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ARTICLE

Creating Something Using nostalgia to build a branch network LEANE CUTCHER University of Sydney, Australia Abstract This article explores the way in which an Australian regional bank has been able to draw on nostalgia for a ‘golden era of banking’ to expand its branch network. The bank’s strategy centres on providing local friendly service delivered by civic-minded small-business people through a franchised community bank model. The article aims to contribute to our understanding of emotions in organizations by highlighting the ways in which nostalgia can be used positively to create connections between customer service and human resource strategies. These connections are made possible through a discourse of community that appeals to a desire for genuine social relationships, personal authenticity, moral certainty and a sense of belonging. That is for a return to ‘something’. Key words community ● customer service ● emotions ● human resource management

AN INCREASING NUMBER of service interactions now take place between the customer and a machine, and are focused on efficiency and speed of delivery. The delivery of service through non-human technology involves customers engaging in self-service and minimizes the human element of the service relationship (Ritzer and Stillman, 2001; Ritzer, 2004). Evidence from the Australian retail banking industry shows how, over the past two decades, banks have moved from offering ‘person-oriented’ service (Ritzer and Stillman, 2001) with an emphasis on face-to-face interactions in local Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore) Vol 8(3): 369–387 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540508095304] http://joc.sagepub.com

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branch settings to ‘system-oriented’ (Ritzer and Stillman, 2001) service delivered via machines or in cyberspace. Highly personalized customer service is increasingly limited to what the retail banks call their ‘high-value’ customers. This personalized service is delivered in stylishly decorated private banking centres, while the majority of customers are directed to self-service options such as automatic teller machines, touch-telephone service systems, or internet banking. The major retail banks have closed branches and structured fees in order to ‘encourage’ customers to move towards technological self-service options and away from a reliance on over-the-counter transactions. This move to ‘system-oriented’ service is part of a worldwide trend in banking and has been the focus of a significant amount of research in the USA, Europe and Australia (Burton, 1994; Knights and Tinker, 1997; Pollard, 1999; Regini et al.,1999; Morgan and Sturdy, 2000; Kitay, 2003). It is also part of a wider trend identified by Ritzer (2004: 10) as the ‘globalization of nothing’, where products and services are offered in nonplaces (for example in banking call centres), as non-things (credit card loans), by non-persons (telemarketer), and as non-services (automatic teller machines). As Ritzer (2004) points out, the production and consumption of ‘nothing’ is not without its benefits. In banking, it has greatly expanded the range of service offerings, allowing customers to bank anywhere, anytime, even in cyberspace. However, while ‘nothing’ carries with it many advantages, it has also led to a sense of loss, as local forms of something are progressively threatened and replaced (Ritzer, 2003: 204). Nothing is crowding out something – the authentic, local, distinctive, and humanized things, spaces and persons. Nostalgia can offer a kind of respite from this nothingness and the feelings of loss it generates. As Davis (1979: 47) argues, and Walt Disney (cf. Bryman, 2004) so clearly understood, nostalgia enchants and the past offers temporary shelter from an unsavoury present and a worrisome future. Indeed, each generation looks back nostalgically to a time they remember as much less fast-paced and more certain. A small number of organization studies have shown how the backward-looking nature of nostalgia has caused it to be viewed negatively and how nostalgic feelings are often disregarded or actively discouraged by management (Gabriel, 1993; Munro, 1998; Brown and Humphreys, 2002; Parker, 2002; Strangleman, 1999). In contrast, this article shows how nostalgia can be used positively by management to facilitate high levels of personalized customer service. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the social relations of production and consumption by highlighting the role of 370

