Imagined communities
A socially constructed community based on a strong sense of group identity and group acceptance, created and imagined by people who perceive themselves to be part of that group. By processes of inclusion and exclusion, the group consciousness is formed through a separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Responsible banks want to understand vulnerable customers. This can be hard when vulnerable customers are merely an imagined community, distant from those working in the bank creating services.
Research commissioned by a large UK bank into vulnerability expected to find a bounded group of people with definable attributes. Instead, what our ethnographic research uncovered is that while there are indeed people who are vulnerable (through poverty or illness), vulnerable customers are not an easily defined group of customers that are different. Rather, vulnerability can be a fluid state of which people move in and out according to circumstance, for example, life crises, such as bereavement, divorce or illness.