BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA
At the
peak of the ‘new economy’, the Swedish newspapers were reporting an interesting
fact: women were entering financial services, joining not the old- fashioned
occupational groups such as bank clerks, but the avant-garde: traders and
analysts. A survey following these announcements (Renemark
2003) revealed that the claim was
unverifiable. True, there were several financial service companies reporting
the arrival of female traders and analysts, but these were very small
companies, and the ‘influx’ often meant one new woman employee. The big
companies, the most likely location of such change, either have not answered
the questionnaire, or else admitted the impossibility of providing accurate
data, as their personnel statistics, even if they showed gender distribution,
did not indicate distribution among different employee categories.
But as
discourses tend to create their own objects, a field study on work careers of
men and women in financial services has been initiated in Sweden, inspired by
Linda McDowell’s Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City (Renemark 2003). Awaiting
its results, this chapter makes use of the material already in existence,
namely a detective story Star Fall, written by David Lagercrantz (2001), a
journalist with an analyst’s past and the biographer of the Swedish inventor of
a navigation system, Hakan Lans. His book came out on June 1, 2001, and its
theme is the crash of the stock exchange and its impact on the Stockholm
financial world. On the cover, the Editor-in-Chief of the Swedish Stock Exchange Weekly says: ‘I have never read a
better description of the frightening side of the world of finances’.
Acknowledgments refer to many actors in financial services, several of them
women. The reviews praise the correctness of the novel’s factual basis. The
background analysis of the global financial market and its operations owes much
to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash, 1929, adds the author in the Afterword.
One of
the main characters in the novel is a young woman analyst (in fact, women in
financial services tend to be analysts, not traders), Elin Friman. The readers
learn three things about Elin: she is brilliant (could have been the world’s
chess champion), she is heavily involved in sexual intrigues, and she is
immoral.
This chapter begins with a
presentation of this character, comparing her first to other women and men in
the novel, and then to other fictitious or fictionalized characters. It
proceeds by analyzing the case of a woman trader tried in Sweden for ‘blanking’
shares—as described in the newspapers, and ends by confronting these Swedish
images with those in international literature on financial markets.
When the stock market
crashes on the evening of January 26, a rumor says that two people have been
murdered in Stockholm; General Bank’s IT analyst Elin Friman, and the famous
inventor Andre Borg [whose IT company has just become public]. It seems that
the murders were committed one after the other, hours only after the rates
started to fall at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and the rumors increase
anxiety and quicken the fall (Lagercrantz 2001: 1).
It is
not advisable to reveal the whole plot of a detective story, so I will limit
myself to saying that Elin is not only a victim, but also a perpetrator, a tool
in the hands of the Russian mafia, and related to it by her relationship with
her former chess teacher. The mystery is resolved by Daniel Mill, an amateur
detective whose moral sensibility made him end his analyst’s career, and turned
him into an astute critic of the world of finances (apart from making him rich
and therefore independent).
Elin is perceived by her
male colleagues primarily as a sex object: ‘her smile, at the same time
uncertain and cool, which sometimes seems to be an erotic promise’, and so on,
through various parts of her body. She listens to men and appears to admire
them:
She made him talk, made him
elaborate long theories on economy, the company, love, human longing. Her
presence intoxicated him... When he noticed that she looked in the same way at
all the male bosses, he began to dislike her willingness to serve, her
incessant cleverness1. (Lagercrantz 2001: 11)
As an employee of the
General Bank, she tends to exaggerate all the desirable traits:
He encouraged ambition and
responsiveness to General Bank’s corporate culture, but Elin went too far. The
bank absorbed her totally, so that sometimes she seemed to lack a core. She
could be anything: a mountain climber, a poet, an evening press reporter, a
university lecturer but also a hippie. (Lagercrantz 2001: 11)
Lacking her own identity,
she assumes that of the man she is (most) enchanted with at the moment. In love
with sensitive leftist Daniel, she is against the world’s injustice. When
Daniel quits his analyst job, she fixes her adoring gaze on the bank’s Managing
Director and becomes a careerist. As it turns out, she is persistently faithful
to one man and one ideology, in a way that is close to fanatic, as her
colleagues reflect afterwards. This lack of an individual identity, muses
the—neglected by Elin—Financial Deputy, could have been produced by a collision
between her natural talents and her poor background, a contrast between nature
and nurture, as it were:
What he sees as a weak self
can have resulted from her youth and uncertainty. She is 27, her father is an
unemployed bus driver who drinks ...so she probably wanted to escape from it
all, find another world, whatever the cost. She has an analytical talent. She
immediately grasps the most complex situations and she remembers numbers—
especially quotations—in a way that almost frightens him. (Lagercrantz 2001:
12)
The readers of Oliver Sachs
will of course recognize the extraordinary capacity of the mechanical memory,
usually accompanied by a complete inability to function in social life. Elin
lies, she uses ‘feminine cunning’ and blackmail. But she is not evil: she helps
her sister and wants to serve her men. If anything, she ‘loves too much’, as
Robin Norwood’s bestseller (1989) put it. She has masochistic tendencies, begs
to be mistreated, and yet abhors the sexual exploitation of other women. She
loves women but also ideologies: she cheats and exploits, but for a higher
cause. A veiled Marxist, she condemns capitalism in general and her bank in
particular, but sees no problem in manipulating the shareholders:
She always talked about the
two rules of the shares market: faith and doubt2. There is no better
way of making money, she used to say, especially as people need not believe or
doubt long. A couple of minutes is enough. (Lagercrantz 2001: 134)
After
her death, people wonder about her and her motives, as more surprising
information is revealed. Her sister finds a photo where Elin looks like a
member of Hitlerjugend, with a caption: ‘Elin, 11, wants to be best in the
world. Believes in hard discipline’. And her US super-boss says: ‘She was
complex. She wanted to serve and to be appreciated—no doubt. But she was also
vengeful and angry...She was like a lion’s paw: soft and pretty, but inside
there was a claw that wanted to tear all of us to pieces’ (Lagercrantz 2001:
225).
