Salvage ethnography in the financial sector: The path to economic crisis in Scotland 9781526108340

Citation preview

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

New Ethnographies This book explores the merger between the Bank of Scotland and Halifax, revisiting ethnographic data collected in 2001–2 from the perspective of the present – that is, after the global financial crisis around 2008 and the associated devastating effects on several banks. It contributes to our understanding of the stereotypes and mutual perceptions that shape Scottish and English national identities, while using the interpenetrating national and organisational contexts to critically examine the concept of culture. Ethnographic data was collected during a year’s fieldwork in the Bank of Scotland and HBOS. The book focuses on the year in which the Bank of Scotland merged with Halifax to form HBOS, scrutinising an encounter between two very different organisational cultures embedded in Scottish and English national identities that are often symbolically opposed. Through this ethnographic setting, it explores how bank staff coped with and made sense of rapid organisational change, and how those changes prefigured the crisis that was to come. That change was part of wider social and economic changes often associated with neoliberalism heightened competition and embattled social solidarity. The study salvages a record of a disappearing banking culture that is symptomatic of wider social change. It also engages in an innovative way with the perennial problem of relating smallscale ethnographic data to large-scale historical change. Written clearly and concisely with narrative momentum, the book will appeal to students and scholars interested in the banking and economic crisis, national identity in Scotland and the UK, the nature of culture and the challenges of ethnographic research.

Cover image: HBOS corporate HQ, Edinburgh. Flickr: Secret Pilgrim CC BY-SA 2.0 Cover design: riverdesign.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-7190-8799-8

HEARN

Jonathan Hearn is Professor of Political and Historical Sociology at the University of Edinburgh

New Ethnographies

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector The path to economic crisis in Scotland

9 780719 087998 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

JONATHAN HEARN

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

Salvage Ethnography.indb 1

24/05/2017 15:07:33

New

Ethnographies Series editor Alexander Thomas T. Smith

Already published The British in rural France: Lifestyle migration and the ongoing quest for a better way of life  Michaela Benson Ageing selves and everyday life in the north of England: Years in the making  Cathrine Degnen Chagos Islanders in Mauritius and the UK: Forced displacement and onward migration  Laura Jeffery Factories for learning: Producing race and class inequality in the neoliberal academy  Christy Kulz South Korean civil movement organisations: Hope, crisis, and pragmatism in democratic transition  Amy Levine Environment, labour and capitalism at sea: 'Working the ground' in Scotland  Penny McCall Howard Integration in Ireland: The everyday lives of African migrants  Fiona Murphy and Mark Maguire An ethnography of English football fans: Cans, cops and carnivals  Geoff Pearson Iraqi women in Denmark: Ritual performance and belonging in everyday life  Marianne Holm Pedersen Loud and proud: Passion and politics in the English Defence League  Hilary Pilkington Literature and agency in English fiction reading: A study of the Henry Williamson Society  Adam Reed International seafarers and transnationalism in the twenty-first century  Helen Sampson Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics: Palestine-Israel in British universities  Ruth Sheldon Devolution and the Scottish Conservatives: Banal activism, electioneering and the politics of irrelevance  Alexander Smith Exoticisation undressed: Ethnographic nostalgia and authenticity in Emberá clothes  Dimitrios Theodossopoulos Immersion: Marathon swimming, embodiment and identity  Karen Throsby Enduring violence: Everyday life and conflict in eastern Sri Lanka  Rebecca Walker Performing Englishness: Identity and politics in a contemporary folk resurgence  Trish Winter and Simon Keegan-Phipps

Salvage Ethnography.indb 2

24/05/2017 15:07:33

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector The path to economic crisis in Scotland

Jonathan Hearn

Manchester University Press

Salvage Ethnography.indb 3

24/05/2017 15:07:33

Copyright © Jonathan Hearn 2017 The right of Jonathan Hearn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 8799 8   hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion and Futura by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby, UK

Salvage Ethnography.indb 4

24/05/2017 15:07:33

Contents

List of figures and tables page vi Acknowledgementsvii Series editor’s foreword viii 1 Introduction: ethnography, history and the vagaries of research 2 History: from the Bank of Scotland’s origins to HBOS and crisis 3 Theory: explaining financial crisis and conceptualising capitalism 4 Culture: nations, banks and the organisation of power and social life 5 Change: discourses of agency and progress in organisational change 6 Identity: struggles with personhood, nationhood and professional virtue 7 Comparison: doing ethnography and thinking comparatively 8 Conclusion Epilogue

1 14 34 49 71 87 108 123 132

References139 Index146

Salvage Ethnography.indb 5

24/05/2017 15:07:33

Figures and tables

Figure 1.1. The basic organisational structure of HBOS, 2001–2 Figure 1.2. Timetable of fieldwork methods Table 4.1. Characterisations of delegates on the 'Assertiveness’ course 

Salvage Ethnography.indb 6

6 9 59

24/05/2017 15:07:33

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time coming: not just from the original fieldwork in 2001–2 on which it is based to the idea of the book, but also from that conception to the delivery of the manuscript to Manchester University Press. The first gap happened because I had largely given up on producing a book out of this body of research, the moment having passed and my research having moved on. But then the economic crisis of 2008 happened, and I began to consider returning to the data in that light, and eventually arranged a contract with MUP for a contribution to the New Ethnographies series. However, even then various other research projects and professional obligations already in train made it difficult to find time to return to the data, do new supplementary research, and write. So my first expression of gratitude goes to my editors at MUP, Tony Mason and Tom Dark, and Alex Smith, series editor, for their patience and support. In addition, Ralph Footring’s assiduous editing has improved the text. I would also like to thank the entire team who worked on the Nations and Regions Research Programme (1999–2005), and the Leverhulme Trust for funding that programme and this study as part of it. In particular, I would like to thank David McCrone, the programme coordinator, and Tony Cohen, who led the ethnographic portion of it. In 2013–14 I enjoyed a Mid-Career Fellowship from the Independent Social Research Foundation to begin a new line of research into the history and institutionalisation of competition in liberal forms of society. Although doing that work was one of the things that delayed the delivery of this book, the ideas generated there shaped the book, and I think thanks to the ISRF are also due here. Jeremy Peat and Ray Perman kindly agreed to discuss the state of banking in Scotland post-crisis with me as I was beginning to plan the book, and I am grateful to them. Of course, I must also thank the many staff members of the Bank of Scotland, the Halifax and HBOS who gave their time and allowed me into their lives for a bit all those years ago. None of these has any responsibility for the contents of this book, which falls to me alone. Although I have wandered away from my anthropological roots, and discuss my ambivalence about the ethnographic method in these pages, nonetheless I would like to thank and dedicate this book to two anthropologists and teachers whose influence was intellectually formative for me, Mario Bick and Jane Schneider.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 7

24/05/2017 15:07:33

Series editor’s foreword

When the New Ethnographies series was launched in 2011, its aim was to publish the best new ethnographic monographs that promoted interdisciplinary debate and methodological innovation in the qualitative social sciences. Manchester University Press was the logical home for such a series, given the historical role it played in securing the ethnographic legacy of the famous ‘Manchester School’ of anthropological and interdisciplinary ethnographic research, pioneered by Max Gluckman in the years following the Second World War. New Ethnographies has now established an enviable critical and commercial reputation. We have published titles on a wide variety of ethnographic subjects, including English football fans, Scottish Conservatives, Chagos islanders, international seafarers, African migrants in Ireland, post-civil war Sri Lanka, Iraqi women in Denmark and the British in rural France, among others. Our list of forthcoming titles, which continues to grow, reflects some of the best scholarship based on fresh ethnographic research carried out all around the world. Our authors are both established and emerging scholars, including some of the most exciting and innovative up-and-coming ethnographers of the next generation. New Ethnographies continues to provide a platform for social scientists and others engaging with ethnographic methods in new and imaginative ways. We also publish the work of those grappling with the ‘new’ ethnographic objects to which globalisation, geopolitical instability, transnational migration and the growth of neoliberal markets have given rise in the twenty-first century. We will continue to promote interdisciplinary debate about ethnographic methods as the series grows. Most importantly, we will continue to champion ethnography as a valuable tool for apprehending a world in flux. Alexander Thomas T. Smith Department of Sociology, University of Warwick

Salvage Ethnography.indb 8

24/05/2017 15:07:33

1

Introduction: ethnography, history and the vagaries of research

This book takes a body of ethnographic data collected in 2001–2, during a year’s fieldwork at the Bank of Scotland and HBOS, and revisits it from the perspective of the present, that is, the time of writing this book (c.2014–16). That present is one in which the global banking and financial crisis that emerged around 2008 has had devastating effects on several banks, including this one. My original research had been planned to take place in the Bank of Scotland (BoS) but earlier in 2001, before the research began, BoS had merged with the Halifax to form HBOS. In September 2008, massively overexposed by the crisis, HBOS was acquired by Lloyds TSB, in a deal orchestrated by the British Labour government to prevent a second bank failure after the collapse of Northern Rock a few months earlier. The time between my fieldwork (and the merger) and the acquisition of HBOS was a mere seven years – of rapid growth followed by spectacular failure. My overarching aim is to explore the tension between the ‘ethnographic present’ of the original research and the unavoidable alteration of perspective on that data that the economic crisis has created. I am interested in how many aspects of the research findings anticipated and prefigured what was to come, and yet can be understood in these terms only from the later vantage point. Larger structural and historical explanations of what went wrong in the financial sector will be drawn on to frame the study, but these are ultimately beyond the immediate scope of this ethnography. Instead, I have tried to make a virtue of the necessarily micro-level body of data generated by ethnography focused on a relatively narrow slice of staff, in a single organisation, over one year, by treating it as something that gains meaning, and depth, precisely by distance, the passage of time and changed ­historical perspective. In this way I attempt to contribute to our understanding of how to do the ethnography of organisations and institutions in a way that achieves depth of analysis. I have tried to produce a book that brings together ethnographic detail and longitudinal perspective, and that provides through its examples a different way to think about how nationalism and national identities operate in everyday life. And I have sought to use this particular case to gain insight into how the economic crisis triggered in 2008 came about, and was implicated in a more general process of social transformation.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 1

24/05/2017 15:07:33

2

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

In particular, I will be examining how that first year after the merger of BoS and Halifax framed and shaped comparative talk about organisational cultures and national identities, which took on a specific salience for the people I studied during this period. In an environment of accelerating organisational growth and heightened competitiveness, staff negotiated and wrestled with notions of the ideal bank employee. These notions were often dissonant with established conceptions of BoS culture, and Scottish ‘character’, in ways that were especially invidious for BoS staff. Thus a larger structural and organisational context triggered anxieties and uncertainties about personal issues, questions of identity, selfhood, value and even virtue (cf. Mills 1959). Time changes everything Let me flesh this out by recounting something that happened shortly before I began writing this book. After work on a Friday in October 2012, I went out to join several old friends for some drinks and conversation, friends I have known since I first met several of them at BoS, when I was doing the ethnographic fieldwork behind this study. They call themselves ‘The Walkers’. The original nucleus of this group had formed well before I met them, as a group of friends from work who would meet every so often for a drink, in the early days going for a short ‘walk’ to the pub after lunch on some Fridays. By the time I knew them this had become an after-hours activity, meeting up at a different pub about once every couple of months. As I write, there are about seven regular members, not counting myself. I am an erratic participant on these nights, but have tried to catch up from time to time. Only two of the group still work for the Bank, the rest all having retired or left for other reasons in the years since I did my research. We met at Leslie’s Bar on Ratcliffe Terrace in Edinburgh. Those present were Thomas, Paul, Donald, Ben, Angus and Duncan.1 I brought out a copy of Ray Perman’s recent book Hubris: How HBOS Wrecked the Best Bank in Britain (2012). It turned out Angus had already read it, and thought it offered a reasonable account of what had happened to the Bank they had all known. We passed it around. Paul was adamant that it was misnamed, that the subtitle should be How Halifax Wrecked the Best Bank in Britain (not HBOS). Or, alternatively, how certain former leaders of the Bank had ruined it. There was clearly a lot of cynicism in the group, which Paul articulated, although I sensed that most of them had made some sort of peace with events. We spoke about the fall in HBOS shares as the crisis worsened, and how staff, who regularly took annual bonuses in shares, held on to them, convinced they would recover. They just could not believe how far they would fall. Ben said his regular cashing-in of shares, to fund holidays and such, meant that he had not lost as much as some. But others had built up retirement nest eggs that had disappeared. This very much echoed what Perman said in his book and what I had heard these fellows say before. I was struck by two themes that emerged spontaneously in the conversation, without any prompting from me, because they harked back to things I had heard during my original research, and that appear in this book. One was a discussion of

Salvage Ethnography.indb 2

24/05/2017 15:07:33

Introduction

3

how Lloyds plc was in a ‘centralisation’ phase, trying to draw control into the centre of the organisation during a period when profits were difficult and costs needed to be controlled. It was wryly observed that this was part of an endless organic cycle of large organisations as they grow, responding to internal power dynamics and to their economic environments. We commented on how, when I was doing the research in 2001–2, BoS and then HBOS had been in a decentralisation phase, in particular distributing control of much of the staff training out to the divisions, diminishing the central training part of the Bank, where many of these guys had met, and where I was based for much of my research. I remembered how then the same detached assessment of this process was expressed in interviews, that the pendulum inexorably swings between centralisation and decentralisation, and that the arguments made for each need to be taken with a pinch of salt. The other theme that struck me was comparative talk about how up to date or backward various organisational systems are, and how this compares with competitors. This is a group of people with considerable experience across various kinds of organisation, in banking and elsewhere. One was talking about the systems in Lloyds being behind those in HBOS, another about the backward systems in a unit in the University of Edinburgh that he had done some systems analysis work for. Among them there was a strong underlying tendency to view organisations as things more or less adapted to the present environment, whether ahead, keeping pace or falling behind. This is a very basic part of how they view the world of business organisations, as a ‘natural’ terrain of competition between the better and the worse adapted. I chatted with Thomas about the present book. He seemed to like the proposed title Salvage Ethnography (explained further below), grasping the idea that it was about the ethnography of an organisational culture that had slipped away into history. The evening as a whole confirmed for me a strong sense of a group that shared something in the past, that was now gone, not just faded with time, but collapsed, wiped off the map. Survivors, in a lifeboat, sharing a drink. Research: original aims, access, design, methods and reframing The original research had purposes that were not exactly the same as the ones I am putting it to now. The study was one of several conducted by a large team of social scientists under the auspices of the Nations and Regions Research Programme (1999–2005) funded by the Leverhulme Trust. That programme was inspired by questions about the effects of recent political devolution in the UK, including the establishment of a parliament in Scotland and an assembly in Wales, on notions of national identity. It involved a variety of studies and methods, ranging from large-scale opinion surveys to localised ethnographies, conducted by sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists and anthropologists (see Bechhofer and McCrone 2009). The objective of my study was to gain a better understanding of the subtle ways in which national identity comes into play in daily life, and in particular how large organisations frame and shape the ways that national identity is construed. As an ethnography, it aimed to systematically observe and interact

Salvage Ethnography.indb 3

24/05/2017 15:07:34

4

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

with people bound together by a specific social context (the Bank) on a daily basis over an extended period of time. This enabled in-depth observation, reflection and analysis of behaviour in that context, to help build up a holistic picture of people’s understanding of themselves and their circumstances. Thus while it was ‘in’ the banking sector, the research was ‘on’ national identity. The purpose was not to make generalisations about large populations (whether British, Scottish or even the staff of the Bank), but rather to offer more nuanced interpretations of how people actually ‘do’ national identity in daily life. Thus this small-scale qualitative study was seen as complementing and offering a methodological counterpoint to the various other studies run under the same programme, to support a com­ posite understanding of national identity. The larger issues of national identity and social and political change have remained alive in the intervening years, with the increasing electoral success of the Scottish National Party (SNP), a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, and a UK referendum on leaving the European Union in 2016. These events fall somewhat outside the purview of this study, but I will address this wider context in the Epilogue. As I have noted, between the initial research design and negotiation of access, BoS entered into a merger with Halifax, to form HBOS. Negotiation of access had been facilitated by social ties between a senior member of the research team and the then Governor of BoS. In fact, after this had been done, the merger with Halifax was entered into, and just before the fieldwork was to start I was notified that the Bank intended to cancel its agreement to allow the research, given the new context. This led to a renegotiation with Bank, in which I and the director of the research programme, David McCrone, made the case for the continuing value of the research despite the merger, and the considerable disruption to the research programme a cancellation would cause. In the end we were successful. I raise this episode partly to note the vagaries of research, but also to highlight that, at this point in time, BoS was still sufficiently embedded within the organisational matrix of Scottish civil society that it mattered to maintain cordial relations between key organisations such as the Bank and the University of Edinburgh, relations that were still underpinned by Scottish social networks. It is also worth noting that BoS had long been the University’s bank, but that this relationship was severed post-2008. So while still based primarily in BoS, the research plan was reoriented to take account of the new HBOS context. The original expectation was that the eth­ nography would allow us to get at everyday, ‘banal’ (Billig 1995) expressions of national identity that are often less noticeable because they are not triggered by explicit, nationally framed confrontations. The merger obviously changed this. It perforce reoriented the research, as it involved a union of a Scottish and an English bank, thus highlighting issues of national identity within that context. While less charged than national confrontations between political parties or football teams, there was nonetheless now a clear dimension of national encounter within the organisation, which raised new issues. ‘Participant observation’ – taking on roles that allow ethnographers to participate in the daily life of those they are studying – is much mythologised and

Salvage Ethnography.indb 4

24/05/2017 15:07:34

Introduction

5

romanticised. There were obvious limitations to doing this, in that I was not a trained banker, nor an employee of the bank. Many parts of the bank involved technical skills and matters of information sensitivity that would have made participant observation impracticable and inappropriate. So I sought to approximate the role of a fellow employee as best I could, and found that before long I was frequently identified as someone on ‘secondment’ to the Bank from the University. Thus my role as ethnographer was assimilated to a role category familiar to bank staff, as the long-term ‘loaning’ of staff from one organisation to another for specific projects is fairly common. I was primarily based in what was called Group Learning and Development (GL&D), which managed and delivered various aspects of general and executive staff training, as well as educational resources for the bank as a whole. While I was there, GL&D also ran projects to standardise staff competency frameworks, manage bank relations with government training schemes, and investigate the potential for e-learning within the Bank. From there I worked in and around various teams involved in human resources (HR) within BoS and HBOS more widely. This made sense because the HR areas, covering such things as public relations, employee relations, community relations and staff training, were centrally concerned with the generation and managing of a corporate culture and identity. Given the core research questions, this was a logical place from which to work. I should note that about two years prior to the merger, there had been a decision by the board of directors to shift the organisational structure of the Bank from one based on geographical regions to one divided according to major core functions. Following this there was a more specific decision to ‘devolve’ much of the staff training functions to the new divisions: Corporate Banking, Business Banking, Retail/Personal Banking, Insurance and Investment, Treasury and Group (core functions) (see Figure 1.1). Furthermore, GL&D had been physically relocated to more modest premises and was undergoing downsizing, as it was redesigned to concentrate exclusively on the training of executives and those identified as having executive potential. The merger tended to accelerate this restructuring process and was clearly demoralising for some of its staff. I went to a central office in GL&D almost daily, where I was assigned a desk and a computer. I normally wore a suit and tie. Participant observation extended to more informal socialising over lunch, at office parties and after hours. Much of what I did in GL&D drew on my academic and research skills, applying those to Bank needs. Sometimes (especially at first) participant observation involved menial tasks, and in some contexts I was more an observer than a participant. My activities developed as people became more familiar with me and new opportunities opened up within the Bank. To summarise: • I began in October 2001 by working in the BoS ‘Learning Centre’, a library of educational/training materials, primarily books and videos. I worked on a project of inventorying the video holdings and repackaging them, as well as various other odd jobs, chatting with staff as they came and went. This provided an initial foothold from which to develop participant observation.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 5

24/05/2017 15:07:34

Salvage Ethnography.indb 6

Banking products and services to small and mediumsize enterprises

Business Banking

Board of Directors

Life, personal, medical and household insurance, pension and investment products

Insurance and Investment

Divisions

Personal banking, branches, card services, phone and internet banking, mortgages

Retail/Personal Banking

Figure 1.1. The basic organisational structure of HBOS, 2001–2

Banking products and services to large businesses (annual turnover of more than £10 million)

Corporate Banking

Chief Executive

Group liquidity, wholesale funding, interest rate management, services and specialist products to business and corporate clients

Treasury

(2) Group Programmes (central services) IT systems, HR, estate management, records keeping, procurement

(1) Group Finance and Risk Financial reporting, regulatory compliance, auditing risk

Group

6 Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

24/05/2017 15:07:34

Introduction

7

• During the early months I also spent time following the public activities of Social Investment Scotland, a consortium of Scottish banks designed for lending to the ‘social/voluntary’ sector, which was then under the directorship of someone seconded from BoS. This ended up fairly peripheral to the research. • A major research activity from early December 2001 through February 2002 was attending ‘menu’ training courses. These were ‘off the shelf ’ staff training courses that any staff could elect to go on, although they were often advised to do so by their managers. Rather than area-specific skills, they focused on developing general skills, with titles such as: ‘Assertiveness’, ‘Leading the Team’, ‘Creativity and Innovation’, ‘Presentation Skills’ and ‘Dealing with Difference’. Here I met staff from across the Bank, regionally, divisionally and in terms of employment grades, participating as if I were another staff member, although my research role was always disclosed to the course leader and participants. This ended up being a particularly rich source of ethnographic data. • From early 2002, a major focus of participant observation became my work with a new team, the Diversity Team, which was set up to integrate diversity and equality policies across HBOS, and to formulate and advocate new policies in this area. The team members came from both BoS and Halifax. I worked on a variety of projects with this team, which involved both working with the team and making contacts and seeking information from other areas within the Bank (as well as outside). The main ones were: (1) designing and analysing the results of a questionnaire designed to assess awareness of diversity issues among staff in HBOS Card Services (based in Cardiff and Dunfermline); (2) researching data and corporate policies on elder care and helping inform an integrated policy on carers for HBOS staff; (3) collecting information on gender pay audits and data sets on gender and pay among staff in various parts of HBOS. These projects allowed me some insights into the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the Bank’s relations with its staff, and an opportunity to provide some reciprocation in exchange for the research access I had been granted. It also facilitated more contact with Halifax-based staff of HBOS, to offset the ‘BoS perspective’ of my fieldwork. Participant observation was supplemented by other methods: • An open-ended questionnaire was administered via an email list originally based on BoS staff identified for managerial training by GL&D. But by this stage in the merger, the list had begun to incorporate staff from a Halifax background. This list was the best available basis for the distribution of this questionnaire and was a means to get ‘buy-in’ from the respondents. Of the 203 respondents: 18 were from Halifax and 185 from BoS; 149 were men and 54 were women. The respondents’ service with the banks ranged from 6 months to about 35 years, with most clustered in the 10- to 25-year range. Responses were fairly widely though not proportionately spread across the major divisions of the Bank, and a few respondents were in training on the graduate scheme and not yet placed in a specific business unit. There is no presumption that the

Salvage Ethnography.indb 7

24/05/2017 15:07:34

8

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

questionnaire responses were statistically representative. Like the rest of the ethnography, the questionnaire study contains the bias of the BoS point of view, as well as being directed at managerial-track staff. A representative sample would have had many more staff at lower grades, working in retail banking and female. It is used as a further source of focused qualitative data, not as a statistical representation of the HBOS staff at the time. • Thirty-nine semi-structured interviews were undertaken, 38 of which were tape-recorded. Most interviewees were chosen on the basis of their responses to the questionnaire described above. I tried to do interviews with respondents who seemed particularly interesting and engaged, and tried to get a relatively balanced sample from across the major divisions of the Bank, which included staff based in London and other UK cities. Of these 23 were with men and 16 with women. I also did a further five interviews (not tape-recorded but written up as notes) with key informants from the HR section of the Bank where the participant observation was based, and one with an Edinburgh-based banking expert outside of HBOS (four men and one woman). • Various documents and in-house publications were collected and selected materials at the Bank’s archives were surveyed. Participant observation went on throughout the research period (October 2001 to September 2002), although the location/focus shifted over time, as planned. The email survey was designed, piloted and conducted during the middle of the research period (February–May). The interviews were conducted in the summer months (June–August). Documents were collected throughout the research period. There was a final period of collecting documents and taking notes at the BoS archives in September. There is a logic to the sequence of methods and how they were phased in. Participant observation was subjected to ongoing analysis through writing and reflecting on field notes. An initial analysis of themes in the field notes informed the design of the email questionnaire, which was developed in dialogue with other members of the Leverhulme research team, and piloted with a small group of BoS staff. The interview questions were also developed partly out of issues raised in the responses to the questionnaire. The combining and ‘overlapping’ of participant observation, survey and interviews aimed to achieve a certain depth in the discursive/qualitative data (see Figure 1.2). I worked with this data, and wrote and published on it for several years after the fieldwork (see Hearn 2006, 2007, 2009), but inevitably my interests moved on to other things. However, after the events of 2008 I found myself periodically returning again to reflect on the research, and eventually devised the plan for this book. This has involved new reading around the topic, some new informational interviews with some well informed observers of the Scottish economic scene to help bring my knowledge up to date, as well as discussions with some of my old contacts at the Bank, as described above. I want the research process to be evident in the presentation of the ethnographic data in Chapters 4–7. In some passages I have stuck very close to my original

Salvage Ethnography.indb 8

24/05/2017 15:07:34

Salvage Ethnography.indb 9

Diversity Team

Figure 1.2. Timetable of fieldwork methods

Document collection

Learning Centre

GL&D

Training courses

Jan.

Participant observation

2002

Dec.

Oct.

Nov.

2001 March

Email questionnaire

Feb.

April

May

July

Aug.

Semi-structured interviews

June

BoS archives

Sept.

Introduction 9

24/05/2017 15:07:34

10

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

field notes, and have indicated this. I indicate where I am using a transcript of a recorded interview and where I am paraphrasing the words of informants from field notes. I have drawn heavily on the responses to the email questionnaire to show the range and complexity of language around certain key themes I explore. These often provide the sharpest verbatim fragments of the general discourse going on in the Bank at the time. When I refer to ‘responses’ or ‘respondents’ I am using this particular body of data. However, I have tried to mix these with ethnographic ‘vignettes’ to achieve a rounder picture of the ethnographic setting. Without following a strict temporal line, these chapters trace the journey from the initial to the final days of my fieldwork. Finally, I have used pseudonyms for the informants I had direct contact with in this study. I have not changed the names of Bank leaders who were also public figures, their names appearing in the news media in association with the Bank. The strengths and weaknesses of ethnography In recent years my research has tended to become more theoretical and historical. This partly reflects my own frustration with some limitations of ethnography as a research method, limitations that the present book grapples with, although I doubt they can be ‘solved’. I did my PhD in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That department was strongly defined by an emphasis on global and historical perspectives, an interest in European ethnography, and the commanding influence of Eric R. Wolf. His magisterial Europe and the People Without History (1982) functioned as a kind of departmental bible during the time I was there. My doctoral research focused on social networks around the nationalist movement in Scotland at the time, exploring the moral discourses and social constructions of history which characterised that movement. True to the style of the department, my ethnographic work was heavily framed within longer-term historical research into the development of modern Scotland and the growth of the welfare state in the twentieth century. One of my core conclusions was that Scottish pressure for devolution and independence was deeply bound up with a moral economic defence of the welfare state in Britain, understood as under attack by Conservative politics socially based in England. When I began the BoS/HBOS project, I remember thinking that it would be satisfying to do something more like traditional, relatively bounded ethnography. Even though the fieldwork was done in a modern formal organisation, it was in some ways more like studying in the proverbial ‘village’ than my previous fieldwork, which had traced out rather loose social networks within a diverse social movement that faded into a much wider national context of social life. But as it turned out, these satisfactions were counterpoised by frustrations with that very boundedness. A few years back I was attending a presentation in anthropology, and a colleague quipped that the presenter’s style of research was ‘claustrophilic’, that is, attracted to the small space, the minute canvass, on which an ethnographic

Salvage Ethnography.indb 10

24/05/2017 15:07:34

Introduction

11

account can be based. Anthropological ethnography, because of its often intensive and detailed focus on a small group over a relatively bounded period of time, lends itself to this perspective. And there is merit in a close understanding of microsocial processes. But usually a well developed understanding of any social process involves locating it in a wider context, situating the more micro within the more macro. Conventionally, eth­nographers have often done this by including an early, contextualising historical chapter based on secondary sources and perhaps some local archives. Eth­nographers who build up a record of sustained research with a particular community over many years of course also acquire a more extended temporal perspective on those they study, and are able to provide particularly rich accounts on that basis. And ethno­historical approaches can also provide a corrective, blending the concern with specific sociocultural groups and the advantages of historical perspective. However, the initial research on which this book was based, while it included some historical contextualisation, was oriented to the ethnographic present. It focused on the ways in which the people I was observing were enacting their senses of national identity, bringing these into play in a daily life that, while clearly shaped and to some degree triggered by the encompassing event of the bank merger, was also somehow abstracted from the wider historical context. There was something ‘claustrophilic’ about the project, with which I was never comfortable. But the passage of time changes things. First, some of what ethnographers study is ephemeral, and that ended up being the case for the present research. Although the Bank of Scotland persists as a kind of regional brand within Lloyds plc (as does the Halifax), the older BoS ethos, and the clash of organisational cultures that defined my research period, are ultimately things that have now passed. So there is value in examining interesting processes before they slip away. But perhaps more importantly, their significance is not inherent in those events, but a matter of the vantage point from which we observe and understand, and that keeps changing. ‘Salvage ethnography’ In an article titled ‘Ethnographic salvage and the shaping of anthropology’ (1970) Jacob W. Gruber argued that much early anthropological fieldwork and eth­ nography was born of a desire to capture and preserve cultures that were assumed to be disappearing, or soon to become so transformed as to be unrecognisable. This was particularly true of the study, in the Boasian tradition, of Indians in North America. While this preservationist ethos, and the accompanying conception of cultures as rather stable and unchanging systems, has been fundamentally challenged, and largely gone out of style, I think the idea is pertinent in the case of this study. My fieldwork of just a few years ago has become a record of a ‘vanishing way of life’ among the bankers, written down as the onslaught of a more ‘pro­gressive’ banking culture was already rendering the memories and self-conceptions of many of the people I worked with obsolete. Of course we are not talking about a people under threat of ethnocide, but rather the steady, cyclical churn of capitalist business practice, the ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter 1976: 81–6) by which

Salvage Ethnography.indb 11

24/05/2017 15:07:34

12

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

progress is measured. Nonetheless, there is a pervasive elegiac air to the data I will present, a feeling of loss and defeat. The point however is not simply to preserve a record of a dying organisational culture. Ultimately, it is to explore the relationship between that original account, largely composed in an ethnographic present to which we cannot return, and the present perspective, which of course is itself slipping into the past as I write. The perspective of the book lies in the tension between then and now, and the significance of the data changes with our historical perspective. Where originally I was more concerned with the vagaries of national identity and people’s sense of personhood under the pressures of corporate merger, I now see a specific acting out of a larger drama of cultural change in the UK banking sector, connected to deep dysfunction in that industry. Chapter overview The next two chapters, 2 and 3, provide a long-term historical perspective on BoS/ HBOS, from inception to the 2008 financial crisis, and then a consideration of the nature of historical explanation, under the rubric of ‘theory’. The historical chapter concentrates on the more recent history but does go back to the late seventeenth century, when the Bank of Scotland was founded. This may appear surplus to requirements, but part of my aim is to situate the ethnographic present in the larger currents of history. There is disproportion between 300 years of history and a year of ethnography, but ultimately that year can best be understood by situating it in ever-widening circles of temporal perspective. Chapter 3 takes ‘theory’ to mean historical, causal explanation. It examines the main attempts to explain the proximate causes of the 2008 crisis, as well as more encompassing political economic arguments about the trajectory and dynamics of capitalism, which must frame these more immediate explanations. I conclude with some thoughts on the problem of relating micro- to macro-analyses, in other words, of placing small-scale ethnographic research like that presented here in a wider historical framework. I argue that this is a necessary part of a well rounded understanding of the fine details of social life. Chapters 4–7 are the ‘ethnographic’ chapters drawing on the original research data. I ask readers to consciously descend from the macroscopic perspective of history to the microscopic one of the (now historical) ethnographic present, but to keep that first perspective in the back of their minds. Each of these chapters takes its title from a governing concept – culture, change, identity and comparison. I see these not as ‘theories’ but as simultaneously key themes in the data and tools for analysis of the data, that have to be articulated in dialogue with the material under discussion. I am not attempting to resolve any wider theoretical debates, but rather to show the necessity of these concepts for making sense of the data and my particular way of articulating these concepts in relation to that data. For this reason I have structured Chapters 4–6 such that a ‘conceptual interlude’ exploring the title concept in question is embedded in the middle of each. Thus each of these chapters starts with an initial exploration of ethnographic data, steps back to

Salvage Ethnography.indb 12

24/05/2017 15:07:34

Introduction

13

contemplate its governing concept, and then returns to the data. Chapter 4 looks at the concept of ‘culture’ as applied to both national groups (Scots and English) and organisations (BoS and Halifax). Chapter 5 explores the theme of ‘change’, as both the unavoidable circumstance of wider social change, and a moral imperative to constant organisational change in the business world. Chapter 6 examines the concept of ‘identity’ and how it bears on how people deploy social categories, such as Scottish and English, and how they experience their own personhood. Chapter 7, on ‘comparison’, takes a different approach. While the chapter is still concerned with the ethnographic data, my primary aim is to explore the in­herently though often only implicitly comparative nature of ethnographic research. Inevitably, as they try to understand ethnographic environments, ethnographers think comparatively about their knowledge and experience of other settings. I try to use this as a way of getting a broader view of the materials in the previous three chapters. Chapter 8 reviews and draws together the themes of the book, returning to the overarching question of historical perspective and explanation. As mentioned above, the Epilogue steps back from the immediate study to relate it to recent political and constitutional events in Scotland and the UK as a whole. Conclusion This has been a fairly reflexive introduction, necessarily so, because the perspective it tries to articulate and that informs the rest of the book emerges out of personal reflections on the merits of the ethnographic method, and my own changing temporal perspective on the research. While I use the ethnographic data to gauge theoretical explanations and the utility of analytic concepts, my first goal is to convey a descriptive sense of the ethnographic setting and its historical context. I am not attempting anything terribly novel or abstract at the theoretical and conceptual end. In my view, in a work such as this, these should serve to help put the particularity of the data in a wider, at least implicitly comparative context, but should not become ends in themselves. I use, combine and refine theories and concepts that suit my own preferred interpretations. But I hope I have presented the data with enough detail and fidelity that at least a strong feeling for the original research settings comes across, however much that has been filtered through my own interpretation. Note 1 I have used pseudonyms for my informants. I have used actual names for leading figures known publicly in association with the Bank.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 13

24/05/2017 15:07:34

2

History: from the Bank of Scotland’s origins to HBOS and crisis

Conceptualising history It is very traditional to begin an ethnography with a chapter of historical background to the case in question. This chapter does that, but it also seeks to be explicit about how it does that, because how we conceptualise history, how we select and organise events, facts, details into a narrative, implies a general approach to explanation. Historical narratives encode a certain amount of theory, whether we like it or not (Carr 1961; Koselleck 1985; White 1984). In the next chapter I will consider theoretical explanations, of both the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, and the long-term political and economic trends that led to it. But here I simply want to make explicit some basic concepts that guide my narrative. It is also important to do this here because these ideas inform later chapters as well. For instance, the ideas of social change and competition that help frame this historical chapter also come into play, at a more ‘micro’ level, in later, more ethnographically focused chapters. I view BoS/HBOS through an ecological and evolutionary model. By that I mean I make sense of the changes to the Bank by seeing these as successive adaptations, always approximate and imperfect, to a changing institutional environment. That environment can include any number of factors, but most crucial among these are the complex interactions of state and economy. Banks are brought into existence, and get their livelihoods, by serving the needs of these two constituencies. And as in most evolutionary theory, competition is a core dynamic, significantly affecting pressures towards change. To varying degrees according to prevailing conditions, banks compete with one another, are affected by political and economic competition between other organisations, and internalise competition, making it part of their own operations. Let me elaborate briefly on these three areas of institutional evolution, state–economy relations and competition. The term ‘evolution’ is liable to set off alarm bells (Degler 1991). It easily triggers two misunderstandings: first, that one is trying to reduce the social to the biological; and second, that one conceives of some predetermined path of development that things will follow. Neither of these is the case here. For me, the emphasis is on how change in an entity (in this case an organisation, a bank) is

Salvage Ethnography.indb 14

24/05/2017 15:07:34

History

15

driven by processes of adaptation to an environment. This analytic model does not, of itself, imply any directional change, simply an ongoing context and core dynamic of change. Whether one regards this conception as relying on an analogy with biological evolution, or whether one regards evolution in both the biological and social domains as reflecting some more general logic of change, does not concern me here (see Hodgson and Knudsen 2010: 30–46). Various efforts to ground theories of social change in an evolutionary model have tried to ana­logic­ ally parallel the various specific processes from genetic evolution (e.g. Nolan and Lenski 2004), especially in trying to identify a concept such as a ‘meme’ (a cultural or informational unit that is ‘inherited’) to correspond to the gene (e.g. Blute 2010; Runciman 2009). I am not interested in such tight analogies, and find them unconvincing. I am in fact more influenced by an older anthropological approach that sought to understand basic tendencies and variations in broad types of social organisation in terms of the ecological conditions in which they develop and operate, and the effects of increasing scales of operation (Fried 1967; Service 1975; Steward 1972). Of course, this kind of ecological explanation loses force as societies become larger, more complex and interpenetrating in their political and economic processes. In effect it becomes impossible to analytically disarticulate the ‘society’ from its ‘environment’. Nonetheless, this more complex, more globalised world of interdigitating societies, economies and polities is itself composed of various entities, primarily forms of social organisation, such as states, firms, voluntary associations, social movements and so on, that can be usefully analysed through the judicious application of an ecological/evolutionary model. Pragmatically, I find that my efforts to make sense of social processes invariably bring me back to some such ‘light touch’ conception. I argue that the most immediate institutional environment in which banks (and many other organisations) emerge, adapt and develop is that set up by the dynamic of state and economy. Moreover, I suggest that there is a certain asymmetry in this formulation that needs to be corrected. Put this way, we tend to think of the economy as an environment to which the state must adapt, but it is equally true that politics constitutes an environment to which economic actors, usually in the form of firms and corporations, must adapt. In modelling this relationship, it is more accurate to picture two interacting institutional clusters of organisations, with the state and various para-governmental bodies (‘civil society’) on one side and a host of major and minor economic organisations on the other. The former are oriented to meeting competing demands in an arena of public opinion, while the latter are oriented to meeting competing demands articulated through markets. These two organisational arenas overlap and interpenetrate. Crucially, this complex dyadic relationship is part of the very definition of modern, liberal, capitalist and democratic forms of society (cf. Ingham 2008; Weber 1927). It is the mutually reinforcing and legitimating power in these two interdependent spheres that gives this form of society its core dynamic. The state protects freedom in the economy (albeit often highly uneven) and the economy in turn delivers productivity and wealth to the state, at least in the good times (Hearn 2012: 135–9). Modern banks are diagnostic of this relationship, often being set up by

Salvage Ethnography.indb 15

24/05/2017 15:07:34

16

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

governments in the first instance, or at least requiring government sanction and a degree of control. Central banks are the obvious paradigmatic case, with their special responsibilities, in various articulations with government treasuries, for such things as currency supply and interest rates. Many other banks and financial organisations are situated more clearly in the private sphere, but because all are collectively involved in national and transnational patterns and flows of financial intermediation and investment, they are perennially of concern to governments. If modern capitalist society is characterised by this mutual reinforcement of core economic and political institutions, then central banks, and banking sectors more generally, are linchpins in that relationship. Competition is a very familiar and yet slippery concept. We use it to describe a wide range of relationships in which entities (e.g. organisms, species, persons, groups, organisations and institutions) come into a contest over limited goods (e.g. food, ecological niches, resources, wealth, status and power). We are concerned here strictly with the human variety, as it plays out in highly institutionalised and organised contexts. On the one hand, there is simply the bare condition of competi­tion between persons, groups and organisations over limited goods. But on the other, there is what I call ‘reflexive competition’, that is, the fact that we not only compete, but deliberately harness and organise the process of competition, treating it as a preferred way to decide who gains what, in the marketplace, in contests for political leadership, and in myriad other contexts of daily life. Competi­tion is a core ideological concept in liberal forms of society, ranging over diverse spheres of life, and legitimating distributive outcomes in a way that often appears very natural, obscuring the human hand in when, where and how it operates. It is perhaps noticeable that I have made no reference so far to two very popular concepts: globalisation and neoliberalism. I do not entirely dispense with these, but find them problematic as conceptual tools of analysis. I regard them as rather abstract, descriptive labels for bundles of large-scale processes that are more precisely understood through the concepts I have just been reviewing. Globalisation usually refers to the general increasing scale and scope of human institutions beyond the bounds of the nation-state, along economic, political, cultural and technological dimensions (Mann 2013; Sassen 2007). Specific theories of globalis­ation tend to focus on one of these dimensions, with the globalisation of capitalism and markets often enjoying pride of place. I have no problem with the broad characterisation of recent decades in these terms, although I am inclined to note that various processes of globalisation (e.g. religious, imperial, commercial) have been going on for centuries (Osterhammel and Petersson 2005; Therborn 2000). The novelty of change since World War II can be exaggerated. But I think that to understand processes of globalisation, we need to come down to a conceptualisation of the dynamic relationships between key entities. The concept of neoliberalism corresponds closely to that of globalisation, referring especially to the ideological turn towards privileging the interests of economic over state institutions and actors, and taking economic theories about markets and competition as a general model for the reform of institutions and organisations throughout

Salvage Ethnography.indb 16

24/05/2017 15:07:34

History

17

society (Crouch 2011; Mann 2013). Again, I recognise this general description of what has happened, but think that we need more precise concepts to get at why it has happened. The risk with terms such as these is that we easily slide from their application, in the form of ‘x is an instance of globalisation and/or neoliberalism’, to dubious assertions of causal analysis, such as ‘x is an effect of globalisation and/ or neoliberalism’. Causal assertions on such a grand scale are of limited value. British banking c.1695–1914 and the founding of BoS and of the Halifax Our story begins in the late seventeenth century. Scotland and England had shared a monarchy since 1603 and were soon to combine their independent parliaments in 1707. The first public British banks were established with the model of the Bank of Amsterdam in mind. It was established in 1609 in the context of a thriving Dutch commercial economy. It took in deposits of metal money and provided a system of credit between its members, and it was backed by the City of Amsterdam, giving confidence in its credit. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 largely through the funds of London merchants, to support the English government, particularly in the costs of war with France. By contrast, the Bank of Scotland, founded in 1695, was forbidden to lend to the Scottish Parliament and needed parliamentary approval to lend to the Crown. It was neither insured by the state nor designed to directly fund the state. Although established by an Act of the Scottish Parliament, it was a business venture among Scottish, especially Edinburgh elites, subscribing their own capital. Prior to this, the main source of investment capital would have been private merchant bankers, who could advance their own money and who sometimes formed partnerships to pool risk. BoS was an early example of a limited liability corporation; that is, its subscribers risked only the money they had invested in the bank. From the outset, the bank made loans in the form of transferable notes or ‘bills’, which soon increasingly circulated as money and supported a more extensive system of smaller-scale credit. This early establishment of paper money was innovative and the Bank’s most fundamental contribution to the Scottish economy. To help it get started, BoS was granted a monopoly in public banking in Scotland and an exemption of its dividends from taxation for its first 21 years (Checkland 1975: 23–33). Of the 172 original ‘adventurers’ (i.e. subscribers) of BoS, about a fifth were resident in London, the rest in Scotland. Greater and lesser landed nobility predominated, with about 41 merchants, primarily based in Edinburgh and London, and a small group of lawyers and judges and a few other professions, all based in Scotland. The Bank arose out of its political economic context. In short, its establishment was particularly supported by ruling elites who had backed the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, which replaced James VII of Scotland (James II of England), a Stuart with Jacobite support in the Highlands, with William and Mary, the firmly Protestant monarchs invited from Holland by the English Parliament. This enabled those elites to legislate for greater security of tenure, reversing the previous royal predations of James VII on the lands of nobility who had opposed