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nostalgia in creating connections between customer service and human resource strategies. The case study evidence presented shows how these connections were made possible through a discourse of ‘community’ which attends to both the temporal and spatial aspects of nostalgia. The article also aims to extend our understanding of nostalgia by questioning whether or not nostalgia is essentially an emotion of a personally lived past (cf. Davis, 1979; Strangleman, 1999, 2004). The answer to this question will help us better understand the role that emotions and the past can play in modern-day service settings. The article begins with a discussion of the way in which employees experience feelings of nostalgia, particularly during times of organizational change. This leads to a broader discussion about the role of nostalgia in attending to a sense of loss created in large part by the move towards globalized and standardized product offerings and services. Following this overview of the existing literature, the case study organization for this study is introduced and the research methodology outlined. The next section of the article sets out the findings from the research and highlights the ways in which management has been able to draw on nostalgia for person-oriented service to extend a network of franchised bank branches and to gain loyalty and commitment from frontline service workers in those branches. NOSTALGIA IN ORGANIZATIONS There is nothing new about nostalgia. The use of the past as a rhetorical device for critiquing the present has a long literary tradition reaching back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play of 1771, Götz von Berlichingen (Barringer, 2005: 252). More recently, academics from a variety of perspectives have written about the way that the fast-changing present has caused some individuals or groups to wistfully remember a past that was less fastpaced and much more secure (Davis,1979; DaSilva and Faught, 1982; Turner, 1987; Gabriel, 1993; Munro, 1998; Strangleman, 1999; Stauth and Turner, 1988;[SMP1] Brown and Humphreys, 2002). Indeed, human beings have always used their memories of the past to make sense of an everchanging present (Misztal, 2003). It was Nietzsche who first expressed the view that human beings are essentially historical animals, who must necessarily be melancholic because only human beings are aware of the passage of time (Stauth and Turner, 1988: 512). Davis (1979) argues that each generation has contemporary concerns that cause it to look back nostalgically. In this way, the past can exercise ‘a considerable influence on the way that present-day events are interpreted, acting as a rich source of symbolism and meaning’ (Gabriel, 1993: 119). Nostalgic memories become, 371

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the means for holding onto and reaffirming identities that have been ‘badly bruised by the turmoil of the times’ (Davis, 1979: 107). It follows then that nostalgia is deeply implicated in the sense of who we are and what we are about (Davis, 1979: 31). It is one of the means we employ in the never-ending work of constructing, maintaining and reconstructing our identities. Nostalgia, because of its capacity to attend to pleas for continuity and to the comforts of sameness, can help organizational members deal with fears and anxieties, including those about their own significance (Davis, 1979). In their workplace study of a Turkish educational institution, Brown and Humphreys (2002: 143) highlight nostalgia’s role in engendering individual-group identification that ‘evoke[d] feelings of pride and affiliation’. They also show how nostalgia provides emotional support during periods of acute organizational change, helping to ‘maintain a sense of individual and collective continuity’ (Brown and Humphreys, 2002: 143). This need for continuity and affiliation is related to the sense of loss that individuals feel during times of change. Wolfram-Cox (1997) explains that experiencing loss in response to change can incorporate a sense of loss as both a movement to look back on the past or on what has been, as well as a return back to where we were before. Perhaps because of this backward-looking tendency, nostalgia in organizational contexts is often viewed as a negative emotion, and any attempt to refer to past organizational practice is perceived as an inability to change. To counter this, management may denigrate the past in order to win consent for change. Munro (1998) found evidence of management ‘rubbishing’ the past with the primary aim of undermining organizational members’ sense of belonging and consequently aspects of their identity. As Munro (1998: 229) explains, with the past rubbished, a worker’s traditional knowledge base is cut off and virtually the only resource left is knowledge of current strategy. Further ‘any feelings of persons in the hierarchy “belonging” to each other, in line with previous responsibilities, seem more or less abandoned’ (Munro, 1998: 230). In this way, relations are no longer the subject of belonging and anyone is replaceable, particularly those who cannot or will not detach themselves from the past. Of course, not all organizational members will react to change in the same way. As Parker (2002) found in his study of managers in a small English building society, it was older head office managers who tended to be nostalgic, attempting to keep ‘tradition alive’, while younger head office and branch managers attempted to modernize, rejecting nostalgia and ridiculing their organization’s history. The past then can be invoked both positively and negatively. 372

