Beyond the Sober State: The Work of Drunkenness in British Bureaucracy

ABSTRACT This article reports the drinking stories of British civil service clerical workers based at a large civil service office complex located in Newcastle upon Tyne between 1968 and 1993. It uses these stories to develop an account of state formation that takes seriously the place of joy, solidarity, contention, and exhaustion within public sector workplaces. The article focuses on the role of drinking and drunkenness in the organizational integration and social reproduction of the postwar clerical workforce at three historical moments: (1) what many clerical workers identified as a “golden age” of workplace camaraderie lasting from the late 1960s to the late 1980s; (2) a 9‐month long strike in 1984/5; and (3) a dramatic period of workplace reforms from 1988 to 1993 when the civil service was broken up into a complex mosaic of departments and agencies in a prelude to the era of outright privatization. Attending to changing relations between space, affect, organization, and intoxication over several decades reveals the important yet shifting place of regional cultures of embodiment within the administrative infrastructures of the (late) liberal state.