The
novel’s psychiatrist (a spokesperson for a Swedish woman writer, says the
author in the Afterword) explains to the Financial Deputy: A person can be
both innocent and wicked and equally genuine in both those roles’ (Lagercrantz
2001: 209). The psychiatrist is a clearly positive female character, but then
she has a suitable job for a woman; she tries to understand people and their
problems. The other two women involved in finances are mentioned only briefly.
Eva Bjork is a top manager at Nordea, another bank, and will become the
Financial Deputy at General Bank in the end. She speaks in public about shares
in a ‘folksy way’, an allusion to the Swedish way of ‘domesticating’ the world
of finances that became very prominent in the mass media (Ohlsson 2003). Teresa
Granquist, another analyst at General Bank, returns several times, but mostly
to deliver information. The only thing the readers learn about her is that she
was ‘tough and cool. Elin did not threaten the male self-esteem in the same
way’ (Lagercrantz 2001: 58).
Teresa
was the only woman who had relatively close contacts with Elin. Elin lived
among men, so she must be compared to men. Daniel Mill is everything she is
not: he has a (moral) core that stabilizes him and makes him incorruptible
(‘Don Quijote’, Lagercrantz 2001: 230). A mafia-related chess master3
is of course evil and corrupt, but he knows what he is doing; Elin does not,
and needs to be told. The chess master is the evil equivalent of the noble
Daniel. Finally, the Financial Deputy is weak, but thoughtful; also, he lacks
Elin’s talents and therefore is not dangerous.
The
detective story genre has its rules, and a dramatization of events and a
demonization of characters belong to the most prominent. Nevertheless, the
character thus created deserves attention, as its construction makes (often
unintentional) use of the accessible cultural material. ‘The construction of
Elin’ can be seen as highly significant, as it reflects both the received image
of today’s finances (inside and outside financial circles) and of people in
financial services. Extremely high intelligence (rather than formal education)
is both assumed and claimed by traders and analysts. Elin is even more intelligent
than most, thus reinforcing the conviction that, for the same job, women need
to be twice as good as men. Her sexual intrigues also correspond to the image
of a ‘work hard, play hard’, no-family oriented world; but while men are
presented as ensnared in her sexual intrigues, Elin initiates them. Last but
not least, lack of moral guidance is a trait supposedly prominent in financial
dealings, but while young men seem to be amoral, Elin is immoral, actively contributing to evil. Less this
characterization create an image of a SuperWoman, like Carol O’Connell’s
(1994) Mallory, it needs to be added that Elin performs all her evil deeds as
instructed by a man, the true master-mind behind the plot. Female after all: a
will-less tool in the hands of a purposeful man.
While there is no doubt
about the fictitiousness of Elin’s character, the message (perhaps unintended)
is clear: the world of finances is no place for women. Those who made it there
are ‘unnatural’—twice everything else the men are, especially the vice, and not
even aware of it. While the novel contains many thoughtful men, acutely aware
of traps and dangers connected to this world, women, it seems, can only be the
victims and the perpetrators in it.
Elin’s
character brings to mind another fictitious woman in the world of finances: the
insurance investigator, played by Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968, director Norman
Jewison). She was also extremely intelligent and played chess4; she
was immoral and exploited sex in her business conduct. However, probably
because it was a US movie, she was redeemed in the last scene, allowing herself
to be—amorously—duped by Steve McQueen (a property tycoon turned robber).
Some
other characters that could be compared and contrasted with Elin are
half-fictitious. I have in mind, in the first place, the movie Rogue Trader (Granada Film, 1998,
director James Dearden): the story of Nicholas Leeson5 based on his
own autobiography. Nick and Elin have two things in common: a working class
background and a wish to ascend in life. Here the similarities end, though. The
movie is developed around two theses. One concerns Leeson’s psychological
makeup; at least as portrayed in the film, he has all the traits of a gambler,
as described in Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler (1886): growing dependence and denial,
diminishing capacity of foreseeing the consequences of his own actions, etc.
