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ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

Theme 1 Research Projects

(1) Financialization at Work

Ismail Erturk, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams

The aim was to promote wider more focused discussion of financialization and to frame CRESC research on the giant firm, the public sector and the restructuring of the economy in our time The main output was a substantial reader (Routledge, 2008) whose 19 extracts counterpose historic and current analysis, political and cultural economy approaches. Commentaries analyse the a prioris of different literatures, and an original introduction argues the case for a conjunctural non epochal account of financialized capitalism which works through separation of intermediary elites and saving masses. The project and a BES award also allowed the team to develop new arguments about corporate governance and about private equity.

(2) Strategised Management in Giant UK and US Firms

Karel Williams, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal and Adam Leaver

How has giant firm strategy in the UK and USA changed after financialization under stock market pressure for shareholder value? .The book Financialization and Strategy (Routledge, 2006) provides a mixed methods answer indicated by the subtitle “narrative and numbers” Long run case studies of Ford, GE and GSK demonstrate the new importance of strategy for the capita market as corporate narratives and initiatives perform management purpose and achievement. This provides the basis for subsequent work on French and German giant firms NED elites and CEO pay.

(3) Representing the Giant Firm: Business Power in a Post Thatcherite World

Michael Moran

The issue here is on the political power of UK and US giant firms in present day capitalism. Specifically, the aim is to consider whether and how more traditional collective forms of business organisation through trade association have been displaced by new techniques of do it yourself representation, PR and lobbying by individual giant firms facing hostile NGOs and such like. This sets the narrative turn in corporate strategy in a broader context and usefully contributes to the wider CRESC agenda on new elites through articles and a forthcoming comparative monograph on business power in Britain and America.

(4) Re-instating an Ethic of Office: The British Civil Service as Constitutional Bureaucracy

Paul du Gay
The interrogation of management and managerialism continues here but the focus shifts. Has the ‘bureaucratic ethic of office’ been dismantled in the British Civil Service through a process of governmentally driven reform of managerial culture which has resulted in a failure to pay sufficient attention to the constitutional and political role of the Civil Service as ‘the fourth service of the crown’. Case study analysis of Next Steps agencies, new performance management systems and changes in personnel management practices has produced a stream of outputs including contributions to monographs.

(5) The Global Location of IT-enabled Shared Service Centres

Debra Howcroft , Hannah Knox and Chris Westrup

What drives location of different kinds of knowledge based work in an economy of global outsourcing? This project focuses on IT-enabled shared service centres (SSC) covering a wide-range of front and back office operations such as accounting, human resources, and call centres The analysis emphasises multiple interacting logics around standardisation, spatial location drivers and workforce cultural identities mediated by intermediaries and political brokers. Building on local fieldwork in the North West, Howcroft and Westrup’s ESF grant of £154k now allows research in Eastern Europe and Asia.

(6) The Democratisation of Finance: Mass Consumption of Complex Financial Products

Ismail Erturk, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Karel Williams

This project questions the rationale for current UK, US and Australian strategies of promoting financially literate mass consumption of complex financial products. Can all citizens make money and manage risk if they acquire and use appropriate literacy skills? Not if outcomes are strongly influenced by income distribution and increasing inequality which excludes low income groups and sets middle and upper income groups on different trajectories of risk versus reward. The outputs establish the basis for further mixed methods inquiries into mis-selling of financial products.

(7) Re-thinking Elites

Mike Savage, Karel Williams and others

Why did the study of elites lapse some 35 years ago and (how) can elite studies be revived through new concepts and techniques?. A CRESC working paper argued that network sociology techniques could be applied to new groups of intermediaries in and around finance who have enriched themselves in the past couple of decades. This was the basis for Savage and Williams’ introduction to the Remembering Elites (2008) book which included CRESC project based contributions by du Gay on the civil service, Green on Greece, Warde on cultural elites and Froud and Tambupolon on non-executive directors CRESC Mid Tem Review Oct 2004 – Mar 2008 which are listed under relevant individual projects; and also for the work on intermediary financial elites in the affiliate ESEMK project.

(8) Reconfiguring State Activities to Create New Spaces of Profit

Jean Shaoul, Pam Stapleton, Anne Stafford

The restructuring of the public sector in the UK and Europe now works through Public Private
Partnerships for infrastructure renewal and has also experimented with new forms of service delivery.
How has this created new sources of profit for the corporate sector and financial intermediaries in
transport and health care and what are the broader implications for the different stakeholders? These
questions are answered in a stream of publications based on forensic accounting techniques applied to
primary financial data with data collection partly funded by grants from the Institute of Chartered
Accountants in Scotland and others

(9) Money’s Eyes: The Visualisation of Financial Data

Michael Pryke

At the cutting edge of financial market technology, specialist software aids the visualisation of financial flows by representing large datasets in multi-dimensional graphical format. The research aims to examine how such software redirects investment strategies and how markets are reframed through visualisation and it begins the task of rewriting accounts of finance so as to give proper weight and significance to the visual. The research, which was published in geography journals, involved participant observation and semi-structured interviews with representatives from firms involved in the development of visualisation software.

(10) The Value of Borders and Money: A Study of Shifting Locations and Relations in a Greek-
Turkish Border Region

Sarah Green

This multi-year ethnographic project on the Greek-Turkish border contributes towards a greater
understanding of current economic transformations in Europe by exploring the relationship between
differences in the circulation of money in the Aegean coastal towns of Mytilene (Greece) and Ayvalik
(Turkey).It feeds into CRESC work on elites through a related inquiry into EU development money
and local elites. It also links with similar studies of European border regions through Green’s creation
of EastBordNet, a pan-European multidisciplinary research network.

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