Salvage Ethnography.indb 17

24/05/2017 15:07:34

18

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

him. This in turn made it easier to treat estates as collateral to underwrite the new bank, which in turn was needed to stimulate trade so that there would be a greater tax base through which to support an army in Scotland to protect economic and political interests. So, although the legal relationship of BoS to the Scottish state was very different from that of the Bank of England with regard to the English state, their underlying purposes – to stimulate commerce and underwrite the expenses of the state – were similar (Saville 1996: 1–6). Early on, even before its banking monopoly expired, BoS came into fierce competition with the Company of Scotland, more commonly known as the Darien Company, which was set up by an Act of the Scottish Parliament in 1695 with exclusive rights to trade between Scotland and America, Africa and Asia. The Darien Company in effect parlayed its rights to trade into a capacity to bank. As the Company accumulated large sums of money in advance of its first trading ventures, it began to use this capital to underwrite its own form of bank notes and soon set upon a strategy to undermine BoS by accumulating BoS notes and threatening to return them en masse in unpayable amounts. BoS could not trespass on the Darien Company’s trading activities in retaliation, having been legally constituted so that it was not allowed to trade on its own account. This conflict led to a liquidity crisis for BoS, depleting its supply of coin and forcing it to close down branches and restrict lending to survive. However, the Darien Company’s fortunes also turned. The main ‘projector’ of the Company, William Paterson, had been driven out of London, where the Company was seen as infringing on the exclusive trading rights of the English East India Company, burning his connections with various London backers. This is part of what drove the scheme to take over banking in Scotland. But the Darien Company overextended itself, leaving too little cash to back its original trading ventures, and also fell prey to embezzling. It withdrew from its banking activities and eventually set up a failed colonial trading settlement in Darien, Panama (1698–1700), ending in deficit in 1706, having squandered a large amount of Scotland’s investment capital (Checkland 1975: 33–7; Saville 1996: 19–38). The failure of the Darien scheme reflected the desperation of actors in the Scottish economy. By 1697 successive years of poor harvests had severely weakened the essentially agrarian Scottish economy, raising indebtedness throughout society. There was awareness that substantial access to imperial trade networks was necessary for Scotland to transform its ecologically vulnerable, low-growth economy. The failure of the Darien scheme compounded this situation instead of solving it. This was no doubt a factor in the decision of the Scottish Parliament to merge with the English Parliament to form a common UK Parliament, in effect completing the tendency towards union that had begun with the Union of the Crowns in 1603 under James VI/I. With the Treaty of Union in 1707 Scotland found greater political stability and access to imperial trade, England secured its northern border and a shared Protestant-commercial culture was consolidated. In the early eighteenth century the Scottish export trade was limited to primary or minimally manufactured goods: textiles (linen, wool); cattle and sheep; leather; various fish; and some coal and lead ore. Guild crafts in the burghs manufactured

Salvage Ethnography.indb 18

24/05/2017 15:07:34

History

19

goods primarily for local markets, with limited economic horizons. Grain was exported only in some good years. Larger merchants often served the carrying trade, or mainly imported colonial goods to Scotland, thereby contributing to a negative trade balance for Scotland. The Union of 1707 at first hit indigenous manufacturers hard as trade tariffs were lifted, but over the next couple of decades the economy began to expand. A major factor from about 1740 to 1776 was the growth of the tobacco trade from the North American colonies, which was dominated by a group of large Glasgow merchants. Some of these profits were reinvested in other parts of the Scottish economy, such as the industrialisation of linen weaving. Politically the society was managed by patronage systems anchored in an aristocratic landed elite that increasingly articulated with a growing merchant class, and negotiated relations with the political centre in London. Attempts by Highland-based aristocratic factions to re-establish the Stuart royal dynasty in Scotland in the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 disrupted the economy and left abiding political tensions, but by their failure underscored the growing political and economic union with England. It was a dynamic and volatile century for Scottish banking. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) was established in 1727 and until 1746 it and BoS controlled public banking in Scotland. The two rival banks were associated the two emerging factions in British politics, RBS with the Whigs and the interests of the growing urban merchant class, with a strong power base in London, and BoS with the Tories and rurally based great landed interests, in keeping with the Bank’s origins outlined above. Soon after RBS was founded, with both banks issuing their own notes, another ‘bank note war’ ensued similar to the Darien Company’s efforts, with both banks threatening to undermine each other by hoarding notes and then using them to drain specie from their opponent. Eventually a truce was negotiated. During this period BoS twice tried and failed to develop a network of regional Scottish branches. RBS only had one branch office, but it was in Glasgow and at the centre of growing trade out of Glasgow. This reflected the stronger Whig–mercantile connections of RBS. Glasgow commerce was also stimulated by merchant bankers, borrowing from RBS and BoS in Edinburgh to make private loans to smaller businesses in Glasgow. More generally, the Scottish banking system developed very distinctively from the English system. A major reason for this was that the Bank of England was established along with a law that said no other bank could be established with more than six partners. This made it all but impossible to create any bank that could rival the resources of the Bank of England. In Scotland, on the other hand, any group could form a bank and enter the banking market. Moreover, all banks were free to issue their own bank notes, without government restraint. Between 1746 and 1772 there was a proliferation of banks in Scotland. The British Linen Company was established in Edinburgh in 1746 with rights to both that trade and banking capacity. It was a pioneer in developing a regional branch network. ­Glasgow’s Thistle Bank was established in 1761. The 1760s saw the growth of smaller, provincial banking companies in Dundee, Perth, Aberdeen and Ayr (Munn 1981). With so many and varied and competing banks, each able to issue

Salvage Ethnography.indb 19

24/05/2017 15:07:34

20

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

its own notes as it saw fit, there were tendencies towards inflation and collapse, as well as continuing ‘bank note wars’. The overheating of the Scottish banking system peaked with the collapse of the Ayr bank in 1772. However, the system had already begun to regulate itself, both voluntarily and by statute by 1765, and it was becoming more stable. Despite its often rocky, crisis-prone development, the effect of this growth in the banking sector was an increasingly integrated Scottish economy. In 1773, when James Boswell and Dr Samuel Johnson reached the Isle of Skye on their famous tour of the Scottish Highlands, they were surprised to find that the peasant tenants were paying their rents to the local lairds (minor lords) with bills they had acquired from drovers in exchange for their cattle (Lenman 1981: 23). Even the outer reaches of the economy were becoming monetised. The nineteenth century was characterised by the growth of industry and empire. The population of Scotland had already grown by about 50 per cent in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century it roughly trebled, from about 1.5 million to about 4.5 million, with people increasingly concentrated in industrialising cities such as Glasgow. Cotton and woollen textile industries were central in the first half of the century, with mining (coal and iron) and the railroads and shipbuilding becoming central industries by the end of the century. The rural economy was transformed as agricultural labour was mechanised and sheep farming increasingly replaced cattle in the Highlands, pushing rural folk into cities and emigration abroad. Meanwhile, new careers were available in the empire, such as administrating, trading, missionising and soldiering. The political system evolved correspondingly, with the franchise in the UK increasingly extended to the developing middle classes in the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884, the last of these extending the vote to the new industrial working classes. The Whig faction evolved into the Liberal Party, allied with the industrial bourgeoisie, and with a strong free trade philosophy, and commitment to ideals of progress and empire. The Liberals became the dominant party in Scotland in the nineteenth century, although they began to lose ground to new labour parties after the last Reform Act. Banking in nineteenth-century Scotland became a bit less exciting. There was continued growth in branch networks and provincial banks. The Union Bank of Scotland was established in Glasgow in 1830, absorbing a host of smaller banks by 1843. The Clydesdale Bank, also based in Glasgow, was established in 1838. Both cases reflected the growing confidence of the Glasgow business community and their desire to end their dependency on Edinburgh-based banking, which was often seen as too conservative in its lending. These were also examples of the new breed of joint-stock banks. Some of the provincial banks had had enough partners for them to be close to being joint-stock ventures, but these new banks had partners numbering in the hundreds and they developed nationwide branch networks. Between 1810 and 1850, the new joint-stock banks together overtook the three chartered banks (BoS, RBS and British Linen) in terms of paid-up capital, thus becoming central to the Scottish banking system as a whole (Checkland 1975: 337). This also contributed to the decline of private merchant bankers, now marginalised by a diverse and extensive field of banking concerns. By mid-century

Salvage Ethnography.indb 20

24/05/2017 15:07:34

History

21

the emergence of a system of a relatively small number of large banks in Scotland meant that: (1) regional interest rates were coming into alignment, allowing the formation of a more integrated national economy; and (2) principles of negotiated self-regulation of the banking industry were established. Scottish bankers also learned to coordinate their actions in warding off unwelcome legislation advanced in England in response to problems with its more unstable banking system in this period. The effect was that Scottish banking settled into cartel-like and much less dynamic arrangements by the end of the nineteenth century. When the Clydesdale Bank began establishing branches in the north of England in 1874, this led to objections from English bankers fearful of takeover by Scotland’s more robust banking system, and an inconclusive government inquiry. In the end there was a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ that the Scottish banks would limit themselves to the branch offices in London necessary for business, and the English banks would stay south of the border, an agreement that held for the next hundred years or so. By the eve of World War I, all Scottish banks were in effect joint-stock companies. BoS enjoyed a dominant position in a sector that had become somewhat complacent and low-risk oriented, relying on customer deposits and short-term loans, and with a somewhat aloof relationship to the actual workings of industry and agriculture. Meanwhile, as suggested above, banking in England had been less stable, especially in the early nineteenth century, partly because of the constraints on bank size due to the six-member rule. The Bank of England’s near monopoly on large-scale banking meant that it served as a kind of bulwark for the financial power of the English landed elite. One eventual effect of this was a distinctively English banking crisis in 1825–6. In short, credit expansion in response to postNapoleonic War deflation and economic contraction led to over-speculation and collapse among the many small, poorly capitalised English provincial banks, which, like the Scottish banks at this time, were able to issue their own notes. Scottish banks, with their larger numbers of investors, were more able to weather the storm as debts were called in (J. D. Turner 2014: 67–71, 212–13). Another development was the growth in savings banks and building societies from 1810 on. Savings banks did not issue notes or lend to business, but simply held personal savings, stimulating this practice among the growing middle and working classes. Building societies, first established in Birmingham in 1775, were largely a northern English phenomenon, growing out of friendly societies that estab­lished the practice of members paying monthly subscriptions to support house building by their members. The early societies were ‘terminating’; that is, once each member had a house, the society was wound up. But these were followed by ‘permanent’ building societies, which maintained an ongoing business of funding house building and purchase. The English building societies in many ways compensated for England’s under-developed banking system at the time. Crucial for our story, in 1853 the Loyal Georgian Society of Halifax established the Halifax Permanent Building Society (HPBS) on these terms, and it developed an extensive branch network in Yorkshire by the end of the century (Hargreaves 1999: 126–8). By 1918 HPBS had become the largest building society in the country.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 21

24/05/2017 15:07:34

22

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector Twentieth-century transformations, c.1914–2000

Having provided a quick general history of British banking, from this point on I will focus on our key players, BoS and, to a lesser degree, Halifax, while still trying to situate them in a general context. Two World Wars and the inter-war depression hit the British economy hard in the twentieth century, leaving a country deep in debt in 1945, and soon to see the rapid decline of its overseas empire (Mann 2012: 30–42). In the post-war period the British Labour Party enjoyed greater power and time in government, but there was also a general shift towards support for a social democratic model across the political spectrum. State management of competing interests, provision of basic social welfare and responsibility for maintaining employment became widely held common sense. This broad consensus generally held up until the 1970s, when declining competitiveness of heavy industries, price rises due to the oil crisis of the early 1970s and general economic stagnation combined to weaken confidence in this model, laying the ground for a revival of a more market-driven conception of economy and society. This broad structural shift was embodied in the person of Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, who increasingly articulated the pro-market ideology that would come to be called ‘neoliberalism’. However, this was not simply a matter of ideology and party policy. Deindustrialisation was weakening the manufacturing economy and the union power base of the Labour Party, and making the economy more reliant on its financial sector for growth, along with an expanding service sector. When the Labour Party came back into power in 1997 under the mantle of ‘New Labour’, it adapted to the new economic order, while attempting to shore up some aspects of progressive taxation and public provisioning, and attending particularly to the interests of public sector workers, who tended to be more unionised and supportive of the old social democratic model. But under Chancellor and later Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Labour courted the powerful financial interest of the City of London, regarding it as a key wealth creator that needed autonomy in order to operate effectively. A key indication of this new relationship was the early decision to devolve control over money supply and interest rates to the Bank of England, and thus out of the hands of ‘interfering’ government. People in Scotland, and indeed in the north of England and Wales, tended to resist this structural shift, being more committed to the industrial and social democratic model and ‘old Labour’. Scotland had gone into industrial decline after World War I, and had become used to routine state intervention to help stimulate its economy. By the latter twentieth century this had led to the domina­ tion of the Labour Party in the ‘central belt’ (Glasgow–Edinburgh) of urban industrial Scotland. But this domination was increasingly challenged by the Scottish National Party (SNP), established in 1934, but only beginning to enjoy electoral success in the 1960s. The contentious ‘politics of neoliberalism’ in the 1980s and 1990s tended to get expressed in Scotland as a competition between Labour and the SNP to most effectively represent social democratic dissent from the prevailing trend, and a general defence of the welfare state. Correspondingly,

Salvage Ethnography.indb 22

24/05/2017 15:07:34

History

23

the Conservative Party suffered a severe decline in support during this period. There was a tendency among Scots occupying positions of institutional power and shaping public opinion to see an attack on the activist state as an attack on their position of social leadership, and to see the defence of the welfare state and the interests of Scotland as conjoined. Part of the Labour Party’s strategy for consolidating Scottish support in the run-up to the 1997 general election was to promise to legislate for a prompt referendum on the establishment of a Scottish Parliament, which had become a mainstream aspiration during this period in Scotland. The new Parliament was established in 1999 and is now the focal point of Scottish politics (Hearn 2000). At the time of the referendum, the then Governor of BoS, Bruce Pattullo, publicly expressed opposition to devolution, a view more common among the business community, always concerned to minimise the unpredictability of political change. But this was at odds with public opinion. The effects of the depression of the 1930s and World War II had been to turn BoS and the other banks towards larger and safer investments in government securities, and to oblige them to lend most of their deposits to the government. After the war many bankers expected a new cycle of industrial boom followed by bust, and they were wary of advances to industry. But gradually BoS’s gilt holdings, deteriorating in value due to rising interest rates, were substantially reduced (at a loss) and lending to industry grew. Between 1957 and 1964 advances to industry grew from 27.8 per cent of assets to just above 50 per cent of assets, with ship owning, shipbuilding and engineering constituting 19.2 per cent of these advances (Saville 1996: 646). Major initiatives in Scotland in this period included advances and overdrafts to support: the Ravenscraig steel mill (opened in the mid1950s); the building of the Firth of Clyde Dry Dock to attract more ship repair and refurbishment work to the Clyde; and the creation of the wholly owned subsidiary of BoS Kingston Financial Services (Clyde) Ltd to facilitate large ship purchases, primarily by foreign owners. As Saville notes, BoS also ‘used its financial muscle wherever possible to steer contracts for shipbuilding and engineering to Scottish firms, and on occasion declined facilities for companies which wished to use builders abroad’ (Saville 1996: 652). Despite these efforts the combined effects of fiercely competitive industries abroad and tepid government support meant that the efforts of the Scottish banks were insufficient to reverse the secular decline of Scotland’s heavy industries. The more sociological point, however, is that the BoS’s interests and activities were well embedded within those of wider Scottish society, making it part of the broader post-war consensus. As Saville remarks: The steel and other metal trades, shipbuilding and the engineering trades remained central to the outlook and wealth of a number of leading Scottish families with whom the Bank had close connections. Some of these were represented on the board. Further, in the 1950s and 1960s there were still hundreds of medium-sized and small industrial, service and building firms, and tens of thousands of workmen who relied on subcontracts from these traditional sectors, as well as those employed in numerous legal, accountancy and architectural practices. This ensured that public interest in the welfare of the larger Establishments remained resilient and dominated

Salvage Ethnography.indb 23

24/05/2017 15:07:34

24

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

political life in a way that marked out Scottish politics. All four political parties – the Conservative and Unionist Party, the Labour Party, the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Party – focused on the well-being of these industrial sectors and vied with each other over solutions. It was natural that the Bank, with its two-and-a-half centuries’ association with industry and the Establishment of the country, would be actively involved, although the importance of bank advances was overshadowed by government spending and party pronouncements. (Saville 1996: 646–7)

In other words, BoS’s relationship to the Scottish economy in this period had become one of an almost paternalistic stewardship. While the normative view in the banking sector was more conservative and capitalism-friendly than that in much of the rest of Scottish society, it was nonetheless embedded in the wider interests of society at that time. The last great chapter in BoS’s relations with Scottish industry is the one titled ‘North Sea oil’. BoS’s background in financing in the areas of science, technology and engineering meant it was well placed to take the lead in the development of the oil industry in Scotland in the 1970s. In 1975 the Bank opened its first international office, in Houston, Texas, as an outgrowth of its involvement in the oil industry. Through various intermediary companies, BoS financing went to such areas as building platforms, drilling and laying pipelines, storage and refining, and various supply services (Saville 1996: 703–8). The Bank remained involved in the oil industry, but eventually North Sea oil passed its initial growth phase, and the general decline in heavy industry and the shift to a service sector economy meant that the Bank increasingly had to look elsewhere for new business. In the 1980s and 1990s this included expansion into the residential mortgage market, personal financial services and credit cards. During this period BoS expanded its provision to small and medium-sized businesses, opening a series of regional business centres throughout the UK. This general programme of diversification included global expansion and the acquisition of banks in New Zealand, Australia and Wales. An ill-considered and abortive attempt to enter into a US banking deal with the American televangelist Pat Robertson in 1999 (discussed further in Chapter 4) was an indication of the pressures to expand the Bank’s global presence. These strategies were developing in a wider context of profound changes in the basic legal structures shaping the financial industry in the UK. First, the UK had seen the growth of ‘secondary’ or ‘fringe’ banks since the 1960s (often in the form of ‘merchant banks’). These were able to operate outside the credit controls that regulated public clearing banks and they specialised in borrowing from wholesale money markets and lending to finance commercial property purchases, business acquisitions and mergers. They also increasingly cut into some of the functions of clearing banks. The Competition and Credit Control Act of 1971 lifted controls on standard banks, enabling them to compete more effectively with the secondary banking sector. The result was a stock market and property boom, which crashed in 1973–5, triggered by oil price increases. The Bank of England had to step in and quietly absorb much of the losses to stabilise the banking industry. Second, in 1986 under Margaret Thatcher a package of legislation deregulating financial markets and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) was enacted, commonly

Salvage Ethnography.indb 24

24/05/2017 15:07:34

History

25

called ‘Big Bang’. These reforms were designed to dislodge the relatively ‘cozy’ old-boy networks associated with London’s ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, and to spur the LSE to become more meritocratic and more competitive with other stock markets, especially Wall Street. As part of the reforms the ‘open outcry’ system of the traditional stock market floor was replaced by electronic, screen-based trading, which set the stage for vast acceleration of financial transactions. The reforms also abolished a system of fixed commissions on transactions, and a functional division of labour between agents or institutions that represented clients with stocks to sell (stockbrokers) and those that actually struck deals (stock­ jobbers). This greatly liberalised trading practice and strengthened both London’s role as a global financial capital and the City of London’s dominant position in the UK economy. Finally, 1986 also saw the Building Societies Act, which paved the way for the demutualisation of many building societies as they transformed into jointstock companies in which former members of the mutual organisation became corporate shareholders. In this way the two largest UK building societies became the new banks, Abbey National and Halifax, adding to general competition in the banking sphere. Over the 1970s and 1980s, precisely because BoS had maintained a certain distance from the often overheated London centre, it had built up its reputation for reliability. BoS managed to stay minimally exposed to both the ‘secondary banking crisis’ of 1973–5 and, a decade later, the over-exposure of many London banks recycling petrodollars into loans to Latin American countries that eventually defaulted in the mid-1980s. It made its aloofness towards London a virtue. Amid all these changes BoS’s reputation in banking circles by the mid-1990s was very good. It was widely viewed as a relatively small but shrewd and prudent operation. Under the cautious and adroit leadership of its Governor, Bruce Pattullo (1991–8), BoS maintained a productive niche in an increasingly competitive and volatile banking sector. As Perman observes: The year 1995 saw Bruce Pattullo receive his knighthood and the Bank celebrate its tercentenary. The Financial Times Lex column marked the occasion by calling the company ‘the most boring bank in Britain’ which had made dullness a virtue. ‘The Business’s steadiness helps explain 300 years of consistent profitability and more recently how the Bank has outperformed the sector by nearly 100 percent since 1980’. (Perman 2012: 50)

Meanwhile, in Yorkshire, since the early 1900s, HPBS had continued to grow, merging with Halifax Equitable, the second-largest building society after HPBS, in 1927. By mid-century its total assets had multiplied a 100-fold, and it was major employer in the region. In 1995 the HBS (having dropped the ‘Permanent’) and the Leeds Permanent Building Society merged, with a plan to then demutualise, as was now possible following the Building Societies Act. The Halifax was established as a public bank in 1997, rich with mortgage assets. Former Society members became shareholders and, in one of the biggest stock market flotations in history up to that point, £18 billion in shares were distributed among 7.6 million people.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 25

24/05/2017 15:07:35

26

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

As a bank, Halifax was flush with mortgage assets, but underdeveloped in areas such as treasury functions and corporate finance, and thus was ripe to join forces with a more established bank (Hargreaves 1999: 217–19). Mergers, acquisitions, the formation of HBOS and the ‘ethnographic present’ The merger to form HBOS can be viewed as a late episode in a long trend in both Scottish and British banking. After World War II Scotland had eight banks. Ancient rivals BoS and RBS were key players, but the post-war scene also included: the Union Bank and the British Linen Bank, which merged with BoS in 1955 and 1971 respectively; the Commercial Bank and the National Bank, which merged in 1958, and then joined RBS in 1967; and the Clydesdale Bank and the North of Scotland Bank, which merged in 1950. These bank amalgamations were largely contained within Scotland and were responses to demands for greater economies of scale and larger units to keep pace with the growing size and capital needs of corporations (Checkland 1975: 641). In the 1960s there were growing concerns about ‘the increased financial and political powers of the City of London which, it was thought, could further erode the commercial standing of the Scottish banks’, combined with the new policies of the Wilson government that ‘encouraged both larger conglomerations and a more competitive framework in banking and finance’ (Saville 1996: 680). The amalgamation of the Royal Bank and the National Commercial Bank in 1967 was a response to these pressures, provoking the BoS/ British Linen merger in 1971, as an effort both to keep pace with RBS and to cope with the same broader pressures. Another marker of this more competitive atmosphere was the decision in 1974 by Barclays to abandon the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ mentioned above and extend its branches into Scotland. As this suggests, the notion of a viable and competitive bank operating pri­ marily within Scottish national and industrial horizons was becoming less tenable. An important and fateful step in this direction had already taken place many years earlier. In the 1950s Scottish banks began to show interest in linking up with highly profitable finance houses specialising in hire-purchase arrangements. In 1958 BoS acquired North West Securities (NWS), based in Chester, England, which eventually became the subsidiary Capital Bank and which was ‘internally merged’ with the rest of BoS in 1999. But it remained a distinctive internal structure within BoS, with its own identity. Capital Bank’s hire-purchase business was very different from traditional personal and small-business lending practised by local bank branches. The latter relied on personal recommendations and local knowledge, whereas the former employed sophisticated credit-scoring systems and relied on considerable staff initiative in the pursuit of business (Saville 1996: 671). These differences generated tensions between BoS and its subsidiary over the years, between more ‘command and control’ and ‘freewheeling’ business styles. Nonetheless, by 1995 NWS/Capital Bank was the second-largest finance house in the UK. This success enabled it to maintain a considerable degree of autonomy within the organisation. The key point for this study is that by the time of the

Salvage Ethnography.indb 26

24/05/2017 15:07:35

History

27

BoS/Halifax merger, the recently integrated Capital Bank, still based in England, contained well over a quarter of BoS’s total staff. Thus the transgression of the Tweed had long been foreshadowed. The entire question of an autonomous Scottish banking sector became a more live issue in 1980, when two ‘colonial banks’, Standard Chartered and HSBC, began competitively bidding to take over RBS. Their proposals were referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) by the Office of Fair Trading. Deeply concerned over the implications of this development for the maintenance of a distinctive Scottish banking sector, the leadership of BoS formed a group to prepare submissions to the MMC making the case against such takeovers and for the importance of regional banking in Scotland as elsewhere in the UK. The MMC required some convincing, concerned that the relatively small size of the Scottish banks rendered them unviable, but in the end, perhaps bolstered by the rioting in socially disenfranchised areas of 31 cities in England in the summer of 1981, the MMC ‘found the case for a separate Scottish banking industry sufficiently persuasive to rule against the proposals’ (Saville 1996: 740) in January 1982. In terms of ownership, the independence of the Scottish banks was complicated. Barclays Bank had acquired 35 per cent stock ownership of BoS through the amalgamation of BoS and British Linen, and had agreed not to alter its stockholding without prior agreement from the BoS board. But there were frictions between Barclays and BoS, and Barclays soon began to indicate a desire to reduce its holdings. For a time the matter was left alone, but in 1984 Barclays decided that its earlier agreements were no longer binding and indicated its intention to sell its shares. BoS was able to guide the Scotland-based Standard Life Assurance Company, with which it had long-standing and close connections, to Barclays. Standard Life acquired the ‘golden share’ in January 1985, thus bringing ownership of BoS back into a predominantly Scottish orbit. But in May 1996 Standard Life announced its intention to sell off the ‘golden share’ (then down to 32.2 per cent), sparking a series of news stories about how this could make BoS vulnerable to takeover if acquired en bloc. This led to various political figures in Scotland such as Alistair Darling (Labour Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury) and Alex Salmond (SNP leader) weighing in on the need to keep BoS ‘independent’. On BBC radio, Conservative Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth, who had met with BoS Governor Bruce Pattullo to discuss the matter, said ‘The Government has always taken the view that market forces are a very useful servant, but they’re not our masters’. In an opinion piece in the Sunday Times on 19 May 1985, Peter Clarke took Forsyth and Pattullo to task for considering the BoS case to be ‘above’ market forces and shareholder interests. By June it was apparent that the shares would be sold piecemeal to a range of institutional investors and stories about the threat of takeover died down. On 24 September 1999, BoS surprised the City by making a £20.85 billion bid to take over NatWest, in effect striking first in an environment where further amalgamation in the banking sector seemed unavoidable (the previous two years had seen quiet and abortive talks of merger with both NatWest and Barclays). The press was delighted, calling the bid ‘savage’, ‘hostile’ and ‘audacious’, and

Salvage Ethnography.indb 27

24/05/2017 15:07:35

28

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

portraying it as a David and Goliath encounter. Chief Executive Peter Burt and Group Managing Director Gavin Masterton were represented in text and cartoons as marauding Jacobites coming over the border, and the Financial Times called it a ‘Braveheart Raid on Dowdy Dame with Tarnished Past’ (25 September 1999). Many commentators were quick to point out that, under these new terms, BoS and other Scottish banks could not expect to have their future ‘independence’ protected. By 29 November, after much press speculation about other potential bidders for NatWest (including Halifax), RBS made a counter-bid of £25.1 billion. As investors worried about the two Scottish banks bidding beyond their means, BoS and RBS share prices fell, while NatWest shares correspondingly rose. In early February 2000 NatWest was still fighting off both bids, but by 10 February NatWest’s major institutional shareholders had opted for the RBS bid, causing BoS shares to jump by 9.3 per cent as the City anticipated a takeover of BoS, despite frequent remarks from financial commentators that it had very little fat to trim. It was during this same period that Capital Bank ceased to be a subsidiary and was finally fully integrated with the rest of the BoS, to make the entire organisation larger and less vulnerable to takeover. In the latter half of 2000 BoS held abortive talks with Abbey National about a possible merger, but nothing came of it. Then on 25 April 2001 it was announced that BoS and Halifax were in merger talks and the City responded positively, raising the share price of both banks, in what was widely seen as a sensible move, bringing together the mortgage-based capital of Halifax and the lending expertise of BoS, creating a strong UK-wide branch network at a stroke, and new opportunities for cross-selling Halifax products to BoS customers. Halifax’s major new online and telephone banking venture, Intelligent Finance (IF), was already based in Edinburgh, further enhancing the ‘fit’. Billed as a ‘merger of equals’, Halifax was nonetheless twice the size of BoS, with around 36,000 employees to BoS’s 19,000, and a market value of around £18 billion compared with BoS’s £10 billion. By 4 May it had been agreed that HBOS would be headquartered at The Mound, BoS’s Edinburgh headquarters, but that the job of Chief Executive would go Halifax’s James Crosby, while Peter Burt, three years away from retirement, would stay on as Executive Deputy Chairman until 2004, to oversee integration. Other top jobs going to Halifax were: Lord Dennis Stevenson, Chairman; Mike Ellis, Group Finance Director; and Andy Hornby, Chief Executive Retail. BoS executives took three director posts: George Mitchell in Corporate Banking; Colin Mathew in Business Banking; and Gordon McQueen in Treasury. Eventually 13 of 15 senior jobs in Corporate Banking and Business Banking, which together with Treasury represented around 30 per cent of the new Bank’s operating profit, went to BoS executives, while 10 of 13 key posts in Retail Banking and Insurance and Investment went to Halifax executives, representing around 70 per cent of the Bank’s operating profits. This division of labour at the top of the organisation reflected primary strengths of the two banks. In late July the Department of Trade and Industry cleared the merger, saying that it would ‘strengthen competitive pressure on the big four’ (HSBC, RBS, Barclays, Lloyds TSB) (Sunday Herald, 23 December 2001, p. 7) and the merger was overwhelmingly supported by BoS and Halifax

Salvage Ethnography.indb 28

24/05/2017 15:07:35

History

29

shareholders a few days later. The first day of trading for the shares of HBOS was 10 September 2001 and shares performed well. However, the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, on the next day inevitably depressed the whole market, obscuring the market’s reception of the new bank. The formation of HBOS seriously stepped up the pressure among the BoS staff to develop a more aggressive, sales-oriented culture, something closer to that which prevailed within Capital Bank. It is important to realise that the pressure in this direction, though often resisted within the Bank, had been growing steadily since the 1960s, with increasing conversations within banking circles about the need to seek more working-class customer accounts, extend banking hours, use computers to increase efficiency, and encourage branch staff and managers not just to maintain, but to develop new business. Nonetheless, the HBOS merger was experienced by many staff as a step change in this direction. The ‘ethnographic present’ that underlies the rest of this book focuses on the year from September 2001 to October 2002, when much work was going on to integrate systems and staff from the two banks. To the ‘crisis’ HBOS was formed near the peak of a general expansion of the British banking system, part of the new, neoliberal centrality of the financial sector to the UK economy. As indicated above, the Labour Party government in Westminster from 1997 to 2010 did little to oppose this trend, seeking rather to capitalise on it as best it could. Only when the banking crisis hit in 2007–8 did this relationship reverse, to one in which the banks were turning to government for support. In Scotland, over five general elections to the Scottish Parliament, power has shifted from Labour to the SNP (specifically: 1999, Labour government; 2003, Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition; 2007, SNP minority government; 2011, SNP majority government; 2016, SNP minority government). In this new political institutional context, the dominant public discourse has tended to be to the left of that in Westminster, with stronger social democratic overtones. The Conservative Party enjoys much less support in Scotland than in England. Nonetheless, Scotland has undergone the same economic structural changes as the rest of the UK, with the service and financial sectors increasingly important (Paterson et al. 2004). In practice, Scottish politics is shaped by a neoliberal political economy, while the major political parties often try to articulate more social democratic policies and aspirations. For those supporting independence, there is an option of projecting such aspirations onto a hypothetically independent Scotland in the future, one that would ‘do things differently’. This aspiration was expressed in the September 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, in which 45 per cent of those voting opted for independence, a sentiment rearticulated in the UK May 2015 general election, in which Scotland sent a record 56 SNP MPs to Westminster, out of a total of 59 Scottish MPs. The early years of HBOS appeared promising, with substantial year-on-year growth. The basic strategy of combining BoS’s strengths in treasury and corporate

Salvage Ethnography.indb 29

24/05/2017 15:07:35

30

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

banking with Halifax’s skills in retail banking and its large mortgage book seemed a good one. Not always apparent, however, was the way this growth was based on assets in the form of loans growing at a faster rate than deposits (13 per cent per annum versus 8 per cent per annum). More generally, there was a fundamental shift in the culture of the Bank and its guiding philosophy, with a decline in the serious attention given to avoiding risk and an increasing emphasis on marketing and aggressive expansion of loan activity. One effect of this was that it became neces­sary to issue a new share offer in 2002, worth £1.37 billion, to help underwrite this rapid expansion. By 2005 there were beginning to be clear signs of loan book deterioration in HBOS’s annual report, although one had to read carefully to see them (Perman 2012: 109–10). The rising star of the new organisation was Andy Hornby, Chief Executive Retail, whose background was in retail management in organisations such as the supermarket group ASDA, rather than banking. His leadership was key to transforming the culture of the Retail Division into one much more oriented to sales and expanding the number of financial products sold to customers. But this ethos was radiating throughout the Bank. Corporate Banking, which had always had a more aggressive, alpha-male, deal-making culture, was pushed even further in this direction. Although there were rumblings against it, it was not generally a surprise within the Bank when Hornby succeeded James Crosby as Chief Executive in 2006, when Crosby announced rather unexpectedly that he was stepping down (ironically, soon to become Deputy Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, the main UK regulator of the banking industry). The immediate causes of the 2007–8 banking crisis can be fairly briefly stated here. Especially in the US and the UK, very risky ‘subprime’ mortgage loans proliferated in an environment of low interest rates and cheap consumer credit. In order to theoretically reduce risk, low-quality loans were combined with higher-quality loans in complex packages known as ‘asset-backed securities’ and ‘collateralised debt obligations’. These were then traded between banks as bundles of assets. But the ratio of low-quality loans in these bundles was increasing, a fact obscured by the complexity of the process and a considerable degree of overconfidence in the banking community. When the unsound nature of these loans, and exposure of banks to them, began to become apparent, with early bank failures such as Northern Rock in the UK, it was nonetheless extremely difficult to determine for many banks what their exposure was, leading to a ‘freezing’ of credit and money markets that regularly shifted large sums between banks to help them deal with day-to-day shifts in exposure. Credit dried up, both between banks, which now wanted to hold onto as many solid assets as possible, and for the wider economy. At HBOS this played out in terms of an increasingly desperate attempt by the Corporate Division to compensate for the decaying value of the Bank’s retail and mortgage loan book, by making ever larger and riskier deals, heavily leveraged and often in the vulnerable commercial property sector. Despite this situation the management of HBOS rejected warnings from auditors KPMG and from their own internal risk department in the Corporate Division (Perman 2012: 204–5;

Salvage Ethnography.indb 30

24/05/2017 15:07:35

History

31

see also PCBS (Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards) 2013). Perman sums up: The reason all this was allowed to happen was that HBOS’ corporate division operated in a culture that valued and encouraged sales above all else. Risk management was regarded as a constraint on the business rather than an integral part of it. Managers were incentivised to focus on revenue rather than risk…. (Perman 2012: 203)

Ultimately the crippling loses were located in the Corporate, International and Treasury Divisions, not the Retail Division itself, even though it incurred greater mortgage-related loses than its major competitors (PCBS 2013: 17; J. D. Turner 2014: 99). But this development appears to have been related to the fact that the overall Bank culture had been influenced at the executive level by an aggressive retail sales ethos, which had displaced an older, more risk-averse banking culture. By the end of 2007, just as the severe downturn set in, HBOS was heavily exposed to the property market. Of its £430 billion in outstanding loans, ‘threequarters of all lending was secured on land, bricks and mortar’ (Perman 2012: 139), most of it residential mortgages, but also construction firms, commercial property companies, and hotel and retail trades. The collapse in September 2008 of the US bank Lehman Brothers, which had lost close to £4 billion on bad mortgage debts, triggered panic in the City and both the FTSE 100 and HBOS share prices fell rapidly as the markets assessed vulnerability. When it became clear that HBOS and several other UK banks would collapse without government support, this was quietly provided by the Bank of England. But this situation was unsustainable. Not willing to nationalise another bank after Northern Rock, and especially one of HBOS’s size, the Labour government (specifically Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling) pressured HBOS into a takeover by Lloyds TSB in 2009 (the new bank is named Lloyds Banking Group plc). Even as the deal was being negotiated, share prices for Lloyds TSB and HBOS were steadily falling. By October 2008, as the takeover was being finalised, the UK government provided a funding package of £300 billion in new capital, guarantees and support to the Bank of England’s ability to supply systemic liquidity, which RBS, HBOS and Lloyds were obliged to accept to stay afloat. Meanwhile, many HBOS staff were also shareholders, having routinely invested bonuses in a once attractive employee shareholding scheme. As they were reassured by their employer and told to keep faith, the value of their savings in HBOS collapsed, costing many staff dearly. In the run-up to the Lloyds takeover there were several futile attempts by outside observers to propose ways of maintaining HBOS’s independence, most notably when Peter Burt, former head of BoS, and George Mathewson, former head of RBS, suggested that the HBOS board oust Hornby and Stevenson, and invite them to manage the Bank out of its difficulties. But it was too late to return to banking as was and the proposal went nowhere. Since the Lloyds takeover, the name HBOS has ceased to be used publicly, but the Bank of Scotland and Halifax continue as regional banking brands underneath the Lloyds umbrella.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 31

24/05/2017 15:07:35

32

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

In its report on the HBOS debacle to the House of Lords and House of Commons, the PCBS emphasised that ‘losses were caused by flawed strategy, in­appropriate culture and inadequate controls’ (2013: 42). The report argued that there were multiple failures involved. First, a ‘federal’ corporate model led to too much power in the separate divisions, and not enough at the centre, particularly in the group risk function that is supposed to be able to execute strong oversight. Thus the Bank lacked sufficient ‘internal control’. Second, external regulation by the Financial Services Authority was inadequate – too light touch and admin­istered through low-level auditing and ‘box-ticking’ rather than critical engagement with the Bank’s leadership. Thirdly, the Bank’s board of directors failed in its duty to scrutinise and hold the executive to account: ‘[t]here was insufficient banking expertise among HBOS’s top management. In consequence, they were incapable of even understanding the risks that some elements of the business were running, let alone managing them’ (PCBS 2013: 31). In a caustic conclusion the report called the recent history of HBOS a ‘manual for bad banking’ (PCBS 2013: 44; see also Ellis and Taylor 2010; and Kerr and Robinson 2012). Conclusion This historical synopsis is meant to do more than just trace a sequence of events. It aims to highlight the underlying processes I discussed at the outset, of institutional evolution, state–economy relations and competition. Thus we can see that, from its inception, BoS was designed to address the interpenetrating political and economic needs of a transforming elite, a landed class increasingly articulating with a merchant industrial class. By the twentieth century it was itself a fully modern joint-stock corporation, run by a class of specialised managers and professionals, serving the needs of business and industry, and retail customers, in the context of a welfare state with a somewhat enfeebled industrial economy. With the profound changes towards highly financialised economies and a liberalised banking regulation regime, in the US and the UK, the somewhat staid midcentury banking model of BoS was again transformed through various pressures into a component embedded within the new HBOS organisation, struggling to deliver unrealistic levels of growth in shareholder value. All along the way, the dynamic of competition is central to changes in both bank structures and the wider banking environment. By the late nineteenth century the chronic rough-and-tumble competition of the ‘bank wars’ (using each other’s notes as weapons) had been stabilised through a combination of negotiated accommodation between banks and state legislation. Competition within the banking industry subsided into a more cartel-like industry serving the needs of an expansive industrial-imperial economy. Soon, more political forms of competition – imperialism, World War and international protectionism in the face of global depression – further dampened the competitive dynamic within the UK banking sector. But gradual recovery after World War II led to corporate consolidation within banking and slowly accelerating growth. The challenge for advanced capitalist economies to be industrially competitive as industrialisation

Salvage Ethnography.indb 32

24/05/2017 15:07:35

History

33

spread to the rest of the world led the US and the UK to place new emphasis on their financial sectors in pursuit of economic growth. This in turn drove the pace of competition in banking and financial services, transforming the UK banking sector into a contest between five extremely large banks with global operations, soon to undergo severe crisis as competition ratcheted up unsustainable levels of consumer and mortgage debt. The long view puts things in perspective. We can see that recent events are a variation on much more enduring themes. We can begin to discern the underlying processes that yielded directional change, while being themselves relatively constant. In the next chapter we will examine some attempts to theorise these processes and the financial crisis they led to.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 33

24/05/2017 15:07:35

3

Theory: explaining financial crisis and conceptualising capitalism

This chapter provides a theoretical frame, both for abstracting more general lessons from the historical account in Chapter 2 and for putting the more fine-grained, micro-level, ethnographic perspective of the following chapters in an interpretive context. After a brief discussion of the purpose of theorising in this instance, the body of the chapter will move from a discussion of attempts to theorise the post2008 economic crisis, to one of wider efforts to theorise the political-economic trajectory of the UK and similar nation-states. It concludes with some reflections on the relationship between large-scale historical and theoretical explanation and small-scale ethnographic research. Later chapters will introduce further theoretical concepts that guide analysis of their content. This chapter, however, is intended to provide the most encompassing frame of explanation and understanding, that concerned with the dynamics of historical change. What is theory for? Theorising cannot be entirely neutral. I have made choices about how best to under­stand this case and am advocating those choices in this chapter by presenting them here. This entire book is motivated by a particular problem – the way that the interpretation of ethnographic data is shaped by historical context. That is why the main theoretical frame presented here concerns how we understand history as process, so that we can better reconstruct the relevant context. The following chapters examine how people in HBOS were making sense of their situations in 2001–2, and the continuities and tensions between how they were doing that then and how we might do that now. Max Weber was particularly concerned with the orientation of social action to systems of meaning and this has often led to the misrepresentation of his views, the suggestion that he was interested in ‘understanding’ not ‘explanation’, in ‘meaning’ not ‘causality’. In fact, it was more that he thought that understanding the orientation of action to meaning was a necessary part of a causal analysis (see Käsler 1988: 175–80). More generally, he understood sociology as the attempt to abstract ‘uniformities’ (patterns, types, regularities) from the welter of historical

Salvage Ethnography.indb 34

24/05/2017 15:07:35

Theory

35

facts, in contrast to history, which in a narrow sense is concerned with reconstructing unique complexes of causal connections, in terms of their particularity. For Weber, sociology aims to accurately comprehend what people do, how that relates to what they think they are doing, and how both those things are conditioned by wider ideational and material circumstances. I will not try to make a case here for the advantages of Weber’s approach over others; nonetheless, I want to be clear that my approach throughout this book largely follows that established by Weber (1978: 4–24). Despite Weber’s distinction between ‘sociology’ and ‘history’, many historians have concerned themselves with how to bring explanatory order to their historical narratives. In a famous series of lectures published under the title What Is History? E. H. Carr argued the need to grapple with causation in history: The true historian, confronted with this list of causes of his own compiling, would feel a professional compulsion to reduce it to order, to establish some hierarchy of causes which would fix their relation to one another, perhaps to decide which cause, or which category of causes, should be regarded ‘in the last resort’ or ‘in the final analysis’ (favourite phrases of historians) as the ultimate cause, the cause of all causes. (Carr 1961: 116–15)

Without wanting to aim too high, the rest of this chapter tries to live up to this standard: first, by surveying a range of causal processes that clearly combine into a set of relevant causal explanations; second, by at least suggesting some sort of prioritisation, or ‘hierarchy’ of causes; and finally, by distinguishing between more proximate causes of the banking crisis, and more long-term causes of the crisis and the direction of economic change generally. Proximate causes of crisis Perhaps the most basic question here is – when did the crisis begin? In mid-2006, as the US housing bubble began to deflate? In late 2007, as credit from the shadow banking system began to rapidly dry up? Or in September 2008, with the highly symbolic bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers? Of course there is no right answer to this question, but where we focus our attention may suggest where we locate causal priority. For convenience I will refer to ‘the crisis of 2008’, as that was the point at which the scale of the problem began to be widely recognised. The literature attempting to explain the crisis has grown rapidly and continues to grow (see Engelen et al. 2011; Friedman 2011a; Kay 2015; Konings 2010; Lo 2012). In this section I have abstracted the main factors that predominate in this literature into six themes. These are not mutually exclusive, but rather form an interacting set of explanations. A brave new world… In some quarters there was a belief in a new paradigm. There was much overheated talk in the two decades before the crisis about a ‘new economy’ emerging that was

Salvage Ethnography.indb 35

24/05/2017 15:07:35

36

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

no longer based on the processes of production that tended to create cycles of boom and bust (for critical discussions see Henwood 2003; Krugman 2008: 9–29). In this thinking, the shift from manufacturing to services, high-speed com­muni­ cations, rapid technological innovations and value added through knowledge rather than labour was seen as leading to a new kind of steadily sustainable capital­ist economy, relatively immune to traditional business cycles. Probably most actors in the financial sector, still having to calculate the ‘real economy’ values underlying various financial speculations, were not entirely taken in by this talk, which tended to be the fodder of pundits (‘The New Economy’ was heralded as such in a 1983 Time magazine cover article). Nonetheless, the presence of the idea in public discourse indicated a general atmosphere of optimism and a view that economic dynamics were sufficiently changed that old verities about boom and bust were not as certain as they once were. This is not so much a ‘cause’ of crisis as a factor that impaired foresight. Ignorance is bliss… Another key dimension is that there was often a lack of knowledge and understanding of the financial instruments being used. In some cases this may have gone as far as wilful ignorance. Those who actually designed complex instruments such as ‘collateralised debt obligations’ (CDOs) and ‘credit default swaps’ understood their basic functions, but as these moved into wider circulation and use their implications for financial systems were often not appreciated, even by those who invented them. This level of ignorance was compounded by critical decisions being made by organisational leaders, such as Andy Hornby in the case of HBOS, with much less financial sophistication and understanding. As Donald Mackenzie (2006, 2009) and various colleagues have argued, many of the concepts and formulas that financial actors saw as descriptive and analytic accounts of how economic processes worked were in fact ‘performative’, in other words, were bringing the economy into being and shaping its operations. This in itself is not an explanation of crisis, but an account of how the economy is actually constituted. However, lack of awareness of this performative dimension may have made some actors complacent about their command over the economic processes they were involved in, and ignorant of the effects of their own actions (cf. Gorton 2010). The devils within… An understandably popular line of argument is simply that unchecked self-­ interest, greed and corruption on the part of those profiting most from the boom were a driver of the crisis. For ‘greed’ to work as an explanation, it would have to be the case that somehow this basic human trait had increased during this period. Some of what this study has to say about shifting bank cultures tends to reinforce this view. More plausible is that self-interest is relatively constant, but under certain conditions, structural and cultural, it is given more scope and

