Chapter 8 - Finance And Banking Flashcards
Finance
Anthropologists look to defamiliarise things - why is it that one note is worth £5 and another £10?
In one sense it is thus about value but in another sense it is about belief. In one way or another people ‘believe’ that something has ‘value’.
Cultural Relativism
Where different cultures have different values and beliefs.
Things get complicated when you talk about responsibility in accordance with different values and beliefs and also when you look at multi-national cultures.
Anthropologists attempt to ‘complexify’ culture.
Money
Money has a specific relationship to morality. Malinowski said that the way a person use their money makes a moral or immoral person.
Counter-culture and complex culture
A bank introduce a ,’culture change programmes’. But 2/3 were not convinced and it revealed that there was a ‘sub culture
of complaint’.
People complain for different things and values and therefore culture is complex.
Complex culture- “when cultures in an organisation are not perfectly shared between people”.
Jon Weeks - BritArm Bank
The ‘culture of complaint’
The management tried to change this through ‘culture change programmes’, and ways to have their staff look forward to things in terms of ‘personal career advancement’ But these were seen as infected by workers.
There were ‘subcultures’ throughout the organisation.
- People believed that they belonged to a different subculture in the bank depending on the complaints they made about the management, and by the ways they related and understood each other.
John Weeks - BritArm Bank
Complex cultures =
Complex cultures = where cultures are not perfectly shared between people.
He explains that when people work together and complain together as a group, when people from different sub-cultures and complaining they ‘join forces’.
John Weeks explains that people assess a SITUATION and come together and act collectively to make complaints.
John Weeks - BritArm Bank
The message that comes from a group in a business is called a….
The message for the business that comes from a group of people who want to have an impact on a business is what John Weeks calls a ‘COUNTER CULTURAL MESSAGE’.
“The shared cultural message that emerges in response to a organisations cultural change”
A message based on collective disagreement or dissatisfaction.
Examples:
Starbucks
- What are the implications of a public knowledge of this kind of business
- The public complain
- Other businesses can capitalise on another businesses scruples.
- Boycott
Examples:
UK UNCUT
THIS GROUP WAS FORMED IN RESPONSE TO THE AUSTERITY MEASURES AND PUBLIC SECOR CUTS that the government has been making in attempts to deal with the financial crisis in the UK.
- They said “ if one big businesses would just pay the right amount of tax, then people like you and me would not have to face cuts to social welfare and other public resources in the UK.”
- What provides the powerful impetus to collectively mobilise diverse groups of people toward one goal? Money?
Christ Gregory
Savage Money (1997) “Values describe and prescribe.”
Looks at the standardization of VALUE, rather than just money. It is how paper/metal/shells/any for of currency accrues VALUE.
Karen Ho
Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009)
She saw that on wall street stock prices and business behaviours are not following traditional models.
Workers are liquidated in the pursuit of stock appreciation.
Learned that: employees, or as we have been calling them in this course the ‘workers’ are readily liquidated in the pursuit of stock price appreciation.
In many ways investment bankers and how they approach work became a model for how work SHOULD BE conducted.
Wall Street shapes not just the stock market but also the very nature of employment and what kinds of workers are valued.
She explains that what they value is not worker stability but constant market simultaneity.
