodies in particular in technology industries, focusing on the values in which dress choices were embedded. Third, this article provides background on the new federal agencies (USDS and GDS), comparing and contrasting historical and cultural contexts in which they emerged. Fourth, the study investigates what happened when technologists integrated into the federal governments, focusing on conflicts and characterizations of dress code. Ultimately, comparing the discourses about casual dress shows the level to which values prioritized by American technology industries became the values prioritized by the US government. Conversely, it shows that the values in technology industry and government remained more distinct in the United Kingdom.

Methodology

This study is a comparative transnational history informed by discourse analysis. In his study of comparative approaches to studying technology, Bourdon identified ‘discursive’ comparison as a genre of technology history that investigates the ‘social’ visions of technology as they are ‘affected by discourses of various interested social agents’ (Bourdon, 2018: 94). The best works, he argues, ‘combine the analysis of discourse with its social role and repercussion’ (Bourdon, 2018: 98). Here, ‘discourse’ refers in the Foucauldian sense to the fields in which power, beliefs and values are maintained, assuming that ‘power manifests in the usage patterns of words and images and that individuals participate in these construction processes in their use of language’ and how those relate to ‘political, social and historical contexts’ (Cramer, 2009: 220). Investigating discourse provides insight into the ‘concrete communicative events (conversations, newspaper articles, etc.) and more abstract and enduring complex discursive “objects” (with their own complex relations)’ (Fairclough, 2013: 3). Discursive analysis is ‘committed to showing the ways in which dominant social factors use specific discourses in order to maintain their power’ (John, 2014: 199). The discourses operating in and around technology ‘may be viewed as instruments of power playing a central role in the history of technological development’ (Bourdon, 2018: 92). The best, Gitelman (2006: 1) argues, look at ‘the novelty years’ transitional states and identity crises’ because this approach ‘stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped’. Many scholars have identified transnational discursive studies as a gap in the literature (Bourdon, 2018; Guo et al., 2012; Livingstone, 2003).

Thus, this article uses comparative transnational historical methods informed by discourse analysis to identify and compare patterns in British and American news media. Building on Gitelman, this study constituted a historical archive of the US and UK national news coverage of the creation of two new federal startups (USDS and GDS) and contextualized that coverage within larger nationally specific discursive constructions about technology and government. The article’s archive resulted from a Lexis/Nexis search of the term ‘United States Digital Service’ in US newspapers (i.e. New York Times and Christian Science Monitor) 2013–2016 (1 year before and 2 years after the USDS’s creation) yielded 170 hits. The same search of ‘Government Digital Service’ in UK newspapers (i.e. Times, Observer, and Independent) 2010–2013 (1 year before and 2 years after the GDS’s creation) revealed 62 hits.

In reading these articles, a pattern appeared. Both the USDS and GDS coverage focused on challenges in integrating technologists used to casual workplace cultures into federal government. With this in mind, I expanded my archive to search specifically for coverage of dress code in GDS and USDS, including a longer time period (to 2018) and including industry and news magazines (i.e. Wired, Atlantic). Ultimately, the work of this article is explaining why dress code became an issue in both countries and why it was covered differently in each.

