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Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
Financial collapses—whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market—are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy.Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers’ approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as “the best and the brightest,” investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.
392 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2008
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March 14, 2024
Against Excellence
If you want to understand the source and the consequences of the rhetoric of modern finance, this is your book.
Ho is an anthropologist who lived and worked among the natives of Financeland and survived to tell about it. Her analysis is brilliant, her anecdotes are priceless, her insights are thrilling.
The way in which companies like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey create personalities, even for those who never work in finance much less who work for them, is remarkable. These are the real sources and defenders of modern American, and global, elitist culture.
The tool of this culture is language. Learning the language is inseparable from adopting the culture of self-proclaimed excellence. It is this central idea of inherent superiority that justifies both ambition - one owes it to one's talents and to the society which needs these talents - as well as the superior rewards that result.
The public ideology of this culture is economic, specifically financial, efficiency. And indeed this ideology is applied ruthlessly by the culture to itself. If you don't produce or if circumstances dictate, you are permanently expendable. Loyalty is at best a conditional virtue. Nevertheless the elite will always be in demand. Excellence is malleable and can readily find new ambitions with their own rewards.
The costs in terms of relationships like family and even the most liberal interpretation of personal integrity are enormous but simply inexpressible in the culture. A must read for any young person tempted by the popularised magic of Wall Street.
If you want to understand the source and the consequences of the rhetoric of modern finance, this is your book.
Ho is an anthropologist who lived and worked among the natives of Financeland and survived to tell about it. Her analysis is brilliant, her anecdotes are priceless, her insights are thrilling.
The way in which companies like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey create personalities, even for those who never work in finance much less who work for them, is remarkable. These are the real sources and defenders of modern American, and global, elitist culture.
The tool of this culture is language. Learning the language is inseparable from adopting the culture of self-proclaimed excellence. It is this central idea of inherent superiority that justifies both ambition - one owes it to one's talents and to the society which needs these talents - as well as the superior rewards that result.
The public ideology of this culture is economic, specifically financial, efficiency. And indeed this ideology is applied ruthlessly by the culture to itself. If you don't produce or if circumstances dictate, you are permanently expendable. Loyalty is at best a conditional virtue. Nevertheless the elite will always be in demand. Excellence is malleable and can readily find new ambitions with their own rewards.
The costs in terms of relationships like family and even the most liberal interpretation of personal integrity are enormous but simply inexpressible in the culture. A must read for any young person tempted by the popularised magic of Wall Street.
March 14, 2010
I've been reading a lot about Wall Street lately, but this book was unique in that it was written by an anthropologist. It was a bit redundant and dry (as are most academic books), but I did get a really good sense of what it was like to be working in a Wall Street bank, and it was definitely worth it for that.
So what is the culture of Wall Street like?
First of, there is this intense culture of smartness, of all these people who went to the best schools and think they are just about the smartest people in the world. That is how the banks sell themselves when they recruit -- the places where the smartest people work.
Then there is this culture of working super-hard, all the time, which goes along with the hyper-competitive attitudes of the people who want to work there. Also, all these people are highly motivated to make money. A lot of money. That's the main reason they go to Wall Street. (no surprise)
But what was interesting to me was that there is also an intellectual justification for what these folks are doing. They think (or are convinced) that by all this buying and selling and trading, they are making the economy more efficient by punishing corporations that are inefficient and delivering more "shareholder value." And they think there is something wonderfully meritocratic about this too -- that the market is the ultimate dispassionate arbiter of value, and that it shakes down old hierarchies of class and race and gender. Of course, this is not really true, and actually Ho spends a lot of time on how race and gender divides are remarkably prevalent on Wall Street.
The title "Liquidated" comes from this almost messianic Wall Street cult of turning all assets "liquid" -- even the people who work at these firms. Ho herself was fired while working for Bankers Trust. As it turns out, people on Wall Street get fired a lot, but they are okay with that and even anticipate it. There is a real culture of people moving around constantly, and this persistent uncertainty that you never know what will happen next so you better make all the money you can now. Ho argues that there is no real planning on Wall Street -- just a constant hunt for something that will make money fast and now.
