The world of our informants was oriented toward action, toward bringing in and executing deals. In order to accomplish these actions, resources were central. Bankers at both banks recognized and used people, objects, and psychological processes as potential resources for accomplishing deal-related actions. Individual and Organization Bankers differed, however, in the types of resources they found important and in how they combined resources. Chapters 2 and 3 described the core differences, showing how Individual Bankers oriented more toward abstract conceptions of themselves and toward decontextualized guidelines for action, while Organization Bankers oriented relatively more toward human and nonhuman resources in the organization and toward properties of specific situations. This chapter and the next describe how the two banks socialized junior bankers into these different orientations. We show how Individual Bankers and Organization Bankers became different kinds of people over their first two years as they worked in these very different environments.

This chapter describes how Individual Bank's work practices socialized bankers into what we called in Chapter 1 a distinct type of involvement. Individual Bank's identity-induced involvement encouraged bankers to use their own identities and abstract concepts that they had accumulated as resources for action. Individual Bankers' actions were mediated by these abstract concepts and scripts. Organization Bank, in contrast, forced bankers to abandon such abstract concepts and to attend to specific situations. This created direct involvement in which bankers brought together resources tailored to a specific situation without letting abstract categories intervene.