A look under the hoodie: how no-collar labor became the tech dress code

Perhaps it goes without saying, but the hoodie was not originally designed for the office. Its origins date back to the 1930s, when what is now Champion Athletic Apparel released the hoodie as a product to warm athletes. However, hoodies soon became a favorite of physical laborers. What was called a ‘hooded sweatshirt’ did not become a ‘hoodie’ until the 1980s, when it was appropriated by ‘B-boys, graffiti artists, and break dancers’ (Patterson, 2016). As such, it became a means for White consumers to culturally access ‘urban coolness’ and ‘urban blackness’, placing the hoodie in a long history of White appropriation (Forman, 2002; Hall, 1996; Neal and Forman, 2004; Rose, 1994). As Murray Forman (2002) noted, the aesthetics of hip-hop cultures cultivated in American urban spaces also cultivated particular individual and collective identities, or what Forman calls ‘street discourses’. The objects marked with those street discourses retain those meanings even when removed from the urban settings from which they emerged and when worn by bodies not associated with those settings, such as White suburban ones. As hoodies became associated with urban Blackness, they became cultural carriers of the racialized urban ‘street’ authenticity, problematically reaffirming and rearticulating urban spaces as ‘ghetto’, ‘inner-city’ and ‘the hood’ (Forman, 2002). As such, the hoodie was a driver of the racialized optics that marked some bodies criminal ‘because they are black and therefore threatening’ (Nguyen, 2015: 793). Thus, before it became associated with techie workplaces, the hoodie was already a complex cultural object with a long and problematic history of class, race and regional identity.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills famously observed how clothing marks people in the workplace. He wrote about how in the 1950s, the US workforce expanded to include ‘blue-collar workers’, those doing manual labor, as well as ‘white-collar workers’, those doing mental labor. He described this mental, White-collar labor as ‘the art of “handling”, selling and servicing people’, and about how the ‘personal or even intimate traits of employees . . . become commodities in the labor market’ (Mills, 1951: 183). The white-collar, then, not only differentiated workers from each other, but it also operated as a stand-in for an entire class of educated service laborers, embodying their values, qualities and practices.

In the previous more than 50 years, many more collar colors emerged, including pink and green, representing caretaking and environmental labor, respectively. The collar also disappeared entirely in the creation of what labor scholar Andrew Ross (2003) calls ‘no-collar’ workers. In contrast to ‘white-collar’ or ‘blue-collar’, no-collar labels a class of workers as technology-savvy, nonconformist, anti-authoritarian, self-directed and entrepreneurial. Ross argues the concept of ‘no collar’ hybridized the privilege of white-collar work (or ‘mind’ work) with the technical or mechanical intelligence of blue-collar work (or ‘hand’ work). This creates a new category of computer labor that is higher in status than other types of mechanical laborers.

No-collar workers rose to prominence in conjunction with computing technologies. As Ross notes, no-collar labor emerged largely in technology centers in California’s Silicon Valley and New York’s Silicon Alley, places that not only glamorized the skill and creativity in computer coding, but also created the technologies of remote access that allowed labor to disconnect from full-time employment and from designated office spaces. This was all part of larger movements that worked to restructure production industries into, for example, venture labor and the gig economy (Neff, 2012). As the conventions of traditional work-life fell away, the norms of work dress adjusted. Andrew Ross (2003) quips that the rise of no-collar labor is in some ways the ‘industrialization of bohemia’ (p. 10).

The transition to no-collar labor was not an easy one for traditional industries to cope with. In 2012, Wall Street executives stood aghast as Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked them for billion-dollar investments while wearing a hoodie. Different reactions to Zuckerberg’s hoodie became a press feeding frenzy, which the Wall Street Journal called ‘hoodiegate’, the clash of ‘Hermes’ vs ‘hoodies’. Finance leaders critiqued Zuckerberg’s hoodie as a sign of ‘disrespect’, ‘immaturity or flippancy’; technologists praised it for its authenticity, for representing ‘the Facebook mystique of youth and coolness’ (Casanova and Webb, 2017: 119). Reports suggested Zuckerberg’s hoodie was central to Facebook itself. Esquire described it as a central branding element (Soller, 2012), and the Atlantic reported that ‘a Zuckerberg- and hoodie-less Facebook would lack all that “growth potential” investors want to know more about’ because ‘we doubt Zuckerberg can succeed without it’ (Greenfield, 2012).

Some even speculated the ‘hoodied techno-guru’ and ‘hoodie-wearing head honcho’ Zuckerberg endowed his hoodie with magical powers (Casanova and Webb, 2017: 199). In a 2010 interview with business journalists Kara Swisher at the ‘All Things Digital conference’, Zuckerberg claimed, ‘I never take it off’ before paradoxically taking it off to reveal what one journalists called a ‘(magical??) official Facebook symbol sewn on its inside’ (Greenfield, 2012).

