This Palgrave Pivot explores the recent financial crisis from a new perspective. Reflecting on
40 years of banking experiences the book will open new avenues to understanding banking and
comment on possible ways to rehabilitate banking organisations. In 1965 the Bank of Ireland
received a consultancy report from McKinsey & Company which heralded a new phase in banking
practice and organisation. In the years that followed the Bank of Ireland opened up its once
traditional culture to outside influences changing the way work was done and workers were
viewed. Direct competition was introduced alongside specialisation of roles and hence college
education was identified as the way to meet demands of the market and bankers began to develop
a full suite of products to keep customers loyal. The once professional bank manager who was a
guardian of good practice eventually became absorbed into the needs of the leviathan
organisation. The end result is an unimaginable and interlinked financial crisis in 2008 that
swept across Ireland and the globe. This book explores banking organisation and practice as it
transforms and across the period from 1960 to 2018. It argues that organisational goals over
individual responsibility paved the pathway towards crisis. Organisationally anxiety and fear
of failure took the place of certainty and stability. While the financial crisis is coming to
an end banking organisations remains fragile and prone to influences that may lead them
towards a path of continuous cycles of boom and bust. Such a state has the potential to create
an unending cycle of boom and bust and the end of stability and the institution of banking.
This book shines a light on that and will be of interest to banking and finance researchers
students and practitioners.
