Kissing Frogs: Do Psychologists and Bankers Live in Different Worlds?

ABSTRACT

Organisational psychology consultants and valuation bankers are essential to creating employee stock ownership plan companies (ESOPs). However, bankers and organisational psychology consultants see the world in different ways and in fact, paradoxically create different sorts of companies from the same companies, engendering an ontological pluralism. This pluralism suggests that social change can happen on a large scale without persuading everyone there is only one way to see or be in the world. In fact, it’s possible that ESOPs are as successful as they are because they are a sort social form that exists differently for various people, while still making line employees wealthier than they otherwise would be.

KEYWORDS:

• Organisational psychology
• investment banking
• ESOPs (Employees Stock Ownership Plan Companies)
• change
• ontology

Acknowledgements

Thanks you, Christian Borch, Kristian Bondo Hansen, Michael Scroggins, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Marilyn Strathern for tolerating early versions of this article and offering helpful critique.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Many ESOPs offer supplemental retirement benefits, such as employee-matched 401k accounts, to mitigate this risk

2 Part of this has to do with the fact that ESOPs are a specific type of business corporation and corporations themselves are instantiated legally via a genre of documents that are replicable across company types (see Latour 1986 on ‘immutable mobiles’ and specifically his discussion of paperwork and metrology in his final section). Businesses generally can do all sorts of different things and still be, legally speaking, corporations. The same goes for the sub category of ESOP. Put another way because ESOPs have a generic legal form, their mode of property ownership and employment can co-occur with all sorts of different kinds of businesses in the USA.

3 The count is imprecise because people, particularly at the junior level move in an out of specific groups at this financial services firm. Moreover, the organisation as a whole was growing fairly rapidly. Any precise count was a moving target.

4 Keep in mind, just because some data are thin or contextless, doesn’t mean that people don’t care about them, or don’t make extremely consequential decisions based on them. As we’ll see below, data can motivate all manner of destiny for a firm.

5 It’s worth noting, too, that there appears to be a gendered component to all of this: at Virtue I spoke with two men and seven women; and at Lemur I spoke to three women and 11 men. Elsewhere (Souleles 2019b: 33ff) I’ve noted the preponderance of men in banking and suggested that this often seems to line up with a bias towards abstracted modes of analysis that are amenable to universal application. This, in turn, is in contrast to Virtue’s mode of deeply contextual thinking. Perhaps this is yet another instance of nuanced care-work being pushed to a women-controlled space.

6 Just as there has been a substantial conversation within anthropology about extending ontological self-determination to the folks that we study, or at least taking their ontological premises seriously, there’s been an equally coherent and persuasive argument against radical ontological difference as it may serve to re-inscribe the tired anthropological trope of an irretrievably ‘savage’ other (see for example Bessire 2014).

7 For more on the history of ESOPs (see Blasi et al. 2014). For more on the long history of collectivism in the United States (see Curl 2012). For more on the concept of the corporation and corporate ownership (see Mackin 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a Louis O. Kelso fellowship from the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.