ABSTRACT
My intentions in this book, as noted in Chapter 1, lie on two levels. My first aim has been to illuminate the ongoing changes in the 'Financial Services' industry in the UK, in relation to the intensification of competition, the action of the regulators and the strategic responses of the senior management of financial institutions such as Buzzbank and Lifelong Assurance. In tracing such changes, I have focused in my empirical work on the experiences of employees of these organisations, specifically in terms of management's attempts at culture management, general forms of surveillance and direct control, the articulation of the associated discourses of professionalism and 'Project Management', and modes of control dependent in part on the construction of a specifically masculine form of subjectivity. Throughout this analysis, I have also paid particular attention to what may be read as 'resistance' of one form or another, usually centring on the rearticulation of discourses, the use of satire and deflationary humour, and occasionally the open articulation of dissent and resistance. At the same time, my wider concern has been to outline the form a critical mode of social research might take, without falling back on an essentialist epistemology nor a universal moral position. In the book, I have structured this critical position around the expansion of my analysis beyond dialectics of control and resistance to encompass power in its broadest sense. As a consequence, I have examined the operation of power in a diverse range of forms in my empirical work, and paid particular attention to the operation of power through the constitution of its subjects. Much of this discussion therefore focused on the construction, reinforcement and manipulation of particular forms of subjectivity in work organisations. Without essentialising any particular form of resistance, or indeed romanticising the notion of resistance itself, I have tried to outline a contingent ethical position which may be taken in relation to each instance of the operation of
power, and I have analysed forms of resistance in accordance with such a perspective. I now intend to reiterate in more detail the key elements of the argument, before engaging in a discussion where I will relate these elements to the objectives set out at the opening of the book.
