Chapter 7 traces Commerzbank’s trajectory of financialisation to highlight how its extroverted strategies differed from those of Deutsche Bank. Commerzbank is a less-likely actor of financialisation as it is a smaller bank and has historically focused on the European SME sector. Commerzbank attempted a transformation without major relocation, and redirected fewer resources to its strategies of liability management (LM). While it established the first German foreign branch in the US in 1971, it never bought a major US or British institution. Commerzbank’s more hesitant approach meant that the bank failed to uphold itself in US money markets several times. The chapter shows that Commerzbank’s significant US immersion only happened during the GFC when it bought the larger Dresdner Bank during the 2008 financial crisis but could not manage Dresdner’s heavy exposure to US RMBS, eventually resulting in a public bailout. Commerzbank’s alternative story demonstrates that the rise of US finance made LM a transformative but differentiated concern for non-US banks.

In Chapter 6, we present our reconceptualization of organizational control. We discuss four fundamental shifts in organizations – from face-to-face work to remote work; from stable, full-time work to alternative work arrangements; from human managers to algorithmic control; and from traditional to platform-mediated gig work – and discuss the impact of these shifts on organizational control. Our reconceptualization consists of both a conceptual part, where we advance a configurational approach to model the causal complexity inherent in organizational control, and an empirical part, where we present exemplary archetypes of control configurations across a variety of twenty-first-century organizations, including US trucking companies, GitLab, Amazon warehouses, Uber, and Upwork.