While the gender hierarchy seems firmly entrenched, investment banking also prides itself of its ethnical diversity. As I discussed previously, the approach to ethnic differences seems different to how gender is dealt with. The argument of voiced in the interviews was that “true cultural differences” would get “sanded down”, therefore ethnic differences had no substance in finance.
However, in the interviews, the respondents seemed generally to conflate the category of ethnicity with internationality. Their experience with ethnic diversity referred to international work contexts, not so much to different ethnic backgrounds from the same country.
Data on ethnicity in investment banking is even harder to come by than for the representation of women. The exception again is the United States, where the national discourse over race and racism has sparked a small debate on the “whiteness” of the industry. In terms of general representation in the workforce and career advancement, Crowe and Kiersz (2015) report that among the top six bulge-bracket investment banks, the total share of non-white workforce varies between twenty-two and forty-seven percent. As with female representation, this drops to values of roughly a third of middle management being non-white, and again among executives to values between four and nineteen percent. The authors conclude that as for women, an ethnic glass ceiling seems to exist as well. For Britain, Ashley et al. (2016) find that ethnic representation in investment banking is an effect of selection by socio-economic background: As minorities are already underrepresented in the population of university students
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investment banks recruit from, ethnic discrimination is not an issue for the business insofar, as that it happens on a societal level, before even encountering the access barrier of recruitment processes.
The issue of ethnicity is also dealt very differently in Australia and Germany. In Australia, it being an immigrant society, the variety of ancestry of the population is considered an integral part of the national identity. The most disadvantaged group however are Aboriginals, who are excluded from society to an extent that their mere existence is often ignored. This issue was not brought up even once in my interviews, as their representation in higher education, and therefore in the recruitment pool is extremely small. In Contrast, in Germany, ethnic divisions between migrants and “natives” are a hot political topic.
Among my sample, from Sydney only Kim as an Asian-Australian self-identified as belonging to a non-majority ethnic group, whereas in Frankfurt, Ramin, Christopher and Dimitris identified as having a migrant background.
It was quite surprising that the issue of ethnicity only was brought up in Sydney by Kim, who, as discussed in Chapter 9.4 (pp. 166-169), felt that because of her gender and her ethnic background, she could not develop the networks necessary for career advancement beyond senior management. As she put it:
[…] well if you think about it, all the corporations are owned by white men.
<laughs> You see, I don’t have that network. I’m a very good worker, but a good worker will only get you to senior management level. The good worker will not get you to partnership – it will not get you to CEO.
As with the glass ceiling, the impression of Kim is that a network with “white men” is not something that can be developed, but rather something you either have or you don’t, where you’re either part of the group or you are not. It is in other words an issue of “identity”, not of networking skills.
Kim’s experience points to a central aspect of the business most of my respondents would not see: That for all the “cosmopolitanism” one develops as a financial professional in this global field, finance remains a field defined by a male, western and white culture. This aspect is masked by my research sites being both in western countries with a predominantly “white”
population. The issue of “whiteness” has been documented in research on expatriates in places where financial professionals encounter a non-white society. As Lars Meier (2009, 2016) shows with an ethnographic study of German expatriate investment bankers in Singapore and London, the white identity only becomes articulated in places perceived as non-white. He argues that
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while in London, German investment bankers had to compete with the locals for social acceptance, in Singapore their whiteness signified a status which already defined them as members of a transnational elite:
[In Singapore] the bankers feel unchallenged in their social position as transnational elite because they consider themselves as whites both desired and required for the development of Singaporean society. They feel that their white, transnational elite identities make them welcome. (Meier 2016: 500)
The central difference defining ethno-cultural identity in finance therefore lies along the line of white/non-white, whereas other ethnic divisions seem of less importance. This becomes clear when considering the case of Christopher, who is Welsh, but lives in Frankfurt. In contrast to Kim, who is limited in her career by her non-white ethnic identity, he explains, that his ethnicity is rather a device, which can be employed to achieve certain outcomes:
I now have dual citizenship, I’ve been naturalized as a German citizen last year. I always like to say, I’m a German with a Welsh migration background.
And depending on the situation I represent myself as a Brit, or I say that I’m German, as a salesman you have to be somewhat extroverted and you have to set a personal note within the industry. When you’re that long in the game people need to know you, and you have to be recognizable. Firstly, there’s my name – there’s nothing more British than my name, and with such a neme at a German firm, and also being fluent in German, that is quite noticeable and unusual. Secondly, there’s…tomorrow I’ll be in Hamburg and I always wear my bowler hat, that British bowler hat, the people in Hamburg love that.