The symbol, which the Guardian called an ‘intriguing strategy-cum-Illuminati-logo’, featured multidirectional arrows symbolizing the social graph, message streaming and global platform and the Facebook motto: ‘Making the World Open and Connected’ (Kiss, 2010). Upon seeing the symbol, Kara Swisher snarked, ‘Oh my god. It’s like a secret cult’. (Bosker, 2010). Hoodies with the symbols sewn in were reportedly given to all Facebook employees (Kiss, 2010). The hoodie also symbolized investment in the product and not the trappings of wealth. The hoodie ‘gives the impression of a different, more modern businessman’, one who ‘cares more about the product than fitting some sort of uncomfortable fashion-norm’ (Greenfield, 2012). Like Steve Jobs’ iconic black turtleneck, for the next generations of technologists ‘the hoodie is power’ (Greenfield, 2012) (Image 1 and 2).

Image 1.

Screenshot by Stephanie Schulte, Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie liner at ‘All Things Digital’, (Cutler, 2010).

Image 2.

Screenshot by Stephanie Schulte, recreation of Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie liner graphic at ‘All Things Digital’, (Tsotsis, 2010).

By the early 2010s, the hoodie had not only become the iconic uniform of Facebook, but it had also become a central, if complicated, component to the identity and image of American technology industries. However, the power of the hoodie was not accessible to everyone in the same way. Scholars have long argued that different people have different allowances for what they can wear in the workplace (Halberstam, 1998; Longhurst, 2001; Steele, 1996). Those with economic power and high status, generally, create workplace dress norms and particular bodies have access to those norms and others do not. The lines of demarcation in technology industry workplace dress operate in intersectional ways. The Wall Street executive outrage during ‘hoodiegate’ illustrated the cultural investment in particular form of workplace class performance. Their reaction signified the continued symbolic power of the ‘power suit’, which dates back to the 19th century and evolved into the ‘uniform of official power’ and ‘prestige’ (Hollander, 1994: 83). Perhaps paradoxically, Zuckerberg’s use of the hoodie was only possible because he had other markers of power and prestige, for example wealth, prep school and Ivy League credentials. Zuckerberg gained access to Wall Street funders because he was the kind of person who could wear a suit and embody the power it signified, ‘because he is a wealthy white whiz kid who embodies the American dream’ (Casanova and Webb, 2017: 119). Zuckerberg’s cultural capital allowed him to wear a hoodie and not suffer universal ostracization as it also mobilized cultural associations with creativity and entrepreneurship, associations valued in capitalist economies focused on markets and productivity.

Had Zuckerberg been a woman, the reaction to his hoodie would likely have been different. Although the transition was rocky, women managed to appropriate the power suit over the last decades, for example, by recreating suit pants into skirts and by pairing them with blouses and jewelry (Albright, 2009). Despite the fact that it is marketed as a gender-neutral clothing item, women have not yet successfully appropriated the hoodie. This difference matters. Research indicates dressing ‘in code’, meaning in compliance with workplace norms determines if women (more than men) are perceived as positively (as intelligent, competent, powerful, organized, efficient and professional (Gurung et al., 2018)). News reports identify dress code as a major challenge for women in technology industries and even part of the ‘subtle sexism’ that exists in the industry (Groth, 2016). Some women have responded to the hoodie phenomenon with what Cristina Cordova calls ‘creative casual’, meaning clear nail polish, dark washed jeans, blouses and cardigans (Shaw, 2011). One retail analyst sees a double standard in that it is difficult for women to wear the same thing every day as many technology executives do; instead, she said, ‘we wear flats to work to flaunt convention. Not hoodies’ (Groth, 2016). Women in technology industries have begun to dress in ways they feel reflect the symbolic values associated with the hoodie’s adoption as the industry’s uniform.

However, some see Silicon Valley’s lack of a corresponding iconic style for tech women as manifestation of the historical marginalization of women in the technology industry (Groth, 2016). In this way, the hoodie has become a part of the conversation on gender inequity. As an article in the New York Times Magazine stated, when it comes to gender, the hoodie is sometimes labeled a ‘costume of dominance’ (Patterson, 2016). The inability to ‘look the part’ of a technology entrepreneur or to seem like a ‘cultural fit’ are only some of many factors in a technology industry corporate culture notoriously hostile to women (Ashcraft, 2015; Groth, 2015; Mundy, 2017; Vassallo et al., 2017).

