ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly takes the reader through the intricacies of description in the back office division of an international investment bank. The chapter draws mainly from fieldwork interviews with staff conducted in 2003; aspects of this research have already been published elsewhere. The fieldwork materials are quite old, but the problems are not. If you were to step into that bank today you would encounter pretty much the same puzzles that were visible there 10 years ago. The point here, however, is not to provide an informed clarification of what is going on in the back office department of a large, international investment bank. It is rather to flesh out, empirically, the problem of the description of financial objects: what it means and how it can be understood. The existence and functioning of information systems is the outcome of an organizational, technological and commercial history. Some, for instance, are industry-wide standard systems developed by an information technology vendor.
