Tax and folk tales

A senior official in what is now HM Revenue and Customs described how new recruits are prepared for negotiating with multinationals that have greater resources and far more specialist advisers. The advice: treat it like a game of chess. Learn the rules, play strategically, do not take the other side's moves personally.

The research applied Propp's structural analysis — developed to explain the morphology of folk tales — to interview material from tax governance.

It is the clearest demonstration in the book of the difference between reading for content and reading for structure. Coded thematically, the advice yields a finding about professional socialisation, which is true and unilluminating.

Read structurally, it produces something else: the advice works precisely because it is false. Chess has fixed rules, consenting players and no consequences off the board. Tax is how a society funds its collective life, and everyone involved knows it. The story is a protective fiction, positioned at the start of a career, doing the work of making bearable something morally weighty.

The wider methodological point is about the gap between the public tale an institution tells and the private accounts its members give researchers. That gap is exactly what narrative method is designed to find, and what a survey cannot reach.

Method

1. What does your organisation tell newcomers that is useful because it is not quite true?
2. Where is the gap between your public tale and the private accounts people give?
3. What moral weight is a metaphor carrying on someone's behalf?
4. Which of your findings would survive being read for structure rather than theme?

Chapter Five: Method — the chapter carries the evidence and the close reading this page only points at.

Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required · no case facts introduced from outside the manuscript