While in search for the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the recent financial crisis, we realise that an association of ICTs with crises in the finance sector is not something new. Back in the banking crisis of the early 1990s, however, when industry commentators were speaking of “the most serious bank crisis since the Great Depression” (Furash, 1993) and the “decline of banking” (Wheelock, 1993), ICTs featured as a response to the crisis, as something that would help banks get out of it.
Indeed, successive deregulation processes in the 1980s and early 1990s have made banks less unique as a distinctive type of institution defining a whole industry by allowing non-financial institutions to enter the competitive arena. In the words of Ed Furash, although banking still plays an essential role in the modern economy, banks are not. This segmentation of the market for financial services has dramatically increased the competition which banks had to face.
The response of the banking industry to this crisis was directed towards reorganisation efforts (including mergers and acquisitions) and reorientation of marketing strategies. In such efforts ICTs had a central role. To this extend and intensity, therefore, ICT-led organizational and business restructuring efforts became a global phenomenon in banking. Suppliers of ICTs on the other hand did not remain aloof. IT companies all over the world seized this opportunity for profit and through mechanisms and forces of globalization and subsequent reorientation of their own marketing strategies, they have contributed to the emergence of a global supply of technological solutions as a response to the banking crisis. The result of the above changes is the emergence of a global supply-use chain, a cycle of development, distribution, implementation and use of technological solutions, accompanied by visions and promises for business success and a better future.
The broad socio-economic environment that emerged from the commoditization and marketisation of ICT-enabled organizational change, which is populated by multiple networks of actors, is analytically captured by the original concept of “Agora of Techno-Organisational Change”. Empirical evidence from the Greek banking and ICT-supply industries reveals the challenges that different actors face within the Agora and the different ways in which they engage it.
Antonis Kaniadakis studied Sociology in Greece and Canada and holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Edinburgh. Research interests include: social studies of technology and organization, information technology marketplace, social studies of finance, e-procurement, digital games.
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