Practical so whats

2.1 Managing the project

Understanding the fictionality of organizations has important consequences for management and project management. Having presented this thesis in its early stages to a group of Project Managers at the Bank, they very much supported the contention that project management had a strong element of both understanding a narrative at work and being able to tell the tale effectively. This had direct implications for their management practice. They were about to interview for a new project manager and decided to include in the interview process a story of a project to date and ask the interviewee to predict how the story would go and how he/she would tell the story at this point. A knowledge of, and skills in, understanding narrative should be included in management training.

2.2 Practical implications for the Bank of England

There are a number of primary conditions and characteristics established in this thesis regarding the emerging Bank of England. It would be helpful for an understanding of the Bank in 2013 to consider how many of these still pertain, for good or ill. For example, the Bank in 1694 was very clearly a protestant institution, its directors ‘protestant to a man’ as Giuseppi declares.373The Directors were drawn from the City of London, they were closely connected, several being members of the Houblon family374, and they were merchants and publicly respected figures. To what extent does the current leadership of the Bank reproduce or challenge this original composition? I suggest that the originary characteristics contain and constrain the present Bank.

I argue that the Bank is a primary model of the organization. As such it had the propensity to shape the management of organizations in very practical ways. Anne Murphy has looked

in detail at the practicalities confronted by the Bank as it opened in 1694. Her work drew my attention to the minutes of the Directors’ meetings which record in wonderful detail the problems they confronted and how they were resolved. The Bank had no procedures for the recruitment or management of the tellers for example. It is noted that ‘Edward Miller who was chosen this morning for a Teller gives his thanks to the Court, and desires to be excused, by reason he has not been much used to tell money, whereupon James Downes was chosen Teller....’375 As Murphy notes : ‘By 1704 the tellers’ duties and responsibilities were codified in a four page set of ‘Orders for the Observance of the Tellers of the Bank’, which ‘give the impression of an ordered and hierarchical environment in the banking hall and make it clear that, by this time, there was a strong system of oversight at the Bank of England.’ She argues that ‘the decisions taken, procedures implemented and mistakes made in the management of the Bank of England’s first tellers can reveal much about early modern business practices and can offer new insights into the progress of England’s financial revolution’.376 I am interested in how the Bank’s status as the ‘foremost project’ of the age (see chapter two) and primary model of the organization in generic and management aspects, shaped its capacity to influence the ethical governance of the emerging financial organizations. To what extent is the Bank of England responsible for the nature and operation of financial organizations in the UK? How has its role as a primary model influenced the ethics and governance of organizations? Is this a role which it can still discharge?

The story of the Bank presented in this thesis draws out the accidental and the uncanny in its emergence; it was born from high-risk enterprise, uncanny good luck, chutzpah and sheer accident, combined with the canny determination of a series of projectors, foremost among them Paterson, Montague and Godfrey. How do the traces of these factors influence the present organization?

2.3 Interdisciplining English Literature and Organization Studies

Moll Flanders and the Bank of England share primary conditions and numerous characteristics. They are implicated in each other’s development and studying them together has brought out information previously unrecognised, such as the influence of Paterson on Defoe’s fiction. It is likely that other comparisons of this sort could prove fruitful. What is the connection between Anthony Trollope’s (1815-1882) experience in the Post Office and his novels? How does the Victorian novel compare to the Victorian organization and what interconnections are to be found? Joint study would seem to provide an index to the shifting operation of the imagination and to the commercial arrangements that influence the project of both the novel and organization. The insights gained from this thesis regarding the novel, the organization, projecting and projectors, indicate that it is worth crossing the divide between the disciplines of literary theory and organization studies. Although, before this sounds too grand I would draw attention to an observation by Nicholson that ‘the intertextuality discovered with the force of revelation in late twentieth century critical theory is for this political culture (i.e. early eighteenth century) part of an assumed pattern of cross-discursive identification’.377 This thesis has merely remembered.