Who wore the hoodie mattered a great deal to its symbolic connotations, not only in terms of gender, but also in terms of race and region. It mattered if the body was a young White Palo Alto resident or a young Black inner-city resident. As noted earlier, by the 1980s and 1990s, the hoodie was already a highly problematic mechanism for appropriating racially charged ‘urban coolness’ and linked with racial optics of criminality. In the early 2010s, the hoodie became an increasingly fraught symbol as it became directly implicated in debates about racial violence in the United States; the ‘hoodie scripted some part of the performance of racial optics and its claims to legitimate violence’ (Nguyen, 2015: 792). After Trayvon Martin was murdered in 2012, the hoodie became a multiply signifying cultural object and a central focus of media attention (Patterson, 2016). Television news networks replayed the 911 call made by Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, in which the dispatcher asked: ‘Did you see what he was wearing?’ George Zimmerman replied, ‘Yeah. A dark hoodie’. Geraldo Rivera blamed the hoodie for Martin’s death, NBA players donned hoodies and ‘Million Hoodie Marches’ took place around the country (Casanova and Webb, 2017). Thus, the hoodie rose to cultural power on the backs of murdered Black men who were victims of police violence, becoming an icon of systemic racism and social inequality. But it also rose on the backs of White technology entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and became an icon of creative labor and the technological innovation. As Casanova and Webb note, all of the figures represent rebellion. However, ‘unlike the presumed rebelliousness of young men of color who wear hoodies, Zuckerberg’s embodied rebellion against corporate norms is both criticized and praised’ (Casanova and Webb, 2017: 119).

This particular cultural configuration of hoodies is peculiarly American. However, overlapping configurations occurred in the United Kingdom. The ‘no collar’ work phenomenon began in the United States, but it quickly became global (Clark, 2012). This casual dress phenomenon disrupted the United Kingdom’s long history of formal wear, a history dominated by conservative workplace dress codes that some date back to 1666, when Charles II mandated a uniform of shirt and waistcoat for all noblemen (Bari, 2019). The United Kingdom was late to adopt the new practices emerging in the United States, leading some to wonder if it was preventing innovation. One dress code survey in 2016 noted that 29 percent of information technology (IT) workers had considered changing jobs because of the strict employer dress codes (TechFruit, 2017). Britain’s Parliament even weighed in on workplace dress in an effort to move it out of conservative ruts. In 2017, lawmakers considered banning employers from mandating that women wear high heels (Lawless, 2017). The UK Government Equalities Office eventually published new guidelines that suggested gender-equivalent rules, such as ‘dress smartly’, and the removal of requirements for single sexes, such as women should wear make-up and have manicured nails (Ahmed, 2018). The conservative and prescriptive nature of British workplace dress code became the focus of several lawsuits, including religious freedom and conscientious objection (Hill, 2013). Although slower to adopt more flexible and casual dress workplace norms, by 2018, 43 percent of workers in the United Kingdom felt business suits no longer belonged in the office and that those wearing them ‘would stick out like a sore thumb’ (Bailey, 2018).

Gender, race, class and regional identity politics differ in the two countries, but these factors figured in cultural understandings of the hoodie in ways parallel to those in the United States. In the United Kingdom, the hoodie and casual athletic dress aesthetics were culturally linked with hooligans, a term that refers to rowdy or violent people known to fight and damage public spaces. Tony Blair made ‘a crackdown on antisocial behavior’ one of the centerpieces of his third term as Prime Minister (Tempest, 2005). As a part of this, he supported a hoodie-ban in shopping centers. This played on a long-held assumption in the United Kingdom that hoodies were chosen by those with criminal intent, those hoping to avoid being recognized by surveillance cameras (McCormick, 2005). That ban was focused on particular raced, classed and gendered bodies. As Casanova and Webb (2017) wrote, this was a ‘superficial effort to regulate supposedly dangerous masculinity’ and to control ‘nonwhite or lower-class men’; after all, ‘women in hoodies are not a social problem’ and ‘rich white men in hoodies’ are unlikely to face enforcement of such bans (p. 119).

Hoodies and casual dress carried these complex meanings on the backs of technologists, as they integrated into traditionally conservative workspaces in federal governments in the United States and the United Kingdom in the early 2010s. These transitions were uncomfortable in large part, this article argues, because they were complex, and because they were intertwined in broader underlying cultural assumptions about race, gender and about the relationship between technology industries and government.