The recent financial crisis follows logically from the culture. For one, there is this relentless competition among both individuals and firms, because the more deals one does, the better one gets paid. The bonus culture is crazy -- most of the compensation is in the form of bonuses, and there is a lot of jockeying to do the most deals to get the most bonuses. It's all about doing deals, selling products, doing more deals, selling more products.
But doing deals doesn't mean doing deals that make sense. So what was the financial crisis about? It was about these Wall Street banks creating and selling financial products like crazy. First, the mortgage-backed securities and other collateralized debt obligations, then the credit default swaps to supposedly protect investors from downside risk. Investors of all stripes bought these products, and got screwed, and of course, the banks failed or almost failed because they couldn't deliver on many of the products they guaranteed and/or the value of their investments dipped.
But that didn't matter to the traders and the executives -- they got their bonuses from doing all these deals and selling all these products, from besting each other on coming up with more and cleverer financial products, regardless of the long-term viability of them. After all, the long-term viability of these products doesn't matter. What matters is doing the deals.
All of this is very depressing. Wall Street is probably still a place that attracts the same super-smart assholes who think they are better than everyone else and then go try to prove it by working like crazy selling financial products that generate fees. And worse the culture of Wall Street is to try to import this super-competitive instability to the rest of the economy.
Yet for all the value these people think they are adding to the economy, it seems to me they are not only parasites, but they are also destroying the good old-fashioned values of loyalty and the idea that there are other things in life besides money and the tyranny of the market. Sad.
So what is the culture of Wall Street like?
First of, there is this intense culture of smartness, of all these people who went to the best schools and think they are just about the smartest people in the world. That is how the banks sell themselves when they recruit -- the places where the smartest people work.
Then there is this culture of working super-hard, all the time, which goes along with the hyper-competitive attitudes of the people who want to work there. Also, all these people are highly motivated to make money. A lot of money. That's the main reason they go to Wall Street. (no surprise)
But what was interesting to me was that there is also an intellectual justification for what these folks are doing. They think (or are convinced) that by all this buying and selling and trading, they are making the economy more efficient by punishing corporations that are inefficient and delivering more "shareholder value." And they think there is something wonderfully meritocratic about this too -- that the market is the ultimate dispassionate arbiter of value, and that it shakes down old hierarchies of class and race and gender. Of course, this is not really true, and actually Ho spends a lot of time on how race and gender divides are remarkably prevalent on Wall Street.
The title "Liquidated" comes from this almost messianic Wall Street cult of turning all assets "liquid" -- even the people who work at these firms. Ho herself was fired while working for Bankers Trust. As it turns out, people on Wall Street get fired a lot, but they are okay with that and even anticipate it. There is a real culture of people moving around constantly, and this persistent uncertainty that you never know what will happen next so you better make all the money you can now. Ho argues that there is no real planning on Wall Street -- just a constant hunt for something that will make money fast and now.
The recent financial crisis follows logically from the culture. For one, there is this relentless competition among both individuals and firms, because the more deals one does, the better one gets paid. The bonus culture is crazy -- most of the compensation is in the form of bonuses, and there is a lot of jockeying to do the most deals to get the most bonuses. It's all about doing deals, selling products, doing more deals, selling more products.
But doing deals doesn't mean doing deals that make sense. So what was the financial crisis about? It was about these Wall Street banks creating and selling financial products like crazy. First, the mortgage-backed securities and other collateralized debt obligations, then the credit default swaps to supposedly protect investors from downside risk. Investors of all stripes bought these products, and got screwed, and of course, the banks failed or almost failed because they couldn't deliver on many of the products they guaranteed and/or the value of their investments dipped.
But that didn't matter to the traders and the executives -- they got their bonuses from doing all these deals and selling all these products, from besting each other on coming up with more and cleverer financial products, regardless of the long-term viability of them. After all, the long-term viability of these products doesn't matter. What matters is doing the deals.
