Strategy Discourse and Financial Services: Enter the Management Consultants and IT

Our general argument about strategy can now be linked to the previous chapters. We have seen how, during the 1960s and 1970s, the organizational field which characterized the financial services in the UK began to break up. Actors within firms, aided and pushed by key outside interests such as shareholders, the government and management consultancies, began to search for ways of understanding what was happening and, in the process, of exerting some control over their futures. In this process, the ‘need for strategy’ began to loom as a central part of their transformation process. They began to articulate this new language and to work out its effects. In the process, old practices and languages began to fall by the wayside or to be reconstructed from the point of view of strategy. These processes were by no means painless. They involved the ejection of certain organizations and individuals from the industry, the repositioning of firms (which had implications for the status, rewards and careers of individuals within them) and the reconstruction of relations between the firms, the state and consumers (which had effects on the financial well-being of millions of people). These processes of change were neither smooth nor unidirectional