Federal startups hack technology to hack bureaucracy

In the early 2010s, both the United States and the United Kingdom were embroiled in national healthcare dramas. In the United Kingdom, the country’s National Health Service (NHS) was in crisis. National press reports described it as too expensive, bogged down by paperwork, and not easy for citizens to use (Rose, 2009; The Times, 2011). These reports noted that the public clamored for modernization of the antiquated system, which threatened to buckle under its own bureaucracy. To fix the healthcare system and other governmental issues, Prime Minister David Cameron created GDS in 2011. He gave the agency a broad mandate and tasked it with implementing a ‘digital by default’ strategy to help federal departments develop their service delivery models to better meet citizen’s needs. GDS became a model agency for Europe and elsewhere. As an American journalist wrote in FastCompany, ‘The British government had demonstrated that the best digital practices from the private sector could be applied to the public realm with transformative results’ (Gertner, 2015). Several years after its creation, Cameron declared the institution ‘one of the great unsung triumphs of the last Parliament’ and credited the institution with saving billions of pounds through governmental reforms (Evenstad, 2015).

In the United States, the story was similar. A scandal broke out around the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, the website designed by government contractors to facilitate the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare (Maney, 2013; Radnofsky, 2014). In the wake of the scandal, President Barack Obama created USDS in 2013. USDS was explicitly modeled on the British GDS and, like Prime Minister Cameron, Obama tasked the agency with rewriting the government’s digital infrastructure. He hoped to broadly apply the techniques, approaches and solutions applied to fix HealthCare.gov across the federal government. This overt modeling pleased those in the United Kingdom. Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude said the GDS was ‘the envy of the world’ (London Times, 2014).

Both Cameron and Obama created ‘venture government’ initiatives in the form of ‘federal startups’ (Schulte, 2018). USDS explicitly described itself as a ‘startup at the White House’, but GDS was also described as a kind of startup in the press. A columnist at the Guardian newspaper lamented that he could not invest in the GDS, because it seemed like ‘the best tech startup in Europe’ (Gertner, 2015). These federal startups had similar goals in that they wanted to bring the federal government online to make it more dynamic and efficient. Both paired technologists with government employees and had them work together inside agencies. As former US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park told a reporter, ‘we need both kinds of people, people who can hack the technology and people who can hack the bureaucracy’ (Gertner, 2015). USDS and GDS were not only similar, they were integrated with each other; they collaborated on projects and shared code.

However, these agencies also differed. They accomplished similar tasks, but did so in ways that reflected different values. In the United States, federal government leadership embraced technology industry laborers and practices when they designed USDS. The agency replaced government protocols with more Silicon Valley style workflows, including project management processes and organizational structures. The agency was not structured like a typical government agency. It used venture labor and ‘cost recovery’ or ‘fee-for-service’ models common in technology industries rather than the traditional contractual models common in government. USDS’s structure matched its goals, which were to do things that sounded very much like Silicon Valley startups wanted to do: to create viral change that would scale across agencies and productively disrupt government (Schulte, 2018).

In the early 2010s, it made sense that the US government leadership would embrace technology industries. Not only did technologists save the Obamacare website, but technology industries were also far more popular than government. In the early 2010s, Americans thought that their government was broken. American approval of the federal government was 20 percent, a figure in powerful contrast to approval of technology companies, which was 71 percent (Pew Research Center, 2015). This stemmed in part from the government’s abysmal record on technology. One audit found that 90 percent of America’s large government technology projects failed in that they were over budget and not functional. It is no wonder that ‘venture government’, disrupting government and including technology industries, made sense in America. This also fit President Obama’s agenda to rehabilitate the view of government in the eyes of the public. He personally ‘recruited top technology talent from the likes of Google and Facebook’ and gave them their new ‘mission: to reboot how government works’ (Gertner, 2015).