All of this is very depressing. Wall Street is probably still a place that attracts the same super-smart assholes who think they are better than everyone else and then go try to prove it by working like crazy selling financial products that generate fees. And worse the culture of Wall Street is to try to import this super-competitive instability to the rest of the economy.
Yet for all the value these people think they are adding to the economy, it seems to me they are not only parasites, but they are also destroying the good old-fashioned values of loyalty and the idea that there are other things in life besides money and the tyranny of the market. Sad.
March 20, 2012
Karen Ho - professor of anthropology and one time Wall St insider - has produced a landmark text that slices financial capitalism into slivers of contradiction, self-deception and hubris.
Her narrative starts with the innocent and everyday: what it takes to get into a Wall St firm and what it's like to work there. It's only for the "best", the "brightest" and the slavishly hard-working. Soon enough she turns to the ideology of Wall Street in which white knights on greenbacks save the poor and mistreated shareholder from the greed of the perennial villain: the lazy, clueless corporate manager - known at Goldman Sachs, according to a recent NYT letter, as "muppets".
The climax of her critique is the chapter on historiographies. She shows how trends in 20th century business strategy and organisation structure were shaped by fads in investment rather than Harvard Business Review. More troubling though, is how the i-banks led corporate America to conglomeration in the 60's only to cull them in an orgy of asset stripping and downsizing two decades later.
If you have it in for Wall St, read Liquidated in parallel with semiotext(e)'s The Violence Of Financial Capitalism; you'll burn with the zeal of Karl Marx. If you wonder how things got this way read it with Wall St (Geisst) and Business Cycles (Lars Tvede). If you're wondering whether it has to stay this way consider The Failure of Corporate Law (Kent Greenfield).
No matter how you read it, it's unlikely you'll ever again see financial capitalism purely through the lens of those self-congratulatory, pre-2007 adverts promoting Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, et al.
Here's hoping that Karen Ho has a long, fruitful career at the intersection of anthropology and the corporation. Can't wait for her next outing.
Her narrative starts with the innocent and everyday: what it takes to get into a Wall St firm and what it's like to work there. It's only for the "best", the "brightest" and the slavishly hard-working. Soon enough she turns to the ideology of Wall Street in which white knights on greenbacks save the poor and mistreated shareholder from the greed of the perennial villain: the lazy, clueless corporate manager - known at Goldman Sachs, according to a recent NYT letter, as "muppets".
The climax of her critique is the chapter on historiographies. She shows how trends in 20th century business strategy and organisation structure were shaped by fads in investment rather than Harvard Business Review. More troubling though, is how the i-banks led corporate America to conglomeration in the 60's only to cull them in an orgy of asset stripping and downsizing two decades later.
If you have it in for Wall St, read Liquidated in parallel with semiotext(e)'s The Violence Of Financial Capitalism; you'll burn with the zeal of Karl Marx. If you wonder how things got this way read it with Wall St (Geisst) and Business Cycles (Lars Tvede). If you're wondering whether it has to stay this way consider The Failure of Corporate Law (Kent Greenfield).
No matter how you read it, it's unlikely you'll ever again see financial capitalism purely through the lens of those self-congratulatory, pre-2007 adverts promoting Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, et al.
Here's hoping that Karen Ho has a long, fruitful career at the intersection of anthropology and the corporation. Can't wait for her next outing.
