Sanne Frandsen

Assistant head Organization, Department of Business Administration

Ethical struggles: Living stories from the frontline of retail banking

Author

Sanne Frandsen
Marita Svane

Summary, in English

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the financial sector globally has become much more reg-ulated to ensure ’ethical’ conduct, yet we have still to understand how the banks has worked to ensure a more cultural shift towards ethical conduct. The purpose of our paper is to examine the cultural changes in three different retail banks, focusing specifically on ethical sales and advising among front-line personnel. Our research question is: how is the appropriate advisor discursively constructed by management and the advisors. Inspired by Bakhtin and Aristotle’s theoretical lenses on practical eth-ics, we bring forward a vocabulary for discussing the ’ethics’ of retail banking in the front line today as well as empirical evidence for the emergence of new plots, identities and cultures of ’good bank-ing’. We argue that our empirical material derived from the cases studies of three different Scandinavi-an banks contributes to an understanding of how ethics may become a governing principle of collec-tive organizational practices and culture in the post-crisis financial sector. Our main academic contri-bution concerns the identification of three key ethical resources and forces that are entangled into each other in an unfinalized and incomplete wholeness, mutually struggling with each other in bringing forward an ethical cultural conduct yet-to-be-achieved. The practical contribution consists in the em-pirical findings of different managerial approaches to growing ethical cultures among frontline per-sonnel. The managerial challenge remains within the ethical struggles involved in the becoming of ethical organizational cultures. As the world is indeterminate and incomplete, ethics remains an ongo-ing work and task compelling practitioners at all levels of the organization to take it on.

Department/s