A hermeneutic study on the perception of responsibility within Banking

Abstract: This thesis explores how those relating to banking institutions engage with, and experience responsibility throughout their daily interaction with these institutional environments. The proposed thesis’ research question is What is responsibility in banking?. To be able to answer it, the relation of the responsibility concept to historical, philosophical, and business accounts were analysed from a selection of papers deemed as important in generating the notion of responsibility. In addition, it was considered living stories resulting from semi-structured interviews conducted with the 19 study participants, which were both professionally related and nonrelated to banks. The interviews offered the participants’ understanding of responsibility and its accounts, both during their upbringing, educational, cultural, and professional spheres. Furthermore, the empirical data were analysed employing the hermeneutic phenomenology, subjectification, and power relations concepts of Foucault’s work. This thesis has shown that responsibility is experienced and perceived differently depending on the context (space and time) and nature of interactions and that these experiences are both similar and different from those in the customer, employee, leader, and shareholder segments of the study sample. The notion of responsibility in banking depends on what is the responsible priority to the established interplay of power. How banking should tackle the improvement of their responsible practices is not an easy matter since stakeholders’ interests are so unsynchronized. Thus, these times call for humanity, collaboration, and discussion among parties, bringing together stories and power as a strategic relationship that allows plurality and political agency to reinvent meaning. This research contributes to a larger body of research exploring sensemaking in finance organizations and contributes to understanding the experiences of those who are engaged with financial services, and the difficulties encountered when considering changing the ethos perception of responsibility.