Continuity and catastrophe: business continuity management and the security of financial operations

Abstract

This paper discusses business continuity management (BCM) and its role in contemporary financial institutions. BCM is a nascent disaster preparedness and recovery strategy that seeks to protect vital business operations from disruptions. The paper traces contemporary BCM back to Cold War continuity of government planning, and shows how BCM came to comprehend security as continuity of processes rather than integrity of goods. BCM is prominent in finance because it promises to mitigate operational risks, and it focuses on risks stemming from interdependencies in financial infrastructures. By engaging with two events that triggered continuity management in banks, Hurricane Sandy in New York City and the ‘Blockupy’ demonstrations in Frankfurt, the paper highlights how BCM is challenged by large-scale disasters as well as acts of public criticism.

Keywords:

• risk management
• resilience
• disaster
• finance
• infrastructure
• politics of temporality

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the conference ‘Die Organisation des Notfalls’ at the University of Freiburg in 2014 and at the workshop ‘Thinking Infrastructure’ at the Copenhagen Business School in 2015. I want to express my gratitude for the comments by the audience and the organizers on both occasions and especially to Nils Ellebrecht and Stefan Kaufmann in Freiburg and Martin Kornberger and Ann-Christina Lange in Copenhagen. I also want to thank Il-Tschung Lim, Nadine Marquardt and Julian Stenmanns for comments on various drafts of this paper as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful engagement with the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 My empirical research on BCM mostly focuses on the analysis of documents, BCM standards and guidelines. Additionally, I also conducted interviews with the continuity managers of an internationally operating German bank (which I have not identified in the paper) in Frankfurt and New York. The interviews were conducted in German. For this paper, I translated the relevant passages to English.

2 However, the recent turn to financial infrastructure in the Social Studies of Finance (SSF) and in cultural anthropology has started to illuminate these material connections of the financial system (MacKenzie et al., 2012; Maurer, 2012; Pardo-Guerra, 2010).

3 This includes the German bank where I conducted interviews with the continuity managers in Frankfurt and New York.

4 https://twitter.com/kenshadford/status/263115191674368001

5 A number of scholars have recently pointed out the significance of such disruptive movements of coal miners (Mitchell, 2009), logistic workers (Cowen, 2010; Toscano, 2011) and environmental activists (Folkers, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Folkers

Andreas Folkers studied social sciences and philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the New School for Social Research, New York. He currently teaches and researches at the Sociology Department in Frankfurt. His research topics include (critical) social and political theory, biopolitics, technopolitics, security, genealogy and (empirical, historical) ontology. He recently finished his PhD project ‘Das Sicherheitsdispositiv der Resilienz. Katastrophische Risiken – vitale Systeme – Technopolitik’.