Gamblers are not chess players, although they imagine themselves to be. The
second thesis is sociological and has to do with a clash and misunderstanding
between two sets of financial people: the old-fashioned bankers of Baring Ltd,
whose world is still a gentlemen’s club, generously open to the newcomers, and
the nouveau-riches like Leeson, who are not even aware of the implicit rules of
the club’s game. Also, while Leeson brings Baring to bankruptcy, Elin has
become a scapegoat for General Bank that, if anything, profits from her death,
which permits covering up many other misdemeanors.
The US equivalent of Nick
Leeson, at least as far as drama goes, is Michael Milken, ‘the king of
junk-bonds’, the story that formed the basis of the movie Boiler Room (2000, directed by Ben
Younger). As the link between the movie and the story is loose, and Milken’s
criminal actions are of a different type than those of Elin and Nick, I shall
only quote Mitchell Y. Abolafia’s comment on Milken’s drama, as he, too, points
to the role of dramatization in the accounts flowing in from the world of
finance:
Like many dramatic heroes,
Milken had a fatal flaw. Some saw it as greed. I think it was hubris. Milken
had developed an exaggerated sense of himself in relation to the rules and
norms of his community. His success was built on an escalating series of
normative violations. There were no restraints for Michael Milken. The crimes
for which he was imprisoned, all of which occurred during the take-over mania
of the mid-1980s, reflect the recklessness of an overheated deal-maker.
(Abolafia 1996: 163)
Abolafia
speaks of a ‘social drama’; this is an interesting way of combining the
requirements of two genres. Social science accounts tend, by definition, toward
sociological interpretations. Fiction is permitted a dramatization that factual
literature usually avoids; drama tends to focus on characters, thus promoting
psychological interpretations. Sociological novels (including a sociological
movie, such as Rogue Trader) and a dramatist approach in sociology
stand in-between: ‘psychologizing’ becomes a social act dictated by genre, to
be studied. In such dramatizations women—possibly because they are fewer— tend
to be portrayed either as ‘characters’ or as sociological tokens.
Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker stands on the ‘Fact’ shelf
in bookstores, but is more stylized than research reports are permitted to be,
and therefore midway between fiction and fact. It offers several interesting
observations considering the role of women in international finance. The women
he mentions are not at all like Elin, but they are very much like Teresa:
‘tough and cool’. Here is Lewis going to be interviewed for a job at Lehman
Brothers:
Good
news. Lehman had sent to Princeton one man and one woman. I didn’t know the
man. But the woman was a Princeton graduate, an old friend I hadn’t expected to
see. Perhaps I would survive.
Bad news. As I walked into
the cubicle, she didn’t smile or otherwise indicate that she knew me. She later
told me that such behaviour is unprofessional. We shook hands and she was about
that chummy as a boxer before a fight. She then retired to her corner of the
room as if waiting for the bell to ring. She sat silently in her blue suit and
little bow tie. (Lewis 1999: 31)
Are they selected because
they are tough and cool or do they learn to become so? Lewis suggests the
latter, speaking of the same Princeton graduate:
One year on Wall Street and
they have been transmogrified. Seven months earlier my friend could be seen on
campus wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt that said dumb things. She drank more
beer than was healthy for her. She had been, in other words, a fairly typical
student. Now she was a bit-player in my Orwellian nightmare. (Lewis 1999: 31-2)
How is this
transmogrification achieved? A snap from a trainee program explains it only too
well:
Everyone
wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes...A
hand shot up (typically) in the front row. It belonged to a woman. She sat high
in her regular seat, right in front of the speaker. The speaker had momentum...
The speaker didn’t want to stop now, especially for a front-row person. He
looked pained, but he could hardly ignore a hand in his face. He called her
name, Sally Findlay.
‘I was
just wondering’, said Findlay, ‘if you could tell us what you think has been
the key to your success’.
This was
too much. Had she asked a dry technical question, she might have pulled it off.
But even the speaker started to smile...he knew he could abuse the front row as
much as he wanted. His grin spoke volumes to the back row. It said, ‘Hey, I
remember what these brown-nosers were like when I went through the training
programme, and I remember how much I despised speakers who let them kiss butt,
so I’m going to let this woman hang out and dry for a minute, heh, heh, heh’.
The back row broke out in its louder laughter yet. Someone cruelly mimicked
Findlay in a high-pitched voice, ‘Yes, do tell us why you’re sooooo successful’. Someone else
shouted, ‘Down Boy’! as if scolding an overheated poodle. A third man cupped
his hands together around his mouth and hollered, ‘Equities in Dallas’.