The story in the United Kingdom is a little different. The creation of the GDS aimed in some ways to do the opposite. GDS was designed as a way of preventing corporate interests from influencing government, a way of fortifying traditional government. The government’s goal was expressed in a statement made by Stephen Kelly, the UK CEO of the Cabinet’s Efficiency Reform Group. He said, ‘The Government has thrown the keys of the castle over to industry and we want them back’ (Sylvester, 2013). By some metrics, the plan worked. The creation of GDS allowed the renegotiation of ‘more than 100 contracts’ with technology company contractors. While USDS was a way to integrate technology industry people and practices into the government, the UK’s GDS was a way to stiff-arm corporations, to push them out by ‘insourcing’ IT and to stand up to what was imagined as corporate bullies (Sylvester, 2013).

Correspondingly, the British like their government far more than Americans. The approval rating in the United Kingdom has been historically higher, often nearly twice the American (Macrory, 2016). The British also historically have a higher level of patience for government bureaucracy than Americans and more historical levels of anxiety about government links with corporate power (Woll, 2014).

Thus, both USDS and GDS agencies integrated technologists into government agencies, but the integration was driven by different goals. The different goals affected the nature and successes of the integration on different sides of the Atlantic. Viewing the way agencies transitioned the technology workers in – the ways their workplace norms such as casual dress became points of debate during the creation of the agencies – is one lens through which to see these differences more broadly.

Transitions: geeks vs grandees

From the start, USDS had trouble recruiting people. It faced a challenge in luring techies away from the potential financial windfalls of Silicon Valley and other sunbelt technology industry hubs. One strategy deployed was an aspirational message and call to arms that combined technology culture conventions with patriotism and service. The website’s early recruitment video, for example, opened with an obviously amateur and whimsical whiteboard drawing (Image 3).

Image 3.

Screenshot by Stephanie Schulte of USDS promotional video, (Schulte, 2016b).

The video pictured workspaces that incorporated the material trappings of technology industries – such as air hockey tables, break-out rooms and walls of post-its. The video featured these cultural markers of innovation and technology authenticity, ones that Internet scholar Lilly Irani might call ‘Googley’ (Irani, 2015: 816). These images featured the ‘doers’ who would ‘cut through bureaucratic red tape . . . in pursuit of efficient and inspired progress’ like the hacker magicians at Google (Irani, 2015: 807).

The audio narrative featured US Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, describing the work as occurring in what she called ‘fabulous cross-functional teams’, drawing parallels to the project-based teams in technology companies. The video also featured Mikey Dickerson, a Google employee and all-around code-wizard, who many credit with saving the Healthcare.gov website (Gertner, 2015). Press coverage of Dickerson noted that instead of listing an official title, his business card said, ‘Don’t Panic’; former Obama Administration Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Todd Park referred to Dickerson as ‘Buddha’ (Gertner, 2015). One after another, current USDS members on the video repeated versions of the same statement: I ‘did well’ and now I want to ‘do good’. This mantra was an established part of the Silicon Valley ethos (Berger, 2018). It referred to the money made in lucrative technology industries (‘did well’), and linked that financial security to the ability to pursue projects that might fulfill service or personal goals (‘do good’). The message to coders in this mantra was that this federal project had the potential to be fulfilling in a way that startup industries were not.

But would technologists fit into federal government? Casual dress was a well-featured sign of USDS’s Googleyness, one that made the agency especially unique in Washington, D.C., a city dominated by suited bureaucrats. When USDS was established, The Hill published an article entirely about whether Obama was going to make Mikey Dickerson wear a suit (Gertner, 2015). The answer was no. President Obama did not mandate a suit and instead got in on the joke. While on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart on 21 July 2015, President Obama described USDS by laughing and shaking his head as he said that he was now employing a bunch of ‘guys in t-shirts’. The dress code in particular meant something special to coders. As Mikey Dickerson told a reporter, the number 1 question he got from potential recruits was this: ‘Are you wearing a suit to work?’ Dickerson explained it this way: it is ‘just the quickest shorthand way of asking, “Is this just the same old business as usual? Or are they going to listen this time?”’ (Gertner, 2015). The acceptance of casual dress into a government agency signaled that USDS was a different kind of agency. Working in tandem with all the other visuals and rhetoric surrounding USDS, casual dress conveyed this message: ‘We are not a government bureaucracy. We are a patriotic start up where you can change the world!’

