Organisational Change and Retail Finance: An Ethnographic Perspective

Financial organizations, like many others, are undergoing radical change. This is affecting both their organizational processes and the technology that supports those processes. This book reports on the use of sociological ethnography in helping guide these changes, both in terms of helping better understand and redraw work processes and through providing more accurate and flexible understanding of he role technology plays. It places he reported research in context by contrasting it with those approaches more commonly associated with change, including business processes engineering, participative design and soft systems methodologies. The book explains what are the benefits of ethnography, as well as the potential it has in helping achieve more desirable change in any and all organizations, financial services included. The book will be of interest to all international researchers concersed with organizational and technological change, as well as managers of organizational development. It will alsointerest advanced students in sociology, anthropology, management science and organizational studies.

Dave Randall is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University.