I had a good laugh at last week's blog by my colleague Jason Toynbee – especially his recommendation that young city traders might be issued with ASBOs in order to stop them causing any further economic damage. Now, given the recently exposed activities of Jerome Kerviel – the French junior trader whose fraudulent transactions appear to have cost his employer Societe Generale around £4 billion – some might suggest even stronger measures are necessary.

Photograph taken by rednuht. Used under Creative Commons license.

While Kerviel's story is making good copy, one problem I have with the press coverage is the depiction of him as a singular and pathological 'rogue trader'. Newspaper reports have tried to account for Kerviel's alleged actions largely by portraying him as a one-off, deviant or 'flawed' personality. Thus we learn that Kerviel was a social introvert whose 'shyness' and 'quiet demeanour' marked him as 'different' to his colleagues. The fact that he was 'never seen with a woman, or a man, always alone' is offered up to signify some (as yet unspecified) psychological problems or personality defects. Bank officials have gone further, and have been quick to identify the previously anonymous Kerviel as a manifestly 'troubled man' with an acknowledged 'fragile mental state', while nameless colleagues have also been moved to label him a 'solitary' figure who may or may not have lived in some kind of 'fantasy world'. Well, OK, perhaps he did – but to me it all sounds pretty ordinary so far. Indeed, the fact that Kerviel 'didn't chat to neighbours', or 'rarely took holidays', hardly marks him out as unusual - sounds like most people with a stressful job.

The aim of all this press-talk is clear; first to shore up belief in the idea that only isolated, 'rogue' individuals commit financial crime (a claim not borne out by any evidence), and, more specifically, to provide SocGen managers, employees and, indeed, the financial industry as a whole, the opportunity to distance themselves from Kerviel, deflecting attention from their own potential culpability in the architecture of this scandal. Indeed, it is arguable here that the media are helping to individualise what is in essence a structural and systemic problem. So I would like to read more about how we have created a financial industry where corporate frauds have become more widespread (if not endemic), that actively encourages and rewards excessive, often reckless, risk-taking, that glamorises individuality in the context of an aggressively masculine culture of deal-breaking and profit-making, that pushes workers to extraordinary limits to achieve targets (but will deride or discard anyone unable to maintain these capriciously applied but ever-increasing standards) and that is widely perceived to lack the moral probity required to ensure effective application of regulatory controls. In fact, it is financial institutions themselves, in slavish adherence to market principles, that create the conditions under which 'rogue' trading can occur – and so can hardly wash their hands of any responsibility when frauds arise. I read recently that Professor Roger Steare of the Cass Business School found that financial services executives subjected to ' integrity tests' tended to 'score lower than average in honesty, loyalty and self-discipline' – a worrying trend but one I think perhaps best explained not by individual pathology but by the ethical deficit contained within the system as a whole; it seems to me that these 'rogue' traders are not born - they're made.

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

As share prices tumble across the world the pressing question must be, why? Why should there be a 5.5% collapse in value in the space of a single ‘Black Monday’ in the City? The answers are complex of course, and the subject of intense debate. According to one position, catastrophic falls are simply an adjustment (if an extreme one) in a market system that, above all, works. The occasional crisis is simply the price to be paid for a competitive economic regime which is naturally efficient and has produced long term growth and prosperity.

At the other, critical, end of the spectrum is an explanation which poses financial crises and full blown recession as endemic. On this view capitalism is contradictory and destructive at its very core, depending as it does on inequality, insecurity and the arbitrary impoverishment of millions of people in times of crisis. Organising economic affairs on the basis of systematic greed, it might reasonably be said, is a recipe for disaster. For what it’s worth I tend to agree with this second position.

Whatever kind of economic analysis is used, though, it’s significant that these explanations remain just that – economic. I think this is too narrow a framework. For one thing, it doesn’t say anything about the immediate subjective factors that trigger a financial crash, make it persist or indeed come to an end. What matters here is what’s going in the minds of financial traders, how they feel as buyers and sellers of stocks and shares. Indeed, during a financial crisis it suddenly becomes clear that the whole system depends on confidence. And when that disappears traders simply follow one another downwards in a circle of fear and uncertainty. ‘Sell! Sell! Sell! ‘ they yell.

Media studies can shed light on this phenomenon. At the turn of the 1960s Stanley Cohen suggested that in portraying the seaside street battles of British youth – the mods and rockers – the media came to represent them as ‘folk devils’. This produced a ‘moral panic’ in society at large, to which the media responded by going further in its representation of bad behaviour. Soon the youth themselves were playing up to the images in the press and television. Cohen called this process, the ‘media amplification spiral’.