Material trapping of technology industries – break-out zones, post-it walls, casual dress – were also present in the United Kingdom’s GDS and were part of the way the agency represented itself as young, hip and innovative. The website featured images similar to the USDS website (Image 4 and 5).

Image 4.

Screenshot by Stephanie Schulte of workspaces from the GDS official page, (Schulte 2016a).

Image 5.

Screenshot by Stephanie Schulte of work flow from GDS official page, (Schulte, 2016a).

However, the transition to the workplace culture of technology industries was not as easy as in the United States. It certainly was no joking matter. One of the projects assigned to GDS was to work with the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) to streamline government subsidies to farmers. The partnership was a fiasco. The agency blew its deadline and failed to distribute most of the £1.8 billion pegged for English farm and landowners. That left more than 50,000 farmers with payment delays, meaning many were ‘on the brink of bankruptcy or vulnerable to loan sharks’. Complicating matters, the GDS project was £60 million over budget, soaring from £155 million–£215 million (Webster, 2016: 9). Worst of all, these failings incurred a £180 million fine from the European Union for incompetence and inefficiency. This fine was not without irony since governmental inefficiency was one of the specific issues GDS was created to remedy.

As bizarre as it sounds, this fiasco was in part blamed on hoodies and casual dress. Members of Parliament dragged leaders into a hearing. Liam Maxwell, the GDS chief technology officer, described a culture clash between government employees and the new digital employees; he said the problem was ‘people dressed differently’. A reporter wrote, ‘the casual clothing of the new team caused resentment among suited civil servants’. The London Times described it as a battle between the ‘geeks’ and ‘the grandees’ in their excoriating coverage of the £180 million penalty. The hearing committee was appalled, and one Public Accounts Committee member called the whole episode ‘a childish turf war’; a Member of Parliament even called one of the players ‘Mr. Fancy Pants’ (Webster, 2016: 9). As one editorial noted, the geeks were victorious in this round of the battle and were ‘relishing their fight with the grandees. As Steve Jobs once said: “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy”’ (Sylvester, 2013).

In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the introduction of casual dress along with the integration of technologists into government became a focus on press coverage of the USDS and GDS. As with Zuckerberg’s pitch on Wall Street, the appearance of t-shirts in workspaces previously dominated by suits and ties became a central element in news media narratives surrounding both USDS and GDS. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, hoodies marked technology workers in the same ways as they marked Zuckerberg – as part of a new creative class, as authentically connected to technology cultures of innovation and entrepreneurship (Lawless, 2017).

The reaction to this integration, however, was different and provides some insight into the conflicting ways these two nations thought about the role of technology in government and, in particular, differing views of the inherent American-ness of technology. In the United States, the casual dress of its government’s newest employees was joked about and highlighted as a recruitment strategy. The high-profile incorporation of collarless workers also allowed government leaders to rebrand government itself as new, as having sexy-startup-innovative-googleyness. It gave the unpopular US government the opportunity to remake itself in the image of an American technology company.

In Europe, American technology companies were not embraced with the same optimism, as demonstrated by the litany of legal conflict between the European Commission and Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook. The phenomenon emerged in Silicon Valley and spread into other domestic industries and other nations as computing technology itself spread. Like the startup products, no-collar labor itself carried with it a kind of American-ness making it a complicated signifier. Scholars have long written about the numerous ways Internet technology took on American cultural values as it emerged and spread (Reed, 2002; Turner, 2006). Therefore, on the one hand, no-collar labor symbolized technological competence and innovation, in ways that started out American but are now global. However, on the other hand, it was also imagined as a carrier of American market values and corporate norms opposing those in Britain. In her London Times editorial, weekly political columnist Rachel Sylvester argued that ‘a quiet revolution is under way in government’. The revolution occurred in ‘East London’s so-called “Silicon Roundabout”’, or the headquarters of the GDS. These headquarters were described as ‘an outpost of the Civil Service that is all water coolers and break-out zones’. GDS was different from ‘any other part of the Civil Service Machine’ in part because ‘here nobody wears a suit. Teenagers in hoodies type furiously at Apple Macs, under the motto: “Be consistent, not uniform”’. Not only did Sylvester reference Apple Macs and its rebellious brand image promoting creativity, but the article also featured an image showing Steve Jobs taking the place of a traditional bower-hatted civil servant. At GDS, ‘staff like to quote Facebook’s slogan “Move fast and break things” to describe the culture change that is under way’ (Sylvester, 2013). The ‘revolution’ here was not only technological, but also cultural. GDS and its American tech industry trappings such as casual dress and American mantras raised alarm bells that the British civil service was under siege.

