SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Business Administration
No 2009:8:
Trading Trust - Post-Aristocratic Finance in the City of Stockholm
Peter Norberg ()
Abstract:
Purpose
The article aims to answer the question if
particular values make for particular forms of trust.
Design/methodology/approach
In the present article, interviews and
conversations the author has made with twenty-one employees in Swedish
brokerage firms, merchant banks and mutual funds play the foremost
empirical role. The informants range from stockbrokers, traders and market
makers to managing directors of brokerage firms.
Findings
Trust is
still important in the financial market, but researchers need to account
for the new condition when finance means working with information
technology and increasingly abstract instruments. Financial organizations
are well described as networks while being informally structured, and
characterised by an inward bonding that is cultural rather than formal.
The article argues that social bonding, building upon the values and
ideology of employees replaces the class-based identification that has
previously characterised the Stockholm financial market. With increasingly
hedonist attitudes, employees in finance form a more fluent, neo-tribal
sociality. Studying at a business school, and interacting socially at work
forms values and constructs an elitist identity in finance. This type of
sociality consists in sharing a lifestyle and having work identities that
dominate their private identities.
Originality/value
The present
piece of research views agents as driven by a plurality of motivations and
rationalities.
Keywords: neo-tribes; stockbrokers; financial networks; trust; (follow links to similar papers)
19 pages, April 2, 2009
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