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This book takes a body of ethnographic data collected in 2001-2, during a year's fieldwork at the Bank of Scotland (BoS) and HBOS, and revisits it from the perspective of the 2014-16 period. It explores the tension between the 'ethnographic present' of the author's original research and the unavoidable alteration of perspective on that data that the economic crisis has created. The original research had been planned to take place in the BoS but in 2001, before the research began, BoS had merged with the Halifax to form HBOS. The book provides 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 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 are examined. The concept of 'culture' as applied to both national groups, Scots and English, and organizations, BoS and Halifax, are also dealt with. The book examines other governing concepts such as organisational change in the business world and social change, identity and the way Scottish and English experience their own personhood, and comparative nature of ethnographic research. The conclusion reviews and draws together the themes of the book, returning to the overarching question of historical perspective and explanation.
to work and monetary transactions. One may think that policy and regulatory restrictions can be overcome by innovations in digital technology: that every hurdle triggers someone to innovate a workaround. However, this is a dangerous way of thinking because exclusion and a lack of rights remain unchanged, while the workarounds bring additional risks with them. In particular, the collapse of the economic and financial sector in Lebanon has turned the
Warf, detached itself from its foundations and zigzagged gracefully across the skyline. The trippy new cityscape and the men in suits had risen off the back of major deregulation in the 1980s. What was once a tightly regulated industry turned into a free for all as, under Thatcher, the movement and provision of credit became the most profitable exercise in British history. By 2019 the total amount of assets owned by the financial sector in the UK was close to £25 trillion. 1 To put it into context
financial sector. Eight of the 12 had been junior Treasury ministers before being appointed to lead the DTI. People such as John Nott, Lord Cockfield, Cecil Parkinson and Peter Lilley had both City and Treasury experience. Only one of the 12, Paul Channon, a bit of a fifth Beatle, had neither background. None of these figures stayed very long or supported their own department. Keith Joseph, the first in post in 1979, had spent several years arguing that a department of industry should not even exist. David Young, another in
; Morlino and Sottilotta, 2019 , p. 5). The centre-left government had already partially bailed out some banks in 2009 through the creation of the Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB), 20 but those measures had proven insufficient to solve banking problems (Huerta, 2019 , p. 28). In response to this situation, the PP government approved a plan for financial sector restructuring 21 which had three main objectives: to inject €52 million into the
in chapter 14 . 2.8 Conclusion In this chapter we have described the process of financial intermediation and discussed the reasons why we need financial intermediaries and hence the benefits of the financial sector. Recently, the role of finance has received a more critical judgement in view of the 2007–8 financial crisis. A number of measures
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
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
only erodes social cohesion, it destabilises the same institutional hierarchies and power structures that underpin elite rule itself. 2 At various points, I've spent time exploring the national news media, the financial sector, big corporations, the Whitehall civil service and political parties at Westminster. In each case, I've found myself witnessing an institutional metamorphosis in the organisations at their centre. They have stopped doing what they were originally developed to do and for whom they were doing it. Adapting to survive and
that might enable infirm parts of the currency union to recover. Protecting the financial sector at all costs In December 2011, to avoid banking meltdown in the periphery spreading to the core, the new ECB head, Mario Draghi, placed the eurozone’s banking sector on an ECB life-support machine. Central banks released gigantic amounts of funds – totalling by March 2012 one trillion euros – to enable banks to buy high-yield government bonds: Long-Term Re-Financing Operation (LTRO) was the name for this scheme. The rules prevented the ECB from practising what had