Confidence as a means of labor. An ethnographic study on the role of aesthetics and practices of the banking business in Germany and Switzerland

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This research project aims at investigating into the daily practices of bank counselors, who seek to generate and maintain their customers' confidence in respect to their work of placing funds and to more or less nontransparent financial products offered. The ethnographic fieldstudy takes place in private banks in Germany and Switzerland. Providing microscopic insights into the workplaces and lifeworlds of bank counselors, the project seeks to contribute to establish a cultural anthropology of the bank business. The fieldwork will entail thick descriptions of the interplay of spatial atmospheres of local banks and their corporate identity on the one hand and on the other hand the daily interactions and routines of the counselors and customers, which deem deeply affected by the aesthetics of the banks. This micro-perspective is supplemented by an approach that considers the larger makro-contexts, such as the confidence crisis in the financial sector, which started 10 years ago as a result the worldwide financial crisis. In combining micro- and macro-levels of research and a variety of methods, such as participant observation, qualitative interviews and discourse analysis, this explorative study will generate also more general findings on the logics, forms and functions of a particular form of aesthetic economy. Strategies and effects of the commodification of emotions will be scrutinized in an underresearched particular economic field from a cultural perspective. From a theoretical point of view, this multi-layered project will lead to a fruitful entanglement of approaches dealing with subjectified work on the one hand and with the atmospheres of architecture from the perspective of cultural sciences on the other hand.