Poor Sally... Equities in
Dallas became training-programme shorthand for ‘just bury that lowest form of
human scum where it will never be seen again’. Bury Sally, they shouted from
the back of the room. (Lewis 1999: 53)
When doing a study of
humiliation at work (Czarniawska 2004), I came across a homepage of the US Navy
that contained a reminiscent passage in a description of the Navy Chiefs’
training:
You are now the ‘CHIEF’! So
this, then, is why you were caused to experience these things. You were
subjected to humiliation to prove to you that humility is good, a great, a
necessary attribute which cannot mar you—in fact, it strengthens you—and, in
your future as a Chief Petty Officer, you will be caused to suffer indignities,
to experience humiliation far beyond those imposed upon you today. Bear them
with the dignity, and with the same good grace, which you bore them today! It
is our intention to prove these facts to you. It is our intention that you will
never forget this day. It is our intention to test you, to try you, and to
accept you. Your performance today has assured us that you will wear your hat
with aplomb, as did your brothers in arms before you. We take a deep, sincere
pleasure in clasping your hand, and accepting you as a Chief Petty Officer in
the United States Navy. (www.NavyChief.com/creed.html, accessed 020515)
What would happen to Sally
if she survived this humiliation, if she became tough and cool? There existed a
range of possibilities, it seemed. Lowest in the ranks was Susan James:
Susan James... played a
strange role. She was something between the baby-sitter and an organiser of the
programme. Her reward for a job well done was, perversely, to be admitted to a
future training programme. Like everyone else, she wanted to work on the
trading floor, but she was one step further removed than us [the trainees] from
realising her ambition. Her distance from the money-making machine reduced her
credibility as a disciplinarian to zero. She had only the power to tattle on
us, and really not even that. Because we were her future bosses, she wanted to
be our friend. Once we had moved to the trading floor and she to the training
programme, she would be pleading with us for a job. (Lewis 1999: 62-3)
Not all women trainees were
lost and humiliated:
as I
walked into the foyer that first morning, a female trainee was shouting into
what must have been a fuzzy telephone connection. In the midst of a scorching
July, the pudgy woman on the phone was stuffed into a three-piece beige tweed
suit with an oversize bow tie, to which I probably would not have given a
second thought, had she not herself called attention to it. She placed one hand
over the receiver and declared to a tiny group of women: ‘Look, I can do six full
suits for seven hundred and fifty bucks. These are quality. And that is a good price. You can’t
get them any cheaper’.
That explained it. She was
wearing tweed because she was selling tweed. She guessed rightly that her
training class represented a market in itself: people with money to burn, eyes
for a bargain, and space in their closets for the executive look. She had
persuaded an oriental sweatshop to supply her with winter wear in bulk. When
she saw me watching her she said that given a bit of time she could ‘do men
too’. She did not mean it as a bawdy joke. Thus the first words spoken to me by
a fellow trainee were by someone trying to sell me something. It was a fitting
welcome to Salomon Brothers. (Lewis 1999: 41)
For the woman, it was also
a fitting training for her future job:
At Salomon Brothers men
traded. Women sold. No one ever questioned the Salomon ordering of the sexes.
But the immediate consequence of the prohibition of women in trading was clear
to all: it kept women further from power. Traders required market savvy.
Salesmen required interpersonal skills. (Lewis 1999: 79)
The crash of 1987 came, and
women were its main victims:
Scribbled
over the empty seat of a redundant saleswoman was her view that ‘Men who call
women sweetheart, baby or honey should have their tiny peckers cut off’.
These were no ordinary
victims, though victims they were. Here in New York, as in London, a
conspicuously large number of women were canned. It’s not as if the women had
been less astute in choosing their jobs; they just had less say in their destiny.
For whatever reason, women coming out of the training programmes were assigned
to loss leaders. For several years one of the sink-holes had been the money
market department. Perhaps 10 percent of the trading floor professionals were
women. But women were nearly half of money market’s sales, and, therefore, a
large number of the sackees. (Lewis 1999: 283)
Without her extraordinary
intelligence and her fanaticism, these women shared Elin’s victimhood because
their destiny has been in the hands of others. Were there no women in the
positions of power? Lewis describes one:
Syndicate
managers on Wall Street and in the City of London are charged with the job of
co-ordinating all deals; the London syndicate manager of Salomon, one of the
few powerful women within the firm, had co-ordinated our German warrant.
Syndicate managers are the investment banking equivalents of chiefs of staff in
the White House, or general managers of professional sports teams... The role
produces masters of realpolitik, Machiavellian in the original sense of the
world. They see all. They hear all. They know all. You don’t cross a syndicate
manager. If you do, you get hurt.
The next day I told the
London syndicate manager of my conversation the previous night [with
Opportunist, who tried to bluff Lewis]. She knew the truth of the German
warrant deal because she had played a role in its success. She was even angrier
than I hoped. She was also extremely plugged in at Salomon Brothers, in the way
that Opportunist was not. I mercilessly left his fate in her hand; it was like
leaving a goldfish in the care of an alley cat. Only then, after it was too
late to reverse the process, did I feel remorse. But not much... The woman I
had spoken with was directly responsible for deciding what the Opportunist was
paid. The Opportunist was expecting a lot of money and a promotion from
vice-president to director. The promotion was critical to his future. This
woman made five or six phone calls and squashed his plans. (Lewis 1999: 228-9)
Not a criminal, not a
fanatic, not a sex maniac, an alley cat after the fish. A specialist in
interpersonal relationship, but not in a ‘feminine’ way—no mothering instincts
or ‘feminine cunning’. Just ‘one of the boys’.
This is a four-year-long
story, so I am going to render only its end phase, not just because of the lack
of space, but also because the media—my source of material—have reached a
certain narrative maturity during that time 6. But let me quote the
first press release on the matter:
February
2, 1999. Trader cheated Nordbank STOCKHOLM (TT) A trader at Merita-Nordbank is
suspected of having swindled the bank out of millions—through illegal deals.
The deals caused the bank a loss close to 300 million kronor. The trader was
arrested on Monday, suspected of serious breach of trust and serious
malversation...
The illegal deals continued
for several months. The trader made so-called blanking deals, that is deals
with borrowed shares similar to Leeson.
Only the
next day (February 3) did the readers learn that the trader was a woman. Dagens Industri revealed it and ended its
long article explaining what had happened in financial terms, saying: ‘For this
trader, as for all others who ended up in a dangerous spiral, it is a
catastrophe. She is right now alone against the whole world and risks a prison
sentence’.
The
District Court freed the woman from both accusations and severely criticized
the way the prosecutor’s office handled the case. The prosecutor’s office
turned to the Appeals Court, and the trial took place January 14-15, 2003.
Two
weeks before the trial, the weekend supplement to the regional newspaper where
both the trader and I live published a portrait of the trader, giving her the
fictitious name ‘Lisa’. The title ran: ‘Here vanished 269 million’, and under
this, in the mock soap opera advertising style, it said: ‘A young woman who
just became a mother. A quarter of a billion that got speculated away. An angry
prosecutor, seeking revenge. A clumsy bank. On Wednesday a new installment of
the drama “Nordbank v. the trader” in Svea Appeals Court. Two Days met the now 35-year-old Lisa from Kullavik,
south of Gothenburg. A super-intelligent lass—who went astray’. This was
followed by a drawing of a childish-looking girl in glasses at a computer,
quotation list to her left, two men in the background, and a color drawing of a
sailboat in a blue bay to the right. The caption says: ‘TALENT. Lisa was not
only a star trader. She has participated in the European Sailing Championship.
And she talked three foreign languages fluently. When she spoke on the
telephone, she often used French, so that her boss and her colleagues wouldn’t
understand’ (the deals were done by Lisa with the help of a female friend at Credit
Lyonnais in France).
Under the headline ‘Clever
in Most Things’, the article sketched a portrait of Lisa:
Who was this 31-year-old
woman who, exhausted, was taken to prison again (she was arrested at her
parents’ house where she took refuge after her deals were discovered by the
bank) and would then be summoned for interrogation every two weeks, so that,
after four months in an isolation cell, she felt so poorly that she couldn’t
participate in person?... She who speculated away 269 million—and her future.
And what
a future it was. She finished the natural sciences high school with the highest
grades. Her performance was equally outstanding at the Stockholm School of
Economics [Elin’s alma mater], where she was also active in the student
association. She studied in Germany and France; she worked in Hamburg, London,
and Paris. She wrote her thesis on share-index swapping using Credit Lyonnais
as her case.
Lisa
speaks fluent English, French, and German and can converse in Italian. She
plays piano, guitar, and clarinet. She has had a traineeship at Sotheby’s in
London and did research on impressionism and modern art.
As a
junior she participated in sailing championships but also skied, played tennis,
squash, and golf, and she danced and practiced gymnastics.
A real
‘A’ child in other words. And yet it all went wrong. Not that she is in a bad
spot. She recently married a man from West Sweden, who is the managing
director of a small food company in a big corporation. He has moved from
Masthugget in Gothenburg and she from Ostermalm in Stockholm to a town in
Scania. They live in an English-style terrace house bought for 2.4 million
kronor.
But Lisa is on sick leave
for ‘reactive depression’ and gets about 10,700 a month after taxes. Last year
in the bank she earned about 1.5 million in salary and bonuses.
She came
to Nordbank in 1996 as an institutional investment trader. She quickly showed
her talents and soon she was at the top of the earning list in the bank. Last
year she earned 22.9 million for the bank, four times the targeted amount. In
the police interrogations her colleagues present a long list of her merits as a
trader: capable, ambitious, inspired, incredibly intelligent, great social
competence, talented, good sense of the market, a star trader. Their opinions
of her person are not worse: humble, never bossy, nice, helpful, easy to get on
with, pleasant, kind, decent, happy, eager to please.
But
there was also another side to her, according to her colleagues. She was a
competitive person and always wanted to be best. Therefore she could be
incredibly sensitive, especially at the beginning, when she could cry over the
loss of a couple of thousand. Her friend at Credit Lyonnais, who was also taken
to court (she did not have the right to approve the deal that she did), and who
shared a flat with Lisa in London, says: ‘She dramatized a lot and exaggerated.
It always sounded worse than it was...She took on herself all the world’s
problems as if they were her fault. A peculiar personality trait’.