July 28, 2018
Although an often frustrating book to get through because it was not well written, contains enormous amounts of redundancy and an excessive amount of quotations where paraphrasing would have worked much better, and often feels like she working out additional research questions as she writes, , this is a ****super**** important study that has many nuggets of brilliance and invaluable contributions to social science literature on wall street, finance, crises of capitalism, etc. Unlike the vast majority of anthropologists and sociologists (with a few notable exceptions like Brooke Harrington) who choose to study the marginalized, people who are easy to get access to, Karen Ho studied "up." And, in studying up, she not only conjectured from afar about their motives, worldview, and so forth, but actually worked among them (investment bankers) and interviewed over a hundred of them extensively. The main takeaway for me, and one which I had not given particular thought to, is that when we appeal to abstract, globalizing forces of capitalism, we in a sense cede to them a kind of inevitable power, as if they were an invisible hand. When, in fact, day-to-day *practices* and cultures instantiate these "forces." Capitalism as it exists today an d the disruptions it creates have evolved as cultures in investment banks have evolved to emphasize value extracted now, without any regard for the future. Ho makes other important points, such as the clash between corporations and investment banks in terms of culture and temporality (also something I hadn't thought about), and Wall Street workers' identification with "the market," and their acceptance of precariousness and "liquidity" in their own lives because of that allegiance. I think the book could have been 150 pages shorter and perhaps made her major points clearer and more accessible to a wider audience who needs this type of book. Especially when she belabors the point about how Wall Streeters see themselves as "smart" without really challenging what that means and especially without challenging what "elite" means in terms of higher education and how that often is just a proxy for class-based access, I wanted to put the book down. But I'm glad I kept reading, because it deserves 5 stars for its contribution to the field.
May 14, 2012
Not easy but essential.
Definition of ETHNOGRAPHY
: the study and systematic recording of human cultures; also : a descriptive work produced from such research
Meanwhile the Author has written a very long book and at times is extremely redundant. For example in the area of how the banks are specific in recruiting the best and the brightest, primarily from Princeton and Havard, after making the point effective it continues to be supported with anecdotal accounts leaving me with the repeating the famous movie line...."You had me at hello"! Even accounting for abstract nuances Karen Ho repeats the understood at the cost of focus as I found myself hoping to get to the next subject repeatedly.
I do believe, though, this overview of a vital industry and specifically of the investment Banker that inhabits it offices and halls is extremely helpful by adding both substance and context to a largely close off culture. This is especially important when you consider the Media coverage of the Banking industry has been mostly superficial low-lighted by catchy front page slogans, hardly beneficial to those who are seeking a more balanced understanding of an obviously complex institution.
I would recommend the book with the provision that skimming is OK although hard as the book is set-up in a form that promotes this practice, but it can be done.
Definition of ETHNOGRAPHY
: the study and systematic recording of human cultures; also : a descriptive work produced from such research
Meanwhile the Author has written a very long book and at times is extremely redundant. For example in the area of how the banks are specific in recruiting the best and the brightest, primarily from Princeton and Havard, after making the point effective it continues to be supported with anecdotal accounts leaving me with the repeating the famous movie line...."You had me at hello"! Even accounting for abstract nuances Karen Ho repeats the understood at the cost of focus as I found myself hoping to get to the next subject repeatedly.
I do believe, though, this overview of a vital industry and specifically of the investment Banker that inhabits it offices and halls is extremely helpful by adding both substance and context to a largely close off culture. This is especially important when you consider the Media coverage of the Banking industry has been mostly superficial low-lighted by catchy front page slogans, hardly beneficial to those who are seeking a more balanced understanding of an obviously complex institution.
I would recommend the book with the provision that skimming is OK although hard as the book is set-up in a form that promotes this practice, but it can be done.
March 27, 2025
3.5 — methodologically fascinating, the premise of doing a formal ethnography of Wall Street finance elite. but gets quite repetitive as a reader. I probably could’ve read 25% and gotten the gist
January 30, 2019
Was really amazed by this analysis of how the culture and individuals that make up investment banks and other Wall Street entities influence corporate America & have created the capitalistic society that led to the '08 crisis. I feel like I came out of this book with a much better understanding of how these firms operate and also of some of the factors that created the housing market crash and resulting recession. Also, I just think it's really cool that she actually worked at an investment bank for a couple years in order to study the culture. Most of the book uses personal anecdotes and quotes from different informants she had during her time on Wall Street, which makes the book that much more engaging.
Would definitely consider this a must read!! Ho's research is relevant, in-depth, and interesting!
Would definitely consider this a must read!! Ho's research is relevant, in-depth, and interesting!
July 17, 2010
Really enlightening. Demystifies Wall Street by reading it from a point of view that is so refreshingly human. A book that anyone seeking to understand finance or economics should read. Ho reveals the financial crises so often attributed to abstract "market forces" to be a product of a Wall Street culture of elitism that begins with Ivy League cliques and is supported by a cut-throat occupational environment characterized by norms of exhausting work schedules, perfectionism, and instability. A very well-researched and well-written book.