Salvage Ethnography.indb 36

24/05/2017 15:07:35

Theory

37

manifests itself more often as what we label ‘greed’. But the key issue here is not so much personal character as institutional cultures that encourage certain kinds of risk-taking behaviour and instil confidence where it may not be warranted (Cohan 2009; Farrell 2010; Tett 2009). Similarly, we can think of ‘corruption’ as personal moral failing and lack of character, but also as a more systemic state of affairs, in which social and institutional aims and purposes become distorted, leading to overall dysfunction, including the encouragement of unprincipled self-interest. During the period in question, there were various scandals – Enron, WorldCom, Bernie Madoff ’s ponzi schemes, the mis-selling of payment protection insurance, LIBOR fixing – that were not directly causally related to the financial crisis but that suggest a general atmosphere of latitude for unscrupulous behaviour. Heads I win, tails you lose… This leads to the question of whether normal checks on corrupt behaviour had become displaced, making such behaviour more likely. A key issue here is the distribution of incentives and disincentives, which were being altered by changes in both financial instruments and banks themselves and their reward structures. Two factors tended to displace the consequences of risky action from those taking such actions (whether or not they knew they were doing so, as discussed above). One was a system where at several points agents were making profits on trans­ actions that created and passed on risk-bearing assets (subprime mortgages, CDOs), thus relieving these agents of the long-term risks associated with those assets, at least until the problems became systemic. In the language of investment this became known as the ‘originate-to-distribute’ as opposed to the ‘originate-tohold’ strategy of creating mortgages: The originate-to-distribute explanation places the blame on the misaligned incentives of the underwriters, who believed they had little exposure to risk; on the rating agencies, which didn’t properly represent risk to investors; and to a decline in lending standards, which allowed increasingly poor loans to be made. (Lo 2012: 158)

The other factor was the growth of banks ‘too big to fail’, in other words whose role as holders of private assets and creators of credit were so large in relation to national and even international economies that governments, and thus ultimately citizens and taxpayers, were obliged to supply them with funds to prevent them from collapsing (see Haldane and Alessandri 2009; Sorkin 2009; Stiglitz 2010: 164–8, passim). In practical terms, the risks involved in these banks’ actions were put onto the state and the public. To what degree such banks were reckless because their managers and directors understood this displacement of risk, versus simply being unaware of the risks they were getting into, and in the end benefiting from this practical leverage over the state, is difficult to know. And in some cases prices were paid: executives were driven from office and banks folded or lost their autonomy, as in HBOS’s takeover by Lloyds. Colin Crouch has coined the apt term ‘privatised Keynesianism’ (2011: 97–124) to describe this situation. The basic idea of Keynesian economics was that when the

Salvage Ethnography.indb 37

24/05/2017 15:07:35

38

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

economy falters, the state should act to provide the missing economic stimulation through deficit spending on public works to provide employment and incomes to spend. Crouch and others have argued that the financial crisis led to government funds going not into public works to create jobs and rescue citizens from unemployment but into private corporations (banks), to prevent their in­solvency. Governments such as the UK Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition (2010–15) pushed through austerity measures, reducing public spending, while also further running up huge public debts by continuing the shoring up of the banking system begun by the Labour government at the time of the crisis. Such shoring up of the banking sector was necessary to prevent an even deeper re­ cession and thus brought some benefits to the general public. Moreover, ongoing national debt problems are more a result of economic contraction and loss of government revenue triggered by the banking crisis than of the initial bailouts. Nonetheless, the actions taken by governments are also indicative of the general power of the financial sector, especially in the US and the UK. When the cat’s away… Following on from this, many explanations primarily emphasise the failure of regulation (Johnson and Kwak 2010; Roubini and Mihm 2010) on the part of bodies such as the Federal Reserve (‘The Fed’) in the US and the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the UK. Established in 2001, the FSA was abolished in the wake of the financial crisis by an Act of Parliament in 2013, with its regulatory role redistributed to two new bodies, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, and to the Bank of England. The relative weakness of financial regulation in this period has various aspects, some paradoxical. On the one hand, these agencies may have become complacent, convinced or at least placated by ‘new paradigm’ thinking. Moreover, they experienced political pressures to interfere as little as possible in financial sectors that appeared to be thriving and thus underwriting the governments of the day. There was a tendency to ‘light touch’ regulation, allowing for a high degree of ‘self-regulation’, which raises issues of conflict of interest (Peston and Turner 2009). But it is also the case that in many ways formal regulation had increased over the previous few decades (e.g. with the establishment of the FSA), precisely because governments had been concerned to open up and expand their financial sectors, as core drivers of economic growth. A key term that comes up in the literature is ‘regulatory capture’ (Lo 2012; Posner 2013), in other words, the capacity of those organisations such as banks, supposedly subject to regulation, to gain control of that process for their own ­interests. This can happen in various ways: informally, by a convergence of thinking between regulators and those in the finance sector (made more likely by the flow of personnel into jobs across this boundary, such as the move by HBOS Chief Executive James Crosby to the FSA); but also more formally, for instance by using economic leverage to influence relevant legislation, steering it towards the interests of regulated bodies.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 38

24/05/2017 15:07:35

Theory

39 Living on the never-never…

All accounts recognise the centrality of housing markets, and real estate markets more generally, to what went wrong (see especially: Acharya et al. 2011; Gjerstad and Smith 2011; McLean and Nocera 2010; Morgenson and Rosner 2011). A key factor was over-reliance on home-ownership, house property values and consumer credit to sustain growth, particularly in the US and the UK. Because the immediate and most visible effect of a collapse of the housing market is the foreclosure on households that have defaulted on their mortgages, it is easy to miss the fact that the real estate boom (or series of national booms, plural) also concerned commercial property. Adair Turner was appointed head of the FSA in 2008, in order to bring new leadership to an institution implicated in the crisis, while also charged with addressing the crisis. Turner argued in a 2014 lecture that: much pre-crisis economics and finance theory presented an inadequate account of the role of credit creation within an economy, and of the consequences of resulting leverage.… In that pre-crisis orthodoxy, credit is extended primarily to finance new business investment. But in fact most credit in advanced economies does not serve this function, but finances either household consumption or the purchase of already existing assets, and in particular the purchase of real estate and the irreproducible land on which it sits. And at the core of financial instability in advanced economies lies, I suggest, the interaction between the in principle infinitely elastic supply of new private credit and matching private money, and the highly inelastic supply of locationally specific land. (A. Turner 2014: 2)

This view warns us that, beyond problems of ignorance and skulduggery in the realms of high finance, there are deeper systemic problems with how these advanced economies pursue wealth creation. There is an unholy alliance between actors in the financial sector competing for high-stakes profits, politicians in govern­ment pursuing citizens’ votes by making them feel well off, and a citizenry that wants to feel well off, and measures success and well-being through its powers of consumption (Hearn 2011; J. D. Turner 2014: 211–20). These problems are related to the decline of manufacturing in these countries and trade imbalances, particularly between the US and China (touched on again below). Adam Smith (1981 [1776]) argued that economic growth in Britain in the eighteenth century was partly driven by competitive consumption among civilising elites who exchanged feudal arms and retainers for ornate mansions, staff and decorative ‘baubles’. In a sense, the role of the US and the UK in the world economy today is to provide an engine of consumption to sustain productive growth going on elsewhere. Entire economies now function, on aggregate, something like Smith’s vain elites seeking prestige through consumption. Ultimately, the crisis of 2008 involved the transformation of large amounts of private debt into large amounts of public debt, albeit with a lot of debt still difficult to calculate and lingering on private ledgers. In the good years, private debt was seen as a sign of a thriving economy. There were quiet rumblings from the margins that a ‘correction’ would have to happen sooner or later, but these were not sufficient to redirect behaviour. Now that states have acquired large debts

Salvage Ethnography.indb 39

24/05/2017 15:07:35

40

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

in their efforts to shore up banks and sustain their economies more generally, the problem of debt is manifestly visible. In this light it is interesting to note Moritz Schularick’s study which shows that while economists have tended to worry more about the effects of public debt than those of private debt, ‘financial crises have typically originated in the private sector’ (Schularick 2013: 191) and that modern democracies have been relatively successful a managing public debt in the long run. He also notes that while levels of both public and private debt rose during the period 1870–2010, the increase in private debt was roughly double that of public debt. Finally, the study suggests that public debt and private debt are two sides of the same coin. In the period leading up to the crisis (1970–2007) high levels of private debt corresponded to low levels of public debt, as the growing economy provided ‘revenue windfalls’ to governments and reduced the need for government spending. But the other side of this is that those countries with higher public debts were less susceptible to downturns in the private economy. Schularick’s point is that levels of public debt and private debt are so interactive and reciprocal that it makes no sense to regard them as separate processes with isolatable problems. One might add that, in the end, all private debts are potentially public. Summing up… Returning to E. H. Carr’s advice, how might we impose some order on this bundle of explanations? First, as already suggested, it is a bit of each. But if we are concerned with causation, we want to make at least some distinctions between different kinds of explanation. Idealistic belief in a new kind of economy, and ignorance of how it and some of its parts actually work, give us reasons why people on the whole did not see the crisis coming. But these are causes only in the most general sense, of conditions conducive to events. Particularly with regard to some of the more complex financial instruments involved, failure to appreciate the performative aspects and how these instruments might become drivers of behaviour gives us a more focused explanation – where ignorance was especially consequential. But the economy is more than the actions of some of its key agents: it is a wider set of social relationships. While opportunities to ‘make a fast buck’ probably do cultivate ‘greed’ in some people, it is the constitution of those opportunities that we need to understand, not the moral character of individuals. Here, the loosening of regulatory oversight and the moral hazards of displacing risks from those taking risky actions seem pretty significant. These created the opportunities for normal people, in a particular kind of situation, to behave irresponsibly, whether wittingly or unwittingly. However, these people were caught up in a social process that was much larger than them, one in which there were motives on all sides, from those seeking profits, to those seeking votes, to those merely seeking private possessions, to go along with what appeared to be an expanding economy. The very assumption, basic to the modern liberal nation-state, that economies ought to grow, and that this is part of what makes them legitimate (Gellner 1964: 33, cf. Galbraith 2014), sets the background dynamic that became focused in the bubble that ultimately had to burst.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 40

24/05/2017 15:07:35

Theory41 Patterns and trajectories of history In this section I widen the scope, from the particular causes of the post-2008 downturn to more encompassing questions about recurring patterns and overall historical trajectories. Again, the aim is to review some representative examples of some of the main lines of explanation, lines that are compatible up to a point. Awaiting the inevitable… One line of explanation is at once general and particular, that which situates the downturn in the context of recurring cycles of boom and bust (Kindleberger and Aliber 2011; Reinhart and Rogoff 2009). Thus the 2008 crisis is understood as, in some sense, a return of 1929. This view stands fundamentally at odds with the belief in a ‘new paradigm’ that had transcended or at least domesticated boom and bust cycles. Instead, preceding bubbles are understood as harbingers of what was to come. As Brenda Visano (2006) observes, one has to strike a balance between discerning underlying similarities in various financial crises that have happened in commercial and capitalist economies over the last three centuries and what is new in each instance. From the South Sea Bubble in Britain, which burst in 1720, up to the present, technological innovations in transport and communications have repeatedly opened up new possibilities for investment. Long-distance sea navigation, steam power and railways, automotive road networks, and electronic communications from the telegraph up to the high-speed financial transactions of today have all set the stage and given a particular twist to different financial crises. And in some cases, as in the 2008 one, the financial instruments of investment themselves are also significant innovations. Additionally, there are always historic­ ally specific political and other institutional pressures shaping the dynamics of crisis. Nonetheless, there is a constant pattern, characteristic of capitalism, of innovation leading to expanding speculative investment in some new asset, the corresponding accumulation of debt, and then the realisation that anticipated returns will not be forthcoming, and economic contraction as various agents, including banks, try to limit their losses. Paul Krugman (2008) has argued that economic crises in the 1990s in Latin America (crucially Argentina), Japan and elsewhere in Asia (crucially Thailand) should have been perceived as harbingers of problems that would come home to roost in the highly liberalised capitalisms of the US and Europe, but that the underlying connections were not recognised or were ignored by those with power over policy. Instead, these were seen as only nationally specific crises, not indications of the general state and potential of capitalism. Krugman castigates the view that business cycles have been largely tamed since the Great Depression of 1929, with the application of Keynesian demand stimulus, and primarily through monetary policies that lowered interest rates to boost spending. He argues that the basic negative cycle – doubts about profitable investment reducing the supply of credit in the system, which creates unemployment and poverty, further reducing demand and possibilities for profitable investment – has returned, which he

Salvage Ethnography.indb 41

24/05/2017 15:07:35

42

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

labels ‘depression economics’. Moreover, the only solution as he sees it is a return to Keynesian counter-cyclical spending, that is, government spending and job creation to ‘reboot’ the economy and its mechanisms of demand. The misleading sense of immunity in ‘the West’ to the hazards of the business cycle may also have been exacerbated by the quick but perhaps superficial recovery from the ‘dot.com’ bubble in the US, driven by over-investment in technology stocks, which burst in 2000. The resulting recession was quickly counteracted by lowering interest rates, which fed into the housing bubble and consumption boom that were at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis (Friedman 2011b: 10; Stiglitz 2010: 4). Divergent paths... Another important perspective arises out of the literature on the ‘varieties of capital­ism’ (Hall and Soskice 2001; see also Ingham 2008: 214–26). Rooted in historical and institutional approaches to economics, this perspective emphasises that capital­ism is not just one thing: there are variant national and regional forms, displaying particular features regarding how firms are typically organised, how relations between capital, labour and the state are typically organised, and how credit and the financing of enterprise are managed. Nonetheless, this historical particularity tends to boil down to a continuum between two main types of capital­ism: ‘liberal market economies’ (LMEs) and ‘coordinated market economies’ (CMEs). The former is also sometimes called the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Anglophone’ variety, as it is epitomised by the economies of the US and the UK, and the latter is sometimes called the Rhineland or German model. As Ingham effectively summarises: Economic coordination of firms in LMEs is accomplished by competitive market relations characterised by ‘arm’s length’ – that is, impersonal – market exchange in response to price signals. CMEs rely more extensively on non-market coordination involving networks, strategic interaction and collaboration. (Ingham 2008: 215)

Accordingly, the banking and finance systems of LMEs are more oriented towards rapid returns on investments, while those of CMEs tend to be more ‘patient’ and oriented towards the long term. Clearly, the 2008 crisis had some origins in the economic style of the LMEs. But this broad category also obscures internal differences, in that the crisis was particularly associated with practices in the US and the UK. Some other ‘Anglo-Saxon’ systems, such as those of Canada and Australia, were much less exposed (Konzelmann et al. 2010; on differences between the US and the UK see Hardie and Maxfield 2013). More broadly, this general mode of analysis raises questions about the trend of history. Will these different tendencies in capitalism ultimately converge? Will the LME variety eventually squeeze out the CME variety, with its more rapid wealth accumulation, or will its speculative tendencies eventually weaken it in relation to the more far-sighted Rhineland model? These are imponderable questions from the present vantage point. But

Salvage Ethnography.indb 42

24/05/2017 15:07:35

Theory

43

the distinction is broadly relevant to identifying the causes of an economic crisis, which speaks with a distinctly American-English accent. Shifting cores… Related to the question of the future of varieties of capitalism is the view that capitalism, as a world historical process, develops through the hegemony of a dominant core state and economy (Arrighi 1994; Braudel 1984; Chase-Dunn and Grimes 1995). This is frequently understood as beginning with growth of trade and banking in the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, which were overtaken by Dutch commercial capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the shift was then to Britain and the rise of industrial capitalism in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and finally to the US in the twentieth century, especially with the growth of the modern corporation. Thus in the previous chapter we saw that the foundings of the Banks of England and Scotland were inspired partly by the success of the Bank of Amsterdam at that time, and by the 1980s the ‘big bang’ reforms of the financial sector in the City of London aimed to keep up with the now leading force of American financial capitalism. This view treats this process not as one of pure economic development, but rather as a matter of political economy, as historical combinations of economic, political and military power, that enable certain core countries to become dominant over other peripheral countries through forms of commerce, conquest and empire. Moreover, the rise of a new core is usually precipitated by the decline of an old one, in causally interdependent ways, as the declining core develops dependencies on the rising core to continue finding outlets for profitable investment of capital. Giovanni Arrighi (1994) argued that there is a recurring historical pattern in which the economies of core countries first expand in terms of material production, but that this leads to an over-accumulation of capital, which in turn leads to a phase of ‘financialisation’, in which restless capital is invested abroad, stimulating the development of the upcoming core. An example of part of this process was the heavy investment of British firms in the development of American railroads in the late nineteenth century, which also led to an economic slump from the mid-1870s (for a helpful overview of his work see Arrighi 2009). Arrighi (2008) has also explored the future of this trajectory and the possibility that the rising global economic power of China may herald a new world system that is neither entirely capitalist nor socialist, but some hybrid. Again, this is speculative, and it does not really follow the pattern that he identified in earlier successions of ‘cores’. Nonetheless, the relationship between China and the US, as the current capitalist core, is central to understanding the 2008 crisis, both because the trade imbalance between the two countries helped underwrite the US housing and consumption boom, and because the continued growth of the Chinese economy became a critical part of the global path to economic recovery (Cowling et al. 2011). These facts suggest that China is set to become the new core of the capitalist world economy, if we accept the general paradigm of the long-term migration of cores, and the assumption that this pattern will continue into the future.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 43

24/05/2017 15:07:35

44

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector Impossible pairings…

In his classic study The Great Transformation (1957 [1944]) Karl Polanyi wrote about a cyclical ‘double movement’ of capitalist society, in which the expansion of the free market principle, ‘laissez-faire’, eroded institutions that traditionally provided stability and security, eliciting a counter-action in the realm of politics, as people used law and the state to place limits on the power and dynamics of capitalism. The twentieth-century welfare state is seen as a prime example of this counter-action by those who follow Polanyi’s argument. Polanyi’s vision was of rebalancing and compromise, along the lines of what has come to be known as social democracy. As we know, however, this double movement shifted back in the other direction from the 1970s, with a reassertion of the dominance of capitalist markets (Blyth 2002). Others have been altogether less hopeful about compromise. In an argument indebted to the Marxist tradition for its underlying logic, Wolfgang Streeck (2011) argues that there is a deep incompatibility between capitalism and democracy, which inevitably generates problems, including the crisis of 2008. For Streeck the three decades following World War II, in which capitalism and democracy appeared to grow in compatible ways in ‘the West’, were an exception to the rule. He sees the financialisation of the liberal market economies from the 1970s, and the expansion of mortgage markets and consumer credit that led to 2008, as failed attempts to ameliorate a contracting real economy, beset by inflation, unemployment and under-employment. In the context of crisis, he sees a tug-of-war between financial interests and democratic states, as the latter are compelled towards austerity and sovereign debt default. Streeck does not suggest that socialist revolution is around the corner, but he does believe that these tensions between capitalism, as rule by markets, and democracy, as rule by a politically constituted collective, run deep, and the idea that economic crisis is a disturbance of a natural equilibrium is an illusion. Transforming states… I placed a fair amount of emphasis in the previous chapter on the role of competition in driving the evolution of banking forms in the UK. There are arguments that make competition even more central to the whole story we have been recounting here from various angles. Over a series of writings, Phil Cerny (e.g. 1997, 2010; Cerny and Evans 2000; see also Evans and Lunt 2010a,b) has argued that we have seen a transformation of the modern state since the 1970s, from the model of the ‘industrial welfare state’ that sought to steer capitalism and national markets towards a combination of productivity and political legitimacy to a new model, especially since the 1990s, of the ‘competition state’, in which policy is oriented towards maximising the competitiveness of firms and national populations within an international arena and global markets. The state itself is conceived as an international competitor, but also as the steward of the competitiveness of its internal parts. One of Cerny’s points is that those who have thought of neoliberalism and globalisation as involving the ‘retreat of the state’ have

Salvage Ethnography.indb 44

24/05/2017 15:07:35

Theory

45

misunderstood the situation (2010: 5). The state, in all its variegated complexity, and indeed the community of states have played an active role in furthering these processes, while at the same time being constrained by them. There is an underlying image here of a process in which the state moves from being the cultivator and incubator of companies and markets within its domestic sphere of action to itself coming to resemble a vast company operating within global markets (cf. Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2005). While recognising the pressures the competition state, and a world organised in terms of competition states, places on ordinary citizens and workers, compared with Streeck’s vision of insuperable contradictions between democracy and capitalism, Cerny’s is one of open-ended adaptation, which may bring new opportunities for global cooperation, even as it entails social costs. Leaving normal… Finally, James K. Galbraith’s book The End of Normal (2014) tries to put the 2008 crisis in a longer historical perspective. He argues that it was not just a disruption of a relatively steady economic process, but a signal that the entire paradigm of constant national economic growth, which also became the central paradigm of economic theory, was a unique period that is coming to an end. The predominant growth that ran from the 1950s to around 2000, led particularly by the US, was an exception, not the norm. Against those who argue whether economic austerity or stimulus is the best strategy to get economies back on track, he suggests that a more fundamental shift to a new model of much slower growth is necessary. This would involve more moderate levels of profits and consumption, and re­ distributive policies that stabilise and spread the circulation of wealth, not just for reasons of justice, but because modern, complex and fragile economic systems are endangered by disequilibrium. Galbraith’s critique of the limited dimensions of contemporary economic debates stands on two key premises. First, they do not take material (or ‘biophysical’) conditions seriously enough, failing to realise that cheap energy and resources, now coming to an end, were an essential condition of exceptional growth, and that new digital technologies may put permanent limits on demands for labour in advanced economies. Second, there is a failure to recognise (and attempts to deny) that financial over-expansion and fraud are not just cyclical tendencies or signs of human and institutional corruptibility, but symptoms of declin­ing growth in the underlying real economy. Much of ­Galbraith’s argument sits within the Keynesian tradition, but it is distinctive in trying to place Keynesian economic ideas more firmly in an historical, institutional, organisational and even natural setting that recognises the peculiarity of the twentieth-century paradigm of constant and substantial economic growth. Summing up again… Again, how do we synthesise and prioritise this series of explanatory theories? Broadly, my own view is that capitalism needs to be understood as a process

Salvage Ethnography.indb 45

24/05/2017 15:07:35

46

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

with systemic aspects. That is, we can analyse it up to a point as a set of constant features and self-reproducing relationships but, ultimately, like all things that evolve, it has the potential to transform beyond all recognition. So while on the one hand the study of economic cycles of boom and bust reveal a repeating pattern, as noted, there is also directionality involved, as new kinds of technologies and communications generate new versions of crisis. The observation that capitalisms are varied, and different variants may have different potentials for survival, or feed into as yet unknown forms of economic organisation, is also compatible with this evolutionary perspective. Whether the long narrative of shifting cores of the world economy is an accurate description of real historical process, or an impressive effort to impose order on a messy reality, is difficult to resolve. However, it does direct our attention to the question of how the balance of power between major cores might currently be shifting, and to the complex symbiotic relationship that has developed between the US and China, which is materially involved in the consumption patterns that helped drive the crisis of 2008. Arguments about social contradictions driving history, as in Streeck’s struggle between principles of capitalism and democracy, are always puzzling, because they tell us that the incompatible is nonetheless possible. Such arguments seem to suggest that there must ultimately be resolution of contradiction, while also suggesting that contradiction is part of the normal order of things. Minimally, we can take such arguments as directing our attention to key tensions and dynamics in sociohistorical processes, which are likely to be shaping evolutionary change, even if we cannot discern just how that will happen. It does seem to me that one of the central features in the development of liberal, capitalist, democratic societies has been the harnessing of competitive energies, routinised in various institutional spheres, such as the management of competition between firms (including banks) and between diverse interest groups through political party systems. In a sense, liberal societies have discovered the basic dynamic of competition in driving evolutionary change, and have internalised it, putting it to use in fostering, while also controlling within limits, contending social interests. This is part of what makes them so dynamic. This makes me sympathetic to Cerny’s argument that modern capitalist states have so internalised this principle that it is coming to define how states and their relations in the international arena of markets are conceived, especially by elites occupying influential positions. Of course, ‘it was ever thus’. The mercantilist relations of European states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fiercely competitive. But at that time ‘competition’ was more a fact of existence than a conscious principle, and even ideal, of social organisation. It took the modern liberal state/society that emerged in the following centuries, with its deep internalisation of the competitive prin­ciple, to see it this way. But having come to see it this way, this itself becomes one of the drivers and underlying patterns of social evolution. But to say that economic competition has been deeply institutionalised is not to say that endless high-level growth is feasible. Galbraith’s argument is salutary, reminding us that such growth may have been a limited historical process, not a permanent systemic property of capitalism.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 46

24/05/2017 15:07:35

Theory

47 Conclusion

The literature overviewed here goes into much greater and more technical detail in its efforts to explain the crisis of 2008, and the deeper and longer economic dynamics behind it, than I can enter into. My basic purpose is to give a broad context to help frame this study. But how do these explanations relate to the small-scale, micro, qualitative and ethnographic data that informs the following chapters? Inevitably, there is a wide gap between the particulars of ethnographic description and the vast sweep of long-term social and economic processes. The people I studied were caught up in, but not in any very direct sense the causes of, these larger processes. Most of the people I encountered in my research were mid-level managerial staff, not organisational leaders whose position might give their decisions and actions extra weight in the course of events. This raises an uncomfortable issue. We often turn to micro-scale social research precisely because we want to uncover the springs of human agency underneath the overwhelming scale of unfolding social, historical, political and economic structures. To some degree such research helps us do this. But we must be realistic, not romantic. The agency of individuals is severely limited by circumstance, and can really be amplified to substantially affect the wider courses of causation only in exceptional situations. But that is not to say that human agency is causally insignificant, nor to deny that it is a distinct form of causation. To take the latter point first, however predetermined human actions may be, conscious actions arise out of highly complex interfaces of personality, dispositions, understandings of reality, motivations, intentions, aspirations, hopes and even fantasies. Though much of the time these psychic forces, connected to wider social forces, balance out into fairly predictable courses of action, they have a certain underlying volatility. People do sometimes redirect their lives, sometimes radically and suddenly. This is not to say such shifts do not themselves have causal explanations, it is simply to suggest that the human mind is a particularly complex nexus of causal forces and potentialities, and is an analytically distinct part of social causality for this reason. To turn to the former point, apart from those rare instances where one or a few individuals find themselves in commanding positions and are able to significantly alter the direction of events through their actions, human agency nonetheless operates in aggregate in profound ways. Just as the constant erosion of water creates vast canyons, the steady, long-term alignment of human will and action towards common ends helps create many of the deep structures of society. It is an illusion to think that, just because people’s actions conform to a larger social pattern, agency has been eliminated. Going with the flow is a kind of agency, albeit often the easiest kind. However, what those common ends are can matter greatly. If large masses of people orient their actions towards maximising individual consumption, one set of guiding structures will emerge, and if they orient their actions towards the salvation of their souls, the preservation of natural resources or the destruction of enemies, other sets of guiding structures will be stabilised. Of course many such large-scale channellings of behaviour are happening at once,

Salvage Ethnography.indb 47

24/05/2017 15:07:36

48

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

and many individuals will be caught up in several of them at the same time. The point is that, over time, the balances between such large-scale patterns of collective action do shift. In ways that no one agent controls, the overall directions of human action do change in consequential ways. The capacity for any individual to affect large-scale social trends is minimal, but when aligned with the actions of large numbers of others, the agency of the individual is nonetheless essential to large-scale social trends, whether these are conventional and established or emergent and novel. Because of its origins in traditional anthropological research, ethnography has a deep affinity with the study of small-scale societies. Its method evokes that earliest period in human history when all social groups were relatively small, and the role of the individual was less dwarfed by the social whole (although human possibilities were limited by material conditions, and small-scale societies can have their own pressures towards conformity). Used in the context of modern mass society, ethnography can be paradoxical. Either one has to filter out and forget the wider context, focusing on explanations at the micro-social scale, or if one tries to include that wider context, the effect can be one of profound dis­proportion between data and explanation. I have chosen the latter path, and think we have to try to make a virtue of this tension. We can perhaps use this disproportion to help force ourselves to confront and grapple with the very real distance between actual lives and experiences and the larger causal forces that shape those lives. Leaving these more philosophical reflections and returning to the study at hand, the purpose of the larger framing presented in this and the previous chapter, historical and theoretical, is to help us identify the milieu and moment in which the ethnographic data was collected, the mood of the time, but also to put that into perspective. It was a time when big changes were afoot, as the old and somewhat staid Bank of Scotland tried to maintain its position by joining forces with Halifax in HBOS, in order to maintain competitiveness with its rivals. It was a time when staff were confronted with a discourse of ‘modernisation’ and the need to keep up with current business practice, and to let go of cherished traditions from the business that they had inherited. It was a time when pressures on retail banking, the selling of financial products to customers, were pushed to the fore to an unprecedented degree. At the time these trends were experienced as ‘just the way things were’, whether or not one liked it or agreed with it. Those who resisted the trend too much were out of step. It is only with the kind of wider perspective traced out here that we can begin to see people’s reactions to the changes going on about them, not just as being in or out of step with the local moment, but as harbingers of deeper and wider historical currents that would eventually break on unseen reefs.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 48

24/05/2017 15:07:36

4

Culture: nations, banks and the organisation of power and social life

There are several reasons for working with and examining the concept of culture in a study such as this. The culture concept has been central to anthropology and has become increasingly prominent in sociology in recent years, and these two disciplines fundamentally inform this book. It has also become a key concept in the subfield of organisational studies, where the idea of ‘organisational cultures’ has become very influential. And this concern with culture radiates from more general social scientific studies of the culture of organisations into more applied fields, such as business studies, which in turn have had more direct influence on the people in my study. So notions of organisational culture were apparent in the language of my informants in the Bank, already a part of their common-sense discourse. And of course, for all these reasons, it was in my mind from the beginning of the fieldwork, and simultaneously operating as both a ‘social science’ and an ‘everyday’ idea, for me and for those I studied. Talking about the concept of identity, Brubaker and Cooper advise keeping a clear separation between what they call, following Bourdieu, ‘categories of practice’ and ‘categories of analysis’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 4–6) – in other words, between the everyday terms through which people make sense of their own lives, and the terms through which social scientists attempt to comprehend those lives in a wider comparative frame. This is impossible to do cleanly in this case, and in many others. However, we can explore the tensions that appear between ‘practical’ and ‘analytic’ uses and meanings. I examine the social science concept of culture more closely and critically in the middle of this chapter. First, I provide some examples, drawing on field notes, of how culture appeared in my fieldwork. Ethnographic intimations The term ‘culture’ and its problematisation arose in preliminary scoping meetings I had even before regular fieldwork had begun. My entry into the Bank as a field site had been negotiated between figures at fairly high levels in both the Bank of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, mobilising social connections and organisational ties. Three people in the HR division then known as

Salvage Ethnography.indb 49

24/05/2017 15:07:36

50

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

‘Group Learning and Development’ (GL&D, see Chapter 1) were assigned as my gatekeepers, to advise me on the structures of the Bank and practical ways to make the research work, and to serve as sounding boards for my ideas. Jessica and Grant were managing directors, and Douglas worked closely under them. All three were to leave the Bank before my fieldwork year was over, choosing to move out of what was clearly a difficult and uncertain context. In one of my early meetings with them the conversation turned to the failed effort by BoS a little over a year earlier, in 1999, to set up a US banking relationship with Christian fundamentalist and televangelist Pat Robertson. When news of this deal broke, protests were raised in Scotland, particularly over Robertson’s antihomosexuality views. As the deal entered rocky waters, Robertson sent a reporter from his television show to Scotland to make sense of the uproar, who reported back that Scotland was a ‘dark land’ in the grip of homosexuality and out of touch with its Christian roots. The damage to relations was irreparable and soon the deal was abandoned. Jessica, Grant and Douglas presented this as a case study in BoS culture and behaviour. Grant argued that the banking deal itself was sound and ethical, but that BoS severely miscalculated the reputation of Robertson in Scotland. In his view Peter Burt, then Chief Executive of BoS, based his judgement of Robertson on his own experiences in the US, where Robertson was more ‘normal’. (Burt had taken his MBA at the Wharton business school and then worked for a period with Hewlett-Packard, both in the US.) But Grant also thought that Robertson offended not just liberal and secular views that supported gay rights but also a certain Presbyterian conservatism and reserve, and feelings about the proper separation of religion and worldly business matters. Obviously Grant’s interpretation does not concord neatly with Weber’s classic thesis about Calvinism and the ‘spirit of capitalism’ (Weber 2002), which argued that Puritan and Presbyterian beliefs motivated believers to seek confirmation of their salvation in their worldly business ventures. However, I think Grant was commenting more on his sense of the then current, somewhat secularised Presbyterian ethos of the Bank, in which controversy was avoided and banking was regarded as an especially dignified business. Be that as it may, this episode reveals cultural disjuncture, at a national level between the US and Scotland/Europe, but also at an organisational level, between the Bank’s top leadership and its rank and file. At this meeting we also discussed problems of unity and coherence across the Bank’s various divisions. We spoke of how an individual might at once be both a large business customer and also a personal retail banking customer, and the need for a joined up relationship between the Bank’s parts and this individual. But it was suggested that the necessary cross-communication and cooperation between divisions were often resisted. There was in their view in-built competition between the divisions and a great deal of autonomous control within divisions and subunits. My sense was that Jessica and Grant saw this as an example of the kind of problematic institutional culture that it was their job, as HR managing directors, to identify and raise to the rest of the Bank, despite resistance. And I think they may have seen my research role as relevant to articulating this problem.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 50

24/05/2017 15:07:36

Culture

51

Another of my preliminary meetings was with Alan Cameron,1 the Bank’s head archivist. Cameron had also written an accessible and richly illustrated history of BoS as part of its tercentennial celebrations in 1995. When I asked if there was a ‘culture of the Bank’, he offered a somewhat deeper historical portrait, saying he had felt this strongly when working on the history of the Bank. He said that BoS contained many family connections, both among employees and with ­customers, and that there was a strong ‘marriage market’ within the Bank. The limited scale of BoS meant that many of the staff knew each other.2 Whatever the formal structure, there was always an easier way to get things done. Informal lines of communication were very strong and good. There was of course a downside of internal knowledge and memory affecting one’s reputation within the Bank. If you made enemies people could mess up your life. Behind all this there was a kind of Presbyterian rectitude. Sexual misconduct was responded to with great disfavour. Affairs among staff were frowned upon and the parties separated by relocation. The upside of this ‘culture’ was that there was a strong ‘family feeling’, one that was not simply paternalistic. Another downside was that the Bank tended to nurse the incompetent, rather than bite the bullet and let them go. This general pattern held up until the 1980s, but was very much less true by the time of my research. It is a broad characterisation that I heard time and again during my fieldwork. Cameron’s comments, and those of Jessica and Grant above, point to the more material underpinnings of ‘culture’, in terms of organisational size, scale, spatial distribution and power hierarchies. I will return to this point. The preliminary meetings with Jessica, Grant and Douglas were held in a large rambling training centre, located in a very ‘nice’ residential neighbourhood in south central Edinburgh. The building fit into the area, appearing like a group of linked residences, not a large, vertical, business-purpose building. It was known at the time of these meetings that before my formal fieldwork would begin the following September, the training centre would be relocated to a much more impersonal business building in north-west central Edinburgh. Part of the early rationale for basing my fieldwork at the original location was precisely that it operated as a hub that brought in staff from around the Bank for various short training courses. But as part of the reorganising that was going on, GL&D was being trimmed down, and some of its staff training functions were being devolved to the various divisions of the Bank. Increasingly training courses were being provided by outside contractors and held in hotel function suites. Meanwhile, GL&D concentrated more narrowly on the training of staff at managerial level, or with ‘management potential’, from across the Bank, while also maintaining other core HR functions. When I began fieldwork in the new, open-plan office building, I was struck by how the non-descript corridor between two main areas had a series of aerial photographs on the wall of the previous training centre. There was something wistful and nostalgic about this, like photographs of a recently lost relative, a trace of a happier time. During the year of fieldwork I became accustomed to what I called in my field notes ‘leaving rituals’. Generally, when staff members were leaving the GL&D group there would be a gathering towards the end of the day in the social area,

Salvage Ethnography.indb 51

24/05/2017 15:07:36

52

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

with refreshments, a card, some humorous presents and perhaps some games. These happened with some frequency, and diminishing fanfare, over the course of my fieldwork, as GL&D was gradually whittled down under the new regime. Early on, people tended to leave on their own initiative; later on, it was more likely that their position had been discontinued. A particularly vivid example happened near the beginning of my fieldwork when Douglas was leaving to work on a project at Edinburgh University. A fairly key figure in the unit, Douglas seemed to command considerable respect and affection from his work peers. That day almost all the GL&D staff went to lunch together at a nearby Indian restaurant, where Douglas regaled those assembled with long, winding, humorous stories. This was done in a style that I particularly associate with Scottish men of his generation, in which the story keeps taking new, unexpected turns, and the speaker is infectiously amused by his own account.3 Later we gathered in the social area by the coffee machine back at the workplace. Everyone was working on a crossword puzzle in which the answers to each of the twenty-six clues (A–Z) were pieces of trivia about Douglas. A colleague who had known him the longest finished first. Douglas received an Edinburgh University T-shirt, in acknowledgement of his new employer, and a bucket of flour, a visual pun on his Scots pronunciation of ‘bouquet of flowers’. He also received a framed picture by a character artist, featuring all the elements in the crossword puzzle. After the presentation of gifts, Douglas started to make a speech, but kept it short, saying he had not expected to start a new career at his age. At one point, after a few halting words, he just said ‘to hell with change’, which I took to be an expression of his contempt for the process GL&D was going through. He concluded with the wish that people would find what they want in life. A point of contrast. In the latter half of my fieldwork year, I had been increasingly working with the Diversity Team, set up to merge and rejuvenate equality and diversity policies between the two banks soon after the merger. Gwen, from the Halifax, was the leader of this team, which I worked with in a participant observational capacity, helping with research on carer policies (i.e. for staff with personal caring responsibilities) and auditing gender pay gaps. She frequently expressed frustration and impatience with the slower, more conservative style of working that was characteristic of BoS. The Diversity Team met alternately in Halifax and Edinburgh. Before one meeting in Edinburgh towards the end of the fieldwork, Gwen and another Halifax-based member of the Team were asking how redeployments of BoS HR staff were going, knowing that there had been a recent final shake-up of staff in that area. I was conveying that there was a predictable amount of unease and distress among staff affected. Their responses were very much along the lines of ‘get used to it’. They seemed to feel that BoS staff were now having to adapt to an environment that they had been accustomed to for some time. I detected an element of Schadenfreude in their responses – we’ve had to go through it, now it’s your turn. They spoke of how the staff at Halifax now came and went with such regularity that little notice was taken – no send-off, or ‘leaving rituals’ as I put it above. You just noticed one day that that someone who was there had gone, their desk empty. These differences in attitudes towards ‘leaving’ indicated something about conflicting ‘cultures’ of the two organisations.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 52

24/05/2017 15:07:36

Culture

53 Conceptual interlude: considering culture

Before further considering the permutations of culture at play during my fieldwork, let me examine the concept itself more closely and critically. First, I ask what is culture? Then, where do we find it? I tend to use the term ‘culture’ somewhat differently from most people in the social sciences. The dominant convention is to define culture in terms of ideation, as a matter of knowledge, ideas, values, beliefs, symbols and so on. Thus in an article titled ‘Making sense of culture’ the sociologist Orlando Patterson offers this definition: ‘collectively made, reproduced, and unevenly shared knowledge about the world that is both informational and meaningful … shared schemata that are internally embodied and externally represented’ (Patterson 2014: 6–7). This nicely highlights the unequal distribution of knowledge-as-culture, a view with which I sympathise, but in the standard fashion, knowledge, information and meaning are at the core of the definition. Whatever Patterson’s refinements, this reflects the general tendency in conceptualisation, perhaps most clearly exemplified by Clifford Geertz’s widely influential anthropological treatment: The concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (Geertz 1973: 5)

This ideational approach to culture itself has a history in the social sciences. As Chris Jenks (2005: ch. 3) has argued, and evident in Geertz’s invocation of Weber, one of its roots lies in the academic milieu of late-nineteenth-century Germany. Arising out of neo-Kantian ideas and debates of the time was the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ (or ‘human’, Geisteswissenschaft) sciences, made by Weber and others before him. In short, Weber, searching for a middle path among his contemporaries, argued that the historical and sociological study of human beings was inescapably embedded in the production of meaning and value (Käsler 1988: ch. 6). Weber believed that because human phenomena are fundamentally shaped by meaning-making and meaning-oriented behaviour, which includes the activity of the social scientist, it could not simply apply the ‘positivistic’ methods of the natural sciences. Human sciences are messier, involving a constant effort to decide what is important, to disarticulate factual and normative understandings on the part of the researcher, and to grasp how the causal processes of human social relations are shaped by our orientation to meanings. The point to appreciate here is that Weber’s idea of culture is articulated primarily in the context of these methodological problems, not in terms of defining an analytically separable sphere of social life, called ‘culture’, characterised by ideational stuff. There is also a more proximate cause of the ideational model of culture in the social sciences. Adam Kuper (1999: ch. 2) gives a very illuminating account of the influence of the sociologist Talcott Parsons on American anthropology, and his role as a key mediator of Weber’s ideas in the mid-twentieth-century social

Salvage Ethnography.indb 53

24/05/2017 15:07:36

54

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

sciences. In his ‘general theory of action’, Parsons sought to resolve the tensions with which Weber wrestled. The mature statement of Parsons’ theory is found in The Social System (1951), which posited that all social action could be understood as being oriented to four subsystems: physiological/organic, personality, social and cultural. The first two are concerned with bodily and psychological needs and processes, the ‘social system’ with the dynamics of social roles, positions and structures, and the ‘cultural system’ with the creation and maintenance of core values and knowledge. It is a mark of the dominance of Parsons in this period that he was quite successful in convincing many anthropologists that the proper understanding of their discipline and its special role was as the study of ‘culture’, now construed more narrowly as symbols, meanings, cognitive models, values and so on (Kuper 1999: 69–70; see also Hearn 2006: 202–3). Today, even while Parsons is long out of fashion in most circles, his highly ideational conception of ‘culture’ as a distinct dimension of social life has spread and cemented. This is evident not only in many strains of anthropology, but also in such subfields as cultural studies, cultural sociology and cultural history. My main objection to this tendency is that I simply do not find it helpful to think of culture as a ‘subsystem’ or ideational ‘layer’ of a wider reality. I have no objection to some social analyses focusing on the ideational or ideological dimension, tracing out connections between symbols and meanings and such. But this strikes me as much too one-sided for a conception of culture, which for me is precisely about looking for what ties the various analytic ‘subsystems’ and ‘layers’ together, in a more holistic analysis. My own use of the culture concept harks back to older, frankly less theorised conventions in anthropology, when it was used more as a covering term for all aspects – material, organisational, i­ deational – of a ‘way of life’. I think of the concept of culture as directing attention to the tendency towards a degree of cohesion and congruence across the entire range of social phenomenon, not to an ideational ‘layer’. It is more like the evidence of a gravitational field that pulls in and orients various elements, while also generating tensions within that field – and with the potential to either intensify or weaken and disperse. A couple of perhaps counter-intuitive comparisons with other concepts may help elaborate. Despite the prevalent use of Weber’s idea of ‘meaningfully oriented action’ to devise a concept of culture, for me culture is more akin to Weber’s notion of ‘elective affinity’ (Swedberg 2005: 83–4). That somewhat mercurial idea suggests that certain social features tend to become aligned and mutually reinforcing in specific historical situations. Typically, Weber used the term ‘elective affinity’ when discussing the relationships between sets of (often religious) beliefs and the structural positions of vocational and class groups (e.g. Weber 1978: 1208). The implication is of causal interaction among parts, but not determination of one by another (Kalberg 2002: lxxvii). From another angle, in Marx, the space for ‘culture’ as conventionally understood is frequently occupied by terms such as ‘ideology’ and ‘superstructure’. In his famous summary statement of the idea of the ‘mode of production’ (Marx 1996 [1859]: 159–61), there is a general suggestion that economic structures will have a determining effect on all other social and ideological structures, and that internal systemic conflicts in the ‘economic base’ will

Salvage Ethnography.indb 54

24/05/2017 15:07:36

Culture

55

necessarily lead to systemic social transformation. We can doubt these hypotheses about structural determination, and still recognise the general insight that the whole set of relations between such disparate things as the material organisation of production, institutions of law and government, philosophy, aesthetics, beliefs and so on form a distinctive pattern, are somehow mutually adjusted to each other and reinforcing, no matter what complex internal tensions exist between them. Weber’s ‘elective affinity’ is rather tentative and Marx’s ‘mode of production’ rather totalising. But they both direct our attention to the connections that cut across social practices and institutions, rather than blocking out an ideational domain for enquiry. That is why they resonate for me when I think about culture. But what is the ultimate source of this ‘gravitational pull’? In a word, power. My point is not simply that culture obscures and legitimates power, or expressively reflects power relations. That would return us to the ‘layer-cake’ approach I am trying to avoid. Rather, the point is that all social relations can create and amplify human powers, and we have a fundamental need of power, both individually and collectively. Power is at the root of human social organisation and all forms of organisation generate power (Mann 1986: 6–10). Thus the general congruence and pulling together of various social forms (e.g. ideologies, institutions, organis­ ations) across various social dimensions (e.g. economy, politics, law, religion, education, arts, science) happen because the aggregate, at least for a time, succeeds as a power-generating and power-deploying system. But all social ‘systems’ are ultimately processes, abstracted from time and inevitable change. Culture, as I am defining it here, is always shifting, tension-ridden and evolving. It is characterised by both solidarity and conflict, both conservation and change. In short, culture is evidence of power and its organisation. This last formulation directs us to the second question guiding this section: where do we find culture? Traditionally, ‘cultures’, plural, as specific instances of the general phenomenon, are associated with ‘societies’, ‘states’ and ‘ethnic groups’. There is now an extensive literature critiquing the idea of any simple one-toone correspondences here (Bashkow 2004; Brightman 1995; Hannerz 1986; Wolf 1984). My own approach simply asserts, as a heuristic principle, that wherever we find relatively enduring and complex forms of social organisation, this can be taken as evidence that these enjoy the requisite power to survive, and we can expect them to exhibit some degree of culture. As people normally find themselves living through multiple, often cross-cutting and embedded organisations, they find themselves situated within an array of similarly cross-cutting and embedded cultures. To adumbrate, people’s lives are organised by families, households, friendship networks, recreational, voluntary and interest associations, workplaces, professions, corporate divisions, religious organisations, states and so on. Each of these will exhibit some degree of local culture, corresponding to the degree of power that organisational form holds over its members. For some people many of these organisational contexts are closely aligned and reinforcing, while for others they are more loosely associated. In the present study, certain organisational contexts come to the fore and others are necessarily in the background. I had very limited insight into the diverse home

Salvage Ethnography.indb 55

24/05/2017 15:07:36

56

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

and private lives of the people in this study. This fieldwork was focused on the workplace and the various organisational contexts that shaped that environment. Central here were the ‘three banks’: HBOS, BoS and Halifax (and, to a degree, Capital Bank, embedded within BoS). And within these there were distinctive parts, such as the major divisions of the Bank, which also had different ‘shadings’ of culture. My informants frequently understood each of the three banks as having a distinctive ‘culture’, I would say because the concept of culture I have just put forward is actually quite intuitive and common sense, especially in relation to the large formal organisations that shape our lives. However, as I suggested at the outset of this chapter, this is complicated by the fact that my informants were generally exposed to a conventional language of ‘organisational culture’ that now permeates the business world and was a routine part of the conceptual apparatus of HR work, the area in which I was based. The idea of ‘organisational culture’ is also basic to the field of organisation studies in the social sciences (e.g. Frost et al. 1991; Parker 2000; Sackmann 1997; Smircich 1983). As I prepared for and conducted fieldwork, I read up in this area, looking for useful conceptual handles to aid the research. Although broadly relevant, nothing really grabbed me, precisely because the concept of culture in this literature tends to follow the ideational paradigm I have been critiquing above. So while I strongly confirm the basic connection between organisation and culture that this literature makes, I am still at odds with the concept of culture it generally uses. One part of this literature, exemplified especially by the work of Geert Hofstede (1996, 1997), has focused particularly on how national cultures impinge on organisational cultures. This is highly salient for the present study, because the encounter between BoS and Halifax was experienced and articulated to a degree as an encounter between Scottish and English national cultures (of course with complicating layers of notions of British culture and a general culture of the banking industry). But whereas Hofstede’s interest is primarily in national cultures as implicit knowledge schema that threaten misunderstanding between business organisations, in a fine-grained ethnographic study such as this one the issue is more the conscious, quasi-rhetorical use of notions of culture as a way of making sense of conflicts and differences, which were particularly acute during the early days of merger. The conception of culture I have proffered implies that there are genuine cultural differences, or at least gradations of difference, between organisations and between nations. But this study is as much about the situated use of the idea of those differences as it is about those differences themselves. Permutations of national and organisational cultures I turn now to how these cultural differences were invoked and questioned by my informants. I draw on field notes, interviews, and especially on the written responses to the open-ended email questionnaire I administered with mid-level managerial staff across the bank, precisely because this gave me one of the widest ‘slices’ through the bank population, and specifically asked questions about national differences and organisational culture, turning up an interesting range of responses.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 56

24/05/2017 15:07:36

Culture

57

Isaac, Associate Director in charge of training in GL&D, had been with the Bank for 27 years in 2001, moving from a background in branch banking and lending about eight years previously. This career path – beginning with standard branch service and then moving into a more core and managerial role – was not untypical for his generation and was a narrative I heard recounted many times. By the time I did my fieldwork, however, it was increasingly common for employees to start as university graduates and be tracked into a more specialised unit, rather than necessarily starting in a branch (often straight out of school) with the standard customer-facing duties. Isaac had oversight of the provision of training courses for bank staff. These could be ‘menu’ courses, that is, relatively set and provided on a regular basis, or ‘bespoke’, that is, designed in response to a specific need articulated by some unit within the Bank. Staff members could sign up for a course on their own initiative, but often they would be encouraged or instructed to by a line manager, in response to issues arising in professional development reviews. Some courses on offer simply concerned technical skills, such as using statistical software. However, the courses that GL&D provided, several of which I attended, primarily concerned softer ‘people’ skills and had names such as: Presentation Skills; Influencing and Persuading; Managing the Team; Dealing with Differences; Coping with Stress; Practical Teamwork; and Negotiating Skills. Some of these courses were taught by core GL&D staff, but most were bought in as services from outside consultants, who tended to run the same courses for the Bank on a regular basis. GL&D staff would design these courses and allow consultants scope to customise them as they saw fit. In an informal, unrecorded interview early in the fieldwork I asked Isaac if he found the category ‘Scottishness’ important in his work. He responded (paraphrasing from field notes): I think there is such a thing as ‘Scottishness’, and it’s evident in BoS.… There are Scottish traits: being loyal to the institution; we come across as inherently modest; don’t like to be publicly recognised; a lack of confidence. People [i.e. Scots] get hung up on the perception of England – as always confident, sure of themselves, aggressive even. When the English win a football match they’re ‘world beaters’ all of a sudden. Whereas Scots expect to lose at football, and identify with that role. But Scots could do well to learn from the English. I’ve worked in England, and the people are nice and friendly. Certain sectors of the media came across as having an attitude of superiority, and this can aggravate things. It’s a matter of perceptions. Humour is important. Scots have a loser syndrome. We like to laugh at ourselves and our failures.

