Ceri Sullivan is a Reader in the
School of English at Bangor.
She was previously a chartered
accountant with KPMG,
a finance director with VSO
and an overseas accountant
with Oxfam. She is currently
trying very hard to relate
Weber’s idea of rational-legal
bureaucracy to the brute fact
that so many poets, novelists and
dramatists were also men of
affairs, and teaches modules which
hop between the two disciplines,
agitatedly.
Eben Muse is a Welsh Medium
Teaching Fellow in Bangor’s School of
Creative Studies and Media.
At the Research Institute for Enhancing
Learning at Bangor University,
he developed a variety of multimedia
learning technologies, including
Edisus, the GO Wales Reflective Diary
and the NeGES e-guidance system.
He’s now working on how digital media
facilitates a form of self – or communal
expression that is not limited by
the vocabulary of any one language,
and teaches modules in this area.
‘This isn’t business’, said Charles, tapping his book, ‘It’s not about buying and selling real commodities. It’s all on paper, or computer screens. It’s abstract. It has its own rather seductive jargon – arbitrageur, deferred futures, floating rates. It’s like literary theory’ (David Lodge, Nice Work).
The phrase ‘credit crunch’ makes what has recently happened in the financial markets seem rather laudable: an exercise to trim flab, so getting back to basic values. Yet the trimmings are largely not coming off where they’ve been laid down. They are coming off social services which taxes should fund. Frankly, the City has never been so much in need of creative thought which is both imaginative and sceptical.
The English Subject Centre funded us to see how English graduates used their skills as literary analysts when working in finance.
We interviewed 16 English graduates, now at senior and junior positions in accounting (both public and private sector), investment, project or systems management, tax advice and merchant banking.
Most interlocutors distinguished between skills encouraged by the humanities and those raised by English alone. Key among the former were:
• rapid reading and assimilation of large volumes of text
• robust analytical and evidential skills
• debating skills
• self-starting and independence
Typical comments were:
Economics and business degrees tend to produce graduates who rely on rigid models, whereas humanities teach an enthusiastic humility before new ideas, which are then assessed on their own merits.
There were some crossovers between my studies of literature and philosophy which the bank benefits from, particularly a sort of science of argument, a sense of what patterns are emerging for analysis and an interest in human identity.
My employer [in a large manufacturing company] made it difficult to get through the recruitment system, but I think they were losing out. I think they should have had more of a mix. Getting business graduates is useful because they hit the ground running when they first come in.
But their perceptions, once they are in, can be very limited. I think it helps to have some people with more exotic degrees, whether it’s English or classics or history. Otherwise, they start running down tram-lines and being very procedural.
Specifically, however, interlocutors felt that graduates in English – as opposed to other humanities subjects – excelled at:
• Taking a diversity of approaches to a problem. They were experienced at discerning layers of meaning in literary texts, could keep the text’s diversity alive, were prepared to keep an open mind and even allow fuzzy logic as the structure unfolded – basically, they enjoyed originality and complexity. This quality is inherent both in the literary text itself and in the way the discipline approaches that text: ‘find a new angle’, ‘be interesting’.
• Presenting a narrative about this new angle, which was both exact and persuasive. This was made up of three elements: taking the right tone for the audience concerned; drawing out analogies and themes; presenting the results with engagement and energy.
Typical comments were:
Financial management isn’t all about numbers. It’s much too important to be all about numbers. It’s at least as much about words. Things are becoming more legally based, and that’s the area where English graduates are strong. I suspect that if we were having this conversation with me as a lawyer, rather than as a tax expert, there’d be a lot more English graduates in my profession – but it is changing.
Fiction works easily with a ‘what if’ scenario, which is essential in strategic planning.
Learning to read poetry closely was particularly helpful in learning to read a document alertly – it was one of the few occasions when it was considered sensible to spend time on an intense analysis of style.
I enjoyed entering different worlds, finding out about individuals’ lives, learning about the past, contextualising the novels. This is still at the core of what I do as a manager – what gets called emotional intelligence now – taking a balanced view that respects other people’s positions.
The further up the bank you go, the more rhetorical and left-of-field responses are appreciated, and the more you have to think in terms of unravelling codes and uncovering secrets, of moving between visualised layers of meaning – say in a merger and acquisition situation. Going straight to the numbers misses the narrative.
I tell stories about numbers, especially to engineers. In a contract, the definitions tell the story before the contract itself begins, and remembering this helps to get the whole picture rather than being stuck in detail. If I use analogies, a storyline and some characters, I can get a meeting to approve a project of over a hundred million pounds.
English can encourage a combative rather than judicious attitude, which is unhelpful in team terms – although at least it ensures a range of ideas are considered.
E-mails sent overseas especially benefit from me being sensitive to how to say what to whom, given we deal with different cultures.
I often use literary examples and quotations: the City is a combination of a business and an entertainments industry, with clever people who need to be entertained if they’ve got to read a hundred pages.
Respondents felt that these two features – open-minded innovation and narrative skills – are particularly important to financial work because:
• Firms are founded on keeping ahead of the market. Innovation is key to success. Even in the case of the public services, resource constraint must be overcome imaginatively – particularly in a credit crunch.
