Neutralising deviance

Research led by Dr Alex Simpson explores ongoing cultures of deviance that persist in elite structures of society. Primarily focusing on the City of London, his project aims to take a sociological snapshot of the organising interests and ideologies functioning within spaces and institutions of global finance. Engaging in the everyday routines, expectations and assumptions of economic actors embedded within the financial services industry, this study contributes towards an enhanced understanding of how the cultural sensibilities that underpin a market based reality perpetuate gross social and economic inequalities through the shifting of negative market costs on vulnerable sections of society.

Supported by an ESRC studentship, this ethnographic study speaks to base issues of morality and justice in the organisation of economic life. Leading to a critical evaluation of the organising ideologies and taken-for-granted assumptions that function within the City of London, the principal findings detail the relational struggles, strategies and vested interests that dominate the field of finance life.

London-skyline

City of London skyline

Project timeframe

The ESRC studentship commenced in October 2012 and ran for three years up to 2015.

Project aims

The aims of this research are to:

  • explore the spatial design of the City of London as a system of exchange networks, firmly embedded within a global economy. Seeking to outline the disciplines and knowledge formations of a culturally-embedded landscape, this objective leads to deeper understanding of the generative interests, ideas and common practices that organise the cultural formation of the New Economy.
  • evaluate this cultural formation and the legitimising, sought after symbols of exchange. Focusing on the social positions of individuals and groups, this objective establishes capital as a ‘social relation of power’ in which the market enters the body to produce a ‘logical’ and ‘moral’ social integration function of legitimation.
  • the final objective, following from the above, is to critically relate the cultural formation of practice in the City of London to a relational understanding of deviance and social harm. In particular, this objective explores the extent to which the everyday embodiment of a broader economic ethos, or habitus, incorporates a social disposition that legitimises acts and deviance and the production of harm within economic life.

Project findings and impact

Findings explore:

  • the symbolic construction of the City of London, represented as the field of finance, as a distinct and dominating structure of market organisation and power.

  • the manifestation of speed, discipline and intelligence as a ruling and embodied system of cultural capital through which economic agents internalise the speed and the flow of the market system.

  • a relational and situated cultural habitus that reconstructs the production of social harm to legitimise acts of deviance as part of a normalising system of market action and profit making.

The-Conversation-logo-box

Read Dr Alex Simpson's article, The Big Short is a perverse Robin Hood parable – in which King John wins, in The Conversation

The-Conversation-logo-box

Read Dr Alex Simpson's article, If the banks were too big to fail, why isn’t the British steel industry? in The Conversation.

Research team

Dr Alex Simpson

Output

Simpson, A (2016) If the banks were too big to fail, why isn’t the British steel industry? The Conversation. 31 March.

Simpson, A (2016) The Big Short is a perverse Robin Hood parable – in which King John wins, The Conversation. 1 March.

Simpson, A (2015) A Four-Step Process to Studying the Field through the City of London, in Current Research on Cities, Vol. 51, pp.96-105.

Conferences

April 2015 – The Market Framework and the Construction of Financial Life within the City of London.
Presented at British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2015.
Glasgow Caledonian University.

March 2015 – ‘Studying Up’ – Themes of and issues of the inverted ethnographic gaze.
Workshop conducted at NYLON Annual Graduate Student Conference.
Max Planck Institute, Berlin.

September 2014 – Our Interests or Theirs? Cultures of market practice within the City of London Presented at Crisis and Social Change: Towards Alternative Horizons.
University of Cambridge.

September 2014 – Legitimising Social Harm: Embedded Cultural Practices within the City of London. Presented at European Group for the Study of Deviance & Social Control.
Liverpool John Moores University.

July 2014 – Understanding the Market: An ethnographic exploration of the City of London
Presented at the International Sociological Association 2014 Congress
Pacifico, Yokohama, Japan

September 2013 – The Political Economy of Harm [Constructing Crime stream]
Presented at Critical Criminology in a Changing World
European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, University of Oslo

July 2013 – London: Economic Liberalisation and Societal Cost
Presented at Post Crash City Conference Series: Urban Economies
Centre for Urban Research, the University of York

April 2013 – Market Society and the Other/One Matrix [Structure and the Other stream]
Presented at The Contemporary Other Postgraduate Conference
Department of Sociology, the University of York

Partners

ESRC