Transformation and Change in Financial Services

Abstract

As we have seen, during the 1980s and 1990s financial services organizations were being transformed from within and without. Inside these organizations, managers and employees came to learn a new way of conceiving of themselves, their roles and functions. As the language and practice of management shifted away from predominantly bureaucratic and traditional models towards strategy, marketing and the discourse of the sovereign consumer, patterns of work, organization and career were restructured. In this chapter, we show how these discourses produced a range of contradictory effects within the field of financial services as a whole.