Bankmannen : en etnologisk studie av yrkesvardag och yrkesidentitet 1945-1995

Sammanfattning: The professional daily life of bank employees has drastically changed in many ways over the course of the period spanning from 1945 to 1995: computerization has affected the manner of working; a broader and more comprehensive assortment of services is now offered; the bank employees'corps has gone from being composed of two thirds men, to being made up of two thirds women; and changes in society have affected relations behind the banking counter as well as over it. The study focuses upon the manner in which bank employees experience their professional daily lives in light of these changes, but also in regards to their more permanent basic features. This is a study of working life in the banking profession; its goal is to illuminate the manner in which bank employees' occupational identity - between 1945 and 1995 - has changed but also remained the same as part of an on going process which receives its impulses from experiences based in the daily activities of bank staff. The emphasis upon experience helps to turn borders and the senses into meaningful themes invoked throughout the study. Borders in banks work to include, exclude, and unite people. They also create security, safety, identity and seclusion, as well as tension and conflict. The most important sources used have been the written memoirs of bank employees reflecting upon their profession, and the written thoughts of banking customers about their relations to both bank employees and banks. The presentation begins with a consideration of the bank's role in society. and money's role in bank employees' activities as well as in the lives of banking customers. This is followed by a chapter concerning the bank employee's daily professional life in which it is possible to discern a shifting cultural pattern, the professional culture. The internal borders which bank personnel experience in their daily work are addressed in the next chapter. The final chapter summarizes changes which have occurred in the professional culture of banking in the post-war era. It also develops the images which bank employees as well as the general public have described in regards to the bank employee's identity. Special interest is paid to the banking crisis which arose in the beginning of the nineties, and the manner in which this crisis affected the image of bank personnel. In conclusion, it is asserted that the presentation revolves around money's role in people's lives, and that the thesis can therefore be seen as a contribution to the ethnology of money.