ABSTRACT
The nature of fiddling varies with the nature of occupations. In highly constrained jobs, fiddles are by definition disruptive: they break the rules and are the symptoms of a management-designed system going wrong. For the employed hawk to operate across the boundaries of the official and hidden economies he needs first to loosen the control of his employing organisation. He can do this by running in parallel ‘a business within a business’, a practice often found among employed professionals and technicians. For donkeys and wolves there is no such freedom; an individual’s time belongs to the firm or the group. If a donkey does private work in management time it is strong-grid mode of occupational pilferage: a symptom for management of things going wrong. Another of the freedoms that autonomy and particularly professional autonomy confers is the freedom to choose collaborators.
