Participation and Self-Entrapment A 12-Year Ethnography of Wall Street Participation Practices' Diffusion and Evolving Consequences

Abstract

A 12-year ethnography illustrates how two investment banks' participative work practices entrapped bankers in indiscriminate overwork, and what the evolving consequences were for the banks and the organizations that the bankers joined subsequently. The banks' participative work practices eliminated all visible organizational controls. Invested in the task, the bankers collectively designed work practices that benefited the banks, but had the unintended consequences of intensifying work pace and habituating bankers to indiscriminate overwork that they experienced as self-chosen. Prior organizational behavioral research predicts outcomes only for about one year. During this time, the banks benefited from the bankers' hard work. Starting in year four, the practices' extremes produced opposite effects, namely declining performance because of body breakdowns, and cultural distance, because depleted bodies made it impossible for bankers to work in culturally normative ways. The bankers carried this pattern of overwork and subsequent breakdowns into the organizations that they joined subsequently, where they introduced the banks' practices.