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This positive and negative recasting of the past can be undertaken for both internal (in relation to employees) and external (in relation to customers) consumption (Strangleman, 1999: 742). Strangleman’s (1999, 2004) research into the contemporary British railway industry demonstrates how history and heritage were selectively annexed negatively within the organization to win consent for change amongst management and workers, and positively as an attempt to recapture the ‘golden age of railways’ and to promote the changes to customers. He highlights the complexity involved in the active recasting of the past by showing how negative meaning was attached to the past ways of managing those companies and services. He found ‘in the railways the implication was that those who looked back to earlier times were seen as nostalgic failures: and ‘established workers were seen as the embodiment of that failure’ (Strangleman, 2004: 143). Conversely, heritage and nostalgic emotions were used positively to re-brand companies and services. Strangleman’s research highlights the potential of the past as a resource by which management can promote and win commitment to change in the present. The past can be portrayed negatively as somewhere we would not want to return to, or positively as preferable to the present. Nostalgia then need not simply be a passive emotion, but can be an ‘active tool in the hands of management’ (Strangleman, 1999: 742). NOSTALGIA FOR SOMETHING Following on from this, Strangleman (1999) argues that rather than nostalgia being an emotion of an essentially lived experience, nostalgic feeling can be detached from direct lived experience, reified and more easily manipulated. This malleability of the past has also been highlighted by DaSilva and Faught (1982: 49), who emphasize the disconnection between the actual past and the way that popular culture increasingly uses nostalgic images to appeal to ‘an undifferentiated emotion generated by an unreal, synthetic, universal image of the past’. DaSilva and Faught (1982) argue popular consumer culture’s use of nostalgia in effect eradicates the connection between an individual’s personal experiences or a group’s social history, as the past becomes a commodity for mass consumption (DaSilva and Faught, 1982). The nostalgic artefacts of popular culture offer events and relationships drained of their meaning in line with the social demand for repetitive, standardized production (DaSilva and Faught, 1982: 54). So that rather than offering people a way back to their communal roots, they are in fact furthering their isolation and sense of loss. This notion of returning to one’s communal roots highlights the temporal, spatial and moral dimensions to the sense of loss that underpins 373

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nostalgia. Turner’s (1987) nostalgic paradigm outlines the four dimensions to our sense of loss. First, there is loss for a golden age of ‘homefulness’, which ‘typically involves some sense of a lost space and lost time from which contemporary social systems can be measured and found wanting’ (Turner, 1987: 150). Second, there is a sense of loss or absence of ‘personal wholeness or moral certainty’ (1987: 150). Third is loss of ‘simplicity, personal authenticity and emotional spontaneity’, and the fourth and final aspect is the idea of a sense of loss ‘of individual freedom and autonomy and the disappearance of genuine social relationships’ (Turner, 1987: 152). It is possible to see how modern capitalist forms of production and consumption have led to this sense of loss. Ritzer (2004: 3) argues that the social world, particularly in the realm of consumption, is increasingly characterized by ‘nothing’, where consumers are offered products and services that are ‘generally centrally conceived, controlled, and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive context’. The conception and control of these products and services occurs at a global level and results in the mass production of ‘non-things’ and the efficient handling of consumers in non-places, by non-people and with non-services (Ritzer, 2004). Mass production on a global scale has led to products and services that are generic (interchangeable), lack local ties, are timeless, dehumanized and fail to enchant us (Ritzer, 2004). These forms of consumption can leave us with a sense of loss. As Ritzer (2004: 150) argues, nostalgia for that which existed in the past implies we had something in the past. In consumption terms that ‘something’ was unique goods and services produced and consumed locally in personalized settings at specific times (Ritzer, 2004). The production and consumption of ‘something’ can help to overcome the sense of loss outlined in Turner’s nostalgic paradigm because it offers humanized exchanges grounded in space and time (Ritzer, 2004) that are based on genuine social relations that have the potential to offer a return to a sense of personal authenticity, wholenesss and moral certainty (Turner, 1987). Very often, the past that is invoked nostalgically is that of the premodern rural world with its associations of rural simplicity, traditional stability, and cultural integration (Turner, 1987). These ‘pre-modern’ communities are imagined as being underpinned by moral certainty and tradition which connects the past to present practices (Giddens, 1990: 105). Modernization brings with it uncertainty and fear, and people will look around for pictures, social signs, social messages, to try to relate to as individuals, and also to discover, in some form, community (Williams, 1985: 295). Suttles (1972: 187) argues that this ‘nostalgia for the past and for a more permanent sense of community and interpersonal loyalty is expected 374