December 29, 2025
Karen Ho’s ethnography does a fantastic job of bringing the faraway culture of Wall Street to the average reader. It’s not hard to follow along with as many other ethnographies and every example perfectly adds to the discussion. A very good insight into how 2008 happened, and how it is possible to happen again.
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March 25, 20191. Capitalism is the worst.
2. Is it terrible that I looked up jobs at McKinsey after reading the chapters I had to read for class? I definitely feel terrible about it.
3. Capitalism is awful and so is finance.
2. Is it terrible that I looked up jobs at McKinsey after reading the chapters I had to read for class? I definitely feel terrible about it.
3. Capitalism is awful and so is finance.
November 11, 2012
This is an ethnography of Wall Street behavior in investment banking firms done by a Princeton grad who is currently an assistant professor of Anthropology at Minnesota. It seems like it is a book version of her dissertation.
Even though I am generally skeptical of ethnographies of business firms due to their theoretical looseness and generally critical stance, I liked this book and though the author contributed to ongoing conversations about Wall Street and its influence on the broader economy. The argument that I took away from this work is that in trying to explain the "every man for himself" perspective that seems so common in discussions of the economy and the workplace in the past twenty years or so, one can gain perspective by looking at how the workplace is structured for investment bankers and how that structures influences the advice they provide to their clients, the types of deals that they negotiate, and the type of short term results that are often obtained. Look at investment banks and investment bankers this way will not explain everything (or even most everything) about the fragility of the economy, the increasing frequency of "jobless" recoveries, the continuing importance of "too big to fail" institutions, pressures for lowering tax rates on the wealthy, etc. But it might help a little in seeing how these economic realities developed since the early 1980s.
The book is long and contains a lot of description. If you read much about the financial industry or hang around business schools, this description rings true -- although with a highly academic jargon and an inflated syllable count. The author is also thorough in noting the many ways in which the rhetoric of the financial industry (shareholder values; pay for performance; increased efficiency; employing the best and the brightest; etc.) falls very short when compared with the actual behaviors and norms of the bankers as business is actually done. This is also not new if you follow the industry. The idea that these bankers actually live (or claim to live) by the tenants of short-term free market capitalism, may well influence how they work with their clients, structure their deals, and thus influence the broader economy. That is worthwhile considering.
The book is not for the timid and takes a while to get going, but I am glad I read it.
Even though I am generally skeptical of ethnographies of business firms due to their theoretical looseness and generally critical stance, I liked this book and though the author contributed to ongoing conversations about Wall Street and its influence on the broader economy. The argument that I took away from this work is that in trying to explain the "every man for himself" perspective that seems so common in discussions of the economy and the workplace in the past twenty years or so, one can gain perspective by looking at how the workplace is structured for investment bankers and how that structures influences the advice they provide to their clients, the types of deals that they negotiate, and the type of short term results that are often obtained. Look at investment banks and investment bankers this way will not explain everything (or even most everything) about the fragility of the economy, the increasing frequency of "jobless" recoveries, the continuing importance of "too big to fail" institutions, pressures for lowering tax rates on the wealthy, etc. But it might help a little in seeing how these economic realities developed since the early 1980s.
The book is long and contains a lot of description. If you read much about the financial industry or hang around business schools, this description rings true -- although with a highly academic jargon and an inflated syllable count. The author is also thorough in noting the many ways in which the rhetoric of the financial industry (shareholder values; pay for performance; increased efficiency; employing the best and the brightest; etc.) falls very short when compared with the actual behaviors and norms of the bankers as business is actually done. This is also not new if you follow the industry. The idea that these bankers actually live (or claim to live) by the tenants of short-term free market capitalism, may well influence how they work with their clients, structure their deals, and thus influence the broader economy. That is worthwhile considering.
The book is not for the timid and takes a while to get going, but I am glad I read it.
