The purpose of this paper is to discuss firm narrative strategies mainly through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, as well as his notions of field and capital. It looks at the Morgan firm narrative strategies employed during the 1912 Pujo money trust investigation and the 1933 Pecora Commission’s hearings in the wake of Wall Street Crash of 1929.  Although more than twenty years apart, on both these occasions, the firm representatives refer to a discourse of codes, customs and traditions that had been carefully constructed and reconstructed, remembered and perpetuated, in the Morgan firm and family, as well as in private banking of that time in general. The paper also addresses how firm history may affect strategy formation in firms’ present and future practice through firm codes, customs and traditions, what Bourdieu calls the ‘capital of the field’. Investigating the 1912 and the 1933 Congressional hearings from a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) viewpoint, the paper shows how Morgan firm discouse is constructed as a sort of habitus, that is as a complex of common ideas, concepts or perception schemes of related emotional attitudes firm and outside-firm intersubjectively shared within a specific group of persons as well as of similar behavioural dispositions.

This paper calls for a view of the firm as emerging through interactions and activity, as relational and dispositional. Relational in the sense that it focuses on formative and substantial realities, individuals and groups rather than objective relations. Dispositional in the sense that this view notes the possible actions agents take as a group and in the structure of the situations where they act or, more precisely, in the relations between them (Bourdieu 1998.