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where large numbers of people throughout the world are being moved out of their local confines and included in mass society’. Within these communities, it is small-business people who are said to offer a sense of moral certainty. As Wright-Mills (1951) explained, these people were seen as the historic carriers of the ‘civic spirit’, which involved their voluntary participation in local affairs for the benefit of their community. This nostalgia of, and for, community and the civic-mindedness of the small-business entrepreneur can also be linked to nostalgia for ‘neighborly person-oriented’ service given that the key features of these interactions is that they take place between people who know each other and are distinguished by their local, face-to-face character (Ritzer and Stillman, 2001). It is the civic-minded small-business person who can provide these neighbourly service exchanges between actors who not only see themselves as involved in a business exchange, but also as members of the same community. It is possible then that neighbourly, person-oriented forms of service can help us overcome a sense of loss by delivering ‘something’ (Ritzer, 2004). Increasingly, firms use nostalgic images and artefacts to promote their services or products. Even McDonald’s whose standardized product and service offerings have given name to Ritzer’s (2000) ‘McDonalization’ thesis and further exemplify his concept of ‘nothing’ (Ritzer, 2004) have used baby boomers’ nostalgia for their childhood to promote its highly standardized products. That other icon of American culture, Disneyland, has long used nostalgia to enchant visitors to its theme parks. Disney’s enchanting relies on appeals to the past with heavy doses of nostalgia laced through the theme park environments and attractions (Bryman, 2004). As Bryman (2004: 37) points out: The message is simultaneously one that conveys a sense of loss (for a past life that was simpler or more exotic than the current one) and upbeat (because it communicates a sense of recovery of that lost era). A case of triumph through nostalgia. Such active recasting of the past to promote products and services suggests that people can be made to feel a sense of loss for times and places they never personally experienced. Strangleman (1999) has argued that the past is infinitely malleable in the hands of management wanting to win consent for change amongst employees and promote services to customers. He questions Davis’s (1979) contention that nostalgia is essentially an emotion of a personally experienced past and argues that ‘nostalgic feeling can be detached from direct lived experience’ (Strangleman, 1999: 743). 375

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This raises an important question for organizations wanting to use nostalgia for both internal and external consumption. Do the nostalgic images and symbols that organizations draw upon need to in some way mirror the personally lived past of their customers and employees? The answer to this question lies in a more nuanced understanding of nostalgia offered in the distinctions drawn by Davis between simple, reflexive and interpretive nostalgia. Simple nostalgia, he argues, is a subjective state that harbours the largely unexamined belief that things were better than they are now (Davis, 1979: 18). Reflexive nostalgia, on the other hand, encompasses a questioning of nostalgic feeling. That is, the person does more than sentimentalize the past, but questions whether or not it really was that way (Davis, 1979: 21). In the realm of interpretive nostalgia, the emotion itself is rendered problematic (Strangleman, 2004: 102). Acknowledging these different orders of nostalgia alerts us to the role of the individual in the creation of nostalgic meaning.As Korczynski (2002: 60) reminds us, the ‘storyteller can enchant the audience only if the audience members invest part of themselves in the experience’. Reflexive and interpretive nostalgia to varying degrees acknowledge the agency of the individual to critically question the nostalgic image or symbol set to enchant them. An unquestioning ‘simple nostalgia’ like the kind used in popular consumer culture where images are standardized and drained of meaning (DaSilva and Faught, 1982) may well not need to be predicated on some direct, lived experience. However, these kind of nostalgic images and discourses are likely to exacerbate feelings of loss and are unlikely to contribute to individual-group identification and to a sense of belonging (Turner, 1987; Brown and Humphreys, 2002). Nostalgic references to a past that was actually lived will invariably lead to a more reflexive and varied response that questions whether things in the present are as bad as they seem in comparison to the past. Such reflexive nostalgia is unlikely to help sell standardized products and services, but it is suggested that it is the kind of nostalgia that will resonate with customers and employees, and is therefore likely to be a much more powerful tool in the hands of management. THE CASE STUDY SITE AND RESEARCH METHOD In seeking to explore this contention, the article examines the case of Bendigo Bank, an Australian regional bank that has used nostalgia for a ‘golden era’ of banking to expand its branch network and increase its market share. It is possible to identify ways in which Bendigo Bank’s strategy appeals to the four dimensions of nostalgic loss. Through their particular discourse of ‘community’ they are attending to a desire to return to a lost 376

