Salvage Ethnography in the Scottish Financial Sector: New Ethnographies

This 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. The 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.

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 small-scale 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.