Epilogue

The epilogue pulls back from the study presented to place it in the context of general patterns of national identity and recent and on going constitutional change in the UK. It explores how this case study relates to recent political events that have happened since the time of fieldwork, including the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014, the UK Brexit Referendum of 2016, and the changing compositions of party systems in Scotland and the UK as a whole. It suggests that these events, like the formation of HBOS and its crisis, reflect deep and rapid economic, political and social changes, and illustrate the human struggle to make sense of and act towards an often imponderable future.

Identity: struggles with personhood, nationhood and professional virtue

This chapter looks at questions of identity at various levels. It considers the Scottish identity of the Bank of Scotland, and how personal senses of Scottishness were refracted through that institutional national identity. It looks especially at how people’s personal identities in the Bank of Scotland were often bound up with an idea of being ‘professional bankers’ in contrast to more generic ‘sales people’ associated with the Halifax. It also considers the gendered dimension of identity. More generally, it is interested in how people invest their personal identities in larger social identities, and how this process is mediated by organisational contexts such as that of the Bank. The conceptual interlude in the middle argues the importance of this triad of the personal, the social, and the organisational, for understanding and analysing identity.

Change: discourses of agency and progress in organisational change

This chapter examines how HBOS staff were coping with and making sense of rapid organisational change during the early days of merger. But more specifically, using material from staff training courses, it looks at how the Bank, like other modern organisations, develops its own internal discourse of the necessity and value of change, as a kind of moral imperative imposed on staff. Moreover, it looks at how the discourse of change within HBOS tended to construct Bank of Scotland as older and backward, and Halifax as younger and progressive, and the ideological work this was doing. The concept of ‘social change’ is scrutinised in the middle section, along with corollary concepts of competition, social structure and agency.

History: from the Bank of Scotland’s origins to HBOS and crisis

This chapter recounts the history of the Bank of Scotland from its creation, through the formation of HBOS, up to the present, in the context of the development of the British banking sector. It also secondarily traces the history of the Halifax. It aims to provide a wide historical frame within which to interpret the recent events in the banking sectors, including the demise of HBOS and the banking crisis. It advocates a ‘light touch’ social evolutionary perspective, in which social change is viewed as the outcome of developing competition between organisations, and an evolving ecology among banking and financial organisations. It emphasises that the wider context of these developments, and for the formation of banks in the first place, is the relationship between the state and economic actors.

Culture: nations, banks and the organisation of power and social life

With this chapter the book shifts from the contextualisation of the original study to the close examination of that study and its data. It presents ethnographic data on the discourses in the Bank relating to the ideas of national and organisational cultures. It examines how staff members compared and contrasted the cultures of the two merging organisations, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and how they construed the differences between Scottishness and Englishness, especially in terms of culturally encoded notions of ‘diffidence’ and ‘confidence’. It shows how all these notions of culture became bound up with the making sense of the tensions engendered by the merger and the general direction of organisational change. A ‘conceptual interlude’ in the middle of the chapter explores the social science concept of culture, arguing that this tends to be too narrow and ideational, and insufficiently attuned to the organisation of power in the generation of culture.

Comparison: doing ethnography and thinking comparatively

This chapter is based on reflections on doing ethnographic research. It argues the centrality of comparisons of the ethnographer’s personal experiences with that of the setting in which they are researching. First it examines more closely a theme raised in earlier chapters, about how HBOS staff sometimes questioned the idea of Scottish/English differences by mobilising other axes of difference based on region, class, gender, and so on. It then looks especially at some of the similarities in institutional change going on in the university sector compared with the HBOS case, and uses this as a basis to speculate about more general trends of change in large organisations and society as a whole, in both commercial and non-commercial sectors.

Theory: explaining financial crisis and conceptualising capitalism

Building on the historical perspective of the previous chapter, this chapter begins by posing the basic questions ‘what is theory for?’. It argues that in the present case it is to situate the events under scrutiny within a hierarchy of more proximate and more general causes impinging on those events. Towards this end it first surveys a range of explanations that have been brought to bear on the post-2008 crisis, and then surveys a range more general theories of the long-term trajectory of capitalism. In both cases it suggests which theories and explanations are probably the most significant. It concludes by reflecting on the challenge of situating relatively small-scale ethnographic data within large historical explanations that seem to dwarf human agency.

Conclusion

The conclusion reviews and reflects on main themes. It emphasises the fact that Bank of Scotland continues, despite the end of HBOS and the elegiac tone of this study. It returns to the idea of ‘salvage ethnography’ and its applicability in this case, and interrogates the idea, present throughout the book, that the original fieldwork data presents us with some signs of the dysfunctions that would lead HBOS into crisis. It considers the tensions between ethnographic and historical modes of understanding and explanation, and the challenges of generalising from particular cases. It reviews the key concepts of culture, change, and identity that structure the central ethnographic chapters. Finally, it situates the study within the evolution of the author’s ideas since the time of the original research.

Introduction: ethnography, history and the vagaries of research

This chapter introduces the study, and the reasons for returning to the original data after more than a decade. It gives an account of how the original research was conducted, outlining the research design and methods. The chapter reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of ethnographic research, explaining the idea of ‘salvage ethnography’, as the study of disappearing culture in the face social change. It argues that historical perspective changes our understanding of ethnographic material, concluding with a summary of the chapters to come.