ABSTRACT
Much as the Germans in London appear in their personal lives and their interactions with the City’s business community to be a solidary transnational group, yet on closer inspection appear to form a diffuse group, linked to many different cultures and incorporating a number of different subcultures within it, the same appears to hold true in their professional lives. As in the consideration of the City in Chapter 4, while a cursory examination of the structure and self-presentation of the London branch of a German bank might suggest that both it and its transnational German personnel are unified social formations, a closer inspection indicates a much more complex reality. In this chapter, I challenge the monocultural view of businesses by examining how a seemingly unified MNC branch in fact included at least four different subcultures, and how the failure to recognise this had a detrimental impact on the success of a restructuring prograrnme aimed at bringing the branch into line with its Head Office.