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time and space, to a need for moral certainty, to a desire for genuine social relationships and for personal authenticity (Turner, 1987: 151–2). Their community bank model promises local communities a return to neighbourly, person-oriented service facilitated through the efforts of local small-business people. The Bendigo Bank community bank model is essentially a franchise arrangement with a local community-based finance company as the franchisee. Under this arrangement, Bendigo Bank provides the name, systems, products, marketing support and training, while the local finance company is responsible for operating costs, including cost of staffing. After meeting operating costs and paying 50 percent of gross profit to Bendigo, 20 percent of remaining profit is paid as a dividend to shareholders and the other 80 percent used to meet ongoing working capital requirements to fund local development programmes.While Bendigo Bank manages and bears the prudential and credit risk, business and operational risks are borne by the local finance company. In-depth case study research conducted into four Bendigo franchises reflects the broad appeal of the community bank concept, which has found support not just from retail bank customers in rural towns, but also from residents of suburbs of large metropolitan cities. The fact that it has found such broad support tells us more about retail banking in the present than it does about any past era of banking. In many respects, the ‘golden age’ of banking invoked by Bendigo management and embraced by the franchisees of the local branches does not resemble actual banking practices of the past, which centred much more around meeting the demands of the back-office processes then providing flexible service to customers. Until the 1990s, Australian banks did not open their doors until 10 am and closed them again at 3 pm so that ledgers could be balanced and customer records updated. It is true that some customers had close access to their local branch manager, but the intimacy and strength of these relationships was dictated by both class and gender. Bendigo’s nostalgic rendering of the past does, however, appeal to a very real sense of loss in the present. In Australia in the decade 1990 to 2000, almost 5000 branches were closed with the majority of these being located in rural and regional centres. People living in these towns and suburbs were forced to rely on remote, technological service options. As the large retail banks progressively closed branches, many towns and suburbs were left without a bank branch. This had negative consequences for small-business people in particular who were not only left without a local daily deposit function, but also witnessed a loss of trade as customers went to larger centres to bank and took their business with them. Evidence 377

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indicates that bank branch closures can have a particularly detrimental impact on local small business because of the general decline in passing trade, loss of access to middle- and higher-income consumers, higher retail tenancy vacancy rates, reduced local investment, higher cash handling costs and insurance premiums, and increased risk of crime (Beal and Ralston, 1997; EFPA, 1999; Connolly and Hajaj, 2001). The negative impact on small business and the local shopping strip brought with it a decline in social connectedness, as locals had less and less opportunity to engage in repeated interactions with fellow citizens. As Putnam (2000: 288) argues, these social transactions ‘grease the wheels that allow communities to advance smoothly’. This was certainly the story in the towns that were the research sites for this article. Seaside1 Community Bank, located in a beachside suburb of a large metropolitan city, Peninsula Community Bank, located in a fast growing coastal town, Heights Community Bank, located in a suburb outside of a major industrial centre on the south coast, and Shire Community Bank, located in a rural town, were all established after the last of the major banks had closed their branches and local businesses had suffered a significant decline in trade. A total of 30 interviews were conducted: five with Bendigo Bank management, four with management of the local franchise companies and 21 with community bank workers. The ‘semi-structured’ interviews, which lasted between 30 and 90 minutes, were conducted on a one-to-one basis at the community banks. While an interview script was used, it was not closely followed, and interviewees were encouraged to talk freely about whatever seemed important to them. All of the interviews were taperecorded with the consent of the interviewees. The interviews were analysed using what Glaser and Strauss (1967) refer to as the ‘constant comparative method’, where the data is coded into categories and basic social processes. The coding of the data was facilitated by the use of the qualitative research software package NVivo (manufacturer: QSR International). The transcribed interviews were reviewed, and themes and subthemes that arose from the transcripts were noted. These themes and related sub-themes emerged iteratively and were readjusted over many readings of the data. The research also involved analysis of a range of documents from Bendigo Bank and the community banks (mainly consisting of official company literature, such as brochures, public relations information, and customer newsletters. In addition, considerable attention was paid to analyzing media articles relating to retail banking in general and the community banks in particular. The following sections set out the findings from the research. 378

