Page - (000116) - in Knowledge and Networks

108 documents from U.K. government departments, particularly the Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills (DIUS), the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and Her Majesty’s (HM) Treasury; and organizations working to support graduate employability in the United Kingdom, particularly the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Education and the Process of Learning the Legitimate Socioeconomic Practice of a City Financial Elite As I have documented elsewhere (Hall & Appleyard, 2009 , 2011 ), ongoing post- graduate education for early-career fi nancial elites can be divided into three broad types, each of which is aimed at inculcating fi nanciers into a particular set of legiti- mated knowledge’s that are deemed important in order to work within investment banking in the City of London. First, education plays an important role in circulat- ing and legitimating the technical know-how or “calculative devices” (Callon & Muniesa, 2005 ) important within the increasingly technical nature of contemporary investment banking in the City. A second form of education focuses on the “psy- knowledges” (Rose, 1998 ) deemed important within such labor markets and include topics such as leadership, while the third form of education concentrates on ensur- ing that early- career investment bankers meet the regulatory clearances required to offer investment advice in the United Kingdom. At one level, these types of post- graduate educational experience for early- career investment bankers support unquestioned assumptions about education’s role in inculcating individuals into the dominant global discourses that surround fi nancial services (on which see Clark, 2011 ), particularly into its technical and quantitative nature, which has intensifi ed since the rise of securitization in the 2000s. As one interviewee noted in talking about a graduate training scheme undertaken with the other graduate recruits at the employing investment bank: At the beginning stage, it’s the technical experience, the grounding that we do…it is very broad; it’s quite theoretical as well. You don’t get the experience of actually applying it. (Analyst, investment bank, London, June 2008) This refl ects changes to the investment banking business model associated with the rise of securitization and structured fi nance. The new approach shifted the emphasis away from the areas of mergers and acquisitions and consulting that until then had dominated investment banking in the City (see Augar, 2009 ), with the increasingly valued technical know-how and modeling skills supplanting the client services and client interactions previously so important in an era of “ gentlemanly capitalism.” However, within this education into the language of global fi nance (Clark, 2011 ) here was widespread recognition that education was much more important than simply facilitating the learning of the key tenets of quantitative fi nance. Rather—building here on my earlier discussion on education’s role in reproducing legitimate forms of socioeconomic practice—it was widely acknowl- S. Hall