A study by the Scottish Economic Policy Network, a leading think tank, said the country suffers from a “dour, conservative and insulated” image and many Scots feel “held back by a series of cultural dispositions which suffocate rather than incubate talent and creativity”.
The reported added: “Scottish businesses were characterised as being hierarchical, bureaucratic, unfriendly, rigid with time-keeping and routes to promotion, conservative and stifling. For many people, this atmosphere was experienced as demotivating, unprofessional, and suffocating.”
The report said that, for many Scots, a “win-win” situation is seeing colleagues or neighbours fail twice. Interviewees were put off the country of their birth by characteristics embodied in Rikki Fulton’s comic character the Rev IM Jolly.
It was commissioned to help inform the Fresh Talent initiative by Jack McConnell, the first minister, which aims to attract foreign workers to Scotland and encourage expats to return to their native country.
Its publication follows comments by Stuart Cosgrove, Channel 4’s director of nations and regions, last week that Scotland is populated by inward-looking people who celebrate failure and revel in a “culture of poverty”.
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In the report Scots émigrés said they had struggled to find careers and salaries appropriate to their level of education at home and that they had flourished abroad in a more culturally diverse and dynamic atmosphere.
It quoted Don Cruickshank, the former chairman of the London Stock Exchange, who urged young Scots to “get out of Scotland” because it was “parochial, self-centred, and riddled with the old-boy network”.
Creative professionals such as architects, designers, poets, novelists and entertainers, were the least likely to abandon their new life abroad for what they saw as a humdrum existence in Scotland. The report found that their foreign experience had brought “a heightened awareness to many creative Scots that Scottish culture can at times be parochial, cynical and sterile”.
Mark Boyle and Suzanne Motherwell, sociologists at Strathclyde University and co-authors of the report, interviewed about 40 Scots who had moved to Ireland, one of the leading destinations for expats.
According to their survey, Irish businesses “were universally acclaimed as being more relaxed, friendly, less intimidating, more professional, more trusting of their employees, more flexible, and in general more supporting of the flourishing of the creativity of the employee”.
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Boyle said he believed the culture of cynicism, parochialism and inhibition in Scotland might explain the lack of entrepreneurship and low number of new businesses. “A lot of them said that in Scotland they felt they had to spend ages to get promotion, that your route was very much mapped out and time served, it was the old boys’ network,” said Boyle.
“In general they found they weren’t given the latitude to be creative flexible workers in the same way they felt they were in Dublin. One person said that in Scotland it’s very rigid and formal whereas in Dublin you’re out on the town with the chief executive most nights of the week and you go back to work the next day.”
One Scot who took part in the focus group research said: “Scottish people tend to go around making problems that don’t exist. In Scotland, I found the bureaucratic hoops that you have to go through stifling.”
Boyle said if McConnell’s initiative was to work he had to encourage businesses to dismantle their “bureaucratic, stifling and conservative working practices” and emphasise Scotland’s selling points, such as low cost of living and free healthcare.