Mutual exchange and teamwork are key for financial analysts in their workplace: the qualified feedback of work colleagues and peers allows for rethinking and reassessing calculations, conclusions, and recommendations. This requires a shared language that facilitates in-depth discussions of each other's considerations, assessments, and text products. At the same time, this shared language acts as separator from other stakeholders as financial jargon is difficult to understand for persons with low financial literacy (e.g., OECD, 2020).
Analyzing the multiple factors that shape and influence the shared language of financial analysts, reveals three key drivers. First, the double-bind situation (Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 2011) in their work environment puts financial analysts in a difficult position as they can never fulfil the (contradictory) requirements, no matter what they do: they have to provide accurate forecasts of future developments with low visibility and at the same time, their performance (that impacts their payroll) is measured by exactly these forecasts. This led to the development of an industry-wide shared language of financial analysts that is characterized by strategic formulations, and hedging phrases. Second, the profound knowledge of the mechanisms, interdependencies, and decisive factors in the financial industry requires a specialized vocabulary for an accurate and unambiguous exchange amongst work colleagues and peers. Fiancial analysts are highly dependant on peers since they influence each other with their forecasts and they are compared with each other with reference to the consensus estimates. And third, experts as the financial analysts tend to assume that all stakeholders understand their shared language, used as a matter of course in their professional setting, whereas there actually is a need for intralingual expert-to-layperson translation for the target audience.
In my presentation, I first provide an overview of the working context of financial analysts (part 1), based on several transdisciplinary collaboration projects and on 25 years of ethnographic research in the field (part 2). From a theoretical perspective, I then analyze the key drivers of shared languages in this professional setting (part 3), and from a practical perspective, I discuss the key drivers' effects on the workplace and on the work of financial analysts (part 4). I conclude by showing how shared languages in financial analysis impact the communication within the industry and which implications result for society at large.
OECD. (2020). OECD/INFE 2020 international survey of adult financial literacy. Retrieved from www.oecd.org/financial/education/launchoftheoecdinfeglobalfinancialliteracysurveyreport.htm
Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H., & Jackson, D. D. (2011). Menschliche Kommunikation. Formen, Störungen, Paradoxien (12., unveränd. Aufl. ed.). Bern: Huber.
