Gender, Space and City Bankers

This book offers a unique insight into everyday work and family lives of city bankers exploring how economic authority combines with individual and institutional claims to cultural, moral and intellectual leadership to sustain the local and global dominance of the banking elite.

Gendered processes of globalisation, transnationalisation and urbanisation are increasing local and global inequalities and widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The global finance industry plays a key role in these processes, directing its operations from local command points in global cities such as London. Drawing on empirical data collected after the 2008 financial crisis - in depth interviews with male City of London bankers who are also fathers, in depth interviews with the bankers' wives, observational data of work and family spaces, and banks' promotional online material -this book explores the day-to-day individual and institutional social practices of wealthy City bankers and banks. The book's analysis offers insight into how the spaces of work and home are integrally linked in ways that mutually shape, support and sustain the gendered dominance of the industry and its highly paid workers.

This book will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the fields of gender studies, critical studies of men and masculinities, urban and metropolitan studies, sociology, studies of globalisation and transnationalisation, anthropology, cultural studies and business management. It will also be interesting for those concerned about the role of the finance industry and neoliberal capitalist ideologies, values and practices in ever-widening local and global inequalities.

Autorentext

Dr Helen Longlands is a lecturer in Education and International Development at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and centre on issues relating to gender, inequalities and social justice, particularly men, masculinities and transnational relationships and structures of power.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

Introduction: global finance and the inequality of hegemony

1 Life in the City: space, place and inequality

2 Inside the boys' club of global finance

3 Gender, space and family

4 Exclusive communities

5 A community in crisis

6 Conclusion: the City in reflection

References

Index