Double-Bind Accountability Dilemmas: Impression Management and Accountability Strategies Used by Senior Banking Executives

This article considers issues of impression management and accountability in the context of the U.K. Banking Crisis Inquiry, which took place in February 2009. In this setting, the bankers’ public image was under serious threat and successful impression management depended on their ability to avoid being held responsible for the crisis. However, in attempting to mitigate or deny their own accountability, they generated a further set of a set of conflicting impression management tasks—specifically, a tension between moral or ethical integrity on the one hand and professional credibility on the other. This produced a quandary, which the authors have termed a double-bind accountability dilemma. The authors’ analysis examines instances of this double-bind accountability dilemma as it emerged in the bankers’ evidence and the strategies by which it was negotiated and managed.