Conclusion: venture government vs venture government

In conclusion, this transnationally comparative historical discourse analysis of news coverage surrounding the creation of two federal agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom, that integrated technologists into the federal government, showed, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, a dominant narrative surrounding the creation of new federal startup agencies that was about the transition from formal workplaces attire to casual dress. This conversation was about clothes, but it was also about more than the clothes. It was also about the underlying values symbolized by the clothes.

As this article has illustrated, by the early 2010s, the casual work wear and the hoodie, in particular, were international markers for technology industries, for creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation, but only for particular bodies. This makes it a useful, if complex, symbol through which to see the transfer of cultural power from older White men in government to young White men in industry. Clothing alone, of course, does not create this transfer, but it is one frame through which to see values come to life.

This comparative study provides some insight not only into how global American technology industry culture norms have become, but also their limits. While both USDS and GDS adopted many values, practices and norms embedded in American technology industries – for example, the notion that you can hack technology to hack bureaucracy – they did so to serve different ends. USDS embraced casual dress, illustrating the ways it hoped to use technology corporations as a model for government. GDS was slow to embrace casual dress, illustrating the ways it hoped to preserve government at the expense of technology industry influence. While both were examples of ‘venture government’, in the United States ‘venture government’ emphasized the ‘venture’; in the United Kingdom, it emphasized the ‘government’. As communication scholar Jill Hills noted, historically, regulation ‘provides the mechanism for politics to rule business’ (Hills, 2007: 5). That applied to the United Kingdom, but not in the United States, where regulation provided the mechanism for government to become business.

In the larger sense, this article speaks to the ways in which computing technology may be globally integrated, but still reflective of national values. It also speaks to the level to which American technological values have become inextricable from its public values. This is, of course, not unidirectional. The development of the values in industry and government evolved alongside and in integration with one another working in capitalist systems. Indeed, one of the central arguments of critical social research is about how ‘the main areas of social life are interdependent and have effects on each other and because of the dominance of the economy in contemporary society its effects are particularly strong and pervasive’ (Fairclough, 2013: 1). Not only did most communication technologies get their start in government from public funds and continue to interplay across those fluid lines throughout developmental years, but the government also has a long history of integrating experts from business and industry into its ranks. There is no causal chart in this kind of research. However, as this article argues, the integration of technology industry models, values and norms in USDS was exceptional compared to other agencies at home and abroad and may indicate more changes to come. As the GDS example illustrates, other alternatives existed. Ultimately, comparative perspectives like this are important because they help people see past their own cultural blinders, help them recognize the situated nature of their perspectives and open new ways of thinking.

Finally, it is important to note that while casual dress persists, the hoodie has peaked and been upscaled. Technology industry hubs have moved from the hoodie to vests and fleeces (Robinson, 2016). Patagonia branded vests and high dollar versions of the iconic hoodie have become a feature of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco International Airport’s vest vending machine even garnered US$10,000 in 1 month (Russell, 2019). In some ways, this shift to the elite-branded vest is a shift toward a more traditional class marking, such as the phenomenon of ‘the summer camp billionaires’, who paired extravagant accessories like ‘spectacular eyewear’ with their iconic casual clothes (Fox, 2016). The move toward vests and branded fleeces may also be a move away from an icon complicated by gender, race and class politics. However, the vest’s power may not last long, for fashion remains culturally ambiguous and fleeting.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks anonymous reviewers, Devon Powers, Julie Passanante Elman, Molly Sauter, and Heather Wagstaff for their contributions to this work.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Stephanie Schulte

Biographical note

Stephanie Schulte is Chair and associate professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas, where she researches communication technologies, popular culture, and transnational media policy. Her book Cached: Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture (NYU Press, 2013), is a transnational political and cultural history of the internet that examines the multidirectional relationships between technological design, American culture, and policymaking.

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