To most people "Keeping up appearances" is a situation comedy about someone trying to be a socialite (candlelit dinner parties) when they are neither competent at it, nor able to aspire to it without causing mayhem for everyone around them.
However it also highlights something non-autistic people do a lot, especially in the work place. The have to try to act out the role they are playing, partly to detach themselves from the people they provide a service for, and partly to impress on people that they have the knowledge and authority that goes with the job.
My reason for raising it is I think it is a fundamental barrier to people on the autistic spectrum succeeding in the workplace. If I am reading things right autism makes it difficult to give the appearance that employers expect as part of the job. Managers need to act like they are in charge, and know what they are doing, and have everything under control. A manager who cannot put this over risks losing control/respect.
My main work background is that of a lecturer/teacher/tutor. OK there's a myth that any lecturer claiming to be on the spectrum has "designer aspergers" as if there was ever any remotest advantage in doing so!
In such a job you are expected to live up to certain intellectual expectations and give the impression that you know all the answers and you can hold a detached stance on things (which is ridiculous because it immediately puts you out of reach of the people you are trying to teach - professional detachment isn't good teaching, in my view).
The media charicature of this is perhaps Endeavour/Morse/Lewis dealing with Oxford academics, who all talk in a very ponderous, timed and effete way. Even when engaging student enthusiasm in a seminar they are still behaving like a pompous twit. I was in more mundane university situations, but you are still expected to be intellectually convincing and distant. I've encountered lecturers who pretend to be manicuring their nails while talking to you, as if to convey superiority, and that your questions are tiresome to someone preoccupied with knowledge.
Trouble is I could never do this - owing to my social skills and my manner of interjecting into conversations. I cannot do airs and graces - I've just got one basic talking mode. Great when talking to students because it removed the barriers, but really got up the noses of senior academics who felt I wasn't maintaining my distance, and wasn't being intellectual enough. Also I'm normally clumsy, shifty eye contact, lose track of conversations, often confused and needing to ask for clarification - basically completely failing to give any impression of being intellectual - in short a professional embarrassment.
Also contributing to discussion tends to be "off the wall". When I try to speak there's a rotation sensation in my head, and my eyes feel funny, and I sort of detach from the context. Sometimes, because I can synthesise and express ideas clearly and effectively, this is very successful. But it isn't reliable. Sometimes, partly due to steress, it all misfires, and nonsense comes out, or I have to repeat a sentence several times, and it basically looks bad. Lifelong advice has been better to keep quiet, but in a profession expecting knowledgeable insight I shouldn't be holding back.
I have to say I don't know whether this is down to autistic spectrum or some other cause. There isn't much written about it (there isn't much written about autism in the workplace though). But it did affect my career. There were certain situations I needed to avoid, if I wasn't actually kept out the picture, because my mannerisms and utterances didn't give the right impression. I cannot "keep up appearances".
I posted this therefore because I'm wondering if it makes sense to others here. I've not seen keeping up professional appearances discussed much in the literature on autism. Maybe I'm just attributing something completely irrelevant to autism because I think it fits.
But I do wonder if it could be a major barrier to people on the spectrum keeping in work. Not being able to act out the expected role play and mannerisms for a job, could be held against an employee.
Any views or insights please?