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NOSTALGIA FOR NEIGHBORLY SERVICE Given the negative impact of branch closures on small businesses, it is not surprisingly that the management committees of the case study banks were dominated by small-business traders, with the impetus for establishing the bank coming directly from the Chamber of Commerce in two of the four cases. As Bendigo Bank’s recruitment manager explained, ‘it is fair to say, that in the main, small-businesses are the ones that are most affected by the withdrawal of banking services and they are the ones that will create the impetus to bring services back’. Not only are the individuals responsible for establishing the local community bank branch mostly small-business people, they also envisage their community bank branch as an independent small business and not as a branch in a larger bank network. As the Chair of Heights Community Bank remarked: ‘We consider ourselves Heights Community Bank. We don’t consider ourselves Bendigo Bank by any stretch. We are a small business and as such we set our budgets.’ These small-business people bring their small-business practice and rhetoric to the management of the banks. This is evident in the emphasis they place on local friendly, flexible service, their approach to employment relations and the way they promote the community banks as local, civic ventures. The community banks can be promoted as local civic ventures, in part because a proportion of the profits of the branch are used specifically for local civic projects. The management committee of the community bank decides upon the percentage allocated to community work and the projects that will be funded. The emphasis is on putting funds back into the local area to develop further the community’s prospects. For example, in Henty, New South Wales, a nursing scholarship has been established by a community bank in order to retain nursing services at the local hospital (Wade, 2001). The local level is also where decision making is said to take place. Whereas the move in the large retail banks has been away from autonomous branches to a reliance on centralized decision making, in the community banks the branch manager has a considerable degree of autonomy. Bendigo Bank promotes the community bank concept around the idea that the branch manager is a ‘local’ and makes decisions locally. This local manager will go out and meet customers in their home and businesses to talk about their plans and needs. The manager and the other staff in the branch are locals. The concept of a local branch manager is part of Bendigo Bank’s claim to offer customers their preference for old-fashioned banking values of the past. It also appeals to a sense of lost community. Certainly the 379

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closure of the large retail bank branches impacted negatively on the financial viability of these communities, but it also threatened a discontinuity in the way that their communities operated. Bendigo’s strategy attends to this sense of discontinuity by offering a return to a more permanent sense of community and interpersonal loyalty. The small-business backgrounds of the management committee chairs and the majority of members of the management committees also inform employment practices generally within the community banks. The chairs of the management committees expected the branch managers to have the same level of commitment to running the local community bank branch that they had themselves to running their small businesses. This meant the local branch managers putting in very long hours, up to 100 hours a week in the initial start-up phase of the bank and 60–70-hour weeks once it was established. However, as the Manager of Coast Community Bank pointed out, managers did not have the potential to reap the same financial rewards as an owner of a small business might because of their status as salaried employees. All staff are employed by the local finance company on individual contracts. These individual agreements facilitate flexibility in hours of work and provide for increased managerial discretion. Wages are set locally and framed in terms of capacity-to-pay arguments. All the frontline service workers interviewed talked about working long hours for no extra pay. The chairs of the management committees were keen to recapture romantic notions of work and to downplay monetary reward and emphasize through a discourse of community service the intrinsic satisfaction of work. For example, the Chair of Shire Community Bank suggested, ‘probably when we become the number one community bank we will give them all [the customer service officers] a rose on the day’. Such a rosy-eyed view of work and reward (in both the literal and symbolic sense) was not shared by the workers in Shire Community Bank who had recently discovered their counterparts in another community bank were being paid more and had negotiated a pay increase for themselves. Recruitment across the community bank network also takes a smallbusiness approach. When recruiting for a new community bank, advertisements are placed in the local press only (that is, the small suburban newspapers). As Bendigo’s Recruitment Manager explained, advertising locally was part of a deliberate strategy to recruit ‘locals’ – ‘the local community feel [this] is very much what it is about’. He also noted that this local recruitment results in a particularly gendered staff profile across the community banks. In 2003, of the 87 managers employed across all 380

