Bankers in the dock: Moral storytelling in action

an article by Andrea Whittle (Cardiff Business School) and Frank Mueller (University of St Andrews) published in Human Relations Volume 66 Number 1 (January 2012)

Abstract

This article draws on insights from a variety of fields, including discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, dramatism, rhetoric, ante-narrative analysis and conversation analysis, to examine the discursive devices employed in the storytelling surrounding the recent financial crisis. Discursive devices refer to the linguistic styles, phrases, tropes and figures of speech that, we propose, are central to the development of a compelling story.

We focus our analysis on the moral stories constructed during a public hearing involving senior banking executives in the UK.

The analysis suggests that two competing storylines were used by the bankers and their questioners to emplot the events preceding the financial crisis. We propose that a discursive devices approach contributes to the understanding of storytelling by highlighting the power of micro-linguistic tools in laying out the moral landscape of the story. We argue that the stories surrounding the financial crisis are important because they shaped how the crisis was made sense of and acted upon.

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