Something similar is surely at work among City dealers who not only watch colleagues around them, but see media reports on the activities of fellow wheelers and dealers across the world. Sure enough, on BBC news last night I watched a designer-suited and booted gaggle emerging from their offices at dusk. So young, so angry, so frightened – this could have been a group of mods on the run at Margate, Bank Holiday, 1964. In fact I was witnessing quite a different kind of youth subculture, one whose fear and anxiety is focused on share prices and the state of their performance related bonuses. Today, as the descent continued I couldn’t help thinking that Cohen’s model fits all too well.

What to do? The new standard method for dealing with wayward youth is of course the ASBO. Which prompts the thought: might not capitalism be reformed by means of an anti-social behaviour order? Why can’t we slap one on those boy-traders – keep them at home till all the financial foolishness blows over.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

It’s an interesting prospect that the next American president could be the son of an African man (and a white woman) who went to a majority-Muslim school as a boy. But to what extent is the candidacy of Barack Hussein Obama really related to this individual man, to his policies or skills as a legislator or thinker? Will his identity as an African-American prove to be the most important factor for his success or failure as the Democrat candidate, whether or not he uses it to manipulate popular perception?

What got me thinking about the possible meanings of ‘Obama’ was the entry of media tycoon and daytime Queen of the air Oprah Winfrey into Obama’s campaign at the end of last year. I wondered then how the personas of the ‘two Os’ could together alter the fortunes of the Obama campaign. I also wondered how her television fan base overlaps  with the political demographic that is so crucial for Obama. At their first rally together in South Carolina on December 8th, Obama drew attention to the unique nature of the event, given their ethnic origins: ‘Me being here is so unlikely…Just like Oprah being where she is so unlikely’. They were able to deploy the public personas they had already constructed through opening up their personal lives to the public – for Obama this was in two memoirs written before he was even a senator. They appealed directly to the state’s demographic (African Americans make up nearly half of all Democratic voters in this traditionally republican-voting state), peppering their speeches with ‘y’all’ and ‘you folks’. After making several references to church attendance, beauty parlours and God, Obama then danced to a Stevie Wonder song and invoked Martin Luther King: “But I’m not in this race because of the odds. I’m in it because of the ‘fierce urgency of now’’.

Photograph taken by Joe Crimmings. Used under Creative Commons license.

7.6 million viewers watch Ophrah's show a day. Will her endorsement of Obama be one of his greatest assets? Perhaps it will serve to further racialise Obama’s image, and then we have to assess if that will help or hinder him.  Whether Oprah's popularity will translate into votes for Obama in the state’s Jan. 26 primary is an open question, but it does seem the case that Winfrey’s popularity has got him out of the starting blocks pretty quickly, allowing him to tap a swathe of hitherto disinterested or disaffected black voters. Oprah's tour came as Obama had cut into Hillary Clinton’s support among female voters in some states and the opinion of US pollsters does seem to be that Winfrey could help Obama draw more middle-aged and older women, the core of Winfrey’s talk show viewership. For the key to any endorsement by celebrities is to win people over who are not already in your camp. Women account for more than half of the state’s black Democratic vote. So if her support makes a difference, it is likely to be amongst women, also considered a crucial part of Clinton’s base in early voting states. But black female voters are also prime target for the primaries in southern states, hence Winfrey’s mention of the large number of beauty parlours in South Carolina. She said, ‘We love to keep our hair done, don’t we?’ She added, ‘I know what it means to come from the South,’ a reference to her childhood in Mississippi. One middle-aged black woman interviewed after the rally said to a journalist that she admired Oprah and Obama because ‘they’re both self-made, positive African Americans’.

I think Obama is an ambiguous character; he both uses and doesn’t use his ethnic identity. He has, no doubt, very little choice in this. I think he has to capitalise on this ambiguity, as Ophrah has so successfully done. Of course it's inevitable that he’s accused of ‘acting like he’s white’ by radical blacks. Also inevitable is the danger of democrats voting for Hillary Clinton because they don’t believe a black man can win the presidency – a kind of disingenuous projection of racism onto others that makes you think of a favourite children’s joke: ‘whoever smelt it, dealt it!’ Just as important, though, is the problem of class. In the US it's common to speak in coded terms of ‘beer track’ and ‘wine track’ candidates. Obama’s biggest problem could be that he’s regarded as a brainy 'wine track' liberal and thus may lose out to a rival, Clinton, whose support is firmly rooted in the blue-collar, non-college degree communities. This seems to have been the case in the New Hampshire primary of Jan 8th.

