Salvage Ethnography in the Financial Sector

Abstract

This book takes ethnographic data collected in 2001-2, during a year’s fieldwork in the Bank of Scotland and HBOS, and revisits it from the perspective of the present, that is, after the global banking and financial crisis that emerged around 2008 with devastating effects on several banks, including this one. It focuses on the year in which 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. Thus the study in a sense salvages a record of a disappearing banking culture, which is symptomatic of wider social change. The book 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. It also engages in an innovative way with the perennial problem of relating small-scale ethnographic data to large-scale historical change. Written clearly and concisely, with narrative momentum, it 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.