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of the community banks, only one was female; conversely, males held only 20 of the 335 customer service officer positions. While this reflects the gendered nature of retail banking work, the high number of female customer service officers is in part because many of the positions were parttime and this, coupled with working locally, suited women with children. A number of the female customer service officers with small children talked about the benefits of working close to home. Further, as independent franchises, the community banks can offer very limited promotional opportunities and are therefore less likely to appeal to younger, career-oriented people. Indeed, the Recruitment Manager explained that very few job applications were received from people under 25 years old. He believed this occurred because ‘the younger people have still got their careers in mind and to move into a single company they might see as a bit more of a deadend’. Further, he argued that people under 25 have only known the current banking system and are not disillusioned like older bank staff ‘who have known something different’. That ‘something different’ referred to a different concept of good customer service, one that had been built up over many years of working in retail banking. The customer service officers framed their preparedness to work long hours and to ‘go the extra mile’ for their customers around notions of service to the community and in this way their work took on features of voluntary service. This can be seen in the kind of service offered at one of the community banks, as described by the Customer Service Supervisor: We have one (customer) that basically is stuck at home and he can’t get out and he rings up every now and then and says,‘Can you bring me some money?’ and we take it up there to him and he signs the voucher and we bring it back . . . We have got another customer who has rung in and said,‘I can’t get in’, so I have just taken the money up. They are good customers and you like to do that for them. It is part of being in the community. Certainly, all the customer service officers interviewed for this research had been working in the retail banking industry for a long period of time, with only one having less than 10 years’ experience. Of the remainder, over half had more than 20 years’ experience in retail banking. Bendigo Bank’s Recruitment Manager indicated that customer service officers with longer careers in the retail banking sector have known ‘something different’ and bring to their role a different conceptualization of ‘good customer service’. His comments suggested that workers with long-term banking experience 381

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do in fact conceptualize ‘customer service’ in different ways from newer banking recruits. Bank workers with long-term experience had a different socialization into service provision. As a Coast Community Bank customer service officer with 25 years’ experience in the banking industry explained: I feel like I have done a full circle. It is more on personal customer service. We know the customers, we call them a lot more by name than you would in say a big bank, where it is just so busy and [because of] lack of staff you don’t provide the service you can give here. Bendigo’s discourse around the customer and customer service resonated with the ideal of ‘customer service’ that older and more experienced retail bank workers had developed over their working life. Commenting on her experience working for a large retail bank, one customer service officer observed: ‘There was a stage when I used to enjoy it, then I didn’t like it because it changed quite a lot from the old banking systems and then coming here was like back to the old ways.’All the customer service officers interviewed expressed satisfaction at being able to return to a form of customer service that they associated with their early careers in the industry. A number of the customer service officers also indicated that not having to achieve sales targets had removed a considerable degree of stress from their working day.As a customer service officer commented: ‘Working here is a lot more pleasant. You don’t have that stress behind you saying you have got to get so many sales. You don’t have that target pressure.’ All the customer service officers interviewed expressed appreciation that the kind of service they were being encouraged to provide at the community banks accorded with their ethic of service – an ethic of service that had been formed early in their careers in the banking industry, but one they believed their previous employer, large retail banks, had abandoned. In fact, the high level of commitment demonstrated towards their new employer, the community banks, was a legacy of the stark shift in management values encountered during their previous employment with the large retail banks. They had experienced first hand the practical implications of the move to systems-oriented service by the large retail banks, including the introduction of self-service technology and the emphasis on sales targets. For all of them this experience had been extremely negative, and all the customer service officers interviewed talked about the satisfaction they derive from having the time to get to know the customers and form relationships with them: to provide neighbourly, person-oriented service. They also appreciated the fact that the concept of customer service offered 382

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by Bendigo Bank is consonant with their own conceptualizations of ‘good customer service’. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Bendigo’s community bank model attends to three forms of loss. First, it attends to the physical loss of a bank branch facility and the negative impact this has on small-business people in the area. Second, it appeals to the loss of social capital that occurs because fellow citizens have less opportunity to engage in everyday business and social transactions (Putnam, 2000). Third, it attends to the loss of meaning and identification with work experienced by both the customer service officers and the managers of the local franchise operation (Strangleman, 2004). The community bank model attends to the first of these losses in a real sense by re-establishing a bank branch facility. It attends to the other two forms of loss through a nostalgic discourse that draws on the rhetoric of ‘community’. It does this by claiming to offer a return to an era of banking when management, workers and customers knew each other, and were not simply in a business relationship, but genuinely involved in each others’ lives – a time of ‘community’. Both the temporal and spatial dimensions of nostalgia are highlighted in the way that the discourse of community so cleverly evokes and attends to the sense of loss that is linked to notions of tradition and the past, and also to notions of place and belonging (Davis, 1979; Turner, 1987). Bendigo Bank’s discourse of community offers both local citizens and workers in the banks a sense of belonging to a locality, to a social group, to oneself (Turner, 1987; Putnam, 2000). Belonging relates to matters such as tradition and community, which contribute to our self-knowledge (Munro, 1998). Through a rhetoric of community, Bendigo has promoted an uncontested ideal that is powerfully attractive to those who feel that modern forms of interaction and interpersonal relations have left them isolated, both financially and personally (cf. Suttles, 1972; Putnam, 2000). ‘Community’ makes for an effective nostalgic discourse because it invokes notions of ‘moral certainty’, ‘genuine social relationships’ and ‘personal authenticity’ (Turner, 1987: 150–2). Of course, not every aspect of the community bank model draws on banking practices from the past. Indeed, there are aspects of the model that were not a feature of an earlier era of banking. Management of the franchised community banks is suffused with values of localism and the very modern workplace concept of flexibility. The employment practices of the community bank branches resemble those of small business rather than large bureaucratic banks. There is an 383