Obama’s credibility and popularity with the electorate as a whole will I think rest on him being an African-American in a country founded on slavery who plays down the destructive aspect of racial divisiveness - he is indeed a 'positive', 'post-racial' African-American. Although he is young and relatively inexperienced compared to Clinton, you could argue he is indeed more 'urgent'. And that's because, as Andrew Sullivan has recently argued in the US magazine Atlantic Monthly, he may be able to bridge the fissures that threaten American culture, represented by the great divide between white secular-minded liberals and neo-conservative religious fundamentalists. Can he hold a mirror up to America in which it sees itself in multi-ethnic unity? However, to successfully attract the black vote in order to achieve the Democratic nomination is one thing; he also must successfully represent the economically marginalised and socially conservative voters across the US. Perhaps this is an even bigger challenge.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

The ongoing Test Cricket row between India and Australia over the issue of racist insults claimed to have been delivered by the bowler Harbhajan Singh to all-rounder Andrew Symonds, has led to to massive media coverage. It has resulted in all sorts of responses, including the idea that racism is the preserve of particular people. One commentator even suggested this could not be about racism because the parties involved were black and Indian. It has also raised again the excesses of  the practice of 'sledging', which originated among Australian cricketers, havng been more or less invented by Steve Waugh, the Australian captain, to provoke opponents and unsettle them through what became uncontained, if supposedly humorous, insults. Waugh was largely able to contain them, but recently the practice has been seen as getting out of hand. Maybe on this occasion 'sledging' has been brought into the debate about racism, because it is a black, Australian cricketer (born in Birmingham, UK to parents, one of whom had African Caribbean links) who is accusing an Indian player of racist language and insulting behaviour, but, nonetheless there is an uneasy tension betwen what might constitute so-called 'banter' and abuse in the media discussion.

At other times 'sledging' has been seen as 'part of the game', as English bowler Monty Panesar suggested in the England Test Tour of Australia in 2006/7. I interviewed Panesar, electronically, as part of my research on the Sport Across Diasporas for the AHRC funded project, Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service. I asked him if 'sledging' had ever had racist components. It is telling that his response was to say that whilst 'on the majority of occasions, the expression is used in the playing of the game, there may be occasions where racism comes into play, but I haven't had experience'. Sledging has taken a perilous path and an interrogation of its meanings and limitation of its excesses are overdue, but, nonetheless, as Panesar says, racism is not so obscure and its meanings are all too identifiable.

What such incidents have shown is both the ubiquity of racialization, which includes racism, and how circuitous its routes and manifestations can be. Racism is a part of sport where there is sadly nothing new about the claim that abuse, of any sort, is not really vicious in intent, but  'just a joke', in order to mask its meanings. However, whilst sports media coverage has centred on individuals, these incidents highlight the wider social field in which racism and other forms of abuse persist and demonstrates that sport can include practices that are definitely 'not cricket'.

About the author

Kath Woodward is senior lecturer in sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

2007 was an extraordinary year in the life of the issue of climate change. It moved to the top of political, business and media agendas, with the bandwagon full to bursting by year end. Over the last decade or so I’ve spent a good chunk of my time advising media people on climate change, and the year end had me sharpening my pencil to draft some new year resolutions, including how I might stand back from this work a little more and make a more effective contribution to improving media performance.

Photograph by openDemocracy. Used under Creative Commons License.

Why a need for a new year’s resolution? Well I think all of us – both the media and the people who feed them with material and advice – have been underperforming. While news and factual media have done a pretty good job of communicating the basic facts of science and policy debates, and – crucially – have almost all moved on from portraying climate science as an ‘is it or isn’t it happening?’ story I feel there are some deep failings that need to be addressed.

I’ve got two immediate targets. The first is to ‘fill in the gaps’. Most coverage of climate change generates impossible leaps of scale that shift within a sentence from distant global processes of cause and effect that are very difficult to make sense of within daily life to a rapid distribution of responsibility to individuals and households. So a first resolution for 2008 is to work harder to encourage media people to reveal the layered responsibilities for action on climate change that live not with the householder but with, for example, the cabinet minister, the designer, the advertising executive and the energy supplier.

If we put half the effort that currently goes into getting householders to ‘do their bit’ into asking difficult questions of some of these folks then we could start dismantling and redesigning our carbon based economy pretty quickly. Mostly this has been told as a bad news story - of restricting choices and cutting down on things. But quite a few of us have been saying this for years, so why haven’t they listened? One of the reasons is that our arguments have been so grim and self-denying. So I want to spend more time pressing for a different way of approaching climate change politics.

This is reflected in the title of a book I’ve co-edited, due out at the end of this month entitled: ‘Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?’ Contributors include: Anita Roddick, A C Grayling, David Cameron, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hilary Benn, John Bird, Kevin McCloud, Oliver James, Philip Pullman and Rosie Boycott. Royalties go back into the Interdependence Day project that the book springs from. By the way the answer we collectively offer to the question in the title is a resounding ‘no’!