Lisa
says of herself that she has a low self-esteem, and exaggerates the negative
side—especially her own. Yet she claims that she did nothing wrong. Her clients
and her bosses bluffed, cheated, erred, and betrayed—but not she. Her father
shares her opinion: she has been made a scapegoat by the incompetent people at
the bank. The prosecutor has another explanation: ‘This, in his opinion,
extraordinarily intelligent woman was understimulated in her job: therefore one
can guess that she was hit by a gambling obsession. People in this profession
have a certain tendency to suffer from gambling obsession’.
The
District Court had concluded that Lisa acted incorrectly, but that the fault
was the bank’s: they did not train and control her properly. The Court was also
very critical of the prosecutor and the Finance Inspector’s way of presenting
the case. The first day at the Appeals Court was curious, still according to Goteborgs-Posten (January 14, 2003): ‘What
a strange trial! On the one side, a supposed grand villain who leaves during
the pause to pump milk from her breasts. On the other side, a pale prosecutor
who has worked all night long and complains about shortage of time even though
he has had four years to prepare’.
As it
turned out, the prosecutor was ‘sent home’ a week earlier as his case had too
many errors and even typing mistakes. But, said GP on the following day, this humiliation
mobilized the whole Agency Against Economic Crime, whose honor was at stake.
Indeed, the Appeals Court decided in March 2003 that ‘convincing evidence’ was
presented showing that ‘she was guilty as accused’. The Court was of the
opinion that fines were not enough and ordered a psychiatric investigation to
determine whether the woman could endure a prison sentence. If the result of
the investigation was negative, she would be sentenced to psychiatric custody.
The family considered appealing to the Supreme Court. The final comment from
the prosecutor was reported thus: ‘He perceives the case’s tragic aspects and
hopes that the woman, now on sick leave, will find a new place in society: this
is an intelligent person with great qualities. But she will hardly find an
appropriate job in this particular sector’.
Extraordinary
intelligence and psychological instability are the two aspects that connect
Lisa and Elin. Although Lisa’s case is much closer to Nicholas Leeson’s
(basically the same type of misdemeanor, gambling tendencies), nobody analyzed
Leeson’s personality in such detail—the descriptions mostly concerned his behavior,
with some comments on his not high intellectual powers (McDowell 1997: 172-3).
To be fair, Leeson could not breastfeed in court, either. McDowell quotes also
a journalist who, at the time of the Leeson affair, expressed a strong
conviction that ‘there could never be a female Nick Leeson’ not merely because
there are so few women dealers and traders, but also because of their
characters’ (1997: 174).
The
working class background is no longer a factor with Lisa; it just seems that,
in a popular rendition, the combination of high intelligence and instability
is explosive. While in the case of men it is supposed to lead to criminality
and sociopathic behavior, dangerous to society and its institutions, women are
mostly themselves destroyed by it.
Again, as in the detective
stories genre, the genre of journalistic accounts has its specificity. It
prefers strong, dramatic plots (perhaps Lisa could become a journalist?), with
an intense psychological element. Let me then move to yet another genre, that
of social science.
The
anthropologist Melissa Fisher studied US women in finances, and analyzed their
autobiographical accounts. She used an analytical strategy close to that of
Abolafia—letting in the drama as a phenomenon to be analyzed—although she
exploits the metaphor of the game in place of the drama. She individuated two
kinds of narratives employed by women in finances, neatly divided between their
occupations: analysts and salespersons on the one hand (the majority), and the
rare traders/investment bankers/bosses on the other. Both groups, however,
reach for the traditional US repertoire to emplot their ‘herstories’. In the
first case, the narrative fits in well; in the second, it clashes, with
foreseeable results.
She summarizes the narratives
of analysts and salespersons in the following way:
The rhetoric of women in
research and brokerage tends to draw on natural attributes of American
femininity, such as conservative risk-averse behavior. In this way, femininity
can be inserted within traditionally masculine areas. In particular, women in
these fields invoke and reframe the figure of the ‘consumer’ as feminine in
order to lay claims to their own ability to forecast, sell and buy stocks. To
play the game of risk, they seem to use gender assumptions about their roles as
mothers making family purchases in order to sell themselves as professional
subjects of economic expertise in the market. (Fisher 2003: 289)
This is
exemplified by the story of Patricia, ‘the good mother’. It recalls other
stories of women’s entrance into the ‘masculine professions’, masqueraded as
an extension of home services into the offices (Calas and Smircich 1993). In
contrast, Maydelle’s story seems to be a version of an ‘alley-cat’. It also
uses the traditional US narrative repertoire, but the one reserved for men, and
therefore ends up as a story of deviation from the first, ‘proper’ one.
Women
positioned in investment banking, on the other hand, provide a different
articulation of playing games of risk. Their narratives draw on supposedly
masculine characteristics of cool calculated rationality, adventure, and
risk-taking. Investment bankers are directly responsible for capital accumulation,
in contrast to women in research and brokerage. Risk-taking is important here.
Yet, because risk-taking women invert all that is traditionally proper about
gender, Wall Street treats these women as ‘anti-mothers’ of the professional-managerial
class. Female bankers become demonic mothers who do not care about their employees
or, in some cases, their real-life children (Fisher 2003: 289).
