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Nick Leeson and the Collapse of Barings Bank: Socio-Technical Networks and
the ‘Rogue Trader’
Ian Greener
Organization 2006; 13; 421
DOI: 10.1177/1350508406063491
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The story of the collapse of Barings Bank has become a case-study in the
risk financial institutions face from fraud (see, for example, Howells and
Bain, 1998: 292–93). It has also become a reference point against which
new cases of financial malfeasance are judged—asset traders who lose
large sums of money are described as the ‘new Nick Leeson’. Leeson
himself remains a popular media figure, appearing on quiz shows a
decade after the events from which he derives his fame.
This paper utilizes Callon’s ‘sociology of translation’ (see especially
Callon, 1986) to analyse the case of the collapse of Barings and Leeson’s
role within it. It does this in order to present a systematic analysis of the
case that develops Callon’s framework further by incorporating insights
from the work of Munro (1999) to extend the vocabulary of actor-network
terms to include two more concepts necessary to account for the disin-
tegration of a socio-technical network. The paper demonstrates how
existing accounts of the collapse of Barings are in themselves incomplete
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Notes
Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their excellent and helpful comments on
how the paper might be improved, to Professor Helga Drummond for her thoughts
on an earlier version of the paper, and to Sue Richardson for her suggestions on
how it might be written more clearly.
1 The ‘sociology of translation’ is one approach amongst many to the study of
actor-networks, but the terms ‘sociology of translation’ and ‘actor-network
theory’ will be used synonymously here.
References
Barnes, B. (1986) ‘On Authority and its Relation to Power’, in J. Law (ed.) Power,
Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, pp. 181–95. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
BBC (1996) £830,000,000 and the Fall of the House of Barings; 12 June.
Bloomfield, B. and Vurdubakis, T. (1999) ‘The Outer Limits: Monsters, Actor
Networks and the Writing of Displacement’, Organization 6: 625–48.
Board of Banking Supervision (1995) Inquiry into the Circumstances of the
Collapse of Barings Bank. London: Bank of England.
Brown, S. and Steenbeck, O. (2001) ‘Doubling: Nick Leeson’s Trading Strategy’,
Pacific-Basin Finance Journal 9: 83–99.
Callon, M. (1986) ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of
the Scallops and the Fisherman at St. Brieuc Bay’, in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action
and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, pp. 196–229. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Callon, M. (1991) ‘Techno-Economic Networks and Irreversibility’, in J. Law (ed.)
A Sociology of Monsters, Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, pp.
132–61. London: Routledge.
Callon, M., Law, J. (1982) ‘On Interests and their Transformation: Enrolment and
Counter-Enrolment’, Social Studies of Science 12: 615–25.
Clegg, S. (1989) Frameworks of Power. London: Sage
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Ian Greener is Senior Lecturer and Research Lead at the Centre for Public Policy and
Management at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. He has
published widely on public sector reform, and is especially interested in gaining
social-theoretical understandings of how organizations reproduce themselves or
collapse. Address: Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester,
Booth Street West, Manchester M15 6PB, UK. [email: ian.greener@mbs.ac.uk]
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