• Financial narratives depend on verbal explication to be taken up. This becomes ever more the case with increasing seniority, where risky and significant decisions must be made.
Typical comments were:
You’re only as good as your next idea. Innovation is an institutional demand.
Business is inherently creative: the transfer of a concept into some sort of reality through legal or numerical expression. Taking an idea and making it real, actually achieving it, requires creativity. You are looking forward and can’t be certain about what impact it might have – economic, legal, human resources – you are creating a scenario about all this, and a methodology to get somewhere with it.
The mode of teaching in English affected these interviewees as much as the subject of literature. Almost all felt that independent study encouraged sustained and deep attention to difficult texts. Small group discussion, where your opinions could be heard and challenged, encouraged keeping options open, risk taking, winging it in speech. The two together produced a flexible and open-minded approach. A few commended lectures for exploring new ideas or research by the lecturer. None, however, felt that large classes were useful, either for listening to new ideas by others or trying out one’s own ideas.
Typical comments were:
Tutorials taught me to shape arguments; colleagues who don’t have this training in coherence get told by clients and managers: ‘I sort of see what you are saying, but you just haven’t said it’.
Tutorials were a ‘fire … ready ... aim’ situation, which encouraged rapid, although not necessarily original, thinking. It took three years to build up enough context to substantiate the positions I took up at first!
Small classes gave you the opportunity to speak up, to be controversial, to stand up for what you said, to listen to what other people said, to change your mind, and things like this. That was incredibly useful, because it was being done in a safe environment, and you could be wrong, and nobody was going to be terribly upset if you were wrong. Even now, I need to be a devil’s advocate on occasion; if somebody presents something to me I need to give it a jolly good kicking to see that it works.
However, many respondents said that acting on good ideas is even more important than talking about them. The words ‘do-able’, ‘accepted’, ‘get a result’ and ‘act on it’ were echoed when people considered what was seen as creative. The academic environment was critiqued by the business community for assuming that talking about an action is just as good as doing it. This may be a stereotype of dons – but the respondents find it rings true.
Typical comments were:
City space requires meetings demand a rapid and panoramic, but not a deep, grasp of ideas and situations – however, if you can convince people about the intellectual merit of something, then they’ll get up and do something about it.
Good ideas are those that get a result, which are responded to (there’s no such thing as a good idea per se), and these come from instinct (a nose for trade) and rigour in analysis (including reading round the subject).
In the firm, there’s a purpose to all the debate, a drive to give a solution, to move into action, to complete a project, which thrills me.
Most people were up-front about the relatively high salary. They also enjoyed the high status of being financial experts. Both the excellent training schemes and the constant requirement to work at the very top of their ability inspired interviewees. They felt they were achieving real results, supporting and changing society. The idea of understanding a major sector of the economy, and – still more – affecting it by their actions, was deeply attractive. Their pride in joining an intellectual elite and making a difference was evident throughout.
Yet English, a few interviewees added sardonically, was not taken seriously by some employers – even though they relied on the high-level communication skills developed by an English degree.
Typical comments were:
I would like to see more educated and female entrants in finance. I’d tell them that it is a challenging environment in which you have to prove yourself, and so grow at a rapid rate; it diversifies your CV; employers take financial experience seriously.
It was amusing to see the surprise of the economics and business BAs on the graduate programme when I passed the qualifying exams. You could see them wondering if a literary person could really be that numerate.
Money is one of the resources that underpins what you do with your life. As such, it is too important to be ignored, or left to the amateurs. It needs imaginative people to make good and cogent decisions. That side of perceiving the world which comes from literature still has a place – business is too important to be left to people who can do no more than do the sums. Making and using money properly is a responsibility.
One interviewee said, ‘you can tell the arts graduates in my company: they dress and carry themselves with a bit more flamboyance‘. As a subject, we’ve let ourselves decline into the ornamental far too easily. We have to show that we are not about sighing appreciatively over lovely, lovely prose, or about walking down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in our medieval hands.
We’ve got to be more bruising when the topic of resources comes up: no, we cannot teach a range of understandings without a decent library allocation; no, we cannot model interactive, creative discourse without groups small enough to let people speak; no, we are not there to mop up students who think they ought to get a degree, but don’t love reading.
Conversely, if we are all serious about the knowledge economy – if we are all behind the idea that soft skills power innovation as much as technical skills – then we all need to champion the specific excellences the English degree trains up. Soft skills, here, are not the worthy but unexciting ones of note-taking and timetabling. They are the specific ones produced by literary study: encouraging diversity in opinions, imaginative apprehension of ‘what if’ scenarios and rigour in interrogating each position.
Thus, English departments must, in all cases
• Value small group teaching and individual approaches. There is a move to reify English’s subject matter, to standardise it, and to teach in large groups. Resist this, passionately.
• Make students aware in our teaching (not just in careers advice sessions) that how they learn to think now affects what sort of job they can get, and how well they will do it.
And, if they want to interact with the largest sector in the British economy – even now – departments could also:
• Offer modules that look at how the financial world uses fictions and is, in its turn, represented.
• Understand the range of knowledge transfer grants that allow staff to approach companies to share research – and go find the companies that need that expertise. They will be delighted.
