Neutralising Deviance: The legitimation of harm and the culture of finance in the City of London

This research project is a profile of inverted social deviance that speaks to base issues of morality and justice in the organisation of economic life. Focusing on the City of London, the aim of the research project is to create a sociological snapshot of the organising interests and ideologies functioning within spaces and institutions of global finance. Engaging in the everyday routines, expectations assumptions of economic actors embedded within the financial services industry, this study contributes towards an enhanced understanding of how the cultural sensibilities that underpin a market based reality perpetuate gross social and economic inequalities through the shifting of negative market costs on vulnerable sections of society. Leading to a critical evaluation of the organising ideologies and taken-for-granted assumptions that function within the City of London, the principal findings detail the relational struggles, strategies and vested interests that dominate the field of finance life.