One prevalent area of contention already mentioned is the cultural change of the recent years. This change has been described by the older cohort, who experienced the business before the wave of globalisation in the nineteen-eighties. One instance I already reported, when Jens told of his early days in the business, where exuberant salaries were not yet a motivation for work.
This criticism is for instance also voiced by Joshua, who explicitly refers to a “current climate of greed”. He describes this the following way:
A cultural change has been one of the reasons I really wanted to get out of the market. It was, became... In the old days it was all about the customer.
And it was all about what could you do for the customer and what clever products could you manufacture for them in order to resolve their issues.
Now, there's been no product development in Australia for the last 15 years?
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And it's all now about how much money I can make.
And it's being driven by the banks themselves. Because they can make more money, actually participating or competing against their customers, than they came in providing pure advice. And that was what's driven that cultural change.
Underlying his opinion is a sentiment of being an “honourable banker”, which he sees threatened by current business practices, where banks use the information they have about their customers for their own advantage, against their customer’s interest.
However, there is also second perspective on this cultural change: Not everyone longs for the good old days, as Michael, the CEO for a big Australian-American investment bank explains:
…the culture um that I was entered into was more of long lunches and all that sort of stuff, but I didn't participate in that because I was so focused on trading and my company…the stockbroking community at that time, they would have long lunches they would go to lunch and drink and you know, instead of being for an hour and a half or two hours, they would go out for lunch for three hours, maybe four. Um, and sometimes they'd come back to the office, sometimes they wouldn't, so it was quite a different era of culture. Um, but that's obviously changed pretty, you know, I sort of got the end of that culture, So anyway, mine was more of a mathematical culture because I am an economist, and I didn’t like that at all.
Michael criticises the old culture for being lenient and lazy. He adds context to the change of culture by qualifying the increasingly mathematical nature of work in the financial sector. In his view, banking has moved from being a “peoples’ business” to being a “numbers game”, as superior mathematical models yield higher returns than human portfolio managers. His account however also shows, how practices of socializing at the workplace over lunch and actual work practices are intertwined, a point also made by Jens from Frankfurt.
As mentioned previously, Jens and others from Frankfurt share Joshua’s perspective that the business has moved away from doing what lies in the customer’s interest, and has become too focused on short-term profits. The story from Frankfurt, which already was partly discussed in the section on income and motivation, matches the accounts from Sydney insofar, as the older respondents describe it as a shift in values, from customer orientation to “greed”. In a
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similar way to Michael, Jens links the “mathematisation” of the business with this cultural change:
Business overall has become much more based on mathematics. Previously, in trading for instance, you had to have more of a “gut feeling” about where the market was heading. Therefore, there was much more exchange about rumours among the traders, and also the salespeople, also because we didn’t have these informational systems. In my time, in the past the stock exchange was open for three hours, in the morning you’d read the newspapers, and then you could pass on news from the papers to your customers. But today, with Bloomberg, with Reuters [the two biggest providers of financial information systems], or even with CNN, you know immediately if anything happens around the world. Within two minutes, everybody knows. That means, you don’t have any informational advantage. And this is why today, mathematical models are much more important for the business.
What Jens describes is a fundamental shift in the nature of the work practices, which underlies the change in business values: Instead of generating profits through informational advantage, it is now the technical knowledge about interpreting this information, made explicit in the form of mathematical formulas, which lies at the heart of the business.
This in turn establishes the ground for a different manner of social engagement: While the old business model was based on generating informational exchange and interpreting this information in a very vague way (via “gut feeling”), the relative weight now has shifted. Since information is more freely available, the more relevant part of the business lies in the interpretation and analysis of this information, via mathematical tools. This knowledge has to be guarded closely, as it represents the core competitive advantage of a firm.
This shift needs to be contextualized with the culture of networking described in the previous chapter. As it has become clear from the interview passages I discussed, networking serves primarily the goal of furthering one’s own career. The object of this practice of networking therefore is not so much the exchange about customers and their market situations, but rather more about the situation of other financial firms. It engages in other words with information about agents in the field; the information flow is internal to the market. Financial professionals engage in this communicative practice therefore not only as conduits transmitting information, which according to Jens was the primary function of such practices in “the old days”. Rather the more important aspect seems to be checking the value of one’s own
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knowledge of how to process the available information. The causal link both Jens and Michael draw between the mathematization of the business and the change of workplace culture thereby serves in their perspective to explain the instrumental stance towards customers and co-workers, as well as the exclusive focus on short-term profit financial actors take in the contemporary state of the financial field.
This change has often been criticized for its wider societal consequences. With the mathematization of finance comes an instrumental orientation of business towards specific indicators of profit, while simultaneously de-valuing other forms of worth, such as the professional ethos of the “honourable” or “smart” banker, as decried by Joshua in the quote at the beginning of this section. The spheres of social worth, of honour and ethos are superseded by the power of naked numbers. As for instance Sighard Neckel (2010: 76f) has argued, this orientation towards profit and profit alone extends beyond the field of finance, and undermines even legitimations of capitalist economic society, such as meritocracy, justice, and rationality.
With regard to the question of this thesis, whether there is a class of financial professionals forming on the global financial markets, it is important to stress that the narratives of Michael and Jens are remarkably similar, despite the different moral stance both take towards the cultural change of the past twenty to thirty years. This goes to show not just the global nature of this culture, but also how out of a certain set of practices (the mathematical formalisation of finance) a common world-view emerges. This hints, together with the factors I have described in the previous chapters, such as the homogenisation of professional education and the social exchange between financial centres, at the formation of what Bourdieu calls the “doxa” of a financial class.