In fact,
Maydelle hastens to assert that she does not ‘beat her kids’—she invites her
employees home to prove it.
The
‘mother motif’ was not present in the Swedish accounts, not only because of a
likely difference in cultural narrative repertoires, but also because most
women in Swedish finances are still too young to be mothers, especially to
their colleagues. Unlike cashiers and other traditional bank employees, mostly
female, they got into their jobs quite recently.
Fisher
ends her essay by mentioning the fate of Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley, ‘the
queen of the net’, a crossbreed between a trader and an analyst. Her queendom,
however, died with the dotcoms. ‘Once more’, says Fisher (2003: 308), ‘a
risk-taking woman has been taken to task for daring to exceed the gendered
norms of the Street’.
What is, actually, ‘the
women’s problem’ in finances, and what do those who survive it actually do? I
believe that Linda McDowell (1997) hits the nail on the head when pointing out
that behind all the dramatization of the feminine ‘character’ there is one
solid fact: the woman’s body. A woman can think like one of the boys, can talk
and act like one of the boys, but she cannot look like one of the boys, or not
close enough. McDowell’s fieldwork in three merchant banks in the City of
London reveals that women in banking are ‘marked’ by their bodies. ‘Without a
single exception, the women I interviewed raised the question of appearance’.
‘Every style available to women is marked, whereas men’s styles are unmarked’
(McDowell: 145). How do they survive? McDowell does not analyze the actual
narratives, only their fragments, but she also employs the drama metaphor,
claiming that they survive by employing the means of the masquerade, in several
variations: playing an honorary man, doing a parody of femininity, etc. While
not all the masquerades are equally successful, the idea of conscious
masquerading seems to be gaining popularity among men and women alike. This,
says McDowell, is because:
The public/private,
home/work division which has a long heritage in western thought... is reflected
in a duality between what is regarded as a necessary masquerade at work and an
essential ‘real’ self that may emerge occasionally on the workplace stage but
is allowed complete dominance only in off-stage activities—perhaps in leisure,
but particularly in home life which has always been portrayed as more real or
more authentic than the artificial and instrumental social relations of the
workplace. As I shall show, the metaphors of performance, of reality versus
masquerade, were also significant elements in the interviews I undertook.
(1997: 161)
For all the incisiveness of
McDowell’s insights and the acuteness of her observations, here is a typical
‘global language’ speaker speaking for the whole of western culture. As an
immigrant in Sweden with a work career in another country, I was struck by the
absence of the public/private, reality/masquerade division in Swedish workplaces.
This is Elin’s problem: she has nowhere to hide, partly because the hiding
places are few (the traditional family men have some; perhaps the division
existed earlier on), partly because she exaggerates what is the general trend
(she is ‘swallowed’ by banking). Her masquerade is of a criminal type; honest
employees have nothing to conceal. But perhaps Teresa is into a successful
masquerade: this is why the readers do not learn how she looks (she looks like
any other woman, not playing a man, and not exaggerating her femininity), and
are not invited to speculate about what she feels and thinks. She is not
important enough to be material for a drama, but because of that she is left in
peace (until the next redundancy campaign, of course).
As my
readers have noticed, I have been using a variety of material here, starting
with ‘pure’ fiction, continuing with a fiction based on an autobiography, a
stylized autobiography, journalists’ reports, ethnographic reports, and
unstylized autobiographical accounts (interviews). Apart from the degree of
fictionality, it is also the position of the narrator that varies: from selfaccounts
to accounts of others’ actions. Finally, as there may exist national
preferences for genres, plots, and characters, it must be pointed out that,
although the context is that of global economy, the narrators are Swedish,
British, and US American.
The
motif of ‘an unstable female genius’ is present only in the two Swedish
stories, those of Elin and Lisa. Rather than drawing from this a conclusion
about Swedes’ preference for high drama in female finances, it needs to be
pointed out that, considering the timing, the actual ‘Lisa’ story was very
likely an inspiration for ‘Elin’, that Elin is a highly dramatized version of
Lisa. What is more, it is not improbable that the newspaper story of Lisa
written in 2003 was inspired by the fictitious character of Elin, made known to
the readers in 2001. The US ‘anti-mother’ and the UK ‘alley-cat’ are less
dramatic versions of female deviance, in the genre ‘she-turned-into-one-of-
the-boys’, not least because they are success stories, ironic as it may sound.
As the
research literature seems to indicate, ‘Teresa’ is probably the most
representative of the actual women in financial services. I am using the
expression in its old-fashioned, statistical sense, but she is material for
statistics in yet another sense. Her case will become anonymized, will vanish
in the mass of numbers. She and Susan James are lucky to get a name in the
stories told, unless it is a feminist story, like that of Fisher’s, where
Patricia Riley— the good mother—shares the spotlight with Maydelle Brooks, the
anti-mother. It is, however, Elin and Lisa who are the popular dramatic
material, the poor-girl-turned-dangerous-fanatic and the
rich-girl-turned-gambler. Were an ‘anti-mother’ or an ‘alley cat’ to fail, they
would probably be dramatized in a similar way (in local variations).