Second resolution: I want to convince more media people that we need to do some hard ‘cultural work’ on climate change. We underestimate the extent to which this issue reframes not just the way we think about science, energy or ‘waste’ but revises the way we think of our place in the world. With knowledge of climate change we have to recognise our place as ‘in and of nature’ not separate from it. Climate change science shows how the aggregate of individual actions reshapes the global atmosphere, and that knowledge demands that we reframe our ethics and politics. It presses us to revise the ‘who, what, where and when’ of responsibility. But that work can’t go on in the seminar room alone – it has to be part of our living culture.

That is why I’ve been excited by talking and working with artists, drama and comedy people over the last year. They are in a good position to move climate change on from being about distant science and policy and start bringing it into daily life and conversation. There’s plenty to keep us all busy in 2008.

About the author

Joe Smith is Lecturer in Environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. Joe has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

There she was. The democratic candidate Hillary Clinton with tears in her eyes speaking about her ‘frustrations’ about how she keeps it all together. It was prompted by a question during an event and was featured and commented upon widely in all media. It is difficult to know whether she became 'emotional' because she was now trailing Obama or the campaign pressure caught up with her. Either way, barely 24 hours after this display of emotion, against predictions, she emerged as the unlikely victor in New Hampshire. It is impossible to know the effect of the tears in her eyes on this outcome. But I wouldn't underestimate it.

Are we witnessing a moment in history when the place of emotion in politics (and public life) is taking the centre stage? More broadly, are we witnessing the emergence of a new image of 'being political' (used to be called ‘man’) who is not only 'rational' but also 'emotional'? The signs of these shifts are everywhere. It is almost as if we are back in the seventeenth century and the battle between what was then called 'reason' versus 'passion' is being waged again though the outcome is by no means certain. Throughout that century a new image of being political emerged where 'his' reasons triumphed over 'his' passions. This image dominated public life since then and what it means to appear in public always carried with it a strong element of being reasonable (as opposed to passionate) and rational (as opposed to emotional). In fact, this was one of the main arguments against including women in politics until the twentieth century: women ostensibly represented the irrational and passionate aspects of being human and such qualities did not belong in public space. Reading arguments by mostly male thinkers against the suffragette movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I am struck by how much emphasis was placed on women as e‘motional beings and how they were incapable of sound judgement in political affairs.

TImes have changed. First, of course, as the suffragettes had claimed, women proved themselves perfectly capable of sound judgement in political affairs, if not, in fact, more so than men. Throughout the twentieth century women have occupied significant political and public positions. As studies repeatedly show, the male world still dominates but it is no longer the same. Yet, it can be, and as many have said, women have occupied these positions by mostly acting in the image of man: rational, reasonable, calculative and instrumental. It was a survival strategy in a man'’s world. ’ Then, in the second part of the twentieth century, women began conducting themselves in public as ‘women’. (In the social sciences this was interpreted as a change from a politics of identity to a politics of difference.) With this interpretation, however, we risk fixing definitions of ‘'man' and 'w‘oman' and associating them with specific qualities: men with rationality and women with emotion. That’ is precisely why in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries many have approached such identities with flexible and fluid meaning rather than thinking that masculinity was lodged in the male body and femininity was lodged in the female body. (In the social sciences this was seen as the birth of cultural politics as opposed to politics of identity or of difference.)

The tears in Hillary Clinton’ eyes may well be one of those moments where such changes are crystallized. I have not encountered a comment by Obama on her tears but John Edwards, the third running candidate, did imply that it showed she is not capable of leadership: "I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business." I guess that's why Edwards is not in serious contention since he is clearly not reading the politics of affect that surrounds him. The remarkable aspect of the success of Clinton against Obama in New Hampshire is that that rare display of emotion may well have finally countered what many are attracted to Obama for: passion and emotion. I suggest that only when Hillary Clinton departed from the script that often constituted her as the reasonable and experienced leader and displayed that she was involved in politics emotionally that she was able to mount a challenge to Obama's passionate politics. Now was this strategic? If one means by strategy intentional action, I would wager that it certainly was not strategic. But if one means by strategy an intuitive orientation toward that which works, I would think that Hillary's tears in her eyes were strategic.  

I don't mean to suggest that emotion has now become legitimate strategy (in both senses) in politics under all circumstances or that women's’ entry into politics has brought about this change. There are many signs that indicate the image of being political now includes being emotional and many signs that men as well as women are caught in the production of this image. How this image affects the politics of our times is a broad issue that requires investigation.

About the author

Engin F. Isin is professor in Politics and International Studies and director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.