He then went on to offer an example from his own work. He described how he regularly taught a course where he asked the attendees ‘What is this culture thing?’ In other words, what difference does culture make? He would set a task and tell people to talk about their achievements for two minutes. In his experience, Scots would normally think this was much too long a time, whereas people from other cultures, such as England and the US, would think it was not enough.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 57

24/05/2017 15:07:36

58

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

This conversation hit on themes that came up repeatedly in my fieldwork. The basic stereotypical contrast, of the English as overly confident and the Scots as diffident, became very familiar to me. But so did the ambivalent evaluation of this: while excessive English confidence could be off-putting, the reticence of the Scots was a limitation, not always a virtue. And the generic concept of culture being used here is one that, unlike my own, refers more specifically and ‘thinly’ to a sphere of values and representations. It is about ways of thinking and feeling that can perhaps be changed and improved. One of the ‘menu’ courses I attended midway through the fieldwork was called ‘Assertiveness’.4 As if scripted by Isaac, the theme of Scottish diffidence was promin­ent. The basic premise of the course was that it is good to be ‘assertive’ when relating adult to adult, that it is a necessary part of balanced social inter­action that all parties have a degree of assertiveness. However, the view of the course was that most people have difficulties with this because they normally incline towards a ‘passive’ or an ‘aggressive’ position. So the course was meant to help deal with both these ‘types’. I found the idea that people tend to conform to certain standard personality types prevalent on these courses and their instruction materials. Simple psychometric instruments were often deployed early on in a course to locate people along some scale (assertive versus non-assertive, for example) and open up the issue of ‘who are we’ in this group and ‘what are our individual tendencies’. The one-day course followed a standard pattern. The morning began by defining key terms, doing a self-assessment questionnaire and watching an instructional video, one of the many of these featuring the comedian John Cleese, called ‘Straight Talk’. The afternoon was taken up with one-on-one role-playing in small teams, with members taking turns to play roles and to observe. Near the beginning, this unusually quiet group was asked to go around the table and introduce themselves and say why they were here, that is, to characterise their own disposition with regard to the course theme. As we went around the table I made a list in my notes, calculating ‘nationality’ by accent, and confirming any questions about this in subsequent conversations (see Table 4.1). Now, this group was not a random sample: they were selected for the course because they had been identified as ‘passive’ or ‘aggressive’. Nonetheless, the cultural stereotype is underscored, and further broadly aligned with gender stereo­types as well. All but Robert, Giannis, Susan and myself were ‘CSOs’, that is, customer service officers, which is to say at the lowest grade in the organisation, and these also tended to be younger. So the stereotypes also mapped on to the promotional hierarchy and age. I spoke to the instructor later, and he said it was the most passive group overall that he had ever dealt with on the course, that it frequently felt like pulling teeth just to get people to say anything. So a certain ‘luck of the draw’ seems to have made this group an extreme example. The conversations I had during the lunch and coffee breaks, in smaller groups and one to one, tended to confirm these differences in disposition. Nonetheless, on the day, despite the stereotypical patterning described, I did not find people readily making connections between Scottishness, Englishness and degrees of assertiveness. It may be that this characterisation was deliberately avoided, to avoid friction around what

Salvage Ethnography.indb 58

24/05/2017 15:07:36

Culture

59

Table 4.1. Characterisations of delegates on the 'Assertiveness’ course Delegate

Nationality

Disposition

Jennifer Lorna Jill Giselle Peter Robert Giannis Myself Susan Leslie Davey

Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish English English Greek American English Scottish Scottish

Passive Passive Passive Passive Passive, but ‘aggressive on the phone’ ‘troubles dealing with people’ Aggressive – ‘conflict with a passive co-worker’ Passive Passive

was a heightened issue during the merger. But I also think this was because the delegates were there as part of a very personalised experience, having been told they individually had a problem with passiveness or aggression that they needed to deal with. This may have been compounded by the general tendency to think in terms of relatively fixed personality types on these courses. This moment of the fieldwork supported Isaac’s characterisation, but did not reveal an active discourse linking assertiveness, which admittedly is not quite the same thing as confidence, to nationality. However, in the email questionnaire I administered, a set of conventional under­standings around this issue was evident. I included this item: Scottish and English people tend to be different from one another. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? What is the basis of your answer?

The ‘agree or disagree’ formulation was there to help motivate responses but, understandably, very few respondents were willing to simply take it at face value. Out of a total of 201 responses (two people left the item blank), a little over half indicated they agreed or ‘tended to agree’, while a little under half said they dis­ agreed, or otherwise tried to qualify the question. So clearly there was no simple consensus or large majority opinion in this group. Moreover, there was a great deal of nuance, variation and qualification within these responses. The point of the open-ended written responses was to capture some of this diversity, to compare with the everyday talk I was encountering in fieldwork. I found these responses to be quite representative of that everyday talk, albeit written and often somewhat more reflective. In general I present whole responses to questions, and it will become apparent that whatever theme I am focusing on in a particular quote, several other themes raised in this study may also be evident. Frequently the difference between Scots and English was summed up as one of national pride:5

Salvage Ethnography.indb 59

24/05/2017 15:07:36

60

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

I think there is a difference in that Scottish people take more pride in their country, i.e. they are proud to be Scottish and of what the country has achieved, given its size. To an extent this is historical view but it is still relevant today. (162, Scottish, BoS, Corporate, male) I agree with the statement. Scottish people have more nationalistic pride. The English people represent the largest population but are made to feel they are discriminating if they pursue anything with a nationalistic voice. Also the intrinsic culture of the English population means that we seem to get less excited than the other nationals. (127, British, Halifax, Retail, male) No I don’t agree. I’m proud to regard myself as Scottish but regard the English/ Scottish issue as healthy fun and rivalry. It’s the idiots that take National Pride too far and to [the] verge of violence. (130, Scottish but born in England, BoS, Group, male) Generally speaking yes, I’d agree with that statement. The Scottish people are more ‘national’ and inward looking. They tend to have more Presbyterian views and are therefore more reserved people, more introverted, less spontaneous. The English tend to have a ‘we’re right’ attitude towards life. This may stem from the old ‘empire’ attitude. The English have less national pride and are more flexible to change. I think the English culture is moving closer towards the US whereas the Scottish culture is that of a dependent island. (165, English, Halifax, Group, male)

The familiar trope of antagonism around sports, especially football, was unsurprisingly evident. Scots have a reputation for supporting any team that is playing against England, an attitude that the English do not normally reciprocate. I would tend to agree. The crucial difference is attitudinal. We all look the same, speak the same language, use the same currency and have the same Queen; so the big stuff is the same. Scots have a very well defined national identity and English people do not. There is a sort of love/hate thing going on as well. Neither could survive without the other and yet there can be a good deal of needle, especially towards the English. There isn’t the same needle going the other way is my observation. I remember being quite shocked at how much Scots wanted England to lose at football – almost pathological. (194, British and English but with Celtic roots, BoS, Retail, male) Agree, largely because Scots tend to characterise themselves in ways which make them the polar opposite of how they perceive English people. So for example, English football fans have a reputation for being trouble-makers, so Scottish fans (the Tartan Army) are always extra-friendly and well-behaved simply to make the English fans look even worse by comparison. Having said that, Scotland and England as countries are now so similar that these distinctions count less than they used to – after all, a high street in Scotland is pretty much identical to a high street in any other part of the UK. (078, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Graduate Scheme, male)

In many ways this ‘attitudinal’ pattern epitomises the ideational concept of culture. While some regard it as harmless rivalry (more likely Scots) and others find it discomforting (more likely English), it seems to float above ‘the big

Salvage Ethnography.indb 60

24/05/2017 15:07:36

Culture61 stuff ’ – appearance, language, currency, monarchy and the high street. It is highly symbolic, but the symbols of football and sport seem to have a life of their own. It is not obvious how they relate to deeper political and cultural tensions. Another theme that came up frequently was that of ‘parochialism’ and ‘insularity’. Agree. Scottish people are broadly nationalistic, tending towards parochial narrowminded. English are more open minded and prepared for change. (181, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Corporate, male) English tend to be less parochial, from having spent 3 years living and working in Edinburgh I believe the Scots feel the English to be arrogant and in general I think the Scots have a ‘chip on their shoulder’ about England and the English. (016, English, BoS, Corporate, male) I would agree with the statement. I think Scots tend to be more parochial and inward looking than the English, although this is obviously a generalism. Many of the Scots I have worked with in England have been loath to ‘immigrate’ south of the border, but once here are often reluctant to return. (131, British, BoS, Business, male) I will answer this a different way. I have now lived in many parts of the UK and think every area has its own uniqueness of personality which make it different. There is as much difference between Southampton and Manchester as between Aberdeen and Edinburgh. The ‘Scottishness’ does tend to be something the media have driven hand in hand with politicians of late, and I must admit when I go back North of the Border I find it difficult to understand some of the insular views which seem to be expressed. The Scots used to be proud of the influence they had on the rest of the World but now seem to be focused so much on themselves they lose the bigger picture. The English just wondered what all the fuss was about. (006, British – ‘but I would support Scotland in a sporting event!’ – BoS, Corporate, male)

However, it was not uncommon to hear this accusation of Scottish insularity inverted, playing on the reputation of the English as reluctant to engage other cultures, even as tourists abroad: I think all people differ and without lurching into stereotypes I think the Scots do tend to differ from the English in a number of ways: • I don’t think we take ourselves so seriously (take football for example). • I think we have a drier, more experience-based sense of humour. • I think we are more ‘cutting’ in our observations and friendships. • I think we are much more open and willing to experience new things, embrace cultures and mix with people from other countries. The English tend to be much more xenophobic and insular and almost afraid to acknowledge that there is a world or anything different or better outside their own parameters. (152, Scottish, BoS, Retail, male)

Using a well established formulation, one respondent pithily summed up the pattern of cultural antagonisms thus:

Salvage Ethnography.indb 61

24/05/2017 15:07:36

62

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

Scottish people are anti-English, but English people are not anti-Scottish. (English people hate the French instead!) (064, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Retail, female)

In my experience there is a wide range of attitudes towards this antagonism, from both the Scots and the English, ranging from not taking it too seriously to genuinely entrenched though largely circumscribed hostility and resentment. One of my key informants in GL&D, Angus, spoke of his own discomfort on this point in an interview. Angus is Scottish but his wider family is quite intermarried across the Scottish/English divide and beyond. We spoke of how he felt about and dealt with these tensions, for instance in a staff management training context. I asked if he ever had to deal with people expressing these ‘cultural’ hostilities. He replied: I have had comments like that and I usually feel embarrassed and it’s part of my nature to try and create harmony in any group gathering or team or whatever and I do find some of these things embarrassing. My niece is married to a guy who’s English but I did actually ask him the other day, did he really think of himself as English, because he’s lived for more than half his life in Scotland. But he just … he has an English accent and people say unkind things, say cruel things, take the Mickey out of him about things like football, which he has no interest in. So I have found myself interjecting and saying ‘Look, this is silly. This has gone far enough. This is embarrassing.’

As Angus says, he is by nature a peace-maker, but I also think his unease with this issue was more common in the staff training environment generally, precisely because these people were by profession and inclination attuned to matters of social interaction and team building. But my wider point, illustrated by Angus’s words, is that there are complex gradations of attitudes towards this antagonism, however routinised it may appear on the surface. Let me return now to the question of cultural confidence, which was also prevalent in the survey responses to the same question. The perception of a marked difference here was broadly confirmed, and I provide numerous quotes to give a sense of the full spectrum of the sentiments and ideas expressed: I think this is true. The degree of difference depends on the region. I deal mostly with London and find them to be much more confident than Scots. Scots assume that people know what they know and so don’t speak up. The London view seems to be that you should point out the obvious or just speak to be seen. It’s about confidence v. diffidence. (176, not indicated but probably Scottish, BoS, Retail, male) Different in terms of ‘self-confidence’ – I believe that because the English come over as being more articulate; they project an image of confidence. Whether they have it or not may be a different matter. (138, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Retail, male) In many ways there is no difference at all; both nationalities are subject to pretty much the same living environment and surroundings, subject to the same influences so unlikely to be radically different. However, Scots have a tendency towards playing and relishing the part of the underdog and generally under-selling themselves and

Salvage Ethnography.indb 62

24/05/2017 15:07:36

Culture

63

perpetuating the notion of being put upon by the English. English never seem to under-sell themselves, more likely the opposite, displaying levels of confidence that seem over the top to many Scots. I think that is the main difference, the degree of confidence displayed. (076, Scottish, BoS, Retail, female) Yes they do tend to differ. This is based on a perception of an English upbringing that has a very strong national confidence, contrasted with a Scottish upbringing, which is more defeatist and less confident. I suspect that attitudes to government do not vary significantly between Scotland and many regional areas of England, whereby many UK regions feel dominated by London and the South East. (035, Scottish/UK, BoS, Group, male) I do not think that the nationalities are that different. Both sets of people have similar goals and interests in life. There are of course regional variations and I can find people in different areas of Scotland quite different in how confident they are and how well they communicate. I find people from Yorkshire to be similar to the vast majority of Scots for example, whereas as I find people from London quite different in terms of how they present themselves. (114, Scottish, BoS, Group, male) I agree with this statement but it could be true for everyone is different from each other and there are no two people the same. In the main though, and this is just personal experience, English people tend to be more outgoing and extroverted and this looks like they are more confident. Scottish people are a little bit more reserved and think before speaking. (186, Scottish, BoS, Corporate, female) I was told this little (or wee!) anecdote by my lecturer … at Heriot-Watt University that really hits the nail on the head to this question (and this is from his own research into graduates): There are two candidates for a job interview, one English and one Scottish. Both were asked the same question, ‘Why do you think we should give you the job?’ English candidate’s answer, ‘I haven’t decided I’m going to take the job yet’. Scottish candidate’s answer, ‘I don’t know. I still can’t believe I’ve got to this stage itself! I’m just glad to be here…’. For me, this sums up the difference: English people are a lot more forward and self-confident. They’re not backwards in coming forward, while the poor wee Scotch fellow has little self-belief. I think it’s mostly cultural and also something to do with the BBC/TV. The Scottish are all familiar with English accents (having grown up hearing mostly English accents on TV), but as I experience, English colleagues/clients are not familiar with various Scottish accents – especially lilts from the islands! 99% of English people (and a few Scottish to their shame!) think I am Irish (?!). (084, British, BoS, Graduate Scheme, male) Yes I agree with the statement. I feel that, in general, my experience of English people indicates that they can be over-confident, sometimes brash (a flagrant generalis­ ation!). I believe that there are similarities or closer ties with certain regions, i.e. Scotland and the North East of England e.g. The Geordies. Differences do exist and I think a lot of the differences are pushed to the extreme by the TV and newspaper media, particularly around London. My experiences of London highlight that the world can revolve around some people in London and they have no idea of the geography of their own country, never mind the UK. The old story of anything north of the Watford Gap is UP NORTH! (018, Scottish, BoS, Business, male)

Salvage Ethnography.indb 63

24/05/2017 15:07:36

64

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

Yes, there is a different mentality between the two. Scottish people are less likely to shout about things right away but go and get on with things and sing about things later. In my view the English are far more up front and willing to promote themselves. I would say they have an air of arrogance that the Scots don’t have. (178, Scottish, BoS, group, male)

These responses reveal the pervasiveness of the English/confident, Scottish/ diffident trope, although interpretations of this are varied. In some cases it is presented as a fairly neutral or ambivalent contrast. But more often there is a clear preference for the Scottish tendency, characterised more as appropriate modesty, and a devaluation of English ‘over-confidence’. However, sometimes the poles of valuation seemed to be reversed. At least one respondent turned the tables, casting the Scots as the arrogant ones: I agree. I spent 11 years living and working in the South East of England, married an English woman and have 2 children who have ‘dual nationality’. I think the basis of the difference comes from the fact that Scottish and English people think differently. Scots have an arrogance in their belief that they are in some way culturally superior to the English and also believe they are always being done over in some way, particularly politically. A bit of a sweeping generalisation, I know, but borne out in experience of watching interaction between Scottish and English colleagues. I believe the two nations look at the wider world differently, probably due to history. (051, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Business, male)

Also evident in these various responses was the frequent qualification of the form: ‘I know this is a sweeping generalisation, but…’. Respondents seemed to feel caught between recognising an evident difference and breaking a taboo against reducing people to stereotypes. Moreover, it is noticeable that these remarks were sometimes qualified by a finer gradation of UK regions. It was suggested that the ‘Geordies’ of Yorkshire are perhaps closer to the Scots in this regard, and that the real heart of ‘arrogance’ and ‘over-confidence’ is London, and the London-centric view of the world. Throughout the survey respondents often qualified the contrast between the Scots and the English by noting other, cross-cutting contrasts, of class, age, gender, as well as other spatial-cultural differences defined by cities and regions. I will return to this point when in Chapter 7 I look more closely at the role of ‘comparison’ in making sense of the world, both for those I studied and for the researcher. I now turn to the question of ‘organisational cultures’. By the summer of 2002, there was a new leadership team in the training and development area, led by Janet, who had been brought in from outside the Bank. Bill was a young English fellow who had been brought in temporarily by Janet to help with transitional projects in setting up the new team. She apparently knew him through previous work at a major credit card company. He had a reputation among the established GL&D staff as good natured and helpful, though, with his handy computer skills, he was thought to have a tendency to leave colleagues’ computer desktops puzzlingly reconfigured. In one of our first conversations he spoke about how different the ‘feel’ of work was at BoS compared with his previous company. It

Salvage Ethnography.indb 64

24/05/2017 15:07:36

Culture

65

was more methodical and measured, less ‘pacey’ and frenetic. He seemed ready to believe that it might not be any less productive or efficient, just different. However, he was surprised by the expectation of a ‘job for life’ at BoS – something he himself had never expected. He seemed to agree with my sense that the Halifax ‘business culture’, compared with that of BoS, was really closer to a US-style business culture. In a later conversation he returned to the theme of the old culture of BoS, which seemed to fascinate him. He spoke of a team whose budget had been cut by £100,000, which equated to three managers’ salaries. Though the need to make these cuts had been established in a meeting months previously, in a recent meeting the director of the team had reportedly said he could not fire people he had worked with for 20 years. Bill seemed very bemused by this and presented it as evidence of the strange and unrealistic business culture of BoS. These exchanges between Bill and myself, two ‘outsiders’ looking in, summarise some core themes for the rest of this chapter. The email survey also posed questions about the direction of change in the organis­ational cultures of BoS, Halifax and HBOS. As the survey respondents were predominantly from BoS, which seemed to be on the receiving end of organis­ational change, I focus on responses to the item regarding BoS: How would you characterise the organisational culture of Bank of Scotland? Is it changing, and if so, how?

Several key descriptors were prominent in the responses and correspond well with other ethnographic observations. BoS was described as being or having been: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

very Scottish traditional, conservative Presbyterian/Calvinist risk averse, cautious formal/status oriented male oriented characterised by promotion through time-serving hierarchical, centralised inflexible, slow to adapt having a customer service orientation defined by professionalism ethical and principled having strong employee loyalty offering a ‘job for life’, looking after its staff ‘like a family’, a community oriented towards cultivating general skills.

As part of HBOS, BoS was seen as becoming: • more sales oriented • inclined towards working longer hours

Salvage Ethnography.indb 65

24/05/2017 15:07:36

66 • • • • •

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

more informal, signalled by casual dress decentralised, less hierarchical more oriented to targets, results and bonuses oriented towards rewarding performers and removing non-performers oriented towards cultivating specific skills.

One response nicely captures the dominant mood: Very close knit, loyal and almost like a ‘family culture’. Changing as we move forward – Biggest change – previously job appointments – you were ‘chosen’ or selected for a position. Now you have to apply and sell yourself into the job. (138, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Retail, male)

Having said this, although use of the descriptions listed above were fairly constant throughout the responses, the emphasis and value put on them varied. For instance, for some, ‘paternalism’ meant ‘safe, a job for life’, while for others it meant ‘hierarchical, male dominated’. One can sense the language here often trying to chart a course somewhere between ‘frankness’ and ‘the company line’. The responses were characterised by a certain sense of loss of the past, of heightened pressure, but they did not uniformly convey a sense of movement from better to worse. Some saw the ongoing changes as negative and unnecessary, others as negative but unavoidable. There was often a sense of the necessity to move with the times, and sometimes even a certain excitement about being part of an organisation that was becoming more dynamic. Many stressed a shift from a ‘customer focus’ (BoS as was) to a ‘sales focus’ under Halifax influence, and although many saw this negatively, some saw it positively. Many of the more nuanced responses noted that the direction of change in organisational culture was not just down to the merger with Halifax. Generally the 1990s were understood as a period when BoS was aware of the increasing competitive pressures of the banking industry and trying to cautiously innovate and modernise. This period was often viewed positively. For some, the integration of the subsidiary Capital Bank was seen as a significant step to weakening the old BoS culture, prior to the formation of HBOS. Similarly, the restructuring from regional to divisional was seen as eroding the older BoS culture, tending to replace it with divisional subcultures. The difference in divisional perspectives was evident in responses. For instance, those based in the Corporate Division, already with a more ‘aggressive’ and London-oriented culture, tended to view the effects of merger more positively. In other areas (Retail, Group) the change was more painful. I look at one longer, more moderate and reflective response to the item on organisation culture, which succeeds in capturing the overall mood of these responses: Family-like. After a period, you got to know a lot of people and tended to compare how you were doing career-wise against each other. The organisation tended to

Salvage Ethnography.indb 66

24/05/2017 15:07:36

Culture

67

employ consultants rather than head-hunt external talent. Thus, everyone recruited at one point, it seemed, had the potential to reach the top. Gavin Masterton was an excellent example of such a person and many before. However, the organisation was typically cautious and whilst it continually tested ideas, it was always on such a small scale and therefore lacked the break-through ambitions. Direct Banking is an excellent example, as is Sainsbury’s Bank, though we should see some change. Often there was lack of serious commitment at the top for brave business development decisions, other than cost control. Thus criticism was rife. Yes it is [changing]. Don’t know the people anymore and its agenda is seriously short-term. Thus, get a feeling of coldness. By contrast, direction from the top is far clearer and individuals have been reduced to the role of implementer. Pace and financial commitment are also there from the top to ensure the organisation is equipped. May have the minds of the people but not the hearts. (079, Scottish, BoS, Retail, male)

The assessment here is neither uncritical of BoS pre-merger nor entirely critical of the new HBOS order. But the sense of loss of cohesive professional community and of estrangement from the new regime is palpable. In a follow-up interview to one of the questionnaire responses, with one of the more senior members of staff in GL&D, the elaboration turned into a somewhat nostalgic and even romantic reflection on the traditional role of the BoS branch bank manager (inferred in­ audible words on tape are presented in brackets). I think you will still find, and I’m not sure if this is uniquely Scottish, I think you’d also find this in parts of rural England, a strong sense of [commitment to] the local branch and to the local branch manager. The branch manager is less of a pillar of the community than they used to [be], again partly because they don’t necessarily live in the community. I remember when I first joined the Bank being involved with a huge debate about a rule that they were looking after and that was about two things. One that the manager had to live within so many square miles of the branch and secondly they were not going to move people for a certain number of years. Once they’d gone into a community, they were going to leave them there. Now both of those actually … the first one was almost legally impossible to enforce and the second one was practically impossible to enforce but still in the mid-1990s that was the line the Bank wanted to take. But you see now, the managers aren’t living in the community so it does make them harder, in some parts, to be the pillar of the community. That’s it. And we used to have the Bank houses where your manager moved in ‘the Bank house’. That said, you will still find managers living in Bank houses and when you get into the more rural areas, which is where you will still find them and inevitably it’s quite a male dominated … they will be … they are likely to also have several other roles. They are likely, at least, to be the treasurer at the golf club, probably a treasurer in the church and they’re going to have some links with Rotary and Round Table, all linked in [with people] coming to them as much as because of their role than [to] them as an individual. So that’s where the managers sat in the community. I can remember, even in Dunfermline, being in absolute awe of the manager of the branch there … because my father knew him through various reasons and we had gone in to pay in money and he’d come out of his office and being introduced to him. You almost felt you’d met God that day. You came home. You’d met Mr Campbell. He was very important. I can still see that, that branch. It’s now a MacDonald’s.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 67

24/05/2017 15:07:37

68

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

In one respect this is simply a window into the past. But in another, it is a fundamental indicator of cultural change, of how organisational cultures relate to wider cultural environments, and what we might mean by ‘culture’. In the conclusion I consider the data presented above by returning to the question of what kind of concept of culture is needed to understand the relationship between ‘national’ and ‘organisational’ cultures, and how social organisation was changing at both these levels. Conclusion On the surface, the discourse represented by the examples above evidences a general pattern of somewhat antagonistic mutual perception, albeit often ambivalent and subtle, across the Scottish/English and BoS/Halifax boundaries. The problem with the thin, ideational concept of culture when trying to make sense of this kind of data is that it invites us, like so much of the instrumental language of ‘business cultures’, to view this as a matter of a discrete domain of values and symbols. If we could just change the way people talk and perceive, the values they attach to rituals such as football, or to the interactional styles of the ‘other’ national group, we could intervene and help people get along. If we could teach them to be more tolerant, confident and assertive, the culture would shift and all would be well. But this ideational layer, culture thinly conceived, is inadequate to the purpose: it is only a part of a much more complex matter. With the merger there was a confluence of a much wider and long-established set of perceptual and representational conventions, summed up by the ­confidence/ diffidence contrast (cf. Craig 2011), and a much more concrete, historically specific and imperative contrast between the two banks. Imperative, because this is where these people worked, where their careers would or would not proceed. So the broad and familiar trope of Scottish/English antagonism was rendered peculiarly salient in this organisational context. As more than one informant put it, HBOS was becoming a place where you had to ‘sell yourself ’ into the job; where those with greater confidence would have an edge. It seems probable to me that there is little fundamental or existential difference between the Scots and the English in terms of actual confidence. Like many of my informants, I doubt that such differences really align with nationalities. I suspect this is more a matter of what are regarded in different contexts as appropriate styles of self-presentation. The resolution of this question is beyond the means of this study. But it does not really matter. What matters is that these differences in preferred styles of self-presentation were becoming materially consequential. As we have seen, there is good reason to think that HBOS, and the banking industry generally, was selecting staff with a bias towards confident self-representation, regardless of the underlying reality. What I have tried to convey through the ethnographic data is that the differences at stake here are not just value preferences or symbolic representations. These norms of self-presentation, associated with BoS as was, were part of an older conception of banking institutions, how they operate and what they are for. They have an ‘elective affinity’ with the form of business organisation described in the

Salvage Ethnography.indb 68

24/05/2017 15:07:37

Culture

69

last long quote, smaller in scale, more locally embedded, and entwined with other local, high-status and dominant institutions. They are associated with a form of organisation that actively sought to cultivate community and loyalty, within a fairly circumscribed, only moderately competitive national sphere. The relationship between BoS and its employees was of a piece with the Bank’s relationship to many other major Scottish institutions and businesses. These in turn dated from the long twentieth-century consolidation of the British welfare state in Scotland, and the relatively small-scale, quasi-corporatist relations among public and private institutions in Scotland. It was part of this cultural complex that was being eroded, ever since the 1970s, but accelerating from the 1990s. Because of general, global transformations going on in the banking industry, BoS found itself at the ‘cutting edge’ of that process of erosion in Scotland. The unease and anxiety with which Scottish staff of BoS often regarded the changes they were witnessing, and the corresponding bafflement with which English staff from Halifax sometimes regarded their resistance, did not in themselves reflect an encounter between two different cultures. They were a symptom of these people, on balance, seeing the world from different sides of a deep underlying cultural transformation that was affecting Britain as a whole. But it is a transformation that has also remained uneven, much further developed in the London-centred south-east of Britain, and incomplete in the north of Britain, especially in Scotland with its distinctive complement of governing historical institutions. Within the UK there has long been a distinctive cluster of organisations and institutions associated with the formal and informal governance of Scotland. Conventionally these are often referred to as Scotland’s ‘civil society’ and represented especially by the core institutions of distinctive educational and legal systems and established Presbyterian Church entrenched at the time of Union in 1707. But this is a simplifying shorthand. The organisational core of Scotland would also have included forms of local government, an indigenous capitalist class focused around certain families, less powerful but also Scotland-based businesses, corresponding labour-representing groups in trade unions and the Labour Party, a Scottish voluntary sector and so on. The list could be much further elaborated. The point is that these organisations together formed a certain concentration of social power and thus culture, as I have construed it. The fieldwork presented here centred on a period in which BoS’s ‘organisational culture’ was already being fragmented by divisional restructuring, devolving greater power to the divisions from the centre, and the not entirely successful effort to ‘integrate’ Capital Bank. Combined with a merger with another bank almost twice its size in capital and staff, which effectively was detaching BoS from its past organisational embedding in Scottish society, it is not surprising that BoS staff often felt beleaguered and culturally out of place. As a form of organisation, BoS had a kind of culture specific to it, which was coming under severe pressure to change. But that was an organisational culture embedded within a wider national culture, also undergoing more per­ vasive changes in economic and political structures. To be properly understood, the question of ‘culture’ needs to be situated within this wider, multiply embedded context of social organisation and power.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 69

24/05/2017 15:07:37

70

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector Notes

1 As I both refer to and cite Cameron’s book in this book, I have not given him a pseudonym. 2 Commenting on this general point in the meeting discussed above, Douglas had said that when BoS staff numbered 11,000 (or 16,000 if the Chester-based subsidiary Capital Bank was included), the Bank was like a ‘village’ and you knew who the ‘elders/chiefs’ were. But since the merger, with that total reaching 60,000–70,000, that was no longer possible. ‘It’s very hard to see the structure anymore’, he said. 3 The Scottish comedian Billy Connolly raises this style, originally cultivated in the en­ viron­ment of the pub, to a high art in his stand-up routine. 4 When attending these courses the instructor was always informed of my research role in advance, and the ‘delegates’, as they were called, were informed at the beginning of the course. As much as possible I participated like all the other delegates. 5 After response quotes, each respondent is identified by a unique number. For general context, I also include a brief note giving the respondent’s: self-ascribed nationality, bank of employment, division/business unit, and gender. Minor errors in the informants’ written responses have been corrected to reduce distraction and improve readability, but not in ways that would alter the original meaning.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 70

24/05/2017 15:07:37

5

Change: discourses of agency and progress in organisational change

As was apparent in the previous chapter, rapid organisational change was the order of the day during my fieldwork. In this chapter I focus on the idea of ‘change’ in several dimensions. On the one hand, organisational changes in size, scale and structure reflect wider changes going on in the banking and financial sector, which in turn are conditioned by wider national and global political economies. But change is also a reflexive concept deliberately deployed by modern organisations in their efforts to manage staff in an unstable environment, and an existential issue experienced at an often intensely personal level. I begin with some ethnographic examples of how change was being articulated and wrestled with in some of the staff training courses I attended. Then in the middle, as in the previous chapter, I offer an ‘interlude’ of more theoretical reflections on the concept of social change and its relevance to the material. I then return to look more closely at aspects of how change was being represented in everyday talk and experienced by bank staff (see also Hearn 2009). Training for change The topic of ‘change’ came up frequently during my research, unsurprisingly given the significant changes that were underway. But change is also almost a term of art in the corporate training field. It is widely accepted common sense that modern organisations are undergoing constant change as they respond and adapt to dynamic business environments. Such organisations must be prepared to alter their own systems, processes and structures as needed, and their staff need to be not just open to and able to cope with change, but ‘change agents’ for the good of the company. Some scenes from the HBOS staff training menu courses I attended help illustrate. A one-day course called ‘Dealing with Differences’ was held at ‘The Foundation’, a BoS building in Chester, the headquarters of Capital Bank. The purpose of the course was to help staff deal more effectively with conflict in the office. The eight delegates (including myself) came from around the UK, and the instructor was exceptionally able, with an easy commanding presence in the group. Interestingly,

Salvage Ethnography.indb 71

24/05/2017 15:07:37

72

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

several of the delegates related the question of differences potentially leading to conflict in the workplace to the notions of national and organisational cultures explored in the previous chapter. A woman from the Corporate Division, based in London, said that there was a Scottish trait of not being open or forthcoming, especially being reluctant to give or receive praise. Adam, the instructor, engaged her in a brief discussion. He suggested this might be connected to the Presbyterian work ethic, and that this resistance to praise was historically part of a BoS culture, that it was part of a set of values that are disseminated from the top by people who have come up through the ranks and exemplify an older view of the Bank. But he also noted (here and again later in a lunchtime conversation) that the top of the organisation was now largely made up of Halifax people, with a different organisational culture behind them. He also suggested that these reserved traits were common to a lot of older high street banks in Britain; that it had to do with the history of these institutions and not just national cultures. As these exchanges indicate, while ‘dealing with differences’ is a generic, ongoing aspect of corporate life, at that point the merger was a key context for the course’s salience. I was particularly struck by a discussion I had with Adam during breaks between sessions in the course. He conveyed a certain amiable scepticism about my research, which I was familiar with by this time. ‘What do you intend to prove or disprove?’, as he put it. He was a no-nonsense person without much time for loose and indeterminate participant observation. Picking up on some of the themes of my research, and the conversations he was having as part of his courses, he talked about how there was a need for a fundamental shift in views about employment. People needed to be able to move between various jobs in the industry they work in, rather than expecting to be with one employer for life. I noted that there was a history of non-migration of staff between the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland, and many of my informants had said that that was now breaking down, which seemed to confirm such a shift. He and others present seemed to agree that this was happening. But what really struck me was the way he seemed to see his own situation as a self-employed consultant as exemplary. I said that I had talked to other consultants (course instructors) who felt unsure about how and where to approach BoS, now that it had been reorganised. He said it did not matter for him, that BoS was one client among many, and that ‘change’ was the norm for him. The upshot of his remarks was that he was used to dealing with change and that others need to learn how to do this. As a relative outsider, he saw the HBOS merger as a very positive business deal, bringing changes that should be embraced. Another course took place at a Holiday Inn in Edinburgh. Called ‘Coping Strategies’, it was primarily concerned with how people deal with pressure and stress in the workplace. It was a small, easy-going group, myself, three delegates and the instructor. The course concentrated on defining stress, learning to recog­ nise the signs and symptoms in oneself and others, what the Bank’s legal and moral responsibilities are, and what the business ‘drivers’ (i.e. reasons) are for wanting to reduce stress. We began by each rating ourselves on the Friedman and Rosenman scale of ‘Type A’ and ‘Type B’ behaviours, which provides 13 ratings for

Salvage Ethnography.indb 72

24/05/2017 15:07:37

Change

73

such things as ‘competitiveness’, ‘patience’, and orientations to external recognition versus internal satisfaction. According to the handout sheet: ‘Type As tend to be competitive, ambitious and action-orientated …. Type Bs, on the other hand, are calmer, more relaxed, more easy-going and less ambitious.’ I was on the Type B end of the spectrum. We also did the Holmes Rahe Social Readjustment Scale, which gives an impact score for various typical life events. High scores imply greatly increased risk of illness due to stress, but, as the handout says: ‘Note that illness is not a necessary result of change. You[r] personality and your ability to cope largely determine how well you will react.’ These scales were used more to open up the issues than for any serious diagnostic purposes. Nonetheless, they frame the topic as basically one of personalities and how different personalities cope with large structural change beyond any individual’s control. That the structural causes of stress might be a problem itself to be addressed tends to fall outside the frame. One member of the group was fairly confessional about personal encounters with stress and learning how to deal with it. But in general the emphasis was not on ourselves but on others, namely members of staff. There was a familiar emphasis on how change has become a permanent state of affairs and can cause stress. Several kinds of stress were discussed, often in age-specific terms. Casual conversation often brought up the issue of older staff who were having trouble adjusting to the new regime. One staff member, apparently, could not get used to not having a secretary to do his typing. Gavin, a senior manager, had lots of young staff under him involved in things like telephone sales. He spoke of the kinds of problems he had to deal with and one he kept coming back to was consumer debt – young staff who ran up huge debts on credit cards, and how he would intervene, get them to stop spending, and perhaps arrange loan consolidation. Exemplifying the issue of the Bank’s legal and moral responsibilities, there was another story about a staff member who had been dismissed and went home and killed himself, leading to a new policy that a counsellor should be present at dismissals, and those dismissed should not be left alone afterwards, but accompanied by a friend, and provided with a taxi rather than allowed to drive home. Bob (also a senior manager) and Gavin both spoke of how their generation tended to live for the Bank, giving up much of their after-hours social life to it, while they felt younger staff were more inclined to draw a line and leave work at the office. But the other side of this was that there was less fellowship and solidarity in the workplace. Perhaps with a bit of romanticising nostalgia, Bob spoke of how in the past the whole branch staff would go out for a few pints on Fridays, as a normal part of the week. Bob and Gavin also emphasised the way their generation saw the Bank as a job for life, from age 17 to 60, and how younger staff no longer had that expectation, but instead expected to change jobs many times. As they saw it, the call to embrace ongoing change (exemplified by Adam, above), including instability of employment, was already normalised for the next generation. One of the first of these menu courses I attended was perhaps the most striking in regard to its treatment of ‘change’. Rather than being explicitly pitched at structural change and its effects (conflict, stress) it was about cultivating ‘Creativity and Innovation’. The value of these qualities was not simply personal fulfilment

Salvage Ethnography.indb 73

24/05/2017 15:07:37

74

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

but also the ability to contribute and add value to the organisation, HBOS. Here, change was supposedly not just something the good staff member could cope with effectively, but a necessary resource they could provide through their own creative powers. As I will show, this message was received somewhat ambivalently. Participation in these courses was confirmed through a formal letter from a senior trainer in GL&D, indicating the instructor, delegates, location and sometimes some preliminary work to be done by delegates and materials for that. For the ‘Creativity and Innovation’ course, the letter was written in a relaxed font and multi-coloured text, signalling the ‘fun’ to be expected. There was also a ‘creativity quiz’ asking ‘What is your creative potential?’ It had three sections: ‘My personality; My problem solving approach; My work environment’. You rated yourself along multiple dimensions under these three headings and added up your score. At the end it said, ‘What do my scores mean? Find out at the Creativity and Innovation course…’. The course ran over two days at a leisure centre in Edinburgh. It attracted 27 people from a wide array of business areas across the Bank, many from England. It was run by Gregor and Boyd, who were Bank staff connected to, but not permanently based at, GL&D. It was clearly an experiment for them, their own attempt to do something more creative and original within the conventional training course format, and I sensed that they were personally enthused by and committed to the idea, even if the experiment inevitably involved some trepidation. They seemed both to enjoy and to believe in their message, but also to feel a bit awkward, not always having their timing down, showing a bit of frustration when things were not quite clicking. They also seemed to be improvising a bit, deciding what to do next from a number of set pieces, rather than having a strict plan. The first day started at 9.30 a.m., with people mingling over coffee. I met people from Corporate, Capital Bank in Chester and the archives at South Gyle in Edinburgh, among other places. It was difficult to recount an exact structure of the two days in my field notes because the course was deliberately rather fragmented and spontaneous. Broadly, the first day was more about ‘loosening up’, the second day more focused on the work context, and applications of creativity techniques and skills. People worked mostly in one of four smaller groups of six or seven, each located at its own table, but coming back together as a large group every so often. Boyd and Gregor had a kind of double act, where Gregor presented himself as typically ‘right brained’ (‘intuitive’) and Boyd as typically ‘left brained’ (‘rational’). They set this up early and played off it through the day. They spent some time elaborating the contrasts, talking about how children are naturally creative, about how one’s inner voice (‘self-talk’) can set up reinforcing cycles of confidence or defeatism, listing things that inhibit creativity (‘fear’ being highlighted by Boyd). After the first day, delegates were asked to think overnight about some aspect of their work where they would like to use their right brain more. The two days were full of team-building activities and left brain/right brain exercises, designed to help teach people to ‘think outside the box’. A few examples. We began by forming a circle and tossing a ball around, naming ourselves when