And if I don’t wear it, they ask “Where’s the hat?” and that’s one of these personal notes, as a Brit. Previously it was different, I came as a British representative of a British firm, but at [our company] everything is German, German, German, but I am always remembered and recognized as the Brit…and when you visit the Oktoberfest in Munich with customers, then of course I wear Lederhosen and say: Look, I’m German! <loughs>.
Diversity and difference thus become valuated, when they are used in order to create business. Thomas comments discussed in the previous section about the physical attractiveness
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of his female co-workers can be read in a similar way: as long as it is marketiseable, difference from the white male norm is accepted and welcomed.
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11 Conclusion: The Formation of a Global Financial Class
In this concluding section I present a summary of my findings in Bourdieu’s categories for the formation of a social class, namely economic social and cultural capital, doxa, and habitus,.
My conclusion is, that the homogenizing forces of the field of finance, its autonomy and its mechanisms of closure produce the foundations for a process of class formation, most visible in the doxa and habitus of the financial professionals.
In part one of this thesis, I have asked the question how global class formation could be conceived of. As the discussion has shown, there were various theoretical and epistemological problems to overcome, before I arrived at the conclusion that the field-theoretical approach of Pierre Bourdieu is the most suitable for conceptualizing the formation of a global class.
As the brief reconstruction of the globalisation debate in Chapter Three (pp.42-51) has demonstrated, one main discursive obstacle lies in the adherence of many authors to a form of juxtaposition of “the global” with “the local”. The truth, it seems, lies in the middle: Global social fields, such as the financial markets, which form the basis for the formation of a global financial class, still require specific localities to unfold their power. Therefore, “the global” and
“the local” never exist in a pure form, as I have shown at the beginning of part two in the comparison of Frankfurt and Sydney in Chapter Eight. As two distinctly different, but comparable financial centres, the analysis of the local institutional structure of the financial field shows that local path dependencies, based on historically different developments, inscribe themselves into a globally integrated financial system without resulting in a complete homogenisation. Instead, different localities can profit from their distinctive history through specialisation in those areas, where the local preconditions are particularly suited to be of global demand. The idea of globality in this instance has the function of a role-model for the development of competitive capacities in order to attract financial capital.
The groundwork for class formation on financial markets mirrors this process. As I have discussed in Section 9.1, the processes of social closure, which form the basis for the formation of a financial class, have deep local roots. Reflecting the different histories and local class structures, the hiring practices of financial organisation differ slightly between Frankfurt and Sydney. While this conserves some of the local particularities within the financial professions, during the course of a career these get “sanded away”, as one respondent put it. The dynamic underlying the globalisation of practices and attitudes is grounded in the autonomisation of the
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global financial field. The establishment of global standards and “best practice” removes the financial field from the control through other social fields, which are more closely connected to the state.
This is not to say that national identities of financial professionals disappear completely, they rather get transformed into devices for self-marketisation, as I have shown in Section 10.2.
In this respect, the true globality of the class needs qualification, as it becomes clear that it is white- and male-dominated, whereby the hierarchy of gender seems to have a stronger effect than the one of race.
An important contribution to the generation of a global outlook lies in the career structure of financial professionals. From the beginning of their career, international work placements and job changes form an important component of the professional development of financial actors. It is this instance where the globality of the field of finance and the global nature of the formation of the financial class become most visible. The transnational career structure in finance sets the social group of financial professionals apart from other social classes. In contrast to for instance the classical managerial career, as for instance discussed by Hartmann (2016) in the context of the transnational capitalist class (see Chapter 4.2, pp. 57-60), a career in finance is not built on continuity in the place of employment, but rather on frequent changes of employer and geographical location. While these moves across organisations and countries are an important tool of career advancement, they also undermine an identification with the employer. The trajectories of financial professionals can therefore be seen as prime examples of global “boundaryless careers”, as they traverse across organisations, countries and infringe deeply on the private lives.
With the demands of such careers comes an “entrepreneurial spirit”, which complements the dynamics of financialisaton. As I have discussed in Section 10.3, Financial professionals act as entrepreneurs of their own. On the one hand towards their clients: it is part of the job of financial professionals to shape entrepreneurial strategies of client firms and investment decisions of individuals. Thus, they assume a powerful position in the arrangement of the modern financial capitalism, one, which used to be occupied by managers.
On the other hand, they act similarly towards the environment of their own firms, who they attempt to reorganise to fit their own purposes. This demonstrates that it is indeed the field of the market, which produces the condition for global sociation and the identity of a global financial class.
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The question that remains is, what these trajectories tell us about the categories of Bourdieu’s model for class formation, that is, the forms of capital, the doxa, and the habitus.