April 23, 2013
the strength of this book lies in the thesis: common place features of "the market", like booms and busts, are not just abstract general features of markets, but are generated by the particular Wall Street culture of smartness, bonus compensation, rampant job insecurity, and extreme future reward discounting. The main flaw with the book is that most assertions are backed up through interviews with bankers, rather than data. It is also very repetitive and marred at times by anthro-speak. The first chapter on recruiting practices at universities is the most readable while the 3rd and 4th chapters on the rise of shareholder value in the 80s are the most dry, but provided the most new information for me. You can probably skip those and still get the main message. Overall the numerous transcribed interviews on different topics with bankers provides an illuminating window into a frenzied culture of greed, job insecurity, networking, and extreme elitism.
February 20, 2021
If you want to know how the economic crisis of 2008 started, then read Liquidated. It talks about the culture of Wall Street and how it is diametrically opposed to the values of Main Street. It basically shows the parasitic relationship of Wall Street to Main Street and the way that they will kill off companies to make a profit, the way a parasite kills what it feeds upon. Not much of this was terribly surprising to me, having temped at corporations, including some who bought up failing companies! But it is a good and very important read, especially for those who advocate reforming Wall Street.
July 24, 2013
Excellent example of an ethnography where the author did not understand the underlying principles of macroeconomics, rejected explanations based on her assumptions, and theorized based on preconceived notions.
March 21, 2025
This book was pretty good. I'm new to anthropology broadly and ethnography in particular, so I chose a book on a topic I feel I understand well. Some chapters resonated more strongly than others.
Chapter 1's treatment of the culture of smartness, chapter 2's discussion of the centrality of "hard work" in financial services and chapter 3's discussion of how financial services thinks of "shareholder value" and the contradictions in that thinking were all pretty powerful and the descriptions rang true for me, in some cases articulating things I always suspected myself but never shared with anybody. My cynical take is that new grads considering a career in financial services should read these chapters: Either to scare themselves away or to give the sociopaths in the crowd a leg up.
Chapter 5 discussion of job insecurity in financial services felt incomplete. I'd have liked to have heard more from HR professionals on how they choose who, specifically, gets laid off and how. The interviews with the staffing professionals were some of the strongest parts of this chapter.
I felt chapters 6 and 7, which try to motivate a mechanism for how financial services culture leads to financial instability and crises, were pretty weak. The causal chain of short-termism and instability leading to bad deals which ultimately blow up is plausible, but not substantiated well enough, and debatably, cannot be substantiated well enough through testimony alone. That said, I'm not sure a full ethnographic analysis of this is even possible because it would require access to CEOs and decision makers inside financial services firms to basically incriminate themselves. If, for example, the author brought in informants who were business leaders within the clients of investment banks discussing why they sought advice, what they hoped to achieve by contracting with the banks, what went right and what went wrong, then I think that could have bolstered the arguments. Ostensibly, the people the banks are serving, even if they were just naive, had some reason for working with the banks. Stock analysts (especially short sellers) that cover publicly traded investment banks would also have made great informants because they have financial incentives to be maximally cynical about the hype cycle that the books author describes.
Chapter 4 was the absolute weakest chapter, from my vantage point, despite having an absolutely spot-on take on shareholder rights and responsibilities. The author conflates neoclassicism in the economics context with Adam Smith, which is not correct, and does not engage with the actual neoclassical economists' thinking. Worse yet, despite a lot of historical revisionism (to be clear good revisionism that sets the record straight), the author misses a golden opportunity to discuss the intellectual underpinnings of the economics and politics 60s and 70s that led to the deregulation revolution in the 80s.
Throughout the book, most informants were mainly low and mid-level bankers, though to the author's credit, several were managing director / executive level (and their stories were often the most damning), which we should be honest about insofar as it skews our perspective on the culture of financial services. I agree with other reviewers that some sections could use some editing and there was a lot of jargon and what I interpret as "performing as an anthropologist". The book documents well, but I'm not sure what else it really amounts to. Policy conclusions or actions are left as an exercise for the reader, I guess. All that said, I think I have a better sense of how anthropologists see the world now: What they see as problems worth studying, how they think about them and the kinds of tools they use to analyze them and how it's possible to do anthropology ethically.
