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

这项研究项目旨在调查银行顾问的日常做法，他们寻求在他们的资金投放工作和提供的或多或少不透明的金融产品方面产生并保持客户的信心。这项人种学田野研究在德国和瑞士的私人银行进行。该项目提供对银行顾问工作场所和生活世界的微观洞察，旨在为建立银行业务的文化人类学做出贡献。实地调查一方面将深入描述当地银行的空间氛围与其企业身份的相互作用，另一方面将深入描述顾问和客户的日常互动和例行公事，认为这些互动和日常生活深受银行美学的影响。这一微观视角辅之以一种考虑更大宏观背景的方法，例如10年前因全球金融危机而开始的金融部门的信心危机。结合微观和宏观层面的研究和多种方法，如参与者观察、定性访谈和话语分析，这项探索性研究还将得出关于特定形式的审美经济的逻辑、形式和功能的更一般的结论。情感商品化的策略和影响将从文化的角度在一个研究不足的特定经济领域进行仔细审查。从理论的角度来看，这个多层次的项目将导致富有成效的方法的纠缠，一方面处理主观化的工作，另一方面从文化学的角度处理建筑的氛围。

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.