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expectation that staff will work long hours and that intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards will be valued. Frontline service staff are encouraged to take the time to form genuine relationships with customers and to see themselves as members of a local community. The idea that the customers and the workers in the banks are all part of the one community can be an effective way of ensuring that community bank staff are prepared to ‘go the extra mile’ in delivering service. Management at Bendigo has sought to harness the ethic of service developed early in the customer service officers’ banking careers and used the concept of community to strengthen their sense of moral authority as caring customer service workers. In this way, management has sought to ‘recapture a supposed lost enchantment in work, a wish to share and replicate a nostalgic vision of what work used to be like’ (Strangleman, 2004: 2). Certainly the workers in the community banks talked about a return to a past ethic of service and to a preferred sense of self. However, their commitment to past ways of delivering service should not been seen as a simple nostalgic response (Davis, 1979). The community bank workers bring to their service roles their own agency (Korczynski, 2002) and are able to be reflective about their work practices and are not entirely rosyeyed about the contract (including roses) on offer from their employer. Just as Strangleman (2004) found in his study of the railway workers, the nostalgia of the community bank workers was much more reflexive, and challenged the simple nostalgia (Davis, 1979) of management for an idealized form of work relations where intrinsic rewards outweigh extrinsic and community service encroaches on non-work time. Management’s customer relations strategy, which promotes the idea of the local branch manager as a community-minded small-business entrepreneur, resonates with the franchisees of the community banks because it allows them to construct themselves as the civic spirit of the community (Wright-Mills, 1951).We can see within the community banks the elements of 20th-century nostalgia identified by Putnam (2000: 287) that seeks ‘to recapture a time when public-spiritedness really did carry more value and when community really did work’. Even when the community bank is located in a suburb of a large metropolitan city, the emphasis is on the ability of small-business people to understand and act upon the needs of their local community. Local small-business people have taken an active role in re-establishing bank services in their town or suburb because of the negative impact of bank branch closures on their own businesses. Their role as operators of the franchise allows them to cast themselves in something of an heroic light and provides them with the sense of personal 384

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authenticity needed ‘to keep the wolf of insignificance from the door’ (Davis, 1979: 34). The evidence presented here suggests that the nostalgic images and identities promoted by Bendigo have been successful primarily because they draw, at least in part, on the lived experiences of retail bank workers and the franchisees who established the banks. The local residents who become franchisees of the banking service have suffered the material consequences of the closure of bank branches; the nostalgic image of a return to banking services of the past also offers the very real practical solution of offering a banking service. However, framing this as a return to the past allows these local small-business people to cast themselves as heroic, civicminded individuals who are offering their local community a return to ‘something’. These civic-minded individuals see themselves developing the social capital needed to grease the wheels of their communities (Putnam, 2000). The reason the community bank employees framed their work as a return to the past was because the nostalgic metaphor of ‘community’ resonated with their identity narratives as caring service workers As Brown and Humphreys (2002: 153) argue, ‘unless nostalgized memories are deemed authentic representations they will lack the credibility required in order for them to be successfully incorporated into coherent and plausible identity-narratives’. This article shows how nostalgia can be a positive emotion and used by management to create connections between customer service and human resource strategies that facilitate the delivery of ‘something’ (Ritzer, 2004). The evidence presented here suggests that the nostalgic images and metaphors employed by management have to be based, at least in part, on the personally lived experiences of employees and managers. Otherwise, rather than increasing a sense of belonging to one another, and to the organization, they may well serve to alienate employees and in turn customers, leading to an increased sense of ‘nothing’. Note 1. Pseudonyms have been given to the actual names of the community banks to protect the confidentiality of the customer service officers working in those branches.

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AQs [SMP1]Move if 1988.

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