Why
should highly stylized stories of exceptional women, presented by popular
culture, be of interest for social studies of finance? There are at least two
reasons. One is that popular culture—novels, films, mass media, and even
how-to, and consultancy books captures the dominant view of the financial
sector at any given time. The other reason is to be found in the old dictum
‘art imitates life and life imitates art’. While I do believe, in a Tardean
spirit, that people learn their jobs primarily by contact-imitation (Taussig
1993), a belief that Lewis’ stories amply corroborate, the popular culture furbishes
them with models and ideals. Somebody said that it is impossible to fall in
love for someone who never read a romantic novel. It is obviously an old
utterance, because at present a ‘romantic novel’ has been replaced by a
‘Hollywood movie’, but the idea still holds. It has been reported that neophyte
mafia criminals in Sweden know by heart all the dialog in DePalma’s Scarface (Czarniawska 2003). While
the observation of everyday routines teaches everyday routines, popular
culture, with its bigger-than-life heroes, provides material for dreams and
rule-breaking behavior. As Linda McDowell puts it, ‘Representations of
fictional bankers influence the behaviour and attitudes of “real” bankers, and
vice versa’ (1997: 39-40).
Why
can’t young people learn their jobs through reading work ethnographies?
Because contemporary ethnographies are modernist, as Manganaro (1990) rightly
observed: complex plots, experimental structures, paradoxical resolutions.
Popular culture, on the other hand, relies on strong narratives and traditional
plots.
What are
‘traditional plots’? Equally traditionally, one turns toward the Greek dramas
and folktales. It is tempting to follow the example of Hayden White (1973) and
look for the four genres of Greek drama (based on four major tropes) in
management texts, as Skoldberg (2000) did. A closer look at the Greek drama,
like, for instance, the insightful scrutiny of Mendelsohn (2003), reveals that
even Euripides used much more complex plots, and embedded plots, not the least
in his plays concerning women. Another possibility would be then to look for
Propp’s (1968) thirty-one functions of which, says McCloskey, economics uses
but seven (1990). But then again, those thirty-one, or even seven, can be
combined or trespassed against in an almost unlimited number of ways. A clever
classifier can fit anything in a set of exclusive categories and if in trouble,
there is always the ‘and those belonging to the emperor’ category. Northrop
Frye (1957) achieved an impressive categorization of literary genres, but the
main result was that his critics were busy for many years afterwards showing
how the actual works poorly fit an abstract categorization. A defense of all
such categorizations consisting in saying that actual works combine various categories
amounts to saying that all literature is basically a combination of 25 (or 27)
letters of an alphabet, which is correct, but not very instructive.
Besides,
why should Greek drama survive so well? Contemporary journalists hardly need
to follow classical theater to do their jobs. Shakespeare might fare better
because of the school imprinting, but Shakespeare’s plots are rather complex.
Folk fairy tales are the best candidate for a strong place in collective
memory, but even those were surely replaced by educational modern children
literature. Those who believe in deep structures have an answer ready:
traditional plots are archetypes, capturing the essence of human psyche and
destiny. For those who, like myself, believe in surface connections, plots are
strong because they have been institutionalized, repeated through centuries,
well rehearsed. Their simplicity does not explain their success: it has to do
with fashion (recall the times when Gothic novels were in fashion, or the
extreme complications of D’Annunzio’s prose, today undecipherable, yesterday
read by all). One should therefore speak of conventional rather than
traditional plots, and of dominant rather than strong plots: they are ‘strong’
in a given time and place. A complete list of such plots is neither possible
nor necessary, but it might be instructive to delineate the presence
(repetitiveness) of such dominant plots in accounts of and from the world of
finances, and also point their connections to various types of traditional
plots. Thus, Greek drama and folk tales, but as a loose inspiration, an
invented tradition rather than as direct imitation or an expression of deep
structure.
Whatever the essential or
constructed traits of traditional plots may be, they are not known for carrying
a feminist message. Extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive women who tried
on masculine pursuits always ended badly in stories (Janion 1996). The stories
of women in finances seem to be confirming the opinion of an egg trader quoted
by Abolafia (1996: 93): women and children do not belong on the financial
markets. If social science cannot, or will not, provide an alternative message,
it can nevertheless show how the popular models are constructed, applied, and
reproduced.
1. The author uses the word duktighet, which in Swedish is used
mostly in relation to children in school and women (in their study or work),
rarely if ever in relation to men.
2. In Swedish they make an
alliteration: tro och tvivel.
3. The connection between the
chess master player and the world of finance starts with General Bank’s
marketing campaign, where the Russian master, of ‘an overwhelming
intelligence’ makes a video for GB saying ‘I want my money to be managed
intelligently’.
4. Lewis (1999: 27) claims
that the bankers use a degree in economics as a sort of standardized test of
general intelligence (what he means is that such education has no other use);
chess playing seems to be a global cultural indicator of extraordinary
intelligence.
5. Played by Ewan McGregor.
6. I am grateful to David
Renemark for collecting the material.
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