A study of identity formation in the London investment banking sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis seeks to investigate identity formation within the London investment banking sector in the context of career development. The sector has undergone a host of changes in the past two decades. The ‘Old City’ was distinguished by trust, reputation and stability which was informally regulated through a kinship network comprised of a social elite. De-regulation in 1986 ushered in the ‘New City’ characterised by individualistic competition, inflated capital sums, truncated careers, volatility and diversification. Existing research concerning identity has largely focussed on how ‘Old City’ class and gender relations continue to predominate and shape career opportunities. Scholars have highlighted how patterns of privilege and exclusion are reproduced through a variety of ‘performances,’ disadvantaging those who are unable to access a limited range of acceptable class and gender positions. This study takes a different starting point to explore how ‘performance’ may play a role in identity work to further careers but in a way which is attentive to the distinctive conditions of the New City. Specifically, this research explores how identity may be constructed and constantly re-worked and revised, drawing upon a range of different resources within a highly diverse setting. The thesis seeks to engage with this research agenda by applying Giddens (1984; 1991) theoretical framework on self-identity, reflexivity and performance. A longitudinal research design was used to elicit qualitative data from six senior investment bank employees, gathering accounts on changes experienced over the period of a year as well as past events. The thesis investigates how a biographical narrative was reflexively maintained via the accommodation and perpetuation of a variety of different performances within a series of social terrains. These in turn served to reproduce the broader financial institutional context. A further contribution is developed which focuses on the theoretical interplays between selfidentity, reflexivity and performance through a detailed analysis of the empirical materials.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".