Salvage Ethnography.indb 74

24/05/2017 15:07:37

Change

75

we received the ball, and trying to name those we threw it to, as a way of starting to learn each other’s names. Then we were given a list of ‘creative’ things people might have done, and went around asking people if they had done any of those things. I felt slightly self-conscious about being able to say yes, I had written a book. But then, others had flown or jumped out of airplanes. The groups worked on exercises that involved solving maths equations by moving/adding figures in counterintuitive ways. For instance, ‘5 + 5 + 5 = 550’ was ‘solved’ by drawing a line from the top of the first plus sign to the left end of its horizontal bar, to get: ‘545 + 5 = 550’. We also read a list of colour words (red, blue, etc.) where the colour of the print did not match the words – first reading the words, then ‘reading’ the colours. The two days alternated between various ‘creative’ activities, such as creating short group plays to help us memorise the sequence of the planets in the solar system, and trying to learn to juggle, and more ‘serious’ discussions and activities. By the latter part of the morning we had moved on to talking about various companies that people thought of as creative/innovative (e.g. Virgin, Starbucks, Jimmy Choo, Microsoft and so on). These were being shouted out and written down on a flip chart. BoS was suggested, but it seemed it was intended sarcastic­ally, or received as such, as indicated by the derisive snorts. This was flagged by Boyd and Gregor as a topic to explore further throughout the course. People were asked to list things BoS had done that were innovative and creative. Various things came out – telephone banking, Mondex cards, integrated financing. Someone asked whether it was creative if you borrowed the idea from somewhere else and simply brought it to the UK (Boyd suggested that that was a form of creativity). Someone joked that the deal with Pat Robertson (see Chapter 4) was ‘outside the box’. But the general assessment was that BoS was a conservative, cautious institution, which did not encourage creativity and innovation. People complained that new ideas did not get support, that BoS only tried something once someone else had done it, that it did innovate, but then pulled back and fell behind. The general assessment was that BoS was typically restrictive, a very ‘left brain’ institution, perhaps hampered by a ‘Presbyterian’ caste of mind (Boyd used this word). One could sense that Boyd and Gregor were setting out to question whether this was entirely true of BoS. Tellingly, the discussion was limited to BoS and did not address Halifax. After a break we returned to the flip chart and the discussion of BoS and innovation. We watched a BoS video from 1998 (about three years earlier) featuring Group Managing Director Gavin Masterton at the beginning and end. It included a long ‘fantasy’ sequence about BoS in 10 years and all the things it would be involved in – hotels, branches in Rio, its own television channel, extended retailing in the branches (coffee, gifts, etc.). At the end, Masterton encouraged BoS staff to be creative and send him ideas, because they were the Bank’s future. Apparently this had been shown throughout the Bank when it was first made, and probably more than half of those present had seen it before. It turned out that Masterton received only six suggestions and almost all of those came from GL&D. The discussion of why this was so tended to focus on Masterton’s rather intimidating persona. Delegates also spoke of having ideas quashed from on high in the past. I could see Boyd struggling a bit to keep this from being seen as a confirmation that

Salvage Ethnography.indb 75

24/05/2017 15:07:37

76

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

the Bank did not mean what it said, or from becoming a ‘gripe session’, while at the same time letting people say what they were actually thinking. This general sense of disconnect between the discussion Gregor and Boyd were trying to foster and the more cynical or beleaguered views of many of the delegates present was evident in various encounters. At one of several coffee breaks I was using the toilet at the same time as a tall fellow named Richard. He was expressing some exasperation with the course, finding it impractical and a bit frivolous considering there were people there worrying about their jobs. In the afternoon, the group I worked with included two women from Capital Bank who clearly had a somewhat combative attitude. One especially seemed to think that Capital was a much more innovative and progressive place before BoS took it over, and that the influence of Halifax would make it more like it was before. There was a distinct though not really articulated sense of grievance towards BoS. Both women suggested that Capital was more informal, more lively, more competitive and sales oriented than stodgy old BoS. Again, as I mentioned in the previous chapter in regard to some of the Halifax staff ’s perceptions of BoS staff, there was a sense of Schadenfreude. BoS was finally getting what it deserved, what was coming to it. At the end of the first day I rode in one of the taxis taking groups of delegates to the train station. The two guys in the back were chatting about life in the Bank. One of them suggested to the other that he was thinking about shifting to another part of the Bank, as the area he was in was insecure. They talked about how difficult it was to move when one had a family and kids, and the dilemmas moving posed. At lunch on the second day I spoke to John, who worked in Community Relations as an in-house graphic designer, who was losing his job, as the policy was that anything that was not a ‘core’ function to do with banking was being outsourced. He had talked to some people on the course about going freelance and doing the same job but independently – but he did not seem to have much appetite for that. Over the two days it seemed to me that how happy or unhappy people were with the course at least partially corresponded with how secure people felt in their jobs. I had met at least two for whom redundancy seemed imminent. Everything I heard confirmed that people in the Corporate and Business Divisions felt relatively secure, and even remote from and unaffected by the merger, while people in central Group functions or Retail felt much more insecurity. The second day proceeded much as the first, with the same alternating mixture of ‘fun’, slightly ‘wacky’ activities, and somewhat more serious exercises more closely related to Bank activities, such as solving a work-related problem or designing a new product. There was a general emphasis on ‘brainstorming’. A recurring theme, perhaps responding to the previous day, was how to deal with discouragement from bosses and line managers. The problem was labelled as that of ‘black abbots’, in other words, the manager who always says ‘ah – but…’. In one exercise we were put into pairs in which we took turns ‘pitching’ an idea to the other person, who was supposed to play the role of the ‘black abbot’ boss. I was paired with one of the women from Capital Bank, who seemed eager to play the role of the ‘black abbot’ to the hilt. We were also given soft black rubber balls to throw at anyone who was a ‘nay-sayer’.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 76

24/05/2017 15:07:37

Change

77

At the end of the second day delegates were asked to fill out an evaluation sheet, and then Boyd (with flip chart) asked the whole group to give examples of good things and things that could be improved about the course. It seemed to me that what people said publicly was more supportive than what I had heard many say privately. One comment from the Capital Bank woman I had been paired with was that she had trouble understanding their Scottish accents and it would help if Boyd and Gregor spoke more slowly. (Afterwards Boyd exasperatedly asked why she couldn’t have asked that at the beginning of the course rather than the end.) People left a little after 4 p.m. I stayed back to help do some picking up and get a lift to the university from one of the senior trainers who had been there observing the experimental course and how it went. Boyd and Gregor immediately began going through the comment sheets and seemed to think they were, on balance, not all that positive. Boyd seemed to be getting pretty worked up. Apparently the two women from Capital Bank, both rather hostile to the course and BoS in general, had been scheming to be in the same group with each other all day (despite saying they liked being reshuffled a lot). One of them was familiar to the senior trainer as a difficult person on these courses, as having a chip on her shoulder of some sort. My own sense had been that the course was a bit condescending and infantilising, while at the same time frequently being fun and a bit of a laugh. As an outsider and social scientist I had a keen sense of an ‘ideological project’ – to encourage people to be more creative because it’s good for the Bank, for business, for the economy and for you. There was in my view a strong effort to make what’s good for the individual and what’s good for the Bank seem to easily coincide, and if there were problems they were due to difficult individuals (whether uncreative staff or ‘black abbots’), not due to structural problems within the institution, let alone within the broader society. I suspect that most participants, like myself but for different reasons, experienced a set of sometimes conflicting or contradictory responses. People seemed to shift between positive and negative in their side comments about how the day was going. I suspect most were feeling a combination of: fun, being entertained, enjoying meeting or catching up with colleagues, wondering if this stuff was practically useful, trying to rationalise being there, resisting being ‘taught’, feeling a bit patronised, treated like kids at playschool rather than adults, and yet generally believing in the overall message that you have to do it yourself, you have to improve yourself and up your game. I frequently heard people say the merger was painful but that there was no alternative, that it was the only way ahead in those times. Conceptual interlude: the reflexive nature of modern social change These vignettes show people trying to grapple with the pressures of organisational change. And as indicated in Chapter 2, on history, such organisational change sits within much larger political and economic forces of change. It is well established that the question of social change, its nature and causes, is at the heart of modern sociology and other social sciences. The classic bodies of social theory developed

Salvage Ethnography.indb 77

24/05/2017 15:07:37

78

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

by Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, to name a few, all sought in different ways to make sense of the effects and direction of the burgeoning commercial and capitalist world economy and the formation of a system of large bureaucratic states. They bequeathed us a set of concepts and problems of continuing relevance for defining modernity: the division of labour, the contradictions of democracy, class conflict and ­alienation, social solidarity, rationalisation. For the present study we are particularly ­interested in modernity not just as the result of all these forces of change, but also as characterised by a specific attitude towards change. Göran Therborn has nicely summed this up, defining modernity as: An epoch turned to the future, conceived as likely to be different from and possibly better than the present and the past.… The end of modernity … [happens when] … the distinction between the past and the future loses its centrality in discourses on society and culture, when change into something different from the past and the present is no longer attractive or meaningful. Modernity ends when words like progress, advance, development, emancipation, liberation, growth, accumulation, enlightenment, embetterment, avant-garde, lose their attraction and their function as guides to social action. (Therborn 1995: 4, original emphasis)

Obviously, words like these have not yet lost their relevance. In fact, some of them bear down rather severely on us. The people described in this study, although not generally concerned with the great sweep of modern history, found themselves compelled by circumstances to participate in and contemplate the grinding necessity of modern change, the need to orient oneself to change, and to believe in, or at least hope for, improvement, a better future. These people found themselves at the fine, cutting-edge of restless social change. Before returning to some further themes around ‘change’ in the ethnographic materials, let me briefly explore some conceptual puzzles associated with the study of social change. A part of what Therborn is talking about is bound up with the idea of ‘social evolution’, which I raised at the beginning of Chapter 2. As I said there, the circumscribed version of the concept that I use in my work does not in itself imply any over-arching directionality to social change. Evolution is a matter of the inter­ action of some basic mechanisms and dynamics (adaptation, competition, etc.) and contingent, open-ended events. Where there are clear directional patterns to social change, these will need some more specific explanation that may draw on, but will not be exhausted by, evolutionary theory. That said, the concept as it developed and was popularised in the nineteenth century, particularly under the influence of figures such as Herbert Spencer, was often given an inherently progressive meaning (see Sztompka 1993: ch. 2). It was made to evince precisely the attitude Therborn is characterising. Although the language of ‘evolution’ was not prevalent in my fieldwork, the attitude that change and adaptation are necessary and inevitable, and either intrinsically good or irresistible, at least in principle, was pervasive there. The Bank, like most modern organisations, business or otherwise, spoke a somewhat moralistic language to itself and its staff about progress and improvement. Even if the more sophisticated forms of evolutionary theory in

Salvage Ethnography.indb 78

24/05/2017 15:07:37

Change

79

social science have moved on, in the popular imagination, especially in the world of business, the evolutionary dream of ‘progress and improvement’ carries on, contributing to the atmosphere in which Bank staff were invited to make sense of their lives. ‘Competition’ is a critical concept in this context (Cerny 2010; Frank 2011; Hearn 2014; Mannheim 1993: 399–437; Simmel 1964: 57–85; Weber 1978: 38–40). On the one hand, we can identify multiple processes of competition that were driving change in the Bank. Within BoS there was competition over power, autonomy and agenda setting among the various divisions of the Bank, and at least a kind of rivalry between BoS and some of its staff who came in through Capital Bank. On the other hand, the merger to form HBOS itself was a response to the competitive pressures in the banking sector towards growing size and increasing shareholder value. But especially in the business world, competition is not just a term for describing and analysing objective processes, it is a term of value. Competition is a good, as is being competitive. However, quite apparent in the data is the fact that this value was more fully embraced in the Halifax part of the Bank, and still viewed more ambivalently in BoS, especially among older staff, and those away from the sharper end of business and corporate activity. Here one still had distinct traces of the older conception of banking, as a profession of service, and a role of stewardship towards business, the economy and even society more generally. Aided by the somewhat more conservative and nationally contained style of banking that had developed in the twentieth century, it was possible to see banking as naturally insulated from the cut and thrust of competition that characterised the rest of the business world. We can see the ‘Creativity and Innovation’ course as, in part, an effort to inculcate this value, but in a more positive and less threatening guise. But behind the call to create and innovate is the need to compete. I have just broached one of the issues that bedevils the study of social change: whether the sources of change are endogenous or exogenous to that which is changing (Noble 2000: 5–7). And as also just suggested, it is clearly both. Banks and other organisations, in adapting to their environments, respond to external pressures and opportunities. As productions of collective human will and consciousness, they do this through internal processes of change, however limited in foresight their actions, and however unintended their outcomes. Adaptation is precisely this dialectic between exogenous and endogenous forces, strikingly so in the case of human-made organisations, which can to some degree deliberately and strategically alter their form and structure. So in any given analysis of this process, there is a question of the balance of forces – does greater causal weight lie within or outside an organisation? How much do organisations drive social change, versus getting swept up in it? In hindsight, HBOS appears more ‘swept up’ and less in command of its fate than might have appeared at the time of fieldwork. But again, beyond the descriptive and analytic, there are normative implications here. No business organisation, or more precisely its leadership, wants to represent itself as operating primarily in a reactive mode. Business leaders want to be setting the pace, to be heading the organisation other organisations are reacting to. Through their endogenous initiatives, they want to put exogenous pressures on others.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 79

24/05/2017 15:07:37

80

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

This points us to another classic question in the study of social change: structure versus agency (Barnes 2003; Sewell 1992). On the one hand, large social structures (societal patterns such as divisions of labour) can appear to evolve and change through a general logic and dynamic specific to them but not really attributable to the willed actions of persons, groups and organisations. The classic example of course is found in some versions of Marx’s theory of economic development, through a necessary structural process of class conflict, from feudalism to capitalism to communism. On the other hand, it is difficult to write out of our accounts of change the deliberate actions of ‘actors’, however defined. This is especially true when events appear to take a new course through the acts of some agents. To some degree this is simply a matter of how ‘macro’ or ‘micro’ are our perspective and account: different modes of explanation are suited to different levels of description and analysis. Moreover, the ‘dialectic’ of forces just suggested implies there is no fundamental choice to be made here. Indeed, as structures are constantly being created by agents, and agents necessarily act through and are constrained by structures, the two aspects tend to interpenetrate in any analysis (cf. Elder-Vass 2010; Hearn 2012: 9–13). Although there have been various efforts to synthesise the two into some unified mode of analysis, the bottom line is we tend to need both, to maintain the distinction precisely so we can talk about their interaction (see Layder 2006). Any study like this one, that is focused on a large, complex, evolving organisation, inevitably needs to strike a balance in its account between various individual and collective agents (individuals, leaders, boards of directors, business units and divisions) and structures (pay grades devised according to industry standards, organisational divisions, financial regulations, markets for financial products and so on ad infinitum). But there is another crucial aspect of the agency/structure distinction, already adverted to. It operates not just as an analytic frame for the social scientist, but as a rhetorical frame for actors. Although they may use other terms, actors operating within specific and often poorly understood horizons of possibilities have a strong interest in mastering, or at least appearing to master, those possibilities. The preferred language is one of action, of controlling one’s circumstances, not one of being buffeted about by structural processes beyond one’s control. In a case such as the HBOS merger, those at the top, in leadership positions, and in the more secure parts of the banks, were inclined to speak a more fully agentic language, while those closer to the middle and bottom, in less secure situations, were more ready to acknowledge resigning themselves to processes beyond their control, or at least to negotiating a difficult path within those processes. This is evident in the ethnographic data presented. In this context, the call to ‘creativity and innovation’ appears to be saying to Bank staff, at a time when many were experiencing diminishing agency, that if they only cultivated certain abilities they could become more effective actors within the organisation. There was an underlying moral message, about how all should lay claim to their active potential, for the good of themselves, and of the Bank. And yet it was also evident that not all found this message entirely believable. How much and what scope of agency one had, or felt one had, depended very much on where one sat within the organisational structures of the

Salvage Ethnography.indb 80

24/05/2017 15:07:37

Change81 Bank, and the varying trajectoriesof its parts. The merger seemed to be empowering those based within Capital Bank and disempowering those providing skills scheduled to be outsourced. For some, the promise of greater agency, via a call to personal improvement, had a hollow ring. The language of change For the rest of this chapter I want to look at two other discursive patterns of ‘change-talk’ that were going on within the Bank during my fieldwork. First, I return to the question of conventional contrasts often made when comparing BoS and Halifax staff, and Scots and the English more generally. In the previous chapter I described how certain ideas (pride, parochialism, confidence) characterised talk about national differences and how BoS was often represented as having a ‘conservative’ and ‘traditional’ culture. These patterns dovetail with a tendency to describe BoS as somehow ‘backwards’ and the Halifax as comparatively ‘advanced’ and ‘progressive’. In other words, there was often an implicit temporal narrative at work that suggested that the two banks (and occasionally the two nations) found themselves at different points in a shared, directional historical development (cf. Fabian 1983). This was of course often complexly combined with closely related tropes just indicated, so talk of ‘parochialism’ can suggest both peripheral (or ‘rural’) and temporally backwards, because of the general association of temporal and spatial change in the modernisation paradigm. Similarly, a language of age, with BoS as ‘old’ and Halifax as ‘youthful’, was often used to compare the organisations and their staff. Some responses to the two email survey questions asking staff to characterise the organisational cultures of the two banks will help illustrate. I begin with the characterisation of BoS, bearing in mind that despite there being two separate questions about each bank and how it was changing, these responses understandably tended to be phrased as comparisons of the two banks: BoS is an extremely traditional culture, slow to change and adapt to the world outside. Systems and processes are largely outdated and there is an underlying opinion among middle management that ‘it is the way we have always done it and we haven’t done too badly’. The organisational culture has been one of upholding traditional values rather than embracing change and the need to sell more products to our customers. This is definitely changing and over the last 12 months senior management have started to drive a move in culture towards an organisation that is sales and customer service focused. The change is very noticeable but the task is in changing the daily habits of staff who have long service with the Bank and are enveloped by the old culture. (041,part Scottish, part British, BoS, Business, male) Traditional, slower and less demanding in the areas already covered by the Halifax. Far more advanced in other areas e.g. commercial banking and business banking. (127, British, Halifax, Retail, male) I feel that the Bank of Scotland pre-merger was a traditional and somewhat dated organisation. Since the merger with Halifax the culture of the organisation has changed dramatically. The Bank has become a much more aggressive player within

Salvage Ethnography.indb 81

24/05/2017 15:07:37

82

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

the financial services market and has become much more sales focused and goal orientated in its approach. Furthermore, I feel the pace of the organisation has increased dramatically; things are beginning to happen a lot more quickly. However, this is increasingly the nature of financial services. (055, British, BoS, Retail, male) Traditional, prudent and forward thinking although post Halifax I would say it is more aggressive, team based and moving quickly into the 21st-century mentality. (066, Scottish, BoS, Graduate Scheme, male) Sometimes traditional, to the extent that [it] doesn’t always embrace change very readily. Hierarchical. Focused on service rather than sales. I think it is changing and becoming more modern with the merger – which is both positive and negative. (100, Northern Irish, BoS, Graduate Scheme, female) Currently a mix of the following: traditional, conservative, slightly hierarchical, highquality, people-oriented, intelligent, innovative, modest, genuine & trustworthy. It is changing by becoming less traditional, less hierarchical and less conservative than it used to be; it is becoming slicker, faster to respond to the market, more innovative, more confident. (155, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Corporate, female) Traditional, formal, slow moving, friendly, homely, safe, customer centric, job for life. Very little change seen so far, I think that many BoS people are in denial. (165, English, Halifax, Corporate, male)

Two things come through in these responses: first, a set of key descriptors with temporal implications (traditional, conservative, modern, advanced, and so on), which situate the banks, their internal parts, and to a degree their staff, in an overall direction of temporal travel; second, the urgency of change, an imperative to respond to immediate pressures, to adapt, and a sense of acceleration. This is brought home sharply in the last quote from a Halifax staff member, whose charge of ‘denial’ among BoS staff carries overtones of impending obsolescence. By contrast, the same question about the culture of the Halifax throws up a different set of descriptors. Bearing in mind that BoS staff predominated in the survey responses, a somewhat tentative and sometimes jaundiced tone overall is perhaps not surprising: The management suggest it is a more modern, ‘enlightened’ organisation with a more progressive style. Certain headlines would suggest this to be true (e.g. the appointment of Andy Hornby which could never have happened in BoS). Not yet sure if further down the organisation it holds true. There is definitely a more gung-ho and can-do attitude prevalent which is a plus but can be a risk if the issues are not fully understood. (051, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Business, male) Very difficult to say because I don’t have any ‘inside’ experience of the Halifax, but at a guess I would suggest that it is probably more modernising and less formal than BoS. (078, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Graduate Scheme, male) Not too sure I know much about what their culture is like but from speaking to people in retail banking it certainly is a younger, more modern approach to banking

Salvage Ethnography.indb 82

24/05/2017 15:07:37

Change

83

than perhaps the Bank of Scotland has taken previously. There is a sense of all working to the same goal, with rewards being made for the achievement of this. Halifax don’t have a good Corporate image so this is where the Bank will be stronger. (186, Scottish, BoS, Corporate, female) I have never seen much of the Halifax ways of doing things. My initial impression is that it is younger than BoS so must be more up to date with goings on. The image is younger. (074, Scottish, BoS, Group, female) I am not really very aware of the culture of Halifax but my impression so far is that of a younger, more forward-thinking, energetic institution. There appears to be more emphasis on the actual ability to do the job. (001, Scottish, BoS, Business, female) Young, motivated, up to date, ambitious, business driven, strong and up there! (011, British, Halifax, Group, female) Halifax culture is constantly changing from pre-merger with Leeds Building Society to plc status to present day. Much less hierarchical and more customer focused than [it] used to be. Cost consciousness also becoming [a] bigger factor in decisions at all levels with internal ‘fit for purpose’ option often taken if cheaper than ‘top notch’ alternative. Less importance placed on individuals and past career record than ­historically. Much more of a here-and-now culture where only the fittest survive – ‘lean and mean’ culture. (159, English, Halifax, Insurance, male)

In these responses, typical of many discussions I had, the terms attached to Halifax, by both BoS and Halifax staff, are things like: modernising, enlightened, progressive, younger and up to date. The last two responses are from Halifax staff. The first of these suggests a certain enthused commitment to the Bank and its ­potential, while the final quote interestingly drives its point home with the popular evolutionary image of survival of the fittest. It also touches on an observation I heard frequently made by both Halifax and BoS staff, especially those with longer careers and greater experience observing the banking sector. That is the fact that the Halifax itself had only fairly recently been dragged in the general direction of a more aggressive, fast-paced, constantly changing culture. Two thoughtful examples of this perspective follow: In the past five years since the merger of the Leeds and the Halifax the culture of that merged organisation has changed as these two organisations were very different, although in the same business sector. The Halifax was known to be very paternal, ‘warm and cuddly’, conservative, with benign dictatorship, job for life. The Leeds was more commercial, open, less bureaucratic, less staid. By the time of the HBOS merger announcement the combining of these two organisations had arrived at a culture that was partway between these and getting used to an adapting and changing business. Much of the old wood had been stripped out and many areas had been through great changes and redundancies. (092, British, Halifax, Group, female) Certainly less hierarchical – more inclusive and participative at all levels to make things happen. Communication has been a very noticeable change in organisational culture and the aggressive sales culture is still something that not everyone appears

Salvage Ethnography.indb 83

24/05/2017 15:07:37

84

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

to be entirely comfortable with. However, the upshot of this has been much more a focus on rewarding contribution and the shift away from the Halifax as being very paternalistic in its approach to colleagues. The downside of becoming much more dynamic and aware of staying ahead of the competition has been that change is now part and parcel of everyday working life – if you don’t accept or contribute to the change, the organisation will now cut you loose. The relationship between the organisation and its workforce has become more ‘adult’ and reciprocal with a growing sense of everyone having a role to play in business success. (166, British, Halifax, Group, male)

As these responses indicate, the episode of the BoS/Halifax merger to form HBOS can also and perhaps more accurately be viewed not as an encounter between Scottish and English banking cultures or traditions, but as part of a general transformation of banking business that radiated through a sequence of mergers in both countries. In this particular merger, notions of national character and difference become salient, combining with notions of organisational culture, to help make specific sense of a more general process. Along with the discursive trope I have been discussing above, of an inevitable direction of change into which events are fit, and perhaps tempering it, there was another trope that I sometimes encountered. Bringing to mind the great theories of cyclical history, from Aristotle to Spengler to Sorokin (Sztompka 1993: ch. 10), this was the idea that it is in the very nature of large business organisations to shift back and forth between periods of centralisation and periods of devolution of powers. In my early discussions at GL&D, people often framed the recent BoS divisional reorganisation that was whittling away the role of their training unit as something that had to be endured but that was likely to be reversed at some point in the future. I encountered this at all levels, in various contexts, often capturing it in my field notes. During one of my first days of fieldwork I had a chat with Neil, a lower-grade long-term employee who ran the mailroom and mail delivery. After some small talk which enabled him to confirm I knew almost nothing about football, we spoke more generally about work. He had moved to GL&D from the central legal department. It had been closed down, its functions parcelled out to the various divisions, much as GL&D’s were being parcelled out. Neil wondered aloud about the wisdom of taking the centre apart and suggested they would just have to put it back together again eventually. Another exchange was with David, one of the regular external consultants running courses for GL&D. During a coffee break at a course called ‘Practical Teamwork’ he remarked: all this centralising by one leader, only to be followed by decentralising by another 10 years later, is relatively indifferent in its organisational effects, that is on the improvement of the business. Its main hidden function is to disrupt and move people around, and create opportunities to clear out under-performers (Paraphrased from field notes)

In one of the follow-up interviews I did with some respondents to the email questionnaire, I spoke with Sandy, a long-time employee of BoS whose work had involved him in the Treasury and Corporate Divisions. I asked him if his sense

Salvage Ethnography.indb 84

24/05/2017 15:07:37

Change

85

was that the merger to form HBOS ‘had to’ happen. He replied as follows (inferred inaudible words on tape are presented in brackets): No, I never agreed it had to happen. The view was that we were too small, that we had to merge, [but I think it was a] fashion statement. Who knows? In five years we might be breaking up all these banking combinations into various different parts and end up pretty much where we started. We won’t go back to what we were but we might become [organised] in different lines. But no, I don’t think the merger [was necessary], not at all.

Overall, my fieldwork suggested a slightly schizophrenic interplay of these two paradigms: relentless adaptation to advancing, modernising change, and submission to a rather directionless and possibly meaningless organic cycle of restructuring. Some leaned more towards one than the other, but of course they were invoked situationally, with little concern for any contradiction. The first of these paradigms was the ‘official line’ articulated by Bank leaders and those who wanted to align their own talk with that line. It was louder and more visible. The second paradigm was more of an undercurrent, a philosophical device, a coping mechanism in response to imponderable change. It tended to be encountered informally, as an aside. However, remembering that these are not so much statements about the ‘true’ nature of change, as normatively infused constructions of that change under force of circumstances, I think we should see them as operating together in a loose discursive system. They offered a grand narrative backdrop against which people could articulate various and shifting feelings, of excitement, alienation and resignation. Conclusion A few years later the direction of change would look rather different. During fieldwork there was a strong sense that those who embraced the ongoing changes were facing up to reality, while those who resisted were ‘in denial’. And of course most faced it, but many reluctantly. However, the negative narrative of the time was one of loss, of the incompatibility of progress and a more hospitable way of work that was becoming a thing of the past. With hindsight, after the banking crisis, the alternatives appear different. Perhaps in barrelling ahead into a new future, BoS and then HBOS missed an opportunity to reassess and scope the banking horizon and its risks more carefully. However, it would have been very difficult for most Bank staff to articulate and advance this view at the time, first because they did not know what was going to happen, whatever misgivings and forebodings some might have felt, and second because to do so would have been contrary to the overriding flow of events, and to the dominant common sense of the organisation, and the sector. This little game of counterfactuals, of imagining other paths not taken, implies choices and the agency to make good or bad choices. The official language that HBOS spoke during the merger, like any large organisation would, was one of seizing one’s fate, ‘grasping the nettle’, taking the initiative. A few years later the

Salvage Ethnography.indb 85

24/05/2017 15:07:37

86

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

Bank’s leadership would be casting themselves as the hapless victims of un­ anticipated events, of forces of global finance beyond their control. There are times when it is attractive to claim agency, and times when it isn’t. Times when we’re sitting on top of the world, and times when it’s sitting on top of us. Doubtless those at the top of the Bank had more power, more options, more scope of control than those in the middle and lower ranks, who were the immediate subject of this study. Nonetheless, we should always distinguish between agency in the sense of actual efficacy and capacity for action and claims to agency, which are always made by those with power, or hopes of it. Another aspect of Therborn’s modern ‘epoch turned to the future’ is that, ­especially in its most liberal and capitalist varieties, agency becomes a pervasive moral imperative. Despite a certain florescence in nineteenth-century philosophy and social theory, it becomes harder and harder to invoke outside and higher forces – God’s will, the logic of history, inevitable human improvement. In some versions the naturalised capitalist market economy is seen as having self-correcting and self-improving tendencies. There is a sense in which strong believers in such a market could simply abandon themselves to their fate within it. But in actual practice the market, business and modern social life in general are seen as arenas in which people act. Sheer fatalism is not a modern option. This chapter has been about how people responded to the call to act in highly uncertain circumstances, and some of the patterns of thought and language they drew on to help do that.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 86

24/05/2017 15:07:37

6

Identity: struggles with personhood, nationhood and professional virtue

The multi-study research project of which this ethnographic study is a part was originally conceived in the context of then recent devolution in Scotland and constitutional change in the UK more generally. We were trying to get a finer-grained understanding of how national identity works on a banal, everyday basis (Billig 1995) and how it connects to personhood and individual identity (Cohen 1996). Thus we chose to explore Scottish national identity within the mundane frame of a large, Scottish-identified institution, BoS, but not one associated with its ‘hotter’ or more explicit manifestations. We were interested in ‘national identity’ rather than ‘nationalism’. For this aim BoS seemed an ideal context, where professional lives and their organisational setting were quietly bound up with Scottishness. Of course the merger altered our plans, throwing questions of national identity into bolder relief than they might otherwise have had. But as is so often the case with ethnographic research, we went with what we got, making virtue of a necessity. This chapter examines aspects of Scottish and other identities as they came into play in my fieldwork, highlighting the different ways Scottishness, as a diverse social category, gets attached both to organisations (BoS) and to selves. Identity in the banks As we have seen, especially in Chapter 4, BoS was frequently described by staff (from both merged banks) as very Scottish. ‘Scottishness’ was seen as a trait not just of most of the staff but of the organisation itself. Returning to the email questionnaire, and the question regarding characterisation of the culture of BoS, responses like these were common: Paternalistic, professional, conservative, cautious, parochial, epitomising a ‘canny Scots’ culture, Presbyterian, inclusive, friendly environment to work in. Becoming less hierarchical and having to ‘move with the times’, more open. (063, Scottish, BoS, Corporate, female) Bank of Scotland is a very conservative, very ‘Scottish’ and very proud organisation. The Bank is becoming more of a retail organisation rather than a bank. The emphasis

Salvage Ethnography.indb 87

24/05/2017 15:07:37

88

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

on history, culture and tradition that were a large part of the Bank when I joined six years ago are now less important. (099, British, BoS, Corporate, male) Definitely Scottish, very deep-rooted attachments to the country. This is a very common characteristic of a provincial banking organisation. When I joined it was not a meritocracy but that has changed and I think now in general the most able people do succeed. The speed of change has accelerated since the merger and I think the identity of the bank and its linkage to Scotland while still important will reduce. It has to in order to survive. (047, Scottish, BoS, Corporate, male)

As these responses illustrate, staff saw BoS as Scottish in character and the Bank as an organisation that had, in the past at least, routinely and strategically played on one dimension of stereotypical Scottish identity, that associated with canniness and caution with money. These were organisational virtues that the Bank brought to its business, and to its merger negotiations, offsetting a certain staid and dowdy image with a reputational advantage in terms of Scottish prudence in financial matters. The ‘official’ representation of BoS’s Scottish identity pre-merger was perhaps best exemplified by the Bank’s tercentenary celebrations, which ran through the year in 1995, and were a major event in the life of the Bank. This year-long ritual of intensification was celebrated widely throughout Scotland. An array of gifts and celebrations were commissioned by the Bank. All staff members were entitled to one of a range of commemorative gifts specially designed for the occasion – decanters, cuff links, jewellery cases, broaches and so on. They were encouraged to attend celebratory dinners put on by the Bank on Burns Night (the annual national celebration of the Scottish poet Robert Burns) and on the founding date of the Bank; across all locations there was a collective toast at the end of that working day. Retired staff were given a special food hamper. Other celebrations and commissions included: new commemorative bank notes; a newly commissioned tartan for the staff uniform; two histories of the Bank, one relatively accessible and richly illustrated for a general readership (Cameron 1995), the other very detailed and scholarly (Saville 1996); a triptych tapestry presenting the Bank’s history; re-gilding of the statue atop the Bank headquarters on The Mound in Edinburgh; naming a new breed of rose for the Bank’s then strap-line, ‘a friend for life’; a competition for composing an original tune for bagpipes; and hundreds of charitable donations in the areas of education, the environment, homelessness, the arts and sports. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh made a special visit to the Bank’s headquarters in Edinburgh to acknowledge the anniversary. The Governor of the Bank, Bruce Pattullo, took the ‘salute’ of the massed military pipe bands at the final tattoo, an annual performance that takes place at Edinburgh Castle every summer, in association with the Edinburgh Festival. A video produced by the Bank to commemorate its tercentenary sums up the national embedding of the Scottish identity of the Bank. Presenter, Scottish actor Tom Conti, somewhat ironically from our present standpoint, described BoS in these terms:

Salvage Ethnography.indb 88

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity

89

Above all it has strived successfully to retain its independence, so that today it is recognised as a truly great Scottish institution. The success of Bank of Scotland is something of which Scots really can be proud….

These celebrations wove together the Bank’s identity with classic Scottish symbols and events, and with Scottish society more broadly. While many firms celebrate their own history, few do so on this scale. Many staff valued this deep historical representation of BoS’s institutional identity. Asked how the organisational culture of BoS was changing, one questionnaire respondent commented: It is changing dramatically. One thing that I grew to admire whilst working for BoS was its sense of history and what BoS has given to the Scottish community over the past 300 years. Particularly being in Edinburgh for the Tercentenary celebrations was an exceptionally proud experience for me. I’m now in London and as this has a sense of an ‘ex-pat’ working environment, I think the traditional culture has gone and there is a sense of starting from scratch again. There is no real feel as to who are the makers and shakers of HBOS just yet, other than those at the very top, and I’m looking forward to this becoming apparent once the dust settles on the merger. (108, British, BoS, Business, female)

Another echoed this attachment to the Bank’s deep history and communal attachments, and voiced a sense of its loss: Bank of Scotland had a very paternalistic culture which seemed to generate a good deal of loyalty from its staff. There was a strong sense of tradition and an awareness of 300 years of history supporting the current business. The reputation of the Bank in the community engendered a sense of pride in the organisation and what it stood for. I don’t feel that there is a Bank of Scotland culture as such now – the merger has resulted in a new entity with new values. To an extent, the 300 years of history and the reputation/standing of Bank of Scotland within the community do not appear to receive as much focus now – colleagues are encouraged to look forward to the new merged HBOS rather than look back at Old Co Bank of Scotland. (164, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Group, female)

One of the key ways in which business organisations attempt to project their identity is through advertising. Many of my informants commented on the fact that BoS had always had a very reserved, off-and-on approach to television advertising, perhaps seeing it as a slightly vulgar activity for a bank. Since 1995 BoS had not even bothered with it. As bank customers were remarkably loyal in Scotland’s small market defined by the three big national banks, at least prior to the last wave of mergers around 2000, it perhaps made good business sense not to waste money trying to attract customers in a very static market. Be that as it may, this was bound to change with the merger. At that time, Halifax had been running a popular, quirky television ad campaign featuring an actual staff member, a branch teller named Howard Brown, bespectacled and somewhat nerdy in his suit, singing and dancing to popular songs with the words changed to promote Halifax products. In my field notes I recorded a conversation about this I had during a ‘Practical Teamwork’ course. At a coffee break, the discussion turned to the new BoS advert,

Salvage Ethnography.indb 89

24/05/2017 15:07:38

90

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

which was modelled on the most recent Halifax advert, in which Howard Brown was seen singing astride a huge flying goose. The BoS version featured a branch employee named Angela, who had been selected for the role through an in-house contest. One of the delegates made a point of saying that he knew her and that she was a nice person, but he seemed to be making an evaluative distinction between her, the person, and the ad itself. There seemed to be mixed feelings in the group that were being expressed rather tentatively. On the one hand, some remarked that BoS had not had much television advertising in recent years and this was a good move. On the other, it seemed out of character with BoS, and with Scotland more generally. As one delegate put it, ‘We’re too cynical for this’. I also sensed that it was perceived by the group as a clear sign of capitulation to the Halifax way, to be piggy-backing on its ad campaign, on its image. I heard several derisive comments about the ad campaign in other contexts around this time. Nonetheless, some seemed to find the shift welcome and refreshing, as in this questionnaire response describing the Halifax culture: Perhaps less institutionalised and more forward thinking. Exemplified by the new advertising campaign, which is happy to take a more light-hearted approach. (023, British, BoS, Corporate, male)

However, what was at issue was not just the aesthetics of the advertising in this particular campaign, nor the sense of ownership of the process. There was also a question of a deeper ethos, a sense of corporate propriety at stake. I did an inter­view with a long-serving member of BoS based in the Treasury and Corpor­ ate Divisions. He was trying to convey some of the tensions in corporate style between BoS and Halifax, and recounted this scene: As an example, just to give you a picture … It’s well known the Bank of Scotland and RBS are the great rivals but it’s also a very respectable rivalry, certainly in Treasury terms. RBS are probably the best provider of treasury and we regard them as a very professional competitor and that’s true, not [just] for Treasury but across the board. I attended a management seminar where we were shown a great theory that the Halifax had brought, where they were going to advertise our better current account against a picture of a dilapidated branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was really having a bit of a pop at a competitor and that’s a very different style than we’d been used to. We would speak about our own products but we wouldn’t do so in a way that we would trash our closest competitors. Now we can call that aggressive and challenging and effective or we can just call it rude and antagonistic.

This suggests that the identity of BoS, at least for some of its staff, was not just a matter of instrumentally projected symbols and ideas to achieve some end, but something more like a personal reputation publicly expressed. This informant’s clear discomfort suggests not just an issue around the identity of the Bank, but a degree of identification with BoS, such that the Bank’s conduct reflects back on the informant himself. I will return to this issue in the latter part of the chapter. Before going further, however, it is worth noting a countervailing discourse in the early days of merger, in which the emphasis was on the similarities between

Salvage Ethnography.indb 90

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity

91

Scottish and Yorkshire cultures and identities, and their mutual distance from London and the south of England. I did an informal interview in late 2001 with Charlotte, from Yorkshire, a member of the GL&D team in charge of graduate recruitment and development. I asked her whether she was conscious of being ‘English’ at BoS and whether it affected her experience of working there (paraphrasing from field notes): I’m conscious of it, but it’s not an ‘issue’, apart from learning geography and pronunciations and so on. I am conscious of the stereotypes of where I’m from and where I went to university (Oxford). Another stereotype I have to deal with is being a ‘graduate in the bank’ (i.e. a product of the graduate recruitment scheme herself). So there are other dimensions of difference and it is difficult to separate or isolate just one. The fact that I’m from the north of England may be helpful. I’ve noticed that in Scotland a lot of the ‘chatter’ is around the east/west, Edinburgh/Glasgow difference, and the Catholic/Protestant difference. That kind of ‘internal’ contrasting also happens in England. There’s perhaps a similar contrast between the north and south of England. I’m now conscious of lots of chat about ‘northerners’ from England, ‘whippets’ and ‘flat caps’ and so on, stimulated by the contact with [the] Halifax.

As another respondent to the question of whether the Scots and the English were ‘different’ put it: Yes and no. The further south you go, yes, I believe they are different, with many English people not aware of any other parts of the UK other than London and surrounding areas. Further north, I believe the English are a little more like the Scots in that they also feel a little alienated at times…. (090, born in England, raised in Scotland, BoS, Group, female)

Correspondingly, a Yorkshire respondent based at the Halifax offered: I feel that in my experience people who live in Britain differ by geographical location as opposed to nationality. In my experience the further north a person originates from the ‘warmer’ personality they have, and the more careful (frugal) they are in relation to money. I feel a natural affinity to Scottish people for some unknown reason – although this probably isn’t surprising as the Scots and Yorkshire people are often referred to as second cousins as they are so alike in their make-up!! (159, English, Halifax, Insurance, male)

In some sense these people are moderating gross stereotypes by means of more refined ones. Nonetheless, it was a formulation I frequently heard during the fieldwork, especially in the early months of merger. Identifying a kindred spirit between Scots and Yorkshire folk, as sharing a certain dour view of the world, dry sense of humour and parsimony, was fairly frequently heard on both sides. Clearly, this provided a rhetorical means to take the edge off the blunter versions of the Scottish–English encounter that were also being expressed at the time. And just as Scotland and Yorkshire were drawn closer together, assimilated, both were counter-posed to London and ‘the south’. This rhetorical device was clearly also useful to HBOS’s leadership in trying to promote the merger to staff. This was

Salvage Ethnography.indb 91

24/05/2017 15:07:38

92

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

made evident in an article in the internal new bulletin HBOS Today, based on an interview with the then Deputy Chairman, Peter Burt: The similar philosophies and cultures of the two organisations have helped the gelling process, he believes. [Quoting Burt:] ‘Neither the Halifax nor Bank of Scotland is London-centric. Both believe the way to go is to grow the business by adding value to customers and championing them….’ (HBOS Today, issue 11, January 2002, p. 3)

However, we must also remember the various, more deracinated accounts of the Halifax’s identity and culture by that point. Commonly, the sleepier building society of the past was seen as quintessentially a Yorkshire institution. But by the time of its taking over the Leeds and transformation into a full bank, it had become much less clearly regionally defined. So there was an ongoing discursive tension between the ‘northern alliance’ version of this relationship traced above and the one we have also seen, of a more modern, faceless, business juggernaut, setting about erasing the Scottishness of BoS. This was perhaps best captured in a phrase I often heard, ‘preserving the brand’, used to describe how, for BoS, the merger was not about preserving a way of life but the externally recognised image of BoS, for marketing purposes if nothing else. Conceptual interlude: the question of identity The initial and primary focus of this study was on ‘national identity’, but what does that term mean? In his book on National Identity (1991) Anthony Smith, one of the most influential scholars of nationalism, simply ties it to his conception of the nation, which is: A named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members. (Smith 1991: 4)

Across his writings Smith argues that attachment to these things called nations, and their historical antecedents, which he calls ‘ethnies’, fulfils a basic human need for meaning, social orientation and so on. Leaving aside whether we find this assertion convincing, defining national identity in this round-about way is not really satisfactory. It takes too much for granted. Another approach, exemplified by Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008), is to zero in on ‘everyday nationhood’, the ways that routine behaviours and social interactions constitute nationhood and bring it into being. But even this is a bit indirect when it comes to the question of identity. It says more about how it is done than what it is. In his widely used introductory text to theories of nationalism, Umut Özkirimli concludes by arguing that we should treat nationalism as a kind of discourse, a way of perceiving, thinking and talking about reality, and thus ‘national identity’ becomes one of the claims that is made in terms of such a discourse (Özkirimli 2010: 208–9; cf. Calhoun 1997; Wodak et al. 1999). However, relativising identity to discourse might still be viewed as refusing to address the question head on. Another response has been

Salvage Ethnography.indb 92

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity

93

to reject the validity of national identity as an analytic category altogether. Siniša Malešević (2011) has questioned whether there really is such a thing as national identity, as something that empirically exists and can be studied. He argues that we are better off thinking in terms of how large-scale forms of social organisation are able to seize upon and mobilise smaller-scale forms of social solidarity, linking them to national ide­ologies. For him, organisation, solidarity and ideology are the more useful concepts, ‘identity’ being too prone to essentialisation. David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer (2015: 6–21) have objected that the entire literature on nationalism is weak and imprecise on the question of national identity as such, too often relying on proxies such as those above. But they also reject Malešević’s position. For them, however intangible and often implicit the object of ‘national identity’ might be, positing it is necessary to make sense of the results of diverse methods that explore questions about it. It is not just something imposed on data by the theorist. The fact that fine-grained interview data shows people thinking and talking in terms of national identity is some kind of evidence of its existence. The fact that large-scale and longitudinally consistent opinion surveys, such as those gauging self-attribution of Scottish, English and British identities, show remarkably consistent results indicates that there is something there that is being measured. In examining how people make claims to national identities, McCrone and Bechhofer come to emphasise the key, salient vocabu­laries of ‘markers’ of identity (birthplace, accent, skin colour and so on) and various strategies by which people obey or try to bend the ‘rules’ for making claims to national identities. They fully acknowledge that what is being measured here are patterns of behaviour and interaction, and cognitive maps of reality in people’s heads, not some substantive ‘essence’ hidden inside persons. But the fact that consistent patterns do emerge, in responses to survey questions, in uses of rules and markers, is for them good evidence of national identity. Many of the things social scientists study and take to exist are gauged in this way, through reliable indicators rather than direct empirical measures, because they are social constructs and non-material. We have explored some issues around how we conceptualise national identity, but to go further it is necessary to consider the question of identity full stop, because, surely, national identity is just one aspect of identity more generally. Indeed, one of the problems with the study of identity is a tendency to treat people in a ‘Mr Potato Head’ fashion, as if they had various discrete kinds of identities (national, ethnic, class, gender, sexual) that get attached to them like Mr Potato Head’s eyes, noses and ears. One version of this is a dramaturgical metaphor in which identities are like roles that people play, switching into and out of according to the appropriate context. Of course people do do this to a degree, foregrounding different aspects of their identity through their behaviour as these become salient. But in my experience, too much of this metaphor loses sight of the individual beings behind these roles. I think ethnographic research makes it more difficult to maintain this fiction, as one experiences a set of real people in many situations over a long period of time. One is forced to grapple with the particularity of their identities. I will work my way back to this point.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 93

24/05/2017 15:07:38

94

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

It is interesting to consider the general trajectory of discussions of identity in social theory. By the late 1960s the term ‘identity’ was becoming more prevalent in the social sciences and popular discourse (Wrong 1968), driven by debates about growing youth culture, feminism, civil rights mobilisation and so on. By and large, theorisations of identity in this period took it as fairly unproblematic that people and groups have identities, but there was a new sense that these were increasingly under pressure from such things as burgeoning bureaucracy, conformism, consumerism and rapid social change. A prime example is the work of the social psychologist Erik H. Erikson (1968), who coined the term ‘identity crisis’ in trying to analyse the troubles of transition from child, to teenager, to adult. But since then there has been a steady shift towards problematising the idea of identity itself. In the 1970s and 1980s the work of social psychologist Henri Tajfel (1978, 1982) became increasingly influential. While still working with fairly stable notions of identity, the emphasis in his ‘self-categorisation theory’ was on how identity categories are constructed through the dynamics of ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ formation, the tendency to divide into a positively valued ‘we’ and an negatively valued ‘they’, and to define these against one another. In this vein, the general direction of theoretical travel has been towards social interactionist accounts of identity (in some respects similar to that offered by McCrone and Bechhofer above), in which identity is conceived of as intrinsically social, and not a question of individual personhood. Thus the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen offers: ‘When we talk of identity in social anthropology, we refer to social identity, not to the depths of the individual mind’ (Eriksen 1993: 60). Identity is something people do, with each other, through symbolic action. A little more elaborately, Richard Jenkins, an anthropologist turned sociologist, says: ‘First, identity is a practical accomplishment, a process. Second, individual and collective identities can be understood using a unified model of the dialectical interplay of processes of internal and external definition’ (Jenkins 2004: 23). Identity here is neither inside nor outside, but instead a kind of ‘interference pattern’ set up through the processes of social interaction. In some hands in recent years this trend has devolved into rather extreme scepticism about identity altogether. One variant of this is exemplified by the ‘performative’ thesis of Judith Butler (1990, 2004). Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, Butler treats self-identity as a potentially dangerous illusion, which we should seek to evade through performative acts of transgression. She was in part responding to strains of feminist theory that problematically tended to essentialise and universalise women’s identity. In resistance to this she swings to the opposite extreme, questioning not just the larger social category ‘women’, or whatever the case may be, but the very coherence and stability of the self, which is now construed as a kind of cage to escape from, a trap to be transcended. Another variant of identity scepticism is found in the work of Rogers Brubaker (2004). In a much-circulated article, Rogers Brubaker ­ rederick Cooper (2000) express frustration with the proliferating and and F preponderant use of the term ‘identity’ in the social sciences. In their view, the constructivist turn I outlined above avoids essentialism, but simply renders the

Salvage Ethnography.indb 94

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity

95

concept too fluid. Rather than return to an earlier, more common-sense concept, they advise treating it as a folk category, that is, an idea the people we study use to make sense of their lives, but not one that social scientists should rely on. It is a ‘category of practice’ out there in social life, but not a proper or reliable ‘category of analysis’ (cf. Bourdieu 1991). They advise using more neutral, researcher-devised analytic concepts such as ‘networks’ to help understand group formation. Thus Malešević’s resistance to identity in the national dimension, an area Brubaker also works on, is given a wider context. I have some sympathy with Brubaker and Malešević’s frustrations. The term ‘identity’ often seems to be called to do too much work. In the context of decades of what has come to be called ‘identity politics’ (Heyes 2014), in which political action, particularly in liberal democracies, has become increasingly mobilised around strongly articulated and often essentialising identity claims, it is easy to become exhausted by the term and to lose all hope of reclaiming it for social scientific purposes. But, as I suggested at the outset of Chapter 4, it is not so easy to make this distinction between ‘practice’ and ‘analysis’. First, because we want to under­stand the categories through which people act and make sense of their worlds, these have to be at least objects of analysis (Brubaker would have no objection here I think). But second, however common sense, uncritical and ideologically driven a concept such as ‘identity’ may be, precisely because it is ‘practical’, and so widely used by diverse groups, it is likely to encode some genuine knowledge about how the world works. In my view, the problem is not so much one of ‘sterilising’ our analytic categories, as pulling back from vernacular use, attempting to find the insight in practical categories, but being prepared also to sharpen, methodise and correct those concepts. In a way I have more confidence in everyday uses of the idea of identity than I do in many rarefied academic ones. One of the most basic things that theorists of identity do not sufficiently take into account is that in everyday talk we commonly use ‘identity’ in two very different senses. On the one hand, we use it to indicate large social categories that we place people into. Just as we label and categorise cars, dogs, trees and styles of music, we do the same with people. Although we may subscribe to some liberal principles that proscribe reducing individuals to such categories, it would be odd if our social relations were somehow exempt from this basic impulse to taxonomise the world. Moreover, people normally do this fully aware that the categories they use are not exhaustive, not always adequate. Individuals and groups can be ambiguously defined in terms of nation, ethnicity, race, age, gender, sexuality, class and so on, not to mention things like friendship or criminality. Sometimes the category ‘other’ is necessary. This is a generic limitation of categorisation that all people, social scientists or not, are familiar with. Nonetheless, it is practically difficult to get any handle on the world, social or otherwise, without recourse to categorisation. On the other hand, we also routinely use the term ‘identity’ in a very different way, to refer not to categories of people, but precisely to the particularity of individuals. Each of us has our own unique identity, a personal and evolving stream of thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences and relationships. Our identity in this sense just is who we are. I have suggested that some would like

Salvage Ethnography.indb 95

24/05/2017 15:07:38

96

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

to abandon both these senses of identity, in acts of performative transgression or for the sake of theoretical precision, and others would like to try to merge them, or at least draw them much closer together, through interactionist accounts that focus on the zone where the two meet. In my view, however, it is precisely in the tension between these two very different senses of identity that the most interesting questions lie. Sometimes the fit between them is easy and taken for granted, but sometimes it is uneasy and full of conflict. We want to be able to talk about this analytically, and this involves not transcending this distinction, but taking it seriously and scrutinising it. I find myself in deep sympathy Dennis Wrong (1961, 1995) and Derek Layder (2004, 2006), who in different ways have both argued that a concept of the individual self is necessary for sociology and for social science more generally. Society is precisely about the creation of a degree of order and unity among fractious individuals, and we cannot really investigate this process if we treat individuals as entirely outside our domain – as a residual category for the attention of historians, biographers and psychoanalysts. Every individual person is saddled with the task of making themselves a part of society, and society is full of institutions and conventions, including the identity categories with which we label people, that are constantly harnessing people, sometimes without their knowledge, sometimes against their will, to help bring them into line. Sometimes people consciously invest themselves, their personal identities, into the social identities available to them. But people also find themselves drafted into social identities against their will, and excluded from others regardless of what they would choose (Jenkins 1994, 2004: 79–93). Social mobilisation of all kinds is very much about this relation­ship between personal and collective identities: from citizens supporting wars, to activists campaigning for causes, to consumers choosing clothes, and fans following celebrities. Throughout social life this dynamic of relating personal identities to social identities is at work. It is part of how solidarities are created and divisions entrenched. Altogether there is a complex, shifting ecology of identity, as this restless process unfolds (Hearn 2012: ch. 10; Hearn 2013). This relationship is mediated. The connecting of persons to wider social identities, and excluding them from others, is done by myriad forms of social organisation. Some organisations, such as those campaigning for group interests and rights, are explicitly for the purpose, calling on individuals to identify with larger collectivities. Others have clear affinities, such as labour parties during the peak of industrial class formation, but are less directly concerned with identitymaking. Still others do this more implicitly, but nonetheless with some purpose, as in the way certain schools, universities and social clubs reproduce elite membership. Moreover, regardless of where particular organisations stand in regard to this process of reproducing larger social identity categories, any organisation, formal or informal, in which people invest much time, energy, motivation, will tend to become a carrier, to a degree, of their personal identities. Our personal identities develop embedded within various key organisational settings: families, households, workplaces and various forms of voluntary association (Hearn 2007). This is crucial for the present study, because in it we find a specific confluence of

Salvage Ethnography.indb 96

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity

97

these processes. The normal investment of self in work, and in the organisation for which one works, in this study became by circumstance much more sharply related to social categories of national identity, which suddenly moved from the background to become much more salient. This shifting of organisational salience for national identity (and, by extension, all sorts of social identities) happens all the time. Unions, churches, universities, businesses and so on are all susceptible under the right conditions to becoming significant contexts and carriers of national and other identities, even though previously they had only been implicitly or tangentially related to these. Another aspect of this process is that identities are often narratively framed, such that people are in effect invited to invest their personal narratives, a formal aspect of their identities, in larger social narratives that resonate for them (Smith 2003; Somers 1994). In such larger narratives, collectivities are cast as macro-agents, protagonists in a social and historical drama, and individuals are encouraged to relate their personal stories to these larger narratives. In the case of nationalism these stories are typically ones of oppression, of political emancipation, of imperial expansion, or of a homeless sojourn in the wilderness. Different kinds of narratives convey different overall moods in regard to the agentic situation in which the collectivity is cast and with which the individual is invited to identify (Hearn 2002). The key point here is that people’s sense of personal agency is realised through the larger agencies of the organisations they are embedded in and refracted through the larger narratives that frame those agencies at both levels. The staff at BoS found their fates framed by a complex concatenation of narratives involving corporate growth, business opportunity, merger as takeover, loss of tradition, and all filtered through readings of English and Scottish identities as characteristically involving traits, confidence and diffidence, associated with differential success in this environment. This brings me to my final point in this conceptual interlude. What I have been saying about agency has implications for power. Power is not just a macroconcept, a matter of large-scale social dynamics of domination and resistance: it is also a personal matter. And it is not just a matter of repression and control: it is also a matter of capability, opportunity and empowerment. I am not making the standard Foucauldian point that power involves a ‘micro-physics’ and should primarily be sought in the fine ‘capillaries’ of society (Foucault 1980). Against Foucault I would maintain that power is also highly centred and concentrated in many instances, and that we cannot understand it simply by looking for its most diffuse and small-scale forms, or by locating it in ‘discourses’, and evacuating it from ‘subjects’ with will and intent. Instead, I am agreeing, again with Layder (2006) and Erik Erikson before him, that an important part of understanding personhood is appreciating the importance of power for the shaping of the self, as an agent, in relation to an encompassing world. All human beings need a certain amount of power over themselves to be psychologically healthy, and good interpersonal relations involve a measure of what Layder calls ‘benign control’ (2004: 13–14, passim), that is, allowing the power of one person over another, in ways that meet the needs of both, and in some cases can be reciprocal. Of course,

Salvage Ethnography.indb 97

24/05/2017 15:07:38

98

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

interpersonal power relations can also go wrong, become pathological, abusive. The main point, however, is that, for people, power is not a distant matter, but an aspect of the basic equilibrium of their daily lives. In ethnographic research one often becomes acutely aware that this is what is at stake, that what one is observing is the way that power dynamics at a much larger level reverberate down to the personal level, to the level of self-determination, self-realisation, self-worth. The experience of power is one of the sinews that connects identity as a social category to identity as a unique aspect of the self. Identity and the self In my fieldwork I became very aware that alongside the various modes of categoris­ ation at play, of nationality and region (Scots, English, Yorkshire, Highlander, Welsh, Irish, etc.), and of which bank one was historically affiliated with (BoS, Halifax, Capital), there was another one, which had to do with what kind of employee one was. This was frequently summed up in terms of professionalism, or the lack thereof. When asked about their reasons for going into banking, informants often cited, among assorted other reasons, the attraction of a career that involved professional qualifications. This question was posed in the email survey, and responses such as these, both from Scots employed at BoS, are indicative: An Uncle & Aunt who both worked for banks recommended a career in that field. In the early 1970s a career in banking was seen as a profession where there was a sense of achievement if one was accepted for employment – T’was seen a good job in the community (maybe not so much these days). (182, Scottish, BoS, Group, male) At the time I graduated I took the view that as banking became more system driven there would be opportunities for corporate bankers to earn a professional income equivalent to other areas such as accounting and law. It’s taken a little longer than I thought but we are beginning to get there! Also banking is a great and honourable profession of helping others and gaining an insight into many businesses and ways of life. Having chosen banking I have stayed with BoS because I am working for the best bank and see absolutely no reason to consider moving to a lesser organisation! (006, British, BoS, Corporate, male)

One of my informants, a woman who had been based at GL&D when I started, but had moved on to another unit by the time I did a formal interview with her, offered this contrast when we were talking about the intensity with which people connect to various identities: Yes, yes, the passion thing. I think with the British thing is that you are forced, in a way, to become British because your passport names you as such.… There’s more passion in Scotland, in a sense, that you can relate…. I think the Scottish people are different … I think they are generally far more professional, in a work context…. I’m generalising but usually [you can see] the [way] that we work and the dedication we give….

Salvage Ethnography.indb 98

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity

99

Much more frequently, however, this contrast was posed more specifically in terms of the norms and ethos of BoS versus Halifax, rather than as a national comparison as in the quote above. As already indicated, ‘professionalism’ was one of the descriptors often associated with the organisational culture of BoS. This was often expressed quite casually and caustically to me in conversations with BoS staff that cast BoS staff as ‘professionals’ and Halifax staff as ‘salespeople’ and ‘retailers’, in other words, not as professionals. Drawing again on questionnaire responses that are indicative of this widespread discourse, we get this characterisation of the culture of BoS: I believe that the BoS culture was a strong behavioural culture of ‘getting on and doing it’. We would just get on with it and get it done – albeit, sometimes if we had sat back and thought a little more, we may not have made some of the more public mistakes in the past. Bank of Scotland of old had … strong values of honesty and integrity, whereas the strong sales culture and commission-based sales appear to be pushing people down the sales at all costs and self, self, self route. Not always a good thing – the financials might make good reading, the staff might be taking home good money, but what does the customer really think! I think the organisation culture is changing – but not necessarily for the better. I have seen standards of professionalism (previously held in high regard by our customers) fall due to the drive for SALES-only culture and sales at any and all costs. Whilst I agree that the company must grow and grow efficiently, we should take great care on the impact on our customers, without whom none of us would have a salary every month! (018, Scottish, BoS, Business, male)

This same axis of contrast appeared when respondents were instead asked to charac­ter­ise the Halifax culture. These are again the perspectives of BoS staff members: I have had limited exposure to Halifax, although from my observations I see it as a results-based organisation. This driver has very much shaped its culture. For example, as a BoS graduate we are expected to do professional qualifications, whereas our Halifax graduate colleagues are trained more specifically in sales techniques etc. rather than recognised qualifications. (190, Irish/British, BoS, Graduate Scheme, male) Despite its roots as a building society in the north of England, Halifax does not appear to be as parochial as one might expect, although there are exceptions to this. The familiality of BoS is not nearly as evident, and the difference can perhaps be illustrated by looking at the length of service of senior staff in central functions. In BoS, historically, a person of 40 would have normally been with BoS for 20 years plus; in Halifax, this service, as far as I can see, would be nearer 5–10 years. The focus appears to be on having specialists in specialist roles and bringing in young high fliers from other industries, especially retail. There does not appear to be any history of developing staff across a wide range of disciplines, nor of encouraging staff to become ‘professional bankers’. When putting forward my cv for consideration in the new organisation, I was advised to remove the term ‘career banker’ as it was

Salvage Ethnography.indb 99

24/05/2017 15:07:38

100

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

thought this would be detrimental to my chances! (062, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Group, female)

It is worth noting that, as in the reference to ‘specialists’ in the quote above, BoS staff did sometimes attribute a degree of ‘professionalism’ to Halifax staff, but it was never presented as a distinguishing feature. Correspondingly, of the 18 Halifax-based respondents to the questionnaire, none volunteered ‘professionalism’ as a descriptor of that organisation, and most stressed the sales and customer focus of the Halifax. And this was generally consistent with my direct encounters with Halifax staff in fieldwork and interviews. Some Halifax staff were frank and blunt about their reservations and mixed feelings, as here: Fast, Cost-obsessed (sub optimally), Young, Image Conscious, Results Driven, Target driven, Leaders as heroes, Glamorous Leadership, Style over substance, Dynamic, Positive. (077, ‘half Polish Yorkshireman’, Halifax, Retail, male)

When respondents were asked about how they envisioned the new HBOS culture taking shape, this distinction again appeared: I suspect that certain divisions will be affected by the merger more than others, for example Retail. I know that already the focus for retail is decidedly more sales focused. Indeed, the focus on sales, throughout all areas of the Bank will have an effect on the culture. This is because in the past bankers were viewed as professionals who would not have deliberately tried to sell ‘products’. Those who work in the Bank will have to come to terms with this change, and adapt accordingly. (075, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Graduate Scheme, female)

Some hoped for a positive synthesis, the best of both worlds: Too early to say. Hopefully it will combine the sales drive of Halifax with the banking experience of BoS to create a professional banking culture, not just a sales environment. (101,part Scottish, part British, BoS, Retail, female) I imagine a little of both – probably the approachability of the Halifax coupled with the professionalism of BoS. (106, British, BoS, Group, female)

With this somewhat critical and rhetorical use of the distinction between ‘professionals’ and ‘retailers’, we are getting a complex combination of a representation of a real historical difference encoded in the cultures of the two banks, and an expression of the discomfort and sense of displacement being experienced by BoS-based members of HBOS. Professionalism is aligned with and stands in for other descriptors, such as integrity and probity. But the key point is that these terms serve as a kind of symbolic suture between the person and the organisation. The organisation is professional, but staff participate in this value as professionals. Professional is more than a descriptor: it is a kind of virtue, an indication of character. Halifax staff are characterised as ‘sales people’ because that is what their organisation calls for. The use of comparative terms like this is directing

Salvage Ethnography.indb 100

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity101 our attention to how the encounter between organisations, the merger, was being experienced as an encounter between individual persons, with their own identities, set in tension with their environment, as the values that once consolidated their relationships with the organisations in which their careers were embedded became problematic, perhaps obsolete. Another key term here is ‘competition’ and its cognates such as ‘competitiveness’. Not surprisingly, this turns up throughout the research data, in a variety of contexts. There was widespread acknowledgement that the banking sector as a whole was becoming more competitive, over customers and returns to share­ holders, and that this was what was driving the recent wave of mergers. It was also widely recognised that the banking sector in England was more competitive overall because it was larger and more dynamic than that in Scotland. And most expected this to be reflected in HBOS’s development into a fiercer competitor. Generally, BoS was described as a bit complacent, competitive within its narrow markets but really only just waking up to the increasing competitive pressures in recent years. The Halifax was usually represented as having internalised a competitive ethos since demutualisation and the merger with the Leeds. The expectation was that the Corporate division, with its new cash reserves coming from the merger, would be able to be more competitive in its London-based sector, while the Retail Division would lead a drive towards sharper competition for personal banking customers across Britain. What I want to highlight here is that the discourse on competition, like that on professionalism, again had implications not just for the Bank as a whole, but for careers, for persons, as agents. The questionnaire item on BoS culture and how it was changing got these responses: Changed dramatically since I started with BoS. Originally fairly paternalistic organis­ation where you felt you were part of the whole organisation. Now changed to one which is so large it has now become a series of distinct business units where to an extent you feel you are competing both internally and externally. (109, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Corporate, male) The BoS culture was a fairly traditional one, with hierarchical structures, job for life, and fairly risk averse. The culture is changing, particularly through HBOS, with flatter structures, more competition for jobs, and a more aggressive strategy. (114, Scottish, BoS, Group, male)

When I asked respondents to anticipate what HBOS would look like in the future, competition was central to their speculations: Sales driven, much more competitive, higher rewards, more redundancies expected, younger staff profile. (188, British, BoS, Business, male) A sales-led business, effectively run by the Halifax side of the operation (it was the larger of the two institutions at the time of the merger). The feeling of job security is going, and with it the culture that I knew for the last few years. Many of its employees may regard their employer as no different from the competition, although within the Corporate arm this is not the case, I believe, as we have secured many good recruits

Salvage Ethnography.indb 101

24/05/2017 15:07:38

102

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

from competitors, who all confirm that BoS Corporate is a market leader in its offerings. (086, Scottish, BoS, Corporate, male) More allegiance to your individual business unit/team rather than HBOS as a whole. See it as being much more competitive and striving. (109, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Corporate, male) Highly competitive, internally as well as externally, in a marketplace which has high expectations and is also unforgiving. However, I would hope/expect it to work within a framework of professional ethics and have a compliance culture which will enhance its reputation. (116, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Group, male)

These responses illustrate two prominent ideas at the time of fieldwork: first, the expectation that more thoroughgoing competition would erode organisational loyalties, that one’s present employer is just one of several that might want to compete for one’s talents; and second, that fiercer competition with other organis­ ations, other banks, came with sharper internal competition, between business units, teams and individuals. Overall, I think some saw this as probably refining the quality of the average HBOS employee, while others saw it as risking dysfunction because necessary degrees of corporate solidarity were weakened. Either way, the implication was that the successful HBOS employee would be one prepared to compete for their job, to ‘sell yourself into the job’ as we have seen it put (Chapter 4). For some this was a call to up their game, to respond to a new challenge. For others it was an expectation that they should be someone other than who they were – someone less diffident, more voluble, more competitive. A tall order. Compared with ‘professionalism’, ‘competitiveness’ is more ambiguous as a virtue; if pushed too far, it can become a vice. At this juncture it is worth saying something about gender. I did not systematically pursue questions on gender in my fieldwork, although I tried to remain alert to the issue. However, in my participant observation work in developing the gender pay audit for the Diversity Team I got some insight into the issue at HBOS. I helped collate bank data and draft an internal report, and attended a conference on the issue of ‘closing the gender pay gap’ with team leader Gwen, who was very committed to the project. The Bank’s initiative was a response to general moves in the sector to address this issue, as indicated by the conference. Without going inappropriately into details, this project revealed that HBOS was fairly normal for the banking sector, and for many other large professional organisations (including in the university sector). That is to say, there was a considerable gendered skewing of levels of promotion, which was linked of course to levels of pay. The HBOS workforce was about 70 per cent women at the time, with women highly concentrated in the lowest and ‘customer service’ grades. In summary: • While women earned more than men on average in the lowest grades, men’s salaries increasingly outstripped women in the higher grades, with a marked pay gap at the executive level (well above the 17 per cent which was regarded as the average gender pay gap for equal work at the time).

Salvage Ethnography.indb 102

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity

103

• This same general trend was reflected in average starting salaries across the grades. • Differences in annual pay awards (bonuses) at the executive level were a significant factor in gender pay discrepancies. • Among those who had served 20 or more years, women were much more likely than men to remain in the lowest or lower grades, and very unlikely to make it to the highest grades. This is sufficient to sketch the situation at that time. Given this and the fact that women were heavily concentrated in the Retail Division, it is a pertinent question whether there was a gendered dimension to the issues explored above. Did women experience some of these pressures, and the apparent devaluation of certain traits, differently from men or more acutely than men? How were gendered identities interacting with the others we have discussed? This is not something I can answer definitively, but some of my fieldwork observations were suggestive in this regard. I attended a two-day training course called ‘Negotiating Skills’ in February, midway through the research. The course was one of the better run of those I attended, with around 10 delegates, including myself, mostly managers of branches or units, but also analysts and a couple of ‘customer service officers’. About half the group were women. A couple of episodes during this course got me speculating about the gender dimension (I commented on this in my field notes at the time). First, at a mid-morning coffee break on the first day, I found myself sitting with Wilson, the instructor, and several of the women. Conversation began with some mordant comments about the ‘Halifax Says No’ blunder in the news that morning. Apparently some training materials, including a flip chart, had been left up and visible in a branch during business hours. On it were indicated the kinds of customers Halifax was not interested in – taxi drivers, window cleaners, market traders and so on – because they inconveniently handle large amounts of smalldenomination cash. With its mortgage market focus, many Halifax branches were less well set up to handle this kind of money. Obviously, this was a public relations blunder, an embarrassment to the Bank. After this opener, things moved on to people’s experiences of the merger, in what I found to be one of the more frank and heartfelt small-group discussions I had encountered during my fieldwork. One of the women, Fiona, a manager from Oxford, had recently learned that her unit was being closed down and that she must look for redeployment. She talked about how difficult this was; there was minimal assistance and many of the jobs advertised went unfilled. The general tone of the conversation among the women was discouraging. They spoke of people being hired in from other banks and insurance companies, while BoS people could not find jobs, with a clear sense of betrayal. They spoke about how the Bank constantly reported the number of new jobs created but did not mention the number of old jobs discontinued. There were also disparaging remarks about declining share value in the company (the share price had been somewhat volatile since the merger, and many staff were affected because they took bonuses in shares), about the struggle to meet unrealisable targets, and about how new

Salvage Ethnography.indb 103

24/05/2017 15:07:38

104

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

performance pay and benefits meant people in different units within the same division were getting very different remuneration. They raised the familiar theme that banking used to be a job for life. One referred to her husband and his father, who had been dockworkers in Rosyth, and how it had been the same thing, a job for life, until recent years. Another said she would have served 30 years in eight more years and was looking forward to getting out early. I sensed a clear preference for the more protective, less competitive environment that rewards years of service, which was now evaporating. The gist of the discussion was, ‘You’ve given years of service, you work just as hard as others, and yet people lose their jobs or get paid less’. I don’t know how much gender was a factor in the mood of this conversation, or to what degree these women can be taken as expressing a perspective that was characteristic of women in general in HBOS at the time. But I can say that this kind of raw expression of unhappiness did not happen often, and I was struck at the time that it was being articulated by a group of women. More often when unease with the changes was being expressed, there was some combination of strained optimism, stoic resignation and ruefulness. And I would say that when I encountered, as I sometimes did, the other side, a sense of excitement and genuine optimism about change, enthusiasm for a heightened competitive environment, this tended to come from men. Like much ethnography, these are anecdotal and inconclusive observations but, placed in the wider context I have described, I think a reading is plausible that says gender is a factor here. The other scene that seemed to have gender implications happened on the second day of the course, in the afternoon, during a large exercise involving an imaginary stationery company experiencing pressures on profitability due to changes in the industry, in which the delegates played the roles of managers and union representatives. Three people were a management team and six others were reps for three different unions (two each), all facing a redundancy package. At a break in the imaginary negotiations, Nelson, one of the men on the union rep team, said he thought it was right and appropriate that the management should get a larger cut of any profit-sharing scheme, to which several of the women, two of them especially, responded with doubt and some scorn. I sensed that Nathan, one of the other men on the team, was sympathetic to what Nelson was saying. He certainly did not challenge it like the others. Here again, I had a strong sense, however impressionistic, that the women in the group were somehow more attached to a more traditional, collectivist ethos, of the kind associated with BoS as it formerly was. I conclude by returning to GL&D, and how corporate restructuring came acutely to bear on personal experiences there. The following account stays close to my original field notes over a few days. By early in 2002, Jessica, the Director of GL&D when I began, had lined up a new job outside HBOS, and things were in motion for Janet, the new head of GL&D, to take over (as part of this process the unit was renamed Executive and Organisational Development towards the end of my fieldwork). Near the end of April I had a meeting with Jessica in which she informed me that an email had gone out to all staff in the unit about a meeting

Salvage Ethnography.indb 104

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity

105

with Janet on the following Monday that would have serious implications for people’s futures. Her speculation was that it might involve reclassifying job roles across the board and requiring everyone to reapply for their jobs (with probably little hope for people in some areas). She explained that many people had been through this process already, or thought that they had escaped it, so the mood was rather ‘tetchy’ that day. I noted that Alison, the Director of one of the more embattled sub-units of GL&D, had been walking around seeming ‘nervously cheerful’, and people had gone out for breakfast rolls that morning in what I took to be a collective comforting activity. Jessica said some had been trying to calculate their severance packages in anticipation. This was all premature, as no one really knew for sure what the substance of the meeting would be on Monday. This seemed to me a big final punctuation mark on the time I had been based there, with people draining away over the period, redeployed to other units, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Jessica seemed quite relieved that this was not her responsibility anymore. After careful and conflicted consideration, I decided not to go in to GL&D on the following Monday. I knew the ‘big meeting’ with Janet would be happening, with potentially painful news for everyone, and decided that it was best to allow people some privacy and not be a ‘voyeur’. It might have been interesting, but I thought the deeper impact would be evident without being present at the time the news was announced. On Tuesday Alison invited me into her office first thing to debrief me. It turned out as Jessica had expected, that all jobs were being redefined and advertised, and everyone now had to apply for a new job, as the old ones were being discontinued. This meant competing against close colleagues of many years, not just against staff throughout the Bank and beyond. In the meeting, Janet had said this was necessary to make it a team that fit her vision of things. Jessica described Janet’s approach as informed by her American and legal background – it was in theory the fairest way, to open up all the jobs at once. However, Jessica thought it might have been more politic to consult with the people in the most threatened areas first and give them some options, in light of the fact that there were going to be no places for them in the new set-up. Everyone I spoke to was very diplomatic about Janet’s decision, indicating they understood her need to define her own team. But I still knew they all felt a bit blindsided. Alison said that the responses after the meeting ranged from tears to laughter, that there was a lot of ‘gallows humour’ about on Monday. Everyone went out to lunch together that day to console each other. Some people appeared to have stayed home on the Tuesday to process the news. On Wednesday the mood was still pretty sombre; people had been meeting with Janet since Monday to discuss their future and possible bids for new jobs and that was still going on. They had until the following Tuesday to apply for jobs. By end of the week they would be having job interviews. I sensed that in many ways the hardest hit were those who had been with the Bank all their working lives. They were not used to thinking of a career beyond the Bank, and felt that they had been loyal and were owed loyalty in return. When I had spoken to Graeme and Duncan the previous day they seemed to be trying to keep a brave face on things and see

Salvage Ethnography.indb 105

24/05/2017 15:07:38

106

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

what happened. Duncan said they had ‘youth’ on their side (both nearing 50). On Wednesday Graeme was saying he had been with the Bank for 29 years, with no disciplinary issues ever arising, and good professional development reviews, and that after all this time he had a lot of skills (his wife and son also worked for BoS). He used to be a ‘real’ banker, making loans, auditing and so on. He planned to train for the next higher vocational qualification and apply within the Bank, perhaps becoming a consultant. He said that if something had not come through by October – that was when he would start to get bitter. Duncan and Graeme were both members of the ‘Walkers’ group that we met in the Introduction (Chapter 1). Duncan soon took early retirement, going on to do work for the Citizens Advice Bureau, and spend more time as a church organist. Graeme continued to follow his career in the Bank. I also spoke to Ailsa that day, based in one of the areas that was being closed down, who apparently was the one who was in tears after the meeting. She expressed a sense of betrayal and anger, feeling she had weathered the storm by now, and expressing her discomfort at having to compete for jobs with colleagues of seven years. She said it was making her rethink her work–life balance and whether she wanted to stay in the organisation if this was the way things were going. She commuted from a town to the west of Edinburgh and had taken note of HR jobs going in that area, thinking this might be a good time to simplify her life and work closer to home. She spoke about loyalty and tradition and how this was not the bank she used to work for. Graeme had made a similar point, that in his meeting with Janet about his options she had stressed that it was not him but the job spec that was the problem. When he told her how long he had been with the Bank she seemed taken aback. Ailsa spoke about how the situation made you ‘feel like a leper’ in that it cast a cloud over your adequacy for the job, making you feel people had doubts about you. She said a colleague went up to another unit on the fourth floor the previous day and detected a hush falling when she arrived. The following week, while I was chatting to Jessica by the coffee machine about the state of play of the job shuffle, Ailsa came up and said she had talked with her husband the previous night about taking the redundancy package on offer, and he had encouraged her to take it, to be shot of the place. Conclusion I have tried to convey a feel for the complex overlapping and interpenetration of identities and loyalties at work in this context. Obviously the events just sketched are at the extreme. However, I think it is fair to say that while not typical of all life in the Bank at the time, certain widespread but often submerged sentiments about the entire course of events around the merger were forced to the surface in this instance. There is no tidy way of tracing out the exact connections between people’s lived biographical experiences, stereotypes of national identity, notions of organisational loyalty and solidarity, and degrees of identification with organisations with which one’s life and livelihood are bound up. But I have tried to show that there are subtle resonances between these, which in this context became quite

Salvage Ethnography.indb 106

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Identity

107

dissonant for some. Fairly obviously, the trend here was towards the weakening of these resonances. HBOS staff might be asked to identify with the developing organisation, but this could not enjoy the reinforcement that once came from being more embedded in national (Scottish) and regional (Yorkshire) settings and communities. Dismantling older, more paternalistic organisational cultures may have provided some welcome room to breathe but it also inevitably weakened solidarities and the capacity for the Bank to be an object of identification. The new model banker was not a ‘company man’ or ‘company woman’, perhaps not a banker at all, but a free agent, extolling the new virtues of competitiveness, innovation, selling and excelling, who happened, of necessity, to work in a bank, such as HBOS. Just before I wound up fieldwork, after the final wave of GL&D redeployments, the start of which I described above, there was a day when the remaining skeleton crew were moving their stuff out of the offices they had occupied since my research began. After a day of helping move boxes, several of us went out for a drink, catching up with some other Bank folk at The Dome, an impressive ­Edinburgh New Town building that had once been the main branch of the National Commercial Bank, before it was taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland. It was now an impressive bar. As we drank our beers and struggled to converse over the din of music and voices resonating in the cavernous marbled interior, I was trying to say something general about my research, where it had come to. Graeme turned to me, chiding in a friendly way, and said that I often spoke in a detached way of the ‘organisation’ or the ‘company’, but that what I did not get was that, for them, it was always ‘the Bank’, a unique entity that they had been with for many years. I think I get it Graeme.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 107

24/05/2017 15:07:38

7

Comparison: doing ethnography and thinking comparatively

The concept of comparison that shapes this chapter functions somewhat differently from the concepts organising the previous three chapters (culture, change and identity). Those served as analytic lenses to bring out particular dimensions of the data. Comparison here is primarily a matter of relating the ethnographic data to other experiences which lie beyond that research. I am using comparison to draw out further themes from the data, and to revisit some we have already explored, but also to pull back from the data a bit and widen the frame. I will explain here at the outset how I think comparison operates in this context, before making a set of selected comparisons. This ethnography, like most, is a case study. And we all know the supposed problem with case studies is that they lack a comparative dimension and cannot serve the purposes of generalisation. But of course that charge has been refuted many times (Becker 2014; Flyvbjerg 2006; Glaser and Strauss 1967; Mitchell 1983). I start from one of the most standard and irrefutable rejoinders, that it simply is not possible not to think comparatively (Bechhofer and Paterson 2000: 3–9; Burke 2005: 21–2). As David Hume once put it: ‘All kinds of reasoning consist in nothing but comparison, and a discovery of those relations, either constant or inconstant, which two or more objects bear to each other’ (1978 [1739]: 73). Any case study is implicitly comparative simply by merit of the use of language and its general terms (bank, crisis, merger) let alone the application of governing concepts (culture, change, identity) which analytically situate the case in a wider field of cases. Of course, this is not a claim to systematic and methodical forms of case comparison, nor a challenge to the merits of such research. It is simply a matter of being clear about how ethnography actually gets done. Ethnographers cannot enter field sites as blank slates. They can and should do their best to quell and bracket their inborn assumptions, to view things as objectively as possible. But inevitably they enter the field with some sort of research agenda and a host of previous experiences through which new experiences are perceived. Apperception, the assimilation of new experiences by means of previous experiences, is unavoidable. Reflective ethnographers have to do their best to make a virtue of this necessity. Ethnographic fieldwork is full of moments where one thinks, ‘that’s odd, not what I expected’,

Salvage Ethnography.indb 108

24/05/2017 15:07:38

Comparison

109

or ‘this is strangely familiar, but out of context’. It is valuable to interrogate these responses and to try to tease out their reasons. The answers will involve some specific juxtaposition of similarity and contrast that is likely to give some analytic leverage, another entry point into the data. The whole mythology of ethnography revolves around this comparative experience. With its roots in the anthropological encounter with the ‘non-Western other’, there has long been an underlying trope of either heightened contrast with the modern/Western condition of the ethnographer, or transcendence of that difference, and discovery of a shared underlying humanity with those ‘culture distant’. Both of these situations, the contrast with the ‘other’ and the identification of deeper similarities, have been used as means to critique the ethnographer’s own society. Of course, the cultural ‘distance’ spanned is not always Western/nonWestern, or modern/traditional: it can also be across classes or other boundaries within the same society or general type of society. My main point is that whether the ultimate aim is to heighten or transcend the otherness of the ethnographic subject, the core conventions of ethnographic discourse tend to place the emphasis on contrast and difference. Finding that those ‘culture distant’ are actually ‘like us’ depends on articulating that difference in the first place. But how does this work when the experiential distance between the ethnographer and subjects is actually rather slight? Does it become irrelevant? My informants at the Bank were largely middle class, as am I. They worked in a large, complex, modern organisation and, as an academic based at a university, so do I. We all spoke minor variants of the same language. In my experience, this reduces the sensation of contrast. Indeed, with this particular kind of ethnography I sometimes struggle to make things unfamiliar, to keep myself ‘alert’. As part of the participant observation I spent many hours sitting at a desk in front of a computer, much as I do on a daily basis as an academic (although I rarely wear a suit). Doing what they did was often numbingly familiar. Nonetheless, I was quite conscious of crossing one particular boundary between ethnographer and subjects, that between what we might call the ‘world of business’ and the ‘world of public service’, as represented by the modern university. I think many academics have a sense of having made a choice of work between these two environments, of having opted out of a more market-driven world and rationale, and opting into one based more firmly on the provision of a general public good (learning, research) supported by the wider goals of society and the state. Although, technically, large UK universities are part of the charitable sector, not the public sector as such, I had a general sense of crossing, institutionally, the public–private divide. And yet even this boundary is blurred. As I said early on, banks by their nature occupy an intermediate position between the state and the wider economy, as mediators between economic actors, as stewards of economies and, often, as creations of the state under special regulation. Historically, they are not as fully immersed in the economy as other firms, because they are also one of its more general conditions of operation. But of course the period in which I did my fieldwork was one in which this distinction was being obscured and banks were being encouraged to operate more like other competitive business firms. On the

Salvage Ethnography.indb 109

24/05/2017 15:07:39

110

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

other side, the aloofness from the cut-and-thrust dynamics of business that many academics think they enjoy can be somewhat illusory. Universities, despite their non-profit status, grow, engage in mergers (swallowing up smaller educational institutions), compete with each other for quality students and sources of funding, and for external markers of teaching and research prestige, and in effect struggle to define their market position within the sector. Such competitive dynamics over resources are of course reproduced internally between the university’s parts, just as they are in business firms. And there is historical directionality here as well. Universities, along with banks, have been becoming more like commercial firms in recent decades. They move in parallel, despite the sense of belonging to different worlds. This is the wider point. Exaggerated distinctions between ‘state’ and ‘market’, or ‘public’ and ‘private’, can obscure the fact that society is made up of a host of complex organisations, sometimes ambivalently placed between these poles, all of which are caught up in sectorial arenas of competition. They all have their own peculiar economies and sets of exchanges with other organisations, institutions and actors. They all seek the requisite power to reproduce and perhaps extend themselves. This process channels them along paths of change, driving internal changes in forms, structures and constitutions, which in turn constitutes change in the entire environment in which they operate, which is itself composed of many such organisations. While organisational leaders will claim to be masters of their ships, there is limited control of the overall, society-wide dynamic of mutual adaptation among organisations. Social evolution proceeds by constant adjustments to immediate circumstances, in a relatively short-sighted way, which has little grasp, conceptual or practical, of long-term consequences. By the time I completed the fieldwork, I had already formulated the view that perhaps some of the parallels between banks and universities were more telling than the differences. The similarities of their shaping pressures and paths are even more apparent to me now. ‘Native’ comparison Having said that my primary concern is to explore the data through comparisons with my own experiences beyond the research, let me first contradict that, and dwell for a moment on the presence of comparative thinking in the words of my informants. As we have seen, comparison of banks (BoS, Capital, Halifax) and of nationalities (Scots and English) was a key and almost unavoidable means of indigenous sense-making in the context of merger. I have tried to convey that this was sometimes done sharply, sometimes ambivalently and often somewhere in between. However, I have tended to focus on that portion of the discourse that was emphasising differences, because I think this was being conditioned by, and serving a function in, the general context of merger. But here I want to go a bit further and explore the ways in which some informants explicitly used comparison as a means of challenging the essentialising tendencies they perceived in their own local discourse.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 110

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Comparison

111

I return one last time to the questionnaire responses to the following item: ‘Scottish and English people tend to be different from one another’. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? What is the basis of your answer?