Chapter 1's treatment of the culture of smartness, chapter 2's discussion of the centrality of "hard work" in financial services and chapter 3's discussion of how financial services thinks of "shareholder value" and the contradictions in that thinking were all pretty powerful and the descriptions rang true for me, in some cases articulating things I always suspected myself but never shared with anybody. My cynical take is that new grads considering a career in financial services should read these chapters: Either to scare themselves away or to give the sociopaths in the crowd a leg up.
Chapter 5 discussion of job insecurity in financial services felt incomplete. I'd have liked to have heard more from HR professionals on how they choose who, specifically, gets laid off and how. The interviews with the staffing professionals were some of the strongest parts of this chapter.
I felt chapters 6 and 7, which try to motivate a mechanism for how financial services culture leads to financial instability and crises, were pretty weak. The causal chain of short-termism and instability leading to bad deals which ultimately blow up is plausible, but not substantiated well enough, and debatably, cannot be substantiated well enough through testimony alone. That said, I'm not sure a full ethnographic analysis of this is even possible because it would require access to CEOs and decision makers inside financial services firms to basically incriminate themselves. If, for example, the author brought in informants who were business leaders within the clients of investment banks discussing why they sought advice, what they hoped to achieve by contracting with the banks, what went right and what went wrong, then I think that could have bolstered the arguments. Ostensibly, the people the banks are serving, even if they were just naive, had some reason for working with the banks. Stock analysts (especially short sellers) that cover publicly traded investment banks would also have made great informants because they have financial incentives to be maximally cynical about the hype cycle that the books author describes.
Chapter 4 was the absolute weakest chapter, from my vantage point, despite having an absolutely spot-on take on shareholder rights and responsibilities. The author conflates neoclassicism in the economics context with Adam Smith, which is not correct, and does not engage with the actual neoclassical economists' thinking. Worse yet, despite a lot of historical revisionism (to be clear good revisionism that sets the record straight), the author misses a golden opportunity to discuss the intellectual underpinnings of the economics and politics 60s and 70s that led to the deregulation revolution in the 80s.
Throughout the book, most informants were mainly low and mid-level bankers, though to the author's credit, several were managing director / executive level (and their stories were often the most damning), which we should be honest about insofar as it skews our perspective on the culture of financial services. I agree with other reviewers that some sections could use some editing and there was a lot of jargon and what I interpret as "performing as an anthropologist". The book documents well, but I'm not sure what else it really amounts to. Policy conclusions or actions are left as an exercise for the reader, I guess. All that said, I think I have a better sense of how anthropologists see the world now: What they see as problems worth studying, how they think about them and the kinds of tools they use to analyze them and how it's possible to do anthropology ethically.
December 19, 2020
Love this look into wall street think....
April 16, 2024
Very great! Her systematic breakdown of Wall Street culture and demonstration of a causal relationship to crisis and major events is quite impressive
December 25, 2025
this is what they expect every social studies thesis to be
Read
May 26, 2022Etno-: race, culture. -Graphy: Writing, recording, or description. Ethnography: The scientific description of the customs of individual people and cultures.
Essay for Inside Work Cultures course at Aalto University.
In the past three decades, the corporate landscape went through a period of increased merger and reorganization activity characterized by an inversive relationship between layoffs, corporate profits, and stock price. This became evident to Karen Ho, author of the book when in 1995 AT&T announced it would split into three companies. This decision gave rise to 77,800 managers receiving buyout offers and almost 50,000 downsized. But paradoxically, the company’s and Wallstreet investment banks’ stock prices rose. Bewilder she wondered, “How could it be that a time of record corporate profits and soaring stock prices could also be an era of record downsizings and rampant job insecurity?”
The author's purpose in this ethnography is to “analyze both Wall Street’s role in the reshaping of corporate America and its corresponding effects on market formations and how Wall Street helped to instantiate these changes.” Wall Street is understood as the concentration of financial institutions and actor networks and corporate America as the large public institutions in the United States.
