Page - (000121) - in Knowledge and Networks

113 After my initial training in New York, I was then sent on, I think, six rotations where I was working for a short period in different functions globally. It was all about learning through doing, getting a feel for the working culture, the hours, the dress, how you handle clients and of course colleagues. But that wasn’t just in London even though that is where I work now. (Investment bank vice president, London, 2009) Taken together, this suggests that postgraduate education plays an important role in inculcating early-career fi nancial elites into the topological networks and the more topographical requirements of working in London’s international fi nancial district. Indeed, these multiple spatitialities have become increasingly marked as elite fi nancial labor markets demand ever more quantitative skills from graduates, something that has not been a historic strength of the U.K. education system pro- ducing many of the early-career elites. Conclusions This chapter has taken the growing interest in economic elites as its starting point to examine the comparatively neglected role of postgraduate education in facilitating entry into and upward mobility within elite fi nancial labor markets in London’s international fi nancial district, particularly in its investment banks. Much of the attention to date has emphasized the role of educational background at a small num- ber of elite, fee-paying public schools and universities in the graduate recruitment process and the importance of the shared educational experience in the development of trust- based relationships between bankers and their historic regulator, the Bank of England, in the City of London (see Pryke, 1991 ). The research presented in this chapter builds on these insights to sharpen the focus on the signifi cance of ongoing education beyond the fi rst degree and second schooling in shaping the nature of socioeconomic practice in the City. In this regard, I have argued that training early- career elites in the technical know-how required to work in investment banks in London’s contemporary international fi nancial district is only part of the function these forms of educational experiences fulfi ll. Rather, education within investment banks through graduate training schemes and that provided by specialist business education providers plays an important role in inculcating new investment bank employees into the expected and legitimated practices, meanings, competencies, and cultures associated with working in investment banking in the City of London. The wider signifi cance of this chapter is twofold. First, theoretically, the analysis reveals the value of extending work on the sociology of education beyond the exist- ing focus on the multiple forms of capital reproduced through educational back- ground to include questions raised by Bourdieu’s wider concepts of fi eld, habitus, and doxa. By examining what these concepts reveal about practice, this chapter has begun to develop a valuable approach for considering how education within elite occupations not only plays an important role for individuals in securing entry into labor markets , but also serves to (re)produce understandings of legitimated forms of practice. In particular, and in relation to the focus of this book more generally, such 6 (Post)graduate Education Markets and the Formation of Mobile Transnational…