I was somewhat heartened by the resistance I found in many of the answers, and also intrigued by the various strategies respondents offered for challenging and refining the question. One common strategy was to relativise the Scottish/English distinction to other regional distinctions, as in these responses: Overall, I disagree with this statement. Whilst we are undoubtedly different, the same can be said of, say, someone from Yorkshire compared to someone from London or Cornwall. (139, Scottish, BoS, Retail, male) In order to properly answer this, a definition of ‘different’ is required. All people are different. You can point to Cornishmen who do not consider themselves to be English and the same can be said for Yorkshiremen. You can point to differences between people from Airdrie and Coatbridge [two towns in central Scotland], which lie right next to each other. I therefore do consider that Scottish and English people are different but only in as much as I consider everyone as being unique and therefore by definition different. I believe that so-called national differences can be attributed to such influences as history and climate. The education system, the media and the entertainment industry (Braveheart) all contribute to a perception of difference which is not necessarily present in the majority of the population. (071, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Business, male) Disagree. We have far more similarities than differences. We share the same language, similar culture, media, climate, economy. There’s as much difference between the people of Glasgow & Edinburgh, or the Highlands & the Lowlands, as there is between England & Scotland. Similarly, someone in Glasgow will probably have more in common with someone from Newcastle than they will with someone from Ullapool. You could argue that people everywhere are the same – it is their cultures and experiences that make them different. (179, Scottish, BoS, Business, male)

While these responses do not necessarily reject Scottishness and Englishness as an axis of difference, the suggestion is that this difference deserves no more weight than many other kinds of regionally based cultural differences. There is as much difference within these countries as between them. Others also pointed to what we might call ‘diverse sociological differences’ as being just as important: I disagree with this statement. I think the statement is too broad and simplistic. Place of birth is only one factor that affects what kind of person someone is – lots of other things, like age, sex, occupation, level of education, life experience – also have an influence. I agree with the much broader statement that people tend to be different from one another. (093, part Scottish, part British, BoS, Group, female) Scottish and English people are fundamentally very similar. There are differences based on the size of the respective countries and the history of the countries. However, there are significant differences between people from different regions of

Salvage Ethnography.indb 111

24/05/2017 15:07:39

112

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

England and maybe we should be examining differences in socio-economic terms, rural/semi-rural/town based, regional differences, religious and ethnic background basis rather than on a purely nationalistic English/Scottish basis. That said, the Scottish have a strong nationalistic bent that is accentuated by the new parliament and retaining separate television channels and sporting fixtures. Similar characteristics are seen in the English. (103, part English, part British, BoS, Corporate, male)

Here again, the idea of Scottish–English difference is not entirely rejected, at least in the second response, but it is demoted in importance relative to other factors: age, sex, ethnicity, religion, occupation, education and so on. Another tendency was to invoke more generally the significance of individuality, to interpret the acceptance of national difference as at odds with the affirmation of individuality. For instance: Disagree – having been brought up in the borders there is no difference between Scottish and English people as a broad statement. There are differences between people, however. There are subtle differences based on background and upbringing and experiences of life. (002, Scottish, BoS, Retail, male) Disagree. It depends on the degree to which we define differences. There are bound to be some cultural differences between the two nations; there again, there are many cultural differences within each nation and, ultimately, everyone is different in some way from everyone else. To agree with the statement would be to generalise or take a stereotypical view of each nationality. (027, Scottish, BoS, Group, male) I don’t agree. Both nationalities are very similar. I see very little difference in individuals. Events like the death of the Queen Mother do demonstrate big differences between the two nations, and our [the Scots] attitude to Europe appears to be more friendly. (017, Scottish, BoS, Group, male)

Many respondents, like the first of the last three above, explicitly drew on their own life experience, many talking about having lived in various parts of the UK, and how this experience problematised the question for them. Apparently for the last of these three respondents, the differences indicated in the last sentence (the Queen Mother’s death was much less observed in Scotland) were not differences between Scottish and English ‘people’ but just aggregate differences in behaviour between the two countries. Strictly speaking, one can have aggregate differences along some dimensions between two populations that are nonetheless made up of unique individuals. But these respondents, and again their words simply exemplify patterns encountered more broadly in the research, were not trying to make statistical points. They were negotiating the difficulties of using conventional identity categories in a particular context. The question was intended partly to trigger this very process of reflection. These respondents knew that this particular distinction was loaded and they therefore stepped back from it. I think many of the Bank staff encountered in this study regarded the Scottish/ English distinction as commonsensical to a degree, but also prone to exaggeration. But I think that these responses are also conveying something more than this.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 112

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Comparison

113

Such categorical and stereotypical thinking is at odds with other core values held by well educated citizens of liberal democratic countries. Those values call on us to recognise individuality and abjure essentialising. They prefer to see people as self-determining agents, not projections of broad social types. And this is sup­ posedly the preferred conception of the business world, with its assumptions of the individual economic agent and the self-motivating employee. As we have seen, staff were also under pressure to be individuals, responsible for their own selfimprovement and competitive against their colleagues if need be. My overall sense was that there was an inevitable tension, a kind of cognitive dissonance, between thinking in terms of groups and individuals, heightened by the circumstances under which I was making these observations. ‘Outsider’ comparison Let me turn now to some of my personal experiences of ‘dissonance’ that provoked reflections on the fieldwork data. I begin with some of the differences between my own habitual work experience and that of the bank and business world environment that struck me at the time. One of these was simply the channels of communication, specifically internal channels within the organisation. Basic things such as email and internal memos seemed to function much as they do in any other large organisation. But I was struck by how closely internal media, through which the official discourse of the organisation, authorised from the top, echoed the formats of popular media in the wider society. Most universities will have some sort of monthly or quarterly bulletin aimed at staff, relaying news of key personnel changes and developments and initiatives across the institution. I currently receive one from my university’s Communications and Marketing Division and another from the School of Social and Political Science in which I am based. By the time of my fieldwork, BoS’s long-running and somewhat dry staff magazine, Between Friends, had been replaced by several staff magazines and bulletins, much more colourful and full of graphics and photographs, circulated electronically and in print in some cases. Between Friends (1987–99) had evolved from a combination of in-house social news, and administrative news from above, to a greater concern with keeping staff apprised of goings-on in other parts of the increasingly large and complex organisation. But in essence its form and presentation were similar to much of the internal print media encountered in universities. The HBOS equivalents that I came across were much flashier. Central was HBOS Today, which came out roughly bi-weekly during my fieldwork, introducing new key figures, promoting the new bank and its standing in the sector, communicating new policies and initiatives, and with smaller and lighter features on rank-and-file staff involved in such things as charity fund raising. On at least two occasions the Retail Division produced for its own staff a special large, glossy, 16-page supplement called Extra!, with an appearance something like Hello! magazine. Of course, the transmission of internal news is a basic function of any large organisation, and in essence very similar solutions are found to the problems of how to provide core information and how to foster a degree of group identity. My

Salvage Ethnography.indb 113

24/05/2017 15:07:39

114

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

point is simply the difference in style. This was particularly brought home to me by my repeated encounters with the use of video communications. I have already given two examples. In Chapter 5 I described the video used in the Creativity and Innovation course in which Gavin Masterton engages in a flight of imagination about BoS’s creative future of proliferating products and businesses. In Chapter 6 I mentioned the tercentenary video celebrating and summarising BoS’s long history, one I suspect was available outside the Bank, but primarily distributed within. Here are three more. In November, during the early days of my fieldwork, I attended a GL&D meeting in which a member of staff was doing an informational presentation on the new Financial Services Authority (which was replaced post-2008 by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority), which was then coming into force and with which HR colleagues needed to be familiar. The main tool of presentation was an in-house video in which an interviewer, presented in the mould of a news reporter, asked questions of various key HBOS figures, including Chief Executive James Crosby, about the Bank’s practice and how it would be affected by this new regulatory authority. Basically, it tended to make a virtue of the necessity, arguing that HBOS was already in line with new FSA standards. Secondly, in June, near the end of my fieldwork, there was a Bank intranet ‘broadcast’, supplemented by video screenings, with a 10-minute report, branded ‘HBOS Today’, reviewing the basics of the new terms and conditions for all staff in the new HBOS organisation, harmonising Halifax and BoS terms and conditions. A more detailed and technical written document was circulated at the same time. In brief, most of the changes were on the BoS side, moving towards the Halifax norm, although the many differences in pension schemes were less liable to change, as these were more fixed by original employment contracts. The group viewing the video in Executive and Organisational Development (the successor to GL&D) took amusement at seeing some familiar HR faces presented in this format. Once again, the video was produced to imitate the style of a TV news magazine, with graphic bullet points, and two presenters, one man, one woman, putting questions to executives such as Crosby and others. There were also ‘vox pop’ segments, with questions from staff. Visual lead-ins to the interviews were shot with the presenters walking towards the camera in some indicative environment, and interviews involved cameras slowly moving in on the interviewee or slowly rotating around them, changing the angle on the ‘talking head’. Finally, in the years leading up to the merger BoS had begun to release its annual reports also in video format. When I viewed the one for 1999 as part of my preliminary research, I noted that a forthright account of why the recent bid to take over NatWest had failed – a circumstance which eventually led to the HBOS merger (see Chapter 2) – was accompanied by pop band Tears for Fears’ hit song ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ in the background (for all I know this may have just been a sly comment inserted by the video producers). Such videos were designed for circulation also to shareholders, not just staff, but they primarily communicated within the close orbit of the organisation. Combined with the ubiquitous use of often somewhat humorous staff training videos on many of the menu courses I

Salvage Ethnography.indb 114

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Comparison

115

attended, I had a strong sense of a video-mediated environment. Of course such visual media are present in the university environment, especially in teaching, and increasingly so as the online technology becomes more sophisticated. However, at HBOS I had a strong sense of a setting in which the normality of home television viewing as a way of receiving information merged into the work environment much more seamlessly for staff. I always had a gut feeling that this ‘television style’ communication was often a bit patronising, but I do not think most of my informants shared that response. To them it felt normal. Another difference I became very aware of was around the idea of ‘teams’ at work. My assignment to the Diversity Team in the latter half of the fieldwork is an indication of how fundamental teams were to how most staff fitted into the organisation, especially those who were not customer facing in branches, which themselves functioned as ‘teams’. In one of my early conversations with Leslie, a member of GL&D with special responsibility for staff training in the Corporate Division, she told me that ‘team building’ was ‘flavour of the month’. According to her, it had become more popular in the previous couple of years, and there had been a shift from it being more restricted to senior staff to being something in demand for ‘the masses’. The idea of small-team management as a routine problem and necessary skill appeared to be radiating through the organisation. I attended a menu course called ‘Managing the Team’, in which the four other delegates were all men with managerial director roles, mostly in corporate and business areas. The discussions there about the difficulties and challenges these delegates faced brought into focus my general observations about how fundamental the idea of the team was to the basic day-to-day operations of the Bank, offering a malleable basic unit of organisation. Academics are normally trained in a discipline and employed to work in an academic unit at least closely related to that discipline. Academics are usually fairly firmly embedded in a ‘department’ and perhaps a ‘school’, ‘college’ or other larger unit. Although teams form for various teaching, research and administrative purposes, these are usually relatively secondary and ephemeral. Committees and ‘committee work’ serve some similar functions, but participation in these can be quite perfunctory and peripheral. These and other ‘teams’ rarely define an academic’s primary locus and function in the organisation, in a given period. There is no strong internal discourse of teams and team member­ship. When I was at HBOS, one of the most basic questions was – what team are you with? Careers were seen as a succession of team roles. Performing effectively in one team would set a staff member up for moving on or up into another, perhaps more strategic and prestigious team. Teams typically ran from about three to a dozen members, with the ideal being around five of six ‘reports’, that is, members who report to a team leader. In the academic setting (leaving aside the administrative staff structures and hierarchy, which do more closely resemble those of the business world) teams tend to be much less clearly internally defined, and run at least on a semblance of egalitarian work sharing. The distinction I am trying to make here of course is not absolute, and admits of many gradations. But there is a difference between the two ‘worlds’. In the HBOS business world, people were mobilised and directed most immediately in their day-to-day work through

Salvage Ethnography.indb 115

24/05/2017 15:07:39

116

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

their roles in teams, with major medium-term goals, which were then situated within a framing structure of major functional units and divisions. The able staff member might in some cases move across these larger boundaries in their migration from team to team. For academics, the larger disciplinary infrastructure of the university is more fundamental to their organisational placement. Within that, some participate more and some less in various task-oriented teams, but these have a more incidental relationship to their career paths, which are determined more by procuring institutionally external recognition, in terms of publications, funding and other plaudits (with the possible exception of those who move heavily into university administration). Along with these differences in organisational structures, there were differences in discursive style, in what normally can and cannot be said. I was taken aback on a course called ‘Influencing and Persuading’ when the instructor indicated that it was a legitimate strategy to plant helpful questions in an audience in advance to aid one’s presentation and that while one should not lie, there was nothing wrong with being economical with the truth if that suited one’s ends. Such advice grinds against the academic’s habituated norms of open debate and collegial scrutiny. On the other hand, on this course and in other settings I found a refreshing, realistic frankness about the idea of power. Power was directly addressed in texts and presentations as a good thing, an essential resource that everyone reasonably wants and needs. Delegates were encouraged to become sensitive to power types and strategies, and their own preferences for these, as part of refining their own abilities to influence others. In my experience in academic settings such explicit valuations of power and its practical necessity tend to be displaced by a language of serving some greater good of the group. There is a discomfort around power language applied to immediate circumstances, which somehow corresponds to the more vague notion of team hierarchy that I was referring to above. At times my social science training and perspective led me to say things that were ‘inappropriate’. In the ‘Managing the Team’ course mentioned above, we were discussing the valued business trait of ‘closeness to the customer’ – knowing what customers want and responding quickly. I said something to the effect that this ‘ideal’ was in many ways dictated by broad competitive conditions in the industry and economy, beyond anyone’s immediate control. There was a clear sense in the instructor’s response that this was irrelevant or ‘off message’. Our purpose was to focus on what was possible. At that moment I felt I had uncomfortably fractured the illusion that makes such courses work, the assumption that work processes are a result of rational and controllable behaviour, that the available agency can meet and overcome structural obstacles. So, while a matter-of-fact language of power was suitable for describing immediate, interpersonal social relations, the idea of being buffeted about by large power structures beyond one’s control was inappropriate. This is almost the opposite of discursive conventions among social scientists. I have highlighted some of the differences that jumped out at me. Let me now consider some of the deeper similarities and parallels that I became aware of. In Chapter 5 I discussed the fact that along with the reality of organisational restructuring that was going on in the Bank, there was a discourse of endless,

Salvage Ethnography.indb 116

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Comparison

117

cyclical, structural change. To recap, BoS had in the years just prior to the HBOS merger reorganised from a regionally based structure to one based on major functional units. Somewhat puzzlingly, the exact structure seemed to vary a bit between various accounts and representations I encountered during fieldwork, but the six major divisions were: (1) Corporate, (2) Business and (3) Retail, each providing a distinctive set of banking services, and (4) Insurance and Investment, (5) Treasury and (6) Group, the last two managing the core fiscal and governance functions of the Bank, respectively (Figure 1.1, p. 6). This made sense because of the increasing complexity and specialisation of function, and the declining importance of spatial distribution given advances in communications technology, apart from the regional/national branding of retail banking. This process was overlain by the structural changes of merger with the Halifax, in which dominant control of different divisions tended to nominally fall to one of the two banks, Corporate and Treasury to BoS, Retail and Insurance to the Halifax, and the others somewhere in between, allowing that, in the long run, overall HBOS leadership tended to be inherited by previous Halifax leadership. Also in the background during the period running up to merger was the ‘internal merger’ of Capital Bank within BoS, to ‘bulk up’ BoS and make it less susceptible to takeover. Together these processes involved a lot of ‘churn’ and uncertainty for Bank staff as structures and roles were reconfigured. I have tried to be clear that the somewhat elegiac tone of this ethnography is partly due to the specific effect of restructuring on my major fieldwork setting, GL&D, whose core functions were being streamlined and many of them devolved out to the new divisions. Corporate takeovers, mergers and restructurings are a routine topic in the ­financial and wider business news, and it is easy to get the impression that these are processes largely peculiar to the dynamic business world. But that is not the case. In the same year I joined the University of Edinburgh, 1998, it acquired the E ­ dinburgh teacher training college Moray House, and in 2011 it incorporated the Edinburgh College of Art. When I entered the organisation, it was undergoing a restructuring process completed in 2002, reconfiguring academic Departments within nine overarching Faculties into Subject Areas (former Departments) clustered within Schools, which in turn were embedded within three major Colleges. Other UK universities have in recent times gone through similar restructurings. One of the key goals of this change was to bring related disciplines closer together in the new Schools, to help foster more interdisciplinary teaching and research. How far this goal has been met is hard to calculate, as it is difficult to disarticulate this process from the effects of other innovations and external pressures on the institution. One effect I think most university colleagues would agree on is that it has led to the general growth of administrative functions and offices, and a sense that organis­ ational leadership is more remote from the average employee than it used to be. Such changes, in both cases, are not simply capricious. They are strategic attempts to maximise the organisation’s key functions and to maintain if not improve its position within a field of competitors. Two main points here are, first, that a degree of disorientation and alienation can be found in both organisations as a result of changes in scale and habituated practice and, second, that the effects

Salvage Ethnography.indb 117

24/05/2017 15:07:39

118

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

of these mergers and restructurings are calculable only to a degree. Organisational leaderships in both cases are making best guesses about how to promote the organisation and its interests. Clearly, some of HBOS’s best guesses were illconceived, eventually leading to its downfall and incorporation into Lloyds plc. But the most basic point I want to make is that the underlying organisational dynamics are similar. No matter how different we might imagine the roles of banks in the business world and of universities as large publicly oriented charities, they end up developing in strikingly similar ways, operating within a liberal, democratic, capitalist constitutional environment in which almost all organisations and institutions, however traditional, have to earn their keep or face obsolescence. I have also focused on the theme of ‘professionalism’, and particularly on the invidious contrast that BoS staff sometimes made between themselves as heritors of a tradition of banking professionalism and their new Halifax colleagues as ‘­retailers’ of financial products. This perception was symptomatic of tensions around the direction of change in HBOS. More generally, however, the idea of professionalism encodes notions of qualification and expertise, and of social standing in the wider community. In association with other major professions, such as doctors, lawyers and teachers, it suggests a certain ethos of public service and a certain permanence of social function. And it suggests some distance from the cut and thrust of commerce. It runs counter to the idea of the generic, flexible employee, however capable or even excellent they may be at their job. As a self-image it is at odds with the hawker of merchandise. Typically, professions are more subject to state oversight and regulation, and housed in institutions (law, education, military, health care and so on) that are to some degree state-created and sponsored. There is a connection between this discourse of professionalism and the historically intermediate position of banks between the state and the economy. At one time the idea of the academic and scholar in the British university was tinged with an idea of elite amateurism, such that the possession of a PhD or other higher degree was non-essential to the role. There was some status in a Professor also being a Mister. But today the PhD is a requirement for entry into what is clearly regarded as a profession, involving years of specialist training and its own special ethos of service. Nonetheless, the standing of academic professionalism in higher education is also somewhat uncertain. To the degree that a pro­fessional is understood as someone salaried yet exercising high levels of autonomy in setting their own work goals and schedules, professional standing could be seen as something undergoing erosion in the current university environment. The sheer growth of regulation and administrative oversight, of assigned bureaucratic and administrative tasks, and the difficulties of securing time for scholarly research that is not directly funded and externally legitimated, have cut into the autonomy that academics once took for granted. One may regard these as necessary trends in order to derive the most valuable performance from academic employees. Nonetheless, they are trends that tend to undermine the conventional understanding of professionalism as hinging partly on autonomy. The issue here is again one of size and scale. Recall the image offered in Chapter 4 by one of the GL&D staff, in which she remembered the role of the small-town

Salvage Ethnography.indb 118

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Comparison

119

bank manager from her childhood. That memory points back to a time when small towns were more governed, implicitly and explicitly, by a cohort of professionals as community leaders, probably in some conjunction with business and land-owning elites. And as we have seen, other informants remarked how BoS as it was in the past felt more like a ‘village’, with all the attendant virtues and burdens. However, its recent history was one of growth and expansion. Similarly, the university sector began to expand massively from the latter part of the twentieth century, in terms of numbers of students and dimensions of research. Moreover, universities are in the business of producing the very professionals that they later employ, and so that expansion in the first instance has grown the academic professions. But that growth also entails an increasing division of labour, a proliferation of parts, and an elaboration of patterns and levels of command from the organisational centre, which, while perhaps limited in capacity to actually guide and control action in its organisational periphery, nonetheless tends to reduce the scope of autonomy formerly held by professional individuals. Professions tend to be inversely related to tight organisational centralisation and routine control. Although constrained by particular functional roles and institutional settings, they normally have some powers of self-regulation and scope for situated judgement and action. The anxieties of BoS staff about their professional standing probably can be interpreted within a wider context of the changing status and declining power of professionals across many organisational fields in current society. This leads us to competition, which has been another one of our central themes. I recall being initially somewhat puzzled by the degree of resistance I perceived in many of the BoS staff to the intensification of competition associated with the merger. From my naive point of view, BoS was part of the business world and its staff could be expected to embrace the competitive principle accordingly, unlike myself, having taken refuge in the non-competitive world of academe. I came to appreciate that there were degrees in this matter, that historically UK banks had been less immersed in the everyday competition of the corporate world and that many of my informants had sought their careers there partly because they preferred this degree of distance. But what had been a sectoral difference between banking and other parts the business world was increasingly becoming a ‘temporal’ difference between more ‘old fashioned’ and more ‘progressive’ banks, as banks increasingly became commercial actors. Many in the Bank were having to adjust to this. Something very similar, however, could be said about the world of higher education in the UK. As ever more and more qualified applicants entered the academic job market, as universities struggled to attract fee-paying postgraduate students, and as standardised, externally run research output assessment schemes increasingly measured the job performance of individuals and research units, a similar ratcheting up of competitive pressures was under way. In all large complex organisations there is usually some scope to decide how far one wants to internalise the surrounding competitive pressures in pursuit of career advancement. However, the overall trend is in the one direction. Some of the deeper pathologies of competition ended up contributing to the 2008 banking crisis and to the demise of HBOS. As banks competed to grow

Salvage Ethnography.indb 119

24/05/2017 15:07:39

120

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

their profits and shareholder returns in an increasingly tight market, rather than competing to provide stable loan services and intermediation of funds, arguably the crucial core function of banks (see Kay 2015), speculative and unwise moves were made, leading to collapse. In other words, the point here is not that competition is an intrinsically negative principle and dynamic, but that it matters what is being competed for. If banks become preoccupied with competing for profits, this is likely to divert them from their primary social function of helping to allocate capital where it is needed and can do the most good. That is what they should primarily be competing with others to excel at, rather than sheer profitability. It is a complex question, how this particular pathology, this misdirection of competitive energies, related to the wider ramping up of the competitive pressures and ethos throughout the Bank and all its activities. But minimally it seems safe to infer that a general increase over several decades in competitive struggles for profitability throughout the economy and the financial sector, in turn heightening internal competitive pressures within myriad economic firms, contributed to an atmosphere in which such deformations of the competitive principle became more likely. Recognising this capacity for the competitive dynamic to divert organisational energies from the primary good (or values) they were meant to serve, it is reason­able to ask how immune the university sector is from this same underlying pathology. The goals of building knowledge, of cultivating critical thought and communication, and the skills that underpin these – in short, the goals of research and teaching – are distinct from the goals of increasing revenues, or satisfying instrumentally defined performance criteria. But, increasingly, universities find themselves strategically orienting to these latter pressures, which appear more immediate, definable and concrete. The degradation of monetary value that ­eventually erupts in the arresting ‘bust’ cycle of economic crisis and stagnation is perhaps easier to discern, at least after the fact, than the slow degradation of the intellectual life of a society. But both can issue from the myopic focus of aims and energies that intense competition can induce. Competition can aid in the refinement of some social values, but if it diverts energies to other, proxy goals, those same values may suffer through neglect. Unfortunately, there is a very general and powerful principle of organisational competition and its pathologies at work here, across society as a whole. Lastly, there is the theme of solidarity, of loyalty to and identification with the organisation. These were clearly weakening in BoS as it became part of HBOS, and had already weakened in the Halifax in previous years. Again, this is partly a matter of increasing scale and distance, the loss of the ‘village’. It is also a matter of the decline of the idea of working for BoS as a ‘job for life’ and the eclipsing of BoS’s role as a large organisation of some centrality and prestige within the comparatively narrow horizons of Scotland. I have tried to convey that there was a mixture of responses to the HBOS merger. In with the alienation and disenchantment were strains of excitement and invigoration for those who hoped to fare well in the new organisation. But my sense was that these more hopeful responses were nonetheless accompanied by a weaker sense of organisational loyalty and identity.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 120

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Comparison

121

Of course it was early days, and it would have been difficult to identify with an organisation that was still taking shape. A few years later, by the time HBOS had ‘bedded in’, it imploded as well, making this a moot point. More generally, HBOS had become the kind of organisation that gives and receives less commitment between it and its employees. Reciprocal benefits and advantages were what it ideally expected from its employment contracts, not paternalistic arrangements. The more staff are treated as free agents, the less an organisation can expect them to develop a strong identification with it. Here again there are parallels with shifts in the higher education sector. Universities go through phases of competitive hiring as they seek to attract academic ‘stars’ and the ‘up and coming’ in the pursuit of prestigious public rankings. Greater emphasis on external networking as evidence of valuable work compels staff to direct their energies outside their home institution. In the search for objective promotion criteria, external recognition carries more weight than long service to the institution, again encouraging staff to orient themselves to a wider pro­ fessional field and less to the university as an employer per se. There are rational justifications for each of these trends. But they inevitably have weakening effects on the sense of organisational community, solidarity and identification, as ‘cosmo­ politans’ advance in their mobile careers and dogged locals are marginalised and left behind. Conclusion Obviously the comparative exercise outlined above is very contingent, depending on the accident of my own professional position. But much useful comparison depends on making a virtue of such contingencies. The accident of my being a ‘professional’ based in a large organisation studying ‘professionals’ in another large organisation provides an opportunity, a natural framework of comparison. This axis of comparison manifests itself at different levels. Most basically, it is grounded in my own personal experiences of BoS/HBOS and of my own specific academic work environment. In turn, these are instances taken to exemplify more broadly banks in the business world and academic disciplines in the world of higher education. Inevitably this kind of ethnographic work is highly particularistic, and attempts to generalise from it have to be cautious. But at the same time, we have no choice but to generalise, to put the particular in some sort of interpretive context. I have tried to use some of the admittedly contingent comparative leverage at my disposal as a means to develop that interpretive frame. Having said that, from the beginning of this book I have indicated that I think it is necessary to try to place such highly particularistic ethnographic and ­historical data into an encompassing and contextualising historical narrative to help make sense of it. So there is another dimension of comparison at work here, that between the present and the past. I will take this up further in the final chapter. Here I want at least to observe that what are ultimately being compared are not just two institutional spheres or particular settings but two institutional and organisational trajectories. These resemble what Howard Becker has called

Salvage Ethnography.indb 121

24/05/2017 15:07:39

122

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

‘natural histories’ in his considerations on case study research (2014: 84–5). One detects a certain developmental pattern or direction of change in more than one case, and uses this as starting point to interrogate what those cases may have in common. The deeper question here, which I have tried to suggest some answers to, is: are these institutional trajectories moving in similar or different directions, in converging, diverging or parallel directions? My sense is that there are some tendencies towards parallelism if not convergence, and that these are perhaps the most telling suggestions that come out of this minimal comparative perspective.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 122

24/05/2017 15:07:39

8

Conclusion

In this conclusion I reflect on some of the key themes, methodological puzzles and conceptual frames brought into play. In this way I aim to overview the study and to some degree locate it in my own wider intellectual trajectory. I do this not to indulge in intellectual biography but to make the relationship between a researcher’s style of thinking and the study at hand more explicit, to the extent that I am able to do this. The continuing Bank of Scotland I should start by saying, by emphasising, that BoS still exists as a functioning banking organisation within Lloyds plc. Although HBOS continues behind the scenes as a ‘holding company’ within Lloyds, it has effectively disappeared from public view, for rather obvious reputational reasons. BoS and the Halifax, however, continue as public brands and banking organisations within Lloyds.1 The BoS ‘brand’ has been preserved, but the organisation has lost much of its earlier culture, ethos and identity that form the substance of this study. No doubt some currently working for BoS might want to contest this, but I base this on the remarks of current and former employees, and what seems to me to be the overwhelming evidence of this study, which tracked fundamental and irreversible changes in the organisation, connected to its embedding within much larger banking organisations, a situation which continued with the move to Lloyds. Still, this study is not meant to suggest that BoS as it stands today, at the time of writing, is particularly unviable, or not an attractive employer in the UK banking sector: only that it is not what it once was. In terms of what I have called the Bank’s ‘culture’, it is a ‘shadow of its former self ’. It also has to partake of some of the current difficulties of its new parent organisation. These include charges of money laundering (along with other banks) made by the US government, charges of tax avoidance brought by HM Revenue and Customs and recent ongoing repayments to customers who were mis-sold payment protection insurance. But none of these controversies seem to pose fundamental threats to Lloyds plc. They are in a sense par-for-the-course problems for contemporary large banking groups. The

Salvage Ethnography.indb 123

24/05/2017 15:07:39

124

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

argument here is not that BoS is in an exceptionally bad state. To the best of my limited knowledge BoS is fairly normal for UK banks currently operating in the sluggish post-2008 economy. Salvage ethnography I have invoked Gruber’s (1970) notion of ‘ethnographic salvage’ as a framing conceit for this study. In one respect this is simply a hook on which to hang things, not in itself requiring much elaboration. At the same time, it does express something fundamental about the project, so it is worth returning here to the original argument and thinking about its relationship to the present study. Gruber’s argument is that anthropology, particularly in the British and American traditions, was heavily shaped by a preservationist ethos that developed first in the British imperial context of the nineteenth century. Some individuals and associations in the spheres of government, colonial administration and the sciences became increasingly aware of the destructive effect of European expansion, on flora and fauna in the first instance, but also on other humans and their cultures. While the course of ‘progress’ seemed inevitable to these people, they also recognised the tragic cost. This sense of urgency, this notion of an ethnographic – indeed a scientific – mission, not to stem the tide of civilization’s advance but to preserve that which was about to be destroyed, was a constant theme throughout the century in those researches that provided the raw materials and experiences that were the foundation of a later anthropology. (Gruber 1970: 1294)

As anthropology developed and became routinised as ethnographic research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was characterised by a natural scientific paradigm of collecting data to preserve the widest array of samples of what were understood to be vanishing ways of life. Ethnographers such as Franz Boas were often keenly aware of trying to reconstruct ‘cultures’ that they believed were crumbling in front of them. Gruber highlights an underlying ambivalence in this ‘mission’. On the one hand, there were scientific motives concerning the loss of data and the cost to expanding knowledge. There was a cognitive tragedy in terms of a developing science of humankind. On the other hand, there was the moral motive, of valuing cultures in themselves, but also regretting the degradation of basic human existence that colonialism and capitalist expansion brought in their wake. This recognition is one of the roots of the deep humanist strain in the anthropological tradition. So how well does this paradigm apply to our present case? Bank of Scotland still exists, albeit as a business embedded within the conglomerate Lloyds plc. It was never an entire ‘society’ incorporating a wide spectrum of aspects of social reproduction. It was only a ‘way of life’ and a ‘culture’ as an organisation and workplace. And I did not commence my research with any mission of ‘salvage’ in mind. There is another crucial difference concerning the location of power, which helps clarify the strengths and limits of the analogy. The main force confronting disappearing

Salvage Ethnography.indb 124

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Conclusion

125

cultures in the heyday of anthropology was Western imperial, colonial and capitalist expansion, as these displaced and undermined indigenous peoples. A centre of power, or set of centres, was executing aims and plans at the expense of these peoples. In our case, the processes of change in question were largely internal to those of capitalism and the modern state. While we can argue that BoS and HBOS fell prey to larger forces, of virulent competition and financial crisis, these are defining features of the evolving system that formed them in the first place. The powers that undid them were, in some sense, of their own making, and part of the endless ‘creative destruction’ that defines capitalism. There is not the same moral distance between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’, however much the people in this study seemed to be at the mercy of forces beyond their control. If, as argued in Chapter 5, constant change is part of the general ideology of modern corporate life, then we are confronted with a relatively constant ‘salvage situation’, a chronic instability of institutional orders and their associated cultures and identities. Nonetheless, there is a basic issue of studying something that was changing particularly rapidly at that time, and in some sense disappearing. This was clearly part of how my informants understood the situation. The persistent mood of loss and nostalgia, of being overtaken by a greater outside force, has to be taken seriously. This sense of loss was attached not just to previous structures and conventions, but to values and identities, and a way of relating to one’s work. And again, as I was beginning to suggest with my comparisons in Chapter 7, is this particular instance of ‘salvage’ a case of something larger? I think it represents a moment in a much wider societal change that cuts across institutions and organis­ ations, and is not neatly contained within the realms of banking, economics and business. The HBOS merger was the key trigger of ‘cultural loss’ in this case, but that merger itself was part of a more general ramping up of high finance as a driver of current capitalist economies, which in turn is connected to the spread of what is sometimes loosely summarised as ‘neoliberalism’ across an array of social institutions. This moment of loss can be read as one small part of the much wider loss and decline of an earlier societal model, associated with the welfare state and social democracy, with more stable occupational careers, with greater organisational paternalism. Harbinger of crisis? This points us towards the background argument, needing fuller statement, that what were observed during the fieldwork, the tensions around the merger, were somehow portents of the crisis to come. Neither HBOS nor other UK banks were brought low in the first instance by loss of solidarity, by weakening organisational identity, by organisational tensions of merger filtered through the categories of national identity – in other words, by the key themes of the original research. HBOS was specifically unstuck by unsound lending and investment practices, partly due to business ignorance, and towards the end perhaps a bit of desperation, which led to overexposure to risk. The key mechanisms of failure, as in the financial crisis more generally, were imponderable debt/asset constructs, which

Salvage Ethnography.indb 125

24/05/2017 15:07:39

126

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

were allowed to spin out of control in an environment of intense competition between financial institutions. These processes fall well outside of the purview of the original ethnographic research, although I have done my best to overview them in the historical and theoretical chapters. Nonetheless, the changes I describe, while not proximate causes, were part of wider conditions in which those causes operated. It is difficult not to suspect that a more cohesive and solidaristic organisation would have maintained better organs of self-scrutiny and oversight, and been less unquestioningly swept up in the currents of competition. And the pervasive language present in the original data, recognising the ratcheting up of competition across the organisation, seems to identify, even if only in a very general way, a key aspect of the changes that would eventually lead to organisational failure. So while the precise causal mechanisms of banking failure were not part of my study, the environing conditions, the encompassing atmosphere that helped make those mechanisms at home, is evident even in the early days of the HBOS merger, and in the broader, ‘cultural’ data I collected. Ethnography and history This study wrestles with the relationship between ethnography and history. I indicated in the Introduction that I had become somewhat disenchanted with ethnography and frustrated by its usual limitations. Increasingly I see the questions that interest me as ones of history, process and evolution, which are not easily captured and addressed within the ethnographic frame. This book is sort of about that tension and trajectory in my research interests. In a way, the sheer passage of time has rescued the ethnography for me, by rendering it more h ­ istorical. But it is not just the passage of time and temporal distance that matter for gaining ­historical perspective. History is made of events; it is an interpretive and explanatory narrative giving order and meaning to events. There are two crucial events in the present narrative. One, the HBOS merger, falls within the fieldwork period and is central to it. The other, the financial and economic crisis of 2008, falls outside of the original fieldwork. But that later event irresistibly reframes my original data. It leads me to look for different things in it. Minimally, the issue this raises for interpretation is the obvious one that the relationship between earlier and later events cannot be explored until those later events have happened. However, it is not just that the new temporal and causal relationship now exists, but that the significance of the original data shifts in light of the new vantage point. It is not that the data itself has changed, but that the way we regard it cannot be as it once was. General and particular This question of the relationship of ethnography to history connects to a more basic one about the relationship between the general and the particular. Chapter 7 tries to cautiously suggest the first move in the almost intuitive generalisations that ethnographers inevitably employ (see especially Becker 2014). On the one hand, this is a study of a very particular organisation, or pair of organisations, at a

Salvage Ethnography.indb 126

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Conclusion

127

very particular moment in time. Some of what it offers is simply an account of that particularity, a description of the organisational tensions at play, and how these were characteristically mobilising interpenetrating discourses of national identity and organisational culture. In a relatively atemporal way it tells us something about these discursive dynamics; it provides an example of how people ‘do’ identity in a particular context. This concern with a more fine-grained understanding of ‘how people do x’ is characteristic of micro-sociological studies that focus on concrete instances of social interaction. In such studies the focus is not on tracing a directional, causal explanation, but rather on typifying and abstracting the main features of a particular instance of a process, such as ‘identity-making’. This gives us a slight paradox, in that the highly particularistic set of data, when combined with the reasonable assumption that it will contain processes of a general type, points towards the rather bold claim that it provides insight into how identitymaking works in general. On the other hand, if we begin from the presumption that the much larger process of the banking crisis has happened, and we are interested in what led up to it, the data gains whatever generalisability it has by merit of that analytic frame that defines it as a moment within the wider phenomenon in question. I have tried to suggest that what happened at HBOS is not necessarily typical of how the wider crisis happened, and that the HBOS merger, while part of a wave of banking mergers, had its specificity, which must be respected. Nonetheless, our grasp of that specificity is richer when we appreciate it as a particular permutation of more general themes, of change in the banking sector, the business world and even the world of large modern organisations as a whole. In other words, there are two main modes of making sense of the data here, of generalising from the particular, and they do not necessarily add up to a single, neatly integrated interpretive approach. One relates highly particular data, by means of very general ideas and concepts (culture, identity and so on) to any other similar data that might be framed by the same concepts. The process of generalisation is largely conceptual and ‘outside’ time. The other relates that highly particular data to a wider body of data, by means of historical contextualisation, treating the data as descriptive of one set of events, but ones that can be situated in a wider causal stream, so that it partakes of any more general causal h ­ y­potheses being applied to that wider set of data, for instance regarding the causes of economic crisis, and the overall trajectory of the modern liberal and capitalist economy. Here the means of generalisation is largely by articulating smaller causal narratives with larger ones. The material in this study is being made sense of by a judicious balance of these two rather separate ways of understanding. This distinction echoes many classic distinctions between functional and historical, or synchronic and diachronic modes of analysis. I have come to the practical view that this is necessary for the well rounded treatment of case study data. Conceptual equipment As the preceding suggests, my work and thinking tend to be two-track. On the one hand, I take a great interest in the particularity of human events, the endless

Salvage Ethnography.indb 127

24/05/2017 15:07:39

128

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

variations with which human action plays out. I enjoy doing ethnographic and historical research and grappling with this particularity, as well as reading such particularistic research carried out by others. On the other hand, I am very interested in the conceptual equipment with which we make sense of the particular, which provides one of the fundamental bases of comparative thinking and generalisation. My working back and forth between these two tendencies is evident in this book, especially in the formulation of the governing concepts that shape the substantive ethnographic chapters (4–6). My preferences expressed in the ‘conceptual interludes’ for how to think about ‘culture’, ‘identity’ and ‘change’ (or perhaps more exactly the relationship between agency and structure) are the outcome of wrestling with this data–concept relationship in this study, and in data I have collected in other studies. And behind that is a process of informal comparison with the many particularistic studies I am familiar with involving these themes, and with typical usages and theorisations of these concepts in the social sciences. Such concepts recommend themselves by two things: how they illuminate the inner workings of the sets of data that are the objects of our analytic attention, and the interconnections they suggest among separate sets of data or objects. They are never empirically proven or disproven. They survive by their utility in serving these two tasks (admittedly bolstered by a great deal of habit and convention), and are constantly subject to repair, overhaul and discard. To reprise: (1) I have argued that ‘culture’ is best thought of as a heuristic guide to the unstable and shifting functional correspondences between a wide range of interacting and evolving social phenomena, material and ideational, emotional and cognitive, institutional and organisational. It is an indication of the presence of power at work, pulling these multiple dimensions together towards certain ends. Prevailing tendencies to assimilate the cultural to the ideational and symbolic provide much too thin a conception of culture (see also Hearn 2006). Although my informants, like many in the business world, often used the term ‘culture’ in this ‘thinner’ sense, when I talk of culture in the present study, I mean this complex correspondence of parts that connects values, ethos and ideas to structures, conventions and procedures, in a kind of order. However, as this study illustrates, such cultural orders are subject to stress and change. (2) I have also argued that ‘identity’ needs to be conceptualised as involving a dynamic duality between unique ‘personal’ or ‘self ’ identity, and identity as large, cognitive social categories manifest through language, as labels we put on people. In turn, the relationship between these two senses of identity is constantly being mediated by forms of social organisation, which mobilise people into, out of and across available identities. Much of how identity actually operates involves the inter­action of these three aspects: personhood, organisations and social ­categories. Keeping these aspects distinct is essential for analytic purposes. Moreover, at the heart of identity processes is the basic human need for power, over oneself and one’s environment. In constructing their identities, people are always negotiating power (see also Hearn 2007; Hearn 2012: ch. 10; Hearn 2013). This study is deeply concerned with how BoS operated as an organisational mediator, connecting senses of self, as loyal employees, as professionals and so on,

Salvage Ethnography.indb 128

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Conclusion

129

to certain readings of Scottish identity. With the merger this mediating role was put under severe strain, and HBOS became in part an arena for differentiating identities, both differentiating self-identities from their organisational settings, and differentiating categorical identities of nationhood, drawn into the dynamics of organisational disruption. (3) Perhaps more modestly, I have argued that some conceptual distinction of the type ‘there are structures and there are agencies’ is indispensable. The obvious facts that these interpenetrate, that agency is always mediated by structure, and that social structures are always to some degree the products of agency do not relieve us of the analytic need to take into account human will and how it is fulfilled, frustrated, or diverted by the structural conditions it encounters and through which it operates. This is a distinction of enduring analytic utility (see Hearn 2012: 9–13). In this study we encountered especially the rhetoric of agency – the moralising appeal to staff to be innovative agents, the claims by organisational leaders to be in control of their fates. With hindsight these ring hollow, having seen how large structural trends in the financial world, set in train by human actions, but taking on a life of their own, have demolished many of the best-laid plans. Perversely, human agency is an essential ingredient in the unintended consequences, for good and ill, that make up so much of social life (cf. Berry 1997: 39–47; Muller 1993: 84–92). To repeat, I cannot possibly ‘prove’ any of these preferred conceptualisations through the present study. I can only say that my experience as a researcher has recommended them to me, and invite others to assess my claims to their utility. Evolution of ideas Just as no empirical case is causally self-contained, the ideas and questions a researcher brings to it are part of a larger evolving train of concerns. Over time, it is not just the sheer temporal perspective that changes, but also the organising body of thought that is itself always moving on. Looking at this process will serve to conclude this final contextualising chapter. The trajectory of my research activity can be roughly divided into three phases, defined broadly by what we might call research methods. In the early years of my doctoral work and after, ethnography, supplemented by historical reading, was my main approach. Then came a period of several years when I concentrated much more on theoretical and conceptual problems, engaging primarily with texts, both theoretical and substantive. Most recently, I have begun to explore more historical questions, but in a theoretically driven and informed way. On balance, I have ­ istorical migrated from being an anthropological ethnographer to being a kind of h sociologist, with a penchant for theorising constantly running alongside. Let me fill in the substantive focuses of my work across this summary trajectory. My early work focused on questions of nationalism and national identity in Scotland, first through my doctoral study of social networks and ideas involved in home rule politics in Scotland in the early 1990s, which led to my first book (Hearn 2000), and then through the present Leverhulme study of everyday national

Salvage Ethnography.indb 129

24/05/2017 15:07:39

130

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

identity at BoS/HBOS, which led to several articles and chapters, but no book, to my frustration. At this time, I occasionally studied and wrote about Scottish politics and culture more generally. I was ‘cutting my teeth’ as a researcher on the empirical case of Scotland. This work tended to generate personal dissatisfaction with the clarity of the various theories and concepts that I found myself bringing to bear on research materials, and a deep impulse towards more theoretical work of self-clarification. As often happens, this impulse was compounded by the experience of teaching, which also leads one to reflect on the coherence of prevalent theoretical ideas and debates. The next phase began by trying to think methodically about the vast literature on nationalism, which has grown considerably, especially since the 1980s. My approach was to tack back and forth between key theoretical statements and diverse substantive studies, scrutinising how well influential theories and concepts seemed to explain the diversity of real-world cases. This led to my initial rethinking of the concept of ‘culture’, present in this book, and to a strengthening conviction that the concept of ‘power’ is always central to the explanation of social processes, and in some sense the most fundamental of social science concepts. I also became increasingly interested in how one’s definition of a phenomenon, in this case nationalism, was bound up with how one understood its historical origins. Theorists of nationalism tend to debate whether nationalism is a modern or more ancient phenomenon, and these debates depend very much on what they think nationalism is, rather than on substantive historical fact. These efforts led to my second book (Hearn 2006), among other writings. In the next part of this ‘theoretical’ phase I turned to the concept of power, approaching the research in much the same way as in the previous nationalism research. Among my main conclusions were these. First, the concept of power as regards social relations becomes uselessly abstract if it is not tied to notions of will and intention, however imperfectly these are realised. Thus we cannot dispense with the distinction between agency and structure when trying to understand power dynamics. Second, power needs to be understood in social evolutionary terms. Human history overwhelmingly demonstrates a steady push towards increasing the power at human disposal, especially through the increasing complexity of social organisation, coordinating and focusing collective social action. And third, the understanding of power in modern liberal forms of society, including social science theories of power, is particularly fraught because of a fundamental tension between values of individuality and self-determination and the burgeoning complexity of power structures in the state and the economy and the patterns of domination they sustain. We love freedom and enjoy the most elaborate forms of subordination. The key output of this phase was my third book (Hearn 2012). In the most recent phase, aided by a one-year fellowship from the Independent Social Research Foundation (2013–14), I have begun developing a new line of research. This looks at the history of the concept of ‘competition’ in Western (especially Anglophone) society and its corresponding institutionalisation across major spheres of social life, such as economics, politics, law, science and religion.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 130

24/05/2017 15:07:39

Conclusion

131

So far this has involved studies of lexical change in the use, context and connotations of the word itself since the seventeenth century, and re-examinations of key, supposedly ‘originating’ texts for the modern concept, by figures such as Adam Smith and Charles Darwin. I have also begun exploring how modern forms of competition demonstrate many of the classic elements and functions of ritual as analysed in the anthropological tradition. This substantive interest in competition arose out of attempts in previous theoretical work to understand how power is legitimated in modern liberal forms of society. The research involves a blend of theoretical and historical approaches (see Hearn 2012: 147–50; 2014). At one point I had thought my work had moved on so considerably that I was very unlikely ever to return to the BoS/HBOS research. But in the wake of the banking crisis I increasingly wondered whether it was worth trying to, in view of the new situation. By that time I was heavily engaged in new projects and other obligations, and struggled to find time to work on the present book. But I did. The point I am trying to arrive at here is that the book I have written is not really a return to previous research; it is more that that research has followed me into the present, a bit unexpectedly, and now must accommodate to the intervening years of research, which put it in a new light. For instance, the early chapters on history and theory are intended to underscore the necessity of putting a case like this in a long-term, broadly social evolutionary perspective, which recognises the fundamental dynamic of power struggles in that process. My treatment of the underlying issues of identity, focused on in Chapter 6 but present in all the substantive chapters, reflects the power-informed model of personhood, organisation and social categories that I eventually arrived at years later. The theme of competition that runs throughout this book reflects my current heightened pre­ occupation with that concept. But then, the theme of competition, the struggles with identity and the sense of accelerating organisational history were all in the original data, and among the triggers of my later conceptual formulations. In sum, though research projects can be bounded and separated, the researcher is a single cumulative process, and you can’t have one without the other. Note 1 The organisational structures at the time of writing are complex. In brief, the Halifax is a division of BoS plc, which is a direct subsidiary of HBOS, a holding company which is a direct subsidiary of Lloyds Bank plc, which is a direct subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group plc. In 2006, before the crisis, HBOS sought to simplify its business structure. By a private Act of Parliament, the Governor and Company of the Bank of Scotland, originally established by an Act of the Scottish Parliament in 1695, was allowed to change itself into Bank of Scotland plc. At the same time, the undertakings of Halifax plc were transferred to Bank of Scotland plc, thus allowing both to operate under a single UK banking licence. That is how the Halifax came to be a division of BoS plc, shortly before HBOS was acquired by Lloyds.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 131

24/05/2017 15:07:40

Epilogue

The original context of this research was the Leverhulme Nations and Regions Research Programme described in Chapter 1 and questions of the impact of constitutional change in the UK on national identity. While the ethnography itself was not directly concerned with the politics of nationalism and devolution, it perhaps makes sense here, at the end, to step back and relate the present account to the evolving politics of nationalism, interacting with economic instability, in the years since the fieldwork to the time of writing.1 One point the Leverhulme team came to appreciate early on was that, in the case of Scotland, it was difficult to gauge any effect of devolution on national identity at the most general level, because national identification in Scotland was already routinely so high. A survey question has been used over many years which asks respondents to place themselves on a five-point scale: (1) British not Scottish; (2) more British than Scottish; (3) equally British and Scottish; (4) more Scottish than British; and (5) Scottish not British. Even allowing for some fluctuation in line with current political events, responses have been fairly stable over the years, with the vast majority placing themselves fairly evenly somewhere between 3 and 5. A similar pattern on this question occurs for Wales, although with the largest response in the ‘equal’ category, and with a stronger response in the ‘British not Welsh’ category, fluctuating around 15 per cent (Curtice 2013). In England over the years the responses to the question have stably given the ‘equally English and British’ response as modal, with the tails on either side weighted towards the ‘English’ end. However, in England this question operates somewhat differently, because these terms are less sharply distinguished. This is different from the Scottish situation where ‘Scottish’ and ‘British’ more clearly refer to different hierarchical levels of inclusion, the former more associated with ‘culture’, the latter more with ‘the state’. However, there is reason to think that devolution has fostered greater attention in England to what Englishness might be. Explicit English identity has appeared to enjoy a revival. And while this has tended to be associated with a right-leaning, anti-immigrant, ethnic chauvinism, and the politics of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), even on the left in England there have been calls to reclaim English identity in a left tradition (Bragg 2007).

