File(s) under permanent embargo
Reason: This item is currently closed access.
Chasing the phantom of a 'global end game': The role of management consultancy in the narratives of pre-failure ABN AMRO
chapter
posted on 2019-02-08, 09:47 authored by Michiel Van Meeteren, David BassensOn 10 October 2007, even before the smouldering global financial crisis erupted in earnest, the curtain
fell for the Dutch bank ABN AMRO. After a protracted hedge fund-initiated takeover battle, the bank
was split up and sold to Banco Santander, Fortis, and the Royal Bank of Scotland at a record high of
seventy-two billion Euros. Less than a year later, on 3 October 2008, the financial crisis fully hit
continental Europe and the Dutch government bailed out the part of ABN AMRO that was sold to
Fortis. In the aftermath of the takeover a wide consensus emerged that this was the inevitable fate of
an underperforming company in a financialized global economy (Financieele Dagblad 2007): ABN
AMRO had played 'the global endgame' and had lost (Smit 2008). This chapter sets out to explain how
and why procyclical corporate mechanisms associated with 'global endgame' discourse, such as the
radical reorganization of the bank to the purpose of shareholder value creation, that sealed the banks'
fate took root at the bank. More specifically, the chapter enquires into the scope of the agency of ABN
AMRO’s management as it was leading a 'second tier' bank from a 'second tier' global city in decline
—i.e. Amsterdam— during the late-1990s and early-2000s (Engelen 2007; Faulconbridge et al. 2007;
Fernandez 2011; Larson et al. 2011)......
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
Global City Makers: Economic Actors and Practices in the World City NetworkPages
170 - 191 (21)Citation
VAN MEETEREN, M. and BASSENS, D., 2019. Chasing the phantom of a 'global end game': The role of management consultancy in the narratives of pre-failure ABN AMRO. IN: Hoyler, M., Parnreiter, C. and Watson, A. (eds). Global City Makers: Economic Actors and Practices in the World City Network. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 170 - 191.Publisher
Edward Elgar Publishing © Michael Hoyler, Christof Parnreiter and Allan WatsonVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2019Notes
This book chapter is closed access.ISBN
9781785368943;9781785368950Publisher version
Language
- en