Financialization as a strategy of workplace control in professional service firms

Recently, there has been an increased focus on finance as a form of control in corporations. In this paper, we explore financialization as an employee control strategy in a Big Four accountancy firm, and more specifically how it affects the everyday lives of the professionals within the firm. We found financialization involved attempts to transform employees working lives into an investment activity where work was experienced as ‘billable hours’ that are ‘invested’ in the hope of a high future pay-off. Employees sought to increase the value of their investment by skilful manipulation. If wisely managed, this investment could yield significant benefits in the future. We argue that financialization involves active employee participation and is a way of binding other forms of control together.

► Billable hours makes employees’ working lives an investment. This has a constant presence in the form of registering time and negotiating for billable hours.
► Investment in the future is managed through skilful manipulation that is widely known, rewarded and informally taught, but not officially sanctioned.
► Financialization is an important form of control. It facilitates self-monitoring and self-management, linking individual performance to that of the firm.
► Financialization becomes a way of making sense of other forms of control, relating them to each other and binding them together.