Salvage Ethnography.indb 132

24/05/2017 15:07:40

Epilogue

133

Over several decades, because of a degree of political alienation from the centre of British power in London, England, and the potential for a secessionist response to that alienation, Scotland has been forced to develop a fairly sophisticated, ongoing public discussion about nationalism and national identity. Such a public discussion is currently in only a nascent stage in England, although recent events such as the referendum in June 2016 on the UK’s membership of the European Union (‘Brexit’, i.e. ‘British exit’), which was won by a small majority in favour of leaving, appear to be moving these questions of national identity onto the centre ground (see Outhwaite 2017). Constitutional questions have become quite lively in Britain in the last few years as this book was written and prepared for press. Let me review the main political events before examining causes more closely and trying to relate these to the present study. The period from 1997 to 2010 saw government by the Labour Party in the UK as a whole, counterpoised to the previous long rule of the Conservative Party (1979–97). The years of Labour government under Tony Blair and then briefly Gordon Brown, were ones shaped by the events of 9/11, including Britain’s participation in war in Iraq, and of financial expansion capped by financial crisis. This crisis contributed to the return of Conservative government, first in the form of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats (2010–15), and then on its own, with a small majority, from 2015. This Conservative government was initially led by David Cameron, who argued the ‘remain in Europe’ case in the Brexit referendum. Having failed in that objective he resigned and was replaced by Theresa May as Prime Minister in July 2016, who leads the government’s efforts to realise Brexit at the time of writing. The Labour government introduced and then broadly consolidated the new devolved arrangements in the UK, by allowing some minor increases in the scope of the powers for the new devolved bodies. A referendum on establishing a regional assembly in the north-east of England, held in November 2004, showed almost 78 per cent against the idea on a 49 per cent turnout. This ended further plans to test these waters. The Cameron coalition government, however, was to be more bold in its use of referendums. In particular it sought to resolve two outstanding areas of political pressure by means of referenda – Scottish secessionism and anti-EU sentiments within and beyond in the Conservative Party – both with unintended results. Actually, Cameron’s government oversaw three referendums, the first of which is apt to be forgotten. As part of the agreement to form a coalition with a working majority after the 2010 general election, there was an agreement to satisfy Liberal Democrat demands to put proportional representation on the political agenda. To this end, a national referendum was held asking the electorate to choose between the existing first-past-the-post system and a new ‘alternative vote’ system, for electing Members of Parliament. The referendum, held in May 2011, had a poor turnout (42.2 per cent) and roundly rejected the innovation by 68 per cent. Perhaps the ‘damp squibs’ of the two previous referendums led David Cameron and his advisors to believe these were effective tools for kicking unwelcome issues into the long grass. The referendum held in September 2014 asked residents of Scotland: ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ A record 86.2 per cent

Salvage Ethnography.indb 133

24/05/2017 15:07:40

134

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

turnout yielded 55.3 per cent saying ‘No’ and 44.7 per cent saying ‘Yes’. While this was the outcome desired by the Conservative government and other ‘unionist’ parties (Labour, the Liberal Democrats), the broader political effects were not. In a public debate that heated up in the last few months, with polls indicating a very narrow gap in the outcome, the process seemed to move many who had formerly been ambivalent, and Labour supporters, into the ‘Yes’ camp. The almost 45 per cent in favour, while not enough to win the day, was significantly higher than polled support for independence over many years. So in effect the referendum boosted the cause. In the following general election of May 2015 the SNP won a massive landslide: 56 out of 59 Scottish seats, gaining 50 on their previous 6. Correspondingly the Labour Party lost 40 seats, the Liberal Democrats lost 10 seats and the Conservatives maintained their one seat. In fact the SNP won only 50 per cent of the vote overall, but in most constituencies, with multiple parties contesting, this was enough to swing the vote its way. The referendum on membership of the EU was a different matter, voted on across the UK. The Conservatives have long been very weak in Scotland, and the wipe-out of Labour MPs by SNP MPs to Westminster in the 2015 general election was not a problem for them, more an advantage. But pressure from the right, where anti-immigration and anti-European sentiments were increasingly captured by UKIP, compounded a longstanding divide in the Conservative Party between those more pro- versus anti-European. The European ‘unionists’ included the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, with UKIP on the ‘leave’ side, but the Conservatives split, with leading figures such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove campaigning for leaving, while Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne made the case to remain. Again, what looked like a safe margin for the unionist (pro-EU) position narrowed in the days leading up to the referendum in June 2016. But this time, to the surprise of many on both sides, the result was 48 per cent to remain and 52 per cent to leave. This result obliged Cameron to step down as party leader (and Osborne with him), to be quickly replaced by Theresa May, a long-term contender for party leader who had stood somewhat aloof from the referendum campaigns. At the time of writing the Conservative government is exploring options in what is expected to be a long-drawn-out process of delivering Brexit. That process officially began on 29 March 2017, when the UK invoked Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. Negotiations for exit are supposedly to be concluded within two years. Behind these events lies a deeper issue, of a changing political and economic landscape, and the weakening grip of the established two-party system, Labour and Conservative, on that terrain. There has been a fundamental historical shift, from a more industrially based economy with a ‘Keynesian compromise’ among class interests, to a ‘neoliberal’, more ‘globalised knowledge-based’ economy, in which power accrues to the highly educated, professional and managerial classes, with social horizons that are more urban and European. It was these kinds of people who tended to vote to remain in the EU. People who voted to leave were often those who have been ‘left behind’ in this great shift. They were disproportionately older, retired or otherwise out of employment, much more likely to

Salvage Ethnography.indb 134

24/05/2017 15:07:40

Epilogue

135

have stopped formal education at secondary school, and more likely to be on lower incomes, employed in skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual labour. The leave vote was a kind of inarticulate cry of the heart predominantly from this sector of the population, who had come to believe that competition from recent immigrants, and the interference and costs of European government, were at the root of their insecure and declining social position. In Scotland, a large portion of this working-class anxiety and disenchantment has been differently channelled into support for independence, and the SNP as an alternative to the ‘discredited’ political parties, particularly Labour, which is seen often as having abandoned its duties to the working class. That the old party duopoly of Labour and Conservatives was weakening was long foreshadowed by the divergence in party systems between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Regarding UK general elections in Scotland, from a post-war peak of just over 50 per cent of the vote in 1955, the Conservative Party went into a long secular decline, accelerating in the 1970s, arriving at a low ebb of around 15 per cent since devolution, where they have remained. From the time of devolution on, the main rivals for Labour hegemony over Scottish Westminster seats were the SNP and the Liberal Democrats. In the five elections to the Scottish Parliament since 1999, Scotland has appeared more as a new two-party system, with the major contest being between the SNP and Labour, albeit the system of proportional representation (the alternative member system) has helped preserve space for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and other smaller parties such as the Greens. However, as indicated in Chapter 2, over this period the balance of popular support in Scotland has shifted away from Labour and towards the SNP. In the Scottish political system, the main rivalry has been between the SNP and Labour, to present themselves as modern social democratic parties, opposed to Conservative politics, and differentiated from each other primarily by the independence issue. While the duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives has been more stable at Westminster, Brexit and its support may signal that this system too is weakening. In fact, although they have won very few Westminster seats, due to the first-pastthe-post system, the Liberal Democrats had cut into Labour and Conservative support since the 1970s. In the 2015 general election UKIP support jumped to 12.6 per cent of the vote, from 3.1 per cent in 2010. And in the 2014 election to the European Parliament, where UKIP functions as a register of protest to the EU as a whole, UKIP reached 27.5 per cent of the vote. In light of the SNP capture of Scottish Westminster seats in 2015, the capacity of either the Conservatives or Labour to win majorities in the UK Parliament as they have in the past is in question. More generally, in different ways, the Scottish independence referen­dum and the Brexit referendum gave expression, and some articulation, to widespread alienation from the British political system. And more generally still, this has underpinning causes in the shifting class structure of the ‘post-industrial’ economy, which has left many voters feeling insecure and lacking control over their own fates, and in search of who to blame. This portion of the population has been neglected by the main parties, who instead have vied to attract the votes of

Salvage Ethnography.indb 135

24/05/2017 15:07:40

136

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

those more fortunate in the ‘new economy’, while taking the more marginalised as either captive or electorally non-essential. Whether it is Scotland seeking to leave the UK or the UK seeking to leave the EU, several imponderable problems present themselves. In the former case, there is the question of how much of the growing national debt, on the rise since the financial crash and ensuing slow growth, a departing Scotland would take with it, and how the smaller country would manage this liability on its own. Also, oil production is a significant but volatile aspect of the Scottish economy. In the run-up to the 2014 referendum the independence campaign argued for the social good that could be done by taking oil revenues more fully under Scottish control. But thereafter oil prices declined substantially, leaving a large hole in speculative budgets for an independent Scotland. Finally, for many years it has been assumed that an independent Scotland would quickly rejoin the EU and adopt the euro as its currency. But in the wake of the financial 2008 crisis, the viability of the euro as a means to integrate diverse national economies has been called into question (e.g. Stiglitz 2016). Without a centralised European fiscal policy and discipline, lending has led to vast imbalances between creditors such as Germany and its banks, which are loathe to accept losses, and debtors such as Greece, which are unable to generate sufficient growth to pay back impossibly high debts. The euro, once a haven, has become dysfunctional. Finally, if the UK leaves the EU, and Scotland splits from the UK to rejoin the EU, this would create a border that would impede trade between the two. The UK was always an aloof member of the EU and has avoided some of the problems of Europe by staying out of the eurozone, and not signing up the Schengen agreement, which entailed maximally open borders within the EU. But even with these opt-outs, too many people were too unhappy with EU membership, and Brexit succeeded. In addition to the crisis of the euro, the EU is indeed a vast elite-led bureaucracy, its key governing bodies democratically remote from the people it governs. And there are deeper contradictions. While it includes ideological commitments to something like a social democratic model, this runs alongside a commitment to a European version of capitalism that has been eroding the conditions for social democracy. Having said this, through the sheer facts of contiguity and history, Europe is an economic and political entity, which must negotiate the relations among its parts, whether they are formally ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the EU. Realistically, the UK can only leave up to a degree and, like it or not, the most effective way to shape the UK’s fate may be through membership, despite the EU’s weaknesses. There is also a much more abstract argument, which says the world’s fate will be shaped by the contending forces of multiple major centres of capital formation, and the world is better off with a unified Europe counterpoised to the US and China, not to mention secondary powers such as Russia, India and Brazil. But this is not the scale on which the costs and benefits of EU membership have been contemplated in the UK. In public political discourse these dilemmas and complexities tend to get papered over by rhetoric: Scotland’s escape from the UK will allow it to move towards a European social democratic norm; the UK’s escape from the EU will unleash a

Salvage Ethnography.indb 136

24/05/2017 15:07:40

Epilogue

137

home-grown, can-do capitalism that has been stifled by ‘red tape’. The burdens of post-2008 debt and austerity will be lifted, and new vistas of prosperity discovered, if the shackles of the UK or the EU were thrown off. Unfortunately, none of this is very plausible. As suggested in Chapter 3, the challenges of a maturing capitalism that can no longer compete with capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’, at least not without turning the clock back to nineteenth-century Dickensian conditions, have not been fully confronted by the politicians of Europe, let alone those of the UK. The abnormality of record economic growth after World War II, and the new normality of stagnation and cycles of over-speculation, have not sunk in. What might all this say about the lives of the people encountered in this study, and its peculiar historical setting and moment? I have no way of knowing how my various informants of so many years ago might have voted in the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums. If I had to guess, based on my experiences with them, I suspect most of the Scottish residents would have voted against independence, probably in greater proportion than the population at large did. And I suspect they followed the trend in Scotland and were much more likely to vote to remain in the EU. Statistically, living in a large city, especially Edinburgh, and being in professional/managerial employment made these results more likely. However, it is interesting to consider some of the ambiguities of this group. On the one hand, they matched the profile of those I have described as more ‘fortunate’ in the deep economic shift of recent decades. They were more urban, professional/ managerial and educated. They were part of the ‘new knowledge economy’, in which banks and the financial sector have been central and expanding. On the other hand, the discourse I encountered, especially among BoS staff, was often one of alienation from a business and banking world that was abandoning older values many identified with. In this regard, they appear in some respects to be among those ‘left behind’ by the new economy. And of course this tension reached a kind of breaking point in the collapse of HBOS in the banking crisis. The differences in organisational culture between BoS and the Halifax were emblematic of this wider historical shift. These two organisations seemed to embody ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ respectively, and HBOS revealed the hazards that that future would bring. We saw a rough mapping of organisational culture onto national culture, with similar attributions of backwardness and progressiveness. We also saw changing patterns of identification. The changes under way encouraged staff to loosen older senses of identity embedded in organisational solidarity and allegiance, and to think of themselves more as autonomous individuals, responsible for their own self-promotion. Thus a change in the nature of the organisation and the relationship it called for from its staff had ramifications for people’s sense of themselves – their personal identities, their national identities and how these were invested in the organisations that shaped their lives. Something broadly similar was going on in these constitutional referendums, a complex mixture of personal and national identities invested in movements, parties and states, which in turn were making various claims on people’s identities. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of how this data relates to wider and subsequent events is in the recursion of certain fundamental patterns of discourse

Salvage Ethnography.indb 137

24/05/2017 15:07:40

138

Salvage ethnography in the financial sector

about social change – patterns both in what gets said and in how it relates to perspectives and positions. I described how ‘change’ in the corporate banking discourse was not just an objective fact but a value in itself. The powerful, vibrant organisation, as with its employees, is one that seeks out and seizes change, one that does not let itself get left behind. While the people I studied were manifestly on the receiving end of ‘change’, buffeted about by the imperatives of merger and an increasingly competitive banking industry, they were summoned to talk, think and act as though their destinies were in their own hands. As did their organisational leaders, until the banking crisis knocked the wind out of their sails. Paradoxically, coping with the unpredictability and risks of major social changes always invites a kind of ‘noble lie’. We claim to be more in command of our situation than we are, as a strategy for gaining what command we can over events. The story of the HBOS merger and its eventual crisis illustrates this at one scale, and the recent referendums on constitutional matters illustrate it at another. The fate of the European political economy (let alone the global political economy), and how best to place nation-states, whether Scotland or the UK, within in it, are ponderous questions. No one really knows the future and there is limited agreement on the relevant parameters. But the political discourse that surrounded these referendums elicits the same kind of language. Those arguing to remain in the UK or the EU tended to invoke the economic risks that would ensue from departure and advocated the safe haven of the status quo. This was the way to have the surest control over one’s fate. Those championing independence, whether from the UK or the EU, tended to present this as a matter of taking back control over one’s fate, having the guts and the optimism to seize the future. At both scales, there is an argument about agency in the face of events that exceeds and outbids actual understanding. I am not making an argument here for or against any of these political positions, any more than I would judge the personal beliefs about the good and the bad in the HBOS merger of anyone in this study. That is not the point. The point is that these events, larger and smaller, of different kinds, are permutations on the modern confrontation with restless social, political and economic change, and the struggle to make sense of it. Where once we submitted to the whims or favour of gods, we now must believe in ourselves, and the inconstant organisational vessels, whether banks or states, that carry us across troubled waters. Note 1 In what follows I have drawn on the polling data and analysis at John Curtice’s website ‘What Scotland Thinks’, http://whatscotlandthinks.org, and Lord Ashcroft Polls, at http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-voted-and-why (last accessed 9 September 2016).

Salvage Ethnography.indb 138

24/05/2017 15:07:40

References

Acharya, V., M. Richardson, S. van Nieuwerburgh and L. White (2011) Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Arrighi, G. (1994) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London and New York: Verso). Arrighi, G. (2008) Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London and New York: Verso). Arrighi, G. (2009) ‘The winding paths of capital’, Arrighi interviewed by David Harvey, New Left Review 56: 61–94. Barnes, B. (2003) ‘The macro/micro problem and the problem of structure and agency’, in G. Ritzer and B. Smart (eds), Handbook of Social Theory (London: Sage), pp. 339–52. Bashkow, I. (2004) ‘A neo-Boasian conception of cultural boundaries’, American Anthropologist 106(3): 443–58. Bechhofer, F. and D. McCrone (eds) (2009) National Identity, Nationalism and Constitutional Change (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Bechhofer, F. and L. Paterson (2000) Principles of Research in the Social Sciences (London and New York: Routledge). Becker, H. S. (2014) What About Mozart? What About Murder? Reasoning from Cases (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press). Berry, C. J. (1997) Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism (London: Sage). Blute, M. (2010) Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution: Solutions to Dilemmas in Cultural and Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Blyth, M. (2002) Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press). Bragg, B. (2007) The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging (London: Black Swan/ Penguin). Braudel, F. (1984) The Perspective of the World (New York: Harper and Row). Brightman, R. (1995) ‘Forget culture: replacement, transcendence, relexification’, Cultural Anthropology 10(4): 509–46. Brubaker, R. (2004) Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brubaker, R. and F. Cooper (2000) ‘Beyond “identity”’, Theory and Society 29(1): 1–47. Burke, P. (2005) History and Social Theory, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press).

Salvage Ethnography.indb 139

24/05/2017 15:07:40

140

References

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge). Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge). Calhoun, C. (1997) Nationalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Cameron, A. (1995) Bank of Scotland, 1695–1995: A Very Singular Institution (Edinburgh: Mainstream). Carr, E. H. (1961) What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books). Cerny, P. G. (1997) ‘Paradoxes of the competition state: the dynamics of political globalization’, Government and Opposition 32(2): 251–74. Cerny, P. G. (2010) ‘The competition state today: from raison d’état to raison du monde’, Policy Studies 31(1): 5–21. Cerny, P. G. and M. Evans (2000) New Labour, Globalization, and the Competition State, (Harvard Papers 70) (Harvard, MA: Center for European Studies, Harvard University). Chase-Dunn, C. and P. Grimes (1995) ‘World-systems analysis’, Annual Review of Sociology 21: 387–417. Checkland, S. G. (1975) Scottish Banking: A History (Glasgow and London: Collins). Cohan, W. (2009) House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street (New York: Doubleday). Cohen, A. P. (1996) ‘Personal nationalism: a Scottish view of some rites, rights, and wrongs’, American Ethnologist 23(4): 802–15. Cowling, K., S. P. Dunn and P. R. Tomlinson (2011) ‘Global imbalances and modern capital­ism: a structural approach to understanding the present economic crisis’, Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 33(4): 575–96. Craig, C. (2011) The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence, 2nd edn (Glendaruel: Argyll Publishing). Crouch, C. (2011) The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press). Curtice, J. (2013) Future Identities: Changing Identities in the UK – The Next 10 Years (London: Government Office for Science). Degler, C. N. (1991) In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Elder-Vass, D. (2010) The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ellis, V. and M. Taylor (2010) ‘Banks, bailouts and bonuses: a personal account of working in Halifax Bank of Scotland during the financial crisis’, Work, Employment and Society 24(4): 803–12. Engelen, E., I. Etürk, J. Froud, S. Johal, A. Leaver, M. Moran, A. Nilsson and K. Williams (2011) After the Great Complacence: Financial Crisis and the Politics of Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Eriksen, T. H. (1993) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press). Erikson, E. H. (1968) Identity: Youth and Crisis (London: Faber and Faber). Evans, M. and N. Lunt (2010a) ‘Understanding competition states’, Policy Studies 31(1): 1–4. Evans, M. and N. Lunt (eds) (2010b) Understanding Competition States, special issue of Policy Studies, 31(1). Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press). Farrell, G. (2010) Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the NearCollapse of Bank of America (New York: Crown Business). Flyvbjerg, B. (2006) ‘Five misunderstandings about case-study research’, Qualitative Inquiry 12(2): 219–45.

Salvage Ethnography.indb 140

24/05/2017 15:07:40

References

141

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, C. Gordon (ed.) (New York: Pantheon). Fox, J. E. and C. Miller-Idriss (2008) ‘Everyday nationhood’, Ethnicities 8(4): 536–62. Frank, R. H. (2011) The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Fried, M. H. (1967) The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology (New York: Random House). Friedman, J. (ed.) (2011a) What Caused the Financial Crisis (Philadelphia, PA, and Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press). Friedman, J. (2011b) ‘Capitalism and the crisis: bankers, bonuses, ideology, and ignorance’, in J. Friedman (ed.), What Caused the Financial Crisis (Philadelphia, PA, and Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 1–66. Frost, P. J., L. F. Moore, M. R. Louis, C. C. Lundberg and J. Martin (eds) (1991) Reframing Organizational Culture (London: Sage). Galbraith, J. K. (2014) The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (New York: Simon and Schuster). Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books). Gellner, E. (1964) Thought and Change (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson). Gjerstad, S. and V. L. Smith (2011) ‘Monetary policy, credit extension, and housing bubbles, 2008 and 1929’, in J. Friedman (ed), What Caused the Financial Crisis (Philadelphia, PA, and Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 107–36. Glaser, B. G. and A. L. Strauss (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory (New York: Aldine de Gruyter). Gorton, G. (2010) Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gruber, J. W. (1970) ‘Ethnographic salvage and the shaping of anthropology’, American Anthropologist 72(6): 1289–99. Haldane, A. G. and P. Alessandri (2009) ‘Banking on the state’, Bank of England paper based on a presentation delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s twelfth annual international banking conference, 25 September. Hall, P. and D. Soskice (eds) (2001) Varieties of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hannerz, U. (1986) ‘Theory in anthropology: small is beautiful? The problem of complex cultures’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 28(2): 362–7. Hardie, I. and S. Maxfield (2013) ‘Market-based banking as the worst of all worlds: illustrations from the United States and the United Kingdom’, in I. Hardie and D. Howarth (eds), Market-Based Banking and the International Financial Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 56–78. Hargreaves, J. A. (1999) Halifax (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Carnegies Publishing). Hearn, J. (2000) Claiming Scotland: National Identity and Liberal Culture (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press). Hearn, J. (2002) ‘Narrative, agency, and mood: on the social construction of national history in Scotland’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 44(4): 745–69. Hearn, J. (2006) Rethinking Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Hearn, J. (2007) ‘National identity: banal, personal, and embedded’, Nations and Nationalism 13(4): 657–74. Hearn, J. (2009) ‘Small fortunes: nationalism, capitalism and changing identities’, in

Salvage Ethnography.indb 141

24/05/2017 15:07:40

142

References

F. Bechhofer and D. McCrone (eds), National Identity, Nationalism and Constitutional Change (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 144–62. Hearn, J. (2011) ‘Global crisis, national blame’, in D. Halikiopoulou and S. Vasilopoulou (eds), Nationalism and Globalisation: Conflicting or Complimentary? (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 212–36. Hearn, J. (2012) Theorizing Power (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Hearn, J. (2013) ‘Nationalism, biography, and the ecology of identity’, Humanities Research 19(1): 5–22. Hearn, J. (2014) ‘Competition as ritual and the legitimation of the liberal nation state’, in R. Tsang and E. T. Woods (eds), The Cultural Politics of Nationalism and Nation-Building (London: Routledge), pp. 68–83. Henwood, D. (2003) After the New Economy: The Binge … and the Hangover That Won’t Go Away (New York and London: New Press). Heyes, C. (2014) ‘Identity politics’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (winter 2014 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/ identity-politics (accessed 1 July 2015). Hodgson, G. M. and T. Knudsen (2010) Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for General Prin­ ciples of Social and Economic Evolution (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press). Hofstede, G. (1996) ‘An American in Paris: the influence of nationality on organization theories’, Organization Studies 17(3): 525–37. Hofstede, G. (1997) Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill). Hume, D. (1978 [1739]) A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn, L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon). Ingham, G. (2008) Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press). Jenkins, R. (1994) ‘Rethinking ethnicity: identity, categorization and power’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 17(2): 197–223. Jenkins, R. (2004) Social Identity, 2nd edn (London: Routledge). Jenks, C. (2005) Culture, 2nd edn (London: Routledge). Johnson, S. and J. Kwak (2010) 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Pantheon Books). Kalberg, S. (2002) ‘Glossary’, in M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, new translation and introduction by S. Kalberg (ed.) (Boston, MA: Blackwell Publishing), pp. lxxvii–lxxxi. Käsler, D. (1988) Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Cambridge: Polity Press). Kay, J. (2015) Other People’s Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? (London: Profile Books). Kerr, R. and S. Robinson (2012) ‘From symbolic violence to economic violence: the globaliz­ing of the Scottish banking elite’, Organization Studies 33(2): 247–66. Kindleberger, C. and R. Aliber (2011) Manias, Panics and Crashes, 6th edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Konings, M. (ed.) (2010) The Great Credit Crash (London and New York: Verso). Konzelmann, S., M. Fovargue-Davies and G. Schnyder (2010) Varieties of Liberalism: Anglo-Saxon Capitalism in Crisis? (Working Paper No. 403) (Cambridge: Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge). Koselleck, R. (1985) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, K. Tribe, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Salvage Ethnography.indb 142

24/05/2017 15:07:40

References

143

Krugman, P. (2008) The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (London and New York: Penguin). Kuper, A. (1999) Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press). Layder, D. (2004) Emotion in Social Life: The Lost Heart of Society (London: Sage). Layder, D. (2006) Understanding Social Theory, 2nd edn (London: Sage). Lenman, B. (1981) Integration, Enlightenment and Industrialization: Scotland 1746–1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Lo, A. W. (2012) ‘Reading about the financial crisis: a twenty-one-book review’, Journal of Economic Literature 50(1): 151–78. MacKenzie, D. (2006) An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). MacKenzie, D. (2009) Material Market: How Economic Agents Are Constructed (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Malešević, S. (2011) ‘The chimera of national identity’, Nations and Nationalism 17(2): 272–90. Mann, M. (1986) The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mann, M. (2012) The Sources of Social Power, Volume 3: Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mann, M. (2013) The Sources of Social Power, Volume 4: Globalizations, 1945–2011 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mannheim, K. (1993) ‘Competition as a cultural phenomenon’, in K. H. Wolff (ed.), From Karl Mannheim, 2nd expanded edn (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Pub­ lishers), pp. 399–437. Marx, K. (1996 [1859]) ‘“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in T. Carver (ed.), Marx: Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 158–62. McCrone, D. and F. Bechhofer (2015) Understanding National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). McLean, B. and J. Nocera (2010) All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (New York: Portfolio/Penguin). Micklethwait, J. and A. Wooldridge (2005) The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York: Modern Library). Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Mitchell, J. C. (1983) ‘Case and situation analysis’, Sociological Review 31(2): 187–211. Morgenson, G. and J. Rosner (2011) Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon (New York: Times Books/ Henry Holt and Co.). Muller, J. Z. (1993) Adam Smith in His Time and Ours (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Munn, C. W. (1981) The Scottish Provincial Banking Companies, 1747–1864 (Edinburgh: John Donald). Noble, T. (2000) Social Theory and Social Change (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Nolan, P. and G. Lenski (2004) Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, 10th edn (Boulder, CO, and London: Paradigm Publishers). Osterhammel, J. and N. P. Petersson (2005) Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press).

Salvage Ethnography.indb 143

24/05/2017 15:07:40

144

References

Outhwaite, W. (ed.) (2017) Brexit: Sociological Responses (London and New York: Anthem Press). Özkirimli, U. (2010) Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Parker, M. (2000) Organizational Culture and Identity (London: Sage). Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System (New York: Free Press). Paterson, L., F. Bechhofer and D. McCrone (2004) Living in Scotland: Social and Economic Change Since 1980 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Patterson, O. (2014) ‘Making sense of culture’, Annual Review of Sociology 40: 1–30. PCBS (Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards) (2013) ‘An Accident Waiting to Happen’: The Failure of HBOS (fourth report of session 2012–13, volume 1: report, together with formal minutes) (London: The Stationery Office). Perman, R. (2012) Hubris: How HBOS Wrecked the Best Bank in Britain (Edinburgh: Birlinn). Peston, R. and A. Turner (2009) ‘Interview with Adair Turner: Peston and the money men’, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 7 September, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b00mg0wk (last accessed 1 March 2017). Polanyi, K. (1957 [1944]) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Boston, MA: Beacon Press). Posner, R. A. (2013) ‘The concept of regulatory capture: a short, inglorious history’, in D. Carpenter and D. Moss (eds), Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Regulate It (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 49–56. Reinhart, C. and K. Rogoff (2009) This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Roubini, N. and S. Mihm (2010) Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (New York: Penguin). Runciman, W. G. (2009) The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sackmann, S. A. (1997) Cultural Complexity in Organizations: Inherent Contrasts and Contradictions (London: Sage). Sassen, S. (2007) A Sociology of Globalization (New York and London: W. W. Norton). Saville, R. (1996) Bank of Scotland: A History, 1695–1995 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Schularick, M. (2013) ‘Public and private debt: the historical record (1870–2010)’, German Economic Review 15(1): 191–207. Schumpeter, J. A. (1976) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: George Allen and Unwin). Service, E. R. (1975) Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton). Sewell, W. H., Jr (1992) ‘A theory of structure: duality, agency and transformation’, American Journal of Sociology 98(1): 1–29. Simmel, G. (1964) Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations, K. H. Wolff and R. Bendix (trans.) (New York: Free Press). Smircich, L. (1983) ‘Concepts of culture and organizational analysis’, Administrative Science Quarterly 28: 339–58. Smith, A. (1981 [1776]) The Wealth of Nations, 2 vols (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund). Smith, A. D. (1991) National Identity (London: Penguin). Smith, R. M (2003) Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Salvage Ethnography.indb 144

24/05/2017 15:07:40

References

145

Somers, M. (1994) ‘The narrative constitution of identity: a relational and network approach’, Theory and Society 23: 605–49. Sorkin, A. (2009) Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis – and Themselves (New York: Viking). Steward, J. H. (1972) Theory of Culture Change (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press). Stiglitz, J. E. (2010) Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: W. W. Norton). Stiglitz, J. E. (2016) The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (London: W. W. Norton). Streeck, W. (2011) ‘The crisis of democratic capitalism’, New Left Review 71: 5–29. Swedberg, R. (2005) The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Sztompka, P. (1993) The Sociology of Social Change (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell). Tajfel, H. (ed.) (1978) Differentiation Between Social Groups: Studies in the Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (London: Academic Press). Tajfel, H. (ed.) (1982) Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Tett, G. (2009) Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J. P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe (New York: Free Press). Therborn, G. (1995) European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000 (London: Sage). Therborn, G. (2000) ‘Globalizations: dimensions, historical waves, regional effects, normative governance’, International Sociology 15(2): 151–79. Turner, A. (2014) ‘Escaping the debt addiction: monetary and macro-prudential policy in the post-crisis world’, lecture given at the Centre for Financial Studies, Frankfurt, 10 February. Available at http://ineteconomics.org/people/adair-turner (last accessed 1 March 2017). Turner, J. D. (2014) Banking in Crisis: The Rise and Fall of British Banking Stability, 1800 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Visano, B. S. (2006) Financial Crises: Socio-Economic Causes and Institutional Context (London and New York: Routledge). Weber, M. (1927) General Economic History (London: Allen and Unwin). Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society, Volume 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Weber, M. (2002) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, new translation and introduction by S. Kalberg (ed.) (Boston, MA: Blackwell). White, H. (1984) ‘The question of narrative in contemporary historical theory’, History and Theory 23(1): 1–33. Wodak, R., R. de Cillia, M. Reisigl and K. Liebhart (1999) The Discursive Construction of National Identity, A. Hirsch and R. Mitten (trans) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Wolf, E. R. (1982) Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Wolf, E. R. (1984) ‘Culture: panacea or problem?’, American Antiquity 49(2): 393–400. Wrong, D. (1961) ‘The oversocialized conception of man in modern sociology’, American Sociological Review 26: 183–93. Wrong, D. (1968) ‘Identity: problem and catchword’, Dissent 15: 427–35. Wrong, D. (1995) The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Salvage Ethnography.indb 145

24/05/2017 15:07:40

Index

acquisitions (take-overs) Bank of Scotland take-over of Capital Bank 26, 69, 117 Lloyds take-over of Halifax Bank of Scotland 31, 123 Royal Bank of Scotland take-over of NatWest 28 Act of Parliament 2013 38, 131n.1 Act of the Scottish Parliament 1695 18, 131n.1 agency (and structure) 2, 15, 18, 29, 34–5, 36, 37, 39, 47–8, 71, 73, 77, 79, 80, 85–6, 97–8, 101, 116, 129, 130, 138 relation between agency and structure 80, 128 Amsterdam 17 Argentina, 41 Arrighi, Giovanni 43 ‘asset-backed securities’ 30 austerity 38, 44, 45 ‘bank note war’ 19, 20, 32 Bank of Amsterdam 17, 43 Bank of England 17, 19, 21, 24, 31, 38, 43 Bank of Scotland contrast with Halifax 65, 66, 81–3, 89–90, 99–101, 137 culture 50, 51–2, 64–5, 66, 72, 73, 81, 89, 99 100, 101, 105, 121, 123, 124 history 17–19, 21, 23–6 identity 88–9, 90 relation with Scottish economy 23–4 Barclays 26, 27 Bechhofer, Frank 93, 94

Salvage Ethnography.indb 146

Becker, Howard 121–2, 126 ‘Big Bang’ 25, 43 Billig, Michael 4, 87 Blair, Tony 133 Boas, Franz 124 boom and bust see business cycles Boswell, James 20 Bourdieu, Pierre 49, 95 Brexit 133, 135 British Linen Company 19, 20, 27 Brown, Gordon 22, 31, 133 Brubaker, Rogers 49, 94–5 building societies 21, 25 Building Societies Act (1986) 25 Burt, Peter 28, 31, 50, 92 business cycles 21, 36, 38, 39–40, 41, 46, 120 Butler, Judith 94 Cameron, David 133, 134 Capital Bank (NWS) 26, 28, 29, 56, 66, 71, 74, 76, 77, 79, 81 capitalism 11–12, 15–16, 24, 32, 36, 41, 44–5, 69, 78, 86, 118, 124, 125, 127, 136–7 Carr, Edward H. 14, 35, 40 case study 108, 121–2, 127 Cerny, Phil 44–5, 46 Chester, England 26, 71 China 43, 46 City of London 22, 25, 26, 28, 31, 43 civil society 4, 15, 23, 69 Clarke, Peter 27 Clydesdale Bank 20, 21

24/05/2017 15:07:40

Index CME see coordinated market economy ‘collateralised debt obligations’ (CDO) 30, 36, 37 colonialism 124, 125 Company of Scotland see Darien Company comparison 49, 64, 68–9, 108, 128 Scotland and England 61–2, 110–12 university and banking culture 110, 113–19 competition 14, 16, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, 32, 46, 79, 101–2, 117, 119, 126, 130–1, 135 Competition and Credit Control Act (1971) 24 ‘competition state’ 44–5 Conservative Party 19, 22, 23, 27, 29, 38, 133, 134, 135 coordinated market economy 42 core/periphery model 32, 43, 46, 119 corruption 37, 40, 123 ‘creative destruction’ 11, 125 credit default swaps 36 Crosby, James 28, 30, 38, 114 Crouch, Colin 37–8 culture banking 26, 29, 30, 37, 48, 49–50 conceptualisation 53–6, 60–1, 128, 130 national 56, 60–4 organisational 2, 3, 4, 11–12, 49, 55–6, 64–7, 77, 79, 127 organisational, relation with national 68–9, 72, 81, 84, 137 Darien Company 18, 19 Darling, Alistair 27, 31 Darwin, Charles 131 de Tocqueville, Alexis 78 debt national (public) 38, 39–40, 136, 137 private 39–40 Department of Trade and Industry 28 devolution 3, 10, 23, 87, 132, 133, 135 Diversity Team 7, 52, 102, 115 dot.com bubble 42 Durkheim, Emile 78 economic crisis of 2008 1, 12, 14, 29, 30–1, 34–5, 37–9, 41–2, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 119–20, 124, 126, 127, 133, 136, 137

Salvage Ethnography.indb 147

147 Edinburgh 2, 8, 17, 19, 28, 51, 52, 72, 74, 107, 137 ‘elective affinity’ 54–5, 68–9 empire 18, 20, 32, 124, 125 English economy 21 English Parliament 17 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 94 Erikson, Erik H. 94, 97 ‘ethnographic present’ 1, 11, 12, 29 European Union 134, 135, 136 EU see European Union evolution 14–15, 83, 126 Federal Reserve (US) 38 Financial Conduct Authority 38, 114 Financial Services Authority (FSA) 30, 32, 38, 39, 114 Forsyth, Michael 27 Foucault, Michel 97 Friedman and Rosenman scale 72 Galbraith, James K. 45, 46 Geertz, Clifford 53 gender 102–4 Germany 53, 136 GL&D see Group Learning and Development Glasgow 19, 20 globalisation 16, 44, 134 Glorious Revolution of 1688 17 Gove, Michael 134 Great Depression of 1929 23, 41 Greece 136 Group Learning and Development 5, 49–50, 57, 66, 74, 75, 84, 98, 104–5, 107, 115, 117 location change 5, 51–2, 107 renamed 104, 114 Gruber, J. W. 11, 124 Halifax culture 83–4, 90, 92, 99, 100 history 21, 25–6 identity 81–2, 92 Halifax Permanent Building Society 21 history 10–11, 12–13, 14, 34–5, 43, 46, 84, 121–2, 126, 128, 129 Hofstede, Geert 56 Holmes Rahe Social Readjustment Scale 73

24/05/2017 15:07:40

148Index Hornby, Andy 30, 31, 36, 82 HPBS see Halifax Permanent Building Society Hume, David 108 identity conceptualisation 93–8, 128–9 national 1, 2, 3–4, 11, 56, 57–64, 87–90, 91, 92–3, 95–6, 97, 98, 112, 125, 127, 129–30, 132, 133, 137 personal 2, 57, 87, 90, 91, 95–8, 100–1, 106–7, 128, 137 ‘identity making’ 127 ideology 16, 54–5, 77, 95 innovation (financial, technological) 36, 41 internal news magazines 113 video communication 114–15 Jacobite 17, 19, 28 James VI/I 18 James VII/II 17 Japan 41 Jenkins, Richard 94, 96 Johnson, Boris 134 Johnson, Samuel (Dr) 20 joint-stock bank (company) 20, 21, 25, 32 Keynesian economics 37–8, 41–2, 45, 134 Kingston Financial Services (Clyde) Ltd 23 KPMG 30 Krugman, Paul 36, 41–2 Kuper, Adam 53 Labour Party 22, 23, 27, 29, 38, 69, 133, 134, 135 Latin America (debt crisis) 25, 41 Layder, Derek 96, 97 Lehman Brothers 31, 35 Liberal Democrat Party 29, 38, 133, 134, 135 liberal market economies 42, 44 Liberal Party 20 liberal society 15, 40, 46, 95, 113, 118 130, 131 Lloyds (TSB, plc) 1, 11, 31, 37, 123, 124, 131n.1 London 8, 17, 19, 25, 69, 91, 101, 133

Salvage Ethnography.indb 148

London Stock Exchange 24 Loyal Georgian Society of Halifax 21 Malešević, Sinisa 93, 95 MacKenzie, Donald 36 Marx, Karl 54, 55, 78, 80 Masterton, Gavin 28, 31, 67, 75, 114 May, Theresa 133, 134 McCrone, David 4, 93, 94 meme 15 mercantilism 46 merchant bankers 17, 24 mergers Bank of Scotland and British Linen Bank 26 Bank of Scotland and Halifax 1, 4, 11, 28, 69, 72, 76, 77, 79, 81, 85, 87, 91, 101, 103, 117, 125, 126 Bank of Scotland and Union Bank 26 Clydesdale Bank and North of Scotland Bank 26 Commercial Bank and National Bank 26 Halifax Building Society and Leeds Permanent Building Society 25, 83, 92, 101 Halifax Permanent Building Society and Halifax Equitable 25 micro/macro relationships 11, 12, 14, 34, 47–8, 68–9, 80, 127 mode of production 36, 54–5 modernity 78 Monopolies and Mergers Commission 27 Napoleonic War 21 nation-state 16, 138 nationalism 1, 92, 97, 129, 130, 131 nationalist movement 10 NatWest 27, 114 neoliberalism 16 22, 29, 44, 125, 134 ‘new economy’ 35–6, 40, 135–6, 137 New Labour see Labour Party North Sea oil 24 North West Securities see Capital Bank Northern Rock 30, 31 NWS see Capital Bank Office for Fair Trading 27 oil industry 23, 24, 136

24/05/2017 15:07:40

Index

149

Osborne, George 134 Özkirimli, Umut 92

Royal Bank of Scotland 19, 20, 26, 28, 31, 72, 90, 107

Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards 31 Parsons, Talcott 53–4 Patterson, Owen 53 Patterson, William 18 Pattullo, Bruce 23, 25, 27, 88 performative 36, 40, 94 Perman, Ray 2, 30–1 petrodollars 25 Polanyi, Karl 44 power and culture 55, 69 conceptualisation 55, 97–8, 116, 130 and identity 97–8, 128 and legitimacy 15, 55, 130, 131 Presbyterian (Church, mind-set) 50, 51, 60, 69, 72, 75, 87 ‘privatised Keynsianism’ 37–8 provincial banks 20 Prudential Regulation Authority 38, 114

Salmond, Alex 27 salvage ethnography 11–12, 124–5 savings banks 21 Schularick, Moritz 46 Scottish economy 8, 17, 18–21, 23–4, 26, 29, 136 Scottish National Party 4, 22, 27, 29, 134, 135 Scottish Parliament 3, 17, 23, 29, 135 ‘secondary banking crisis’ 24–5 Smith, Adam 39, 78, 131 Smith, Anthony 92 SNP see Scottish National Party social change (and cultural) 15, 24, 29, 35, 36, 37, 39, 47–8, 52, 54–5, 65–6, 67–8, 68–9, 71–2, 77–9, 82, 84, 85, 88, 101, 104–5, 110, 116–17, 117–18, 119, 120–2, 125, 134, 138 social democracy 22, 29, 44, 46, 125, 135, 136 social evolution (and cultural) 14–15, 32, 46, 55, 78, 80, 110, 125, 128, 129–31, 132, 138 Social Investment Scotland 7 South Sea Bubble 41 Spencer, Herbert 78 Standard Life 27 state–economy relationship 35–6, 37–8, 39–40, 71, 77, 86, 109, 118, 130, 137 Streeck, Wolfgang 44, 46 subprime mortgages 30, 37

RBS see Royal Bank of Scotland recession 21 referendum on Scottish independence (2014) 4, 29, 133–4, 137 referendum on UK membership of the European Union (2016) 4, 133, 134, 137 ‘reflexive competition’ 16 Reform Acts 20 ‘regulatory capture’ 38 research methods archival 8, 92, 113 email questionnaire 7–8, 56, 59–64, 65–7, 81–4, 87–8, 89, 90, 91, 98, 99–100, 101–2, 111–12 ethnography 3–4, 10–11, 12–13 14, 34, 47–8, 71, 87, 93, 98, 104, 108–9, 117, 121, 126, 128, 129 interviews 8, 56–7, 67, 84–5, 90, 91, 98, 100 participant observation 4–7, 58–9, 72–7, 84, 89–90, 100, 102–4, 105–6, 109, 114–16 retail banking 48 Robertson, Pat 50, 75

Salvage Ethnography.indb 149

Tajfel, Henri 94 Thailand 41 Thatcher, Margaret 22, 24 ‘The Foundation’ 71 The Mound 28, 88 The Walkers 2, 106 Therborn, Goran 78, 86 Tocqueville, Alexis de see de Tocqueville, Alexis Tory Party see Conservative Party training courses 3, 7, 51–2, 57, 71 ‘Assertiveness’ 7, 58–9 ‘Coping Strategies’ 72–3

24/05/2017 15:07:41

150Index ‘Creativity and Innovation’ 7, 73–7, 79, 80 ‘Dealing with Differences’ 7, 57, 71–2 ‘Managing the Team’ 115, 116 ‘Negotiation Skills’ 103–4 ‘Practical Teamwork’ 84, 89 TSB, plc see Lloyds (TSB, plc) Turner, Adair 39 UK economy 25, 29, 120, 123, 134 UKIP see United Kingdom Independence Party Union Bank of Scotland 20 Union of 1707 18, 19, 69 Union of the Crowns 18

Salvage Ethnography.indb 150

United Kingdom Independence Party 132, 135 University of Edinburgh 4, 50, 52, 117 varieties of capitalism 42, 43, 46, 86 Wales 132 Weber, Max 34–5, 50, 53–4, 78, 79 welfare state 22, 23, 44, 45, 125 Whig Party see Liberal Party William and Mary of Orange 17 Wolf, Eric R. 10 World War I 21, 32 World War II 16, 23, 32, 44, 137 Wrong, Dennis 96

24/05/2017 15:07:41