‘City of London, City of Learning’? Placing Business Education within the Geographies of Finance

The role of highly skilled financiers in shaping the spatialities of financial systems has been widely studied by social scientists. However, comparatively less attention has been paid to the growing use of business education to (re)produce 'highly skilled' financiers throughout the career life-course. In response, in this article, we adopt a cultural economy approach to report on the use of business education by investment banks operating in London's; financial district. Whilst business education in general and MBA degrees in particular are often claimed to facilitate globally mobile economic elites, we argue that the assembling of financial expertise through business education also serves to territorially and societally embed financiers into particular regulatory regimes and organizational cultures. As a result, we suggest that business education represents an important, yet hitherto neglected, set of activities in understanding the continued geographical and organizational heterogeneity of elite financial labour markets. In so doing, we argue that a focus on financial business education demonstrates the value of cultural economy approaches to financial geography and research into the variegated nature of finance capitalism more generally