In February, a group of bank employees spread out across the London School of Economics’ campus to quietly observe the behaviour of students and academics. They watched them in the park, library and coffee shops as an exercise in ethnography, a practice usually associated with studying the behaviour and customs of remote tribes.

They were on a course being run by the LSE and the Banking Standards Board. Their aim: to discover what lessons from ethnography can be applied to help change the culture in their firms. Dr Daniel Beunza, assistant professor of management at the LSE, said participants came back with “fantastic accounts of behaviour they had observed”.