Corporate identity, company law and currency: a survey of community images on English banknotes

Victoria Barnes; Lucy Newton

doi:10.1080/17449359.2022.2078371

Corporate identity, company law and currency: a survey of community images on English banknotes

Victoria Barnes^*
, Lucy Newton

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

196 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Financial instruments are the subject of considerable interest. The supply of promissory notes has attracted the attention of financial historians, political economists and antiquarians, alike. We consider bank notes as a mechanism for building corporate identity. The article focuses on the bank notes that were issued in the early nineteenth century by newly established joint stock banks in the English provinces. Despite not having a legal personality, which could be separated from the bank’s owners, the banks did not use symbols of the owners, such as family crests or other personal means, to communicate their identity. The article shows that these notes displayed symbols of a collective culture and regional identity. We argue that this was crucial to building the bank’s position within the local commercial community and in generating a persona which customers could trust.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	43-75
Number of pages	33
Journal	Management and Organizational History
Volume	17
Issue number	1-2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2022.2078371
Publication status	Published - 10 Aug 2022
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We are grateful for the helpful comments of Jennifer Black, Chul Chung, Damian Clavel, Marcus V. A. B. De Matos, David Gindis, Jonathan Hardman, Victoria Hooton, Christina Lubinski, Helen Rutherford, Clare Sandford-Couch, Grigorij Tschernjawskyj and Sarah Wilson, and three anonymous reviewers. We thank the British Museum for their kind permission to use the images.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

advertising
Bank notes
banking
corporate identity
corporate personality
finance
money

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Business and International Management
History
Strategy and Management

Access to Document

10.1080/17449359.2022.2078371Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

Corporate identity, company law and currency: a survey of community images on English banknotes
Copyright 2022 the authors. This is an open access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits distribution and reproduction for non-commercial purposes, provided the author and source are cited.
Final published version, 9.83 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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title = "Corporate identity, company law and currency: a survey of community images on English banknotes",

abstract = "Financial instruments are the subject of considerable interest. The supply of promissory notes has attracted the attention of financial historians, political economists and antiquarians, alike. We consider bank notes as a mechanism for building corporate identity. The article focuses on the bank notes that were issued in the early nineteenth century by newly established joint stock banks in the English provinces. Despite not having a legal personality, which could be separated from the bank{\textquoteright}s owners, the banks did not use symbols of the owners, such as family crests or other personal means, to communicate their identity. The article shows that these notes displayed symbols of a collective culture and regional identity. We argue that this was crucial to building the bank{\textquoteright}s position within the local commercial community and in generating a persona which customers could trust.",

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Corporate identity, company law and currency: a survey of community images on English banknotes

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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