‘Customers were not objects to suck blood from’: Social relations in UK retail banks under changing performance management systems

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12267
• Author: Knut Laaser
• Date: 01 November 2019
• Published date: 01 November 2019

‘Customers were not objects to suck blood

from’: Social relations in UK retail banks

under changing performance management

systems

Knut Laaser

ABSTRACT

Utilising an analytical framework informed by a moral economy approach, this arti-

cle examines the social relationships between bank workers and customers in the

context of changing performance management. Informed by 46 in-depth interviews

with branch workers and branch managers from UK banks, this article focusses on

the interplay of the pressures arising from an intensified and all-encompassing perfor-

mance management system and bank workers lay morality. The article seeks to

analyse why one group of bank workers engages with customers in a primarily instru-

mental manner, while another group tends to mediate and engage in oppositional

practices which aim to avoid such an instrumentalisation. The article argues that

moral economy gives voice to the agency of workers and the critical concerns of the

social, economic and moral consequences of market-driven and purely profit-oriented

workplace regimes.

1 INTRODUCTION

Informed by 46 in-depth interviews with bank workers and branch managers (BMs)

from different UK retail bank branches and framed by the analytical framework of

moral economy (ME), this article sheds light on two key aspects: first, the article

explores how the labour process in retail banks changed in the last two decades,

dominated by intensified performance management system (PMS) that features an

all-encompassing managerial control system that pushes bank workers to relate in-

strumentally to customers and prioritise selling over customer orientation. Second,

the article explores why a group of recently recruited bank workers are more prone

to instrumentalise customers, while a group of more experienced bank workers are

more likely to avoid such instrumentalisation by engaging in oppositional practices.

This article utilises an ME approach to work and employment that frames the explo-

ration of workers experiences of intensified PM in front-line-service work (FLSW),

analysing the materialist reality of the labour process as well as workers lay morality

which shapes if and how they engage in oppositional practices to compliance, respec-

tively. The framework of ME focusses on how economic practices are shaped by

❒Knut Laaser is at Brandenburger Technische Universität Cottbus (BTU), Cottbus, Germany and a

Lecturer in Work, Employment and Society, Stirling Management School, Stirling, UK. Correspondence

should be addressed to Dr Knut Laaser, Lecturer and Senior Researcher, Work, Employment and

Society, Stirling Management School, Stirling, UK. E-mail: knut.laaser@stir.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2019 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu-

tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

50:5

–6, 532

–547

moral norms and sentiments, and how, in turn, moral norms and sentiments are

formed by economic and institutional forces. Part and parcel of an ME approach

to work and employment is the concept of lay morality that theorises actors as eval-

uative and sentient beings, whose evaluation of their own and others’actions and

faring is informed by notions of justice and fairness, informing actions that range

from oppositional practices to compliance.

2 THE PREVALENCE OF PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

A common theme within the sociology of work and employment is the observation of

‘(…) the greater use of market forces in organising the employment relationship’

(McGovern et al., 2007: 41). A testimonial of this is the development and centrality

of PMS in organisations (Cushen, 2013; Findlay and Thompson, 2017). Performance

management has evolved in the last two decades in many sectors of the economy

from annual performance appraisal practices towards a systematic and ongoing

managerial control system (Laaser, 2016; Taylor, 2013; Williams and Beck, 2018).

While PMS expresses continuity with, and indeed combine, traditional managerial

control techniques, critical employment and management scholarship point towards

the greater scope for managerial control that PMS enables featuring methodical

collection, storage, analysis and display of information of workers’effort via the

utilisation of sophisticated Information and Communications Technology (Carter et

al., 2014; Jeske and Santuzzi, 2015; Laaser, 2013; Laaser and Bolton, 2017; Newsome

et al., 2013).

Performance management system (PMS) has become particularly prevalent in

semi-routinised FLSW were front-line workers are ‘in direct contact with customers

(…) and in a subordinate position in the employment relationship’(Bélanger and Ed-

wards, 2013: 436). Critical employment research indicates that PMS in semi-

routinised FLSW feature individualised performance targets, systematic collection,

analysis and evaluation of work effort, performance-related pay and punitive mana-

gerial practices (Callaghan and Thompson, 2001; Ellis and Taylor, 2006; Korczynski

and Ott, 2005). A prime example of an industry in which PMS became a dominating

feature is the banking sector in the UK. Historically, the banking industry was

characterised by paternalist management practices that fostered a unitary ideology

with the propagation of shared objectives and values that masked the power asymme-

try between BMs and workers (Heritage, 1977; Kerfoot and Knights, 1993). Further-

more, patriarchal values were deeply ingrained in the organisation of work, encoded

in high levels of sexual division of labour and overt and covert discrimination

against female bank worker (Crompton, 1989). In tandem with paternalism and

patriarchism, banks workplace regime rested on early forms of appraisal systems that

assessed behavioural and social dimensions of bank staff via highly subjective annual

inspections, aiming to bend staff to the unique banking culture (McKinlay, 2002).

The development of PMS in the banking industry is intermeshed with the wider

changes in the political economy. The financial industry witnessed seismic shifts in

the 1980s under the Thatcher regime, being subject to deregulation and re-regulation

policies that aimed to increase the profitability and market power of the industry

via heightened entrepreneurialism and competition between financial organisations

(Kerfoot and Knights, 1993; Knights and McCabe, 1998; Watson, 2004). Banks

responded in the late 1980s to the changing political economy of the financial industry

by implementing harsher forms of strategic management programmes that informed

Social relations under changing performance management 533

© 2019 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd