Jonathan Hearn – författare

This book is based on ethnographic research from 2001-2, during Bank of Scotland's first year of merger with Halifax to form HBOS. The research is revisited from the present perspective in the wake of the global banking and financial crisis that undermined HBOS in 2008. This historical perspective on the ethnographic data is used to explore: people's responses to the pressures of heightened competition and organisational change; mutual and sometimes antagonistic perceptions of Scottish and English identities across the two merged banks; conflicting evaluations of national and organisational cultures; and the challenges of integrating ethnographic and historical perspectives in a single study. As an historical ethnography it 'salvages' a disappearing culture of Scottish and UK banking, disintegrated by neoliberal processes.

Competition is deeply built into the structures of modern life. It can improve policies, products and services, but is also seen as a divisive burden that pits people against one another. This book seeks to go beyond such caricatures by advancing a new thesis about how competition came to shape our society. Jonathan Hearn argues that competition was ''domesticated'', harnessed and institutionalised across a range of institutional spheres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Responding to crises in traditional forms of authority (hereditary, religious), the formalisation of competition in the economy, politics, and diverse new forms of knowledge creation provided a new mode for legitimating distributions of power in the emerging liberal societies. This insightful study aims to improve our ability to think critically about competition, by better understanding its integral role, for good and ill, in how liberal forms of society work.

Competition is deeply built into the structures of modern life. It can improve policies, products and services, but is also seen as a divisive burden that pits people against one another. This book seeks to go beyond such caricatures by advancing a new thesis about how competition came to shape our society. Jonathan Hearn argues that competition was ''domesticated'', harnessed and institutionalised across a range of institutional spheres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Responding to crises in traditional forms of authority (hereditary, religious), the formalisation of competition in the economy, politics, and diverse new forms of knowledge creation provided a new mode for legitimating distributions of power in the emerging liberal societies. This insightful study aims to improve our ability to think critically about competition, by better understanding its integral role, for good and ill, in how liberal forms of society work.