To try to understand Wall Street culture it's necessary to have a historical overview. This enables us to glimpse into a time when corporate America was able to act independently from Wall Street’s financing and ideologies. It this crucial to understand the ideologies that govern our modern economic thought as contingent and dependent. Only by acknowledging this we can think of Wall Street culture as one of the multiple periods in time and can start thinking and developing alternatives that aim at achieving human well-being and prosperity and do not foster job insecurity and inequality.
According to Steve Faser, Wall Street was a ghost town for at least forty years after the Great Depression. It was a time when the stock market was regulated, and remnants of previous crises made shareholding seen as deceitful and unstable. The public thought stocks were too risky, large funds couldn’t invest more than 50 percent of their portfolios in stocks, and commercial banks couldn’t invest in them at all. For a long time, the stock market was stagnant. Managerial capitalism dominated economic thought, corporations financed expansion and innovation with internal resources, and shareholder value was only of minor concern; stockholders were seen as one of the multiple clients the corporation had, along with employees and customers.
By the 1960s, Walt Street started to gain momentum as the memories of the last crisis faded away, corporations grew steadily, and Wall Street investment banks and institutional investors conducted promotional campaigns to increase shareholding. A dispute between the two dominant visions of capitalism followed. As institutional shareholders assembled substantial equity in corporations, they began to demand shareholder priority and control. The challenge of balancing the public interest with private profit concluded that striving for the latter (increasing the stock price) would accommodate all the goals of the corporation and would ultimately benefit everyone. This triumphant idea has dominated the economic thought for decades and has allowed Wall Street to thrive and subject corporate America to its malpractices. Although unchallenged for a great amount of time, public unrest rooted in rampant downsizings and inequality has motivated authors like Karen Ho to analyze and exhibit the role of Wall Street in producing these times of distress.
Given this historical overview, I proceed by analyzing two of the most fundamental cultural traits of Wall Street.
Elitism and culture of smartness. This is one of the tools Wall Street uses to legitimize its global authority in the financial markets. Wall Street achieves this in multiple complementary ways. Its main strategy is by recruiting only from the most exclusive universities, e.g., Ivy Leagues, especially Harvard and Princeton. Investment banks recruit using a quotas system for particular universities to guarantee an exclusive diversity. The reason is that students studying in these institutions are already prefilter. Reputedly, they have the skills Wall Street is looking for, e.g., ambition, leadership, history of excellence and achievement, interpersonal skills, etc. Technical expertise or a background in finance are secondary. They can achieve this by carrying out aggressive recruitment campaigns and alluring students with the “perfect lifestyle” abundant in wealth and power. “Recruiters visit the university virtually every week, even on weekends; they show up in the greatest numbers at career forums, panel discussions, and social events; their advertisements for information sessions, “meet and greets,” and free drinks and hors d’oeuvres dominate the campus newspapers daily; their company literature and application forms are easily accessible either at campus locations or online.” (Ho, 2009, p.44).
High risk/High reward. This is a term the author allots a cultural trait in investment banking that consists of a social contract the employee gets into when accepting a job at an investment bank. “When things are great, you are going to do well, you get paid well. When things are bad, you have no job” (Ho, 2009, p.44). Investment bankers’ compensation splits into salary and year-end bonuses. For a first-year analyst (the lowest front office position) the bonus amounts between 25% and 43% of the total pay. And as the employee becomes more senior, the bonus increases much faster than the salary does. Reaching the point where the bonus is a multiple of the salary. The bonus is based on performance. Performance is determined by the number and size of deals executed. This compensation scheme is problematic because the investment banker gets compensated regardless of the impact on the corporation and society. “In an environment of job insecurity and compensation for short-term performance, investment bankers are induced to make the most out of the present—practices which often lead to mortgaging the future. Wall Street, then, in helping to construct a market bubble” (Ho, 2009, p.).
I conclude that the author succeeds in meeting the objectives of the study. To evidence this assessment intelligibly I must split up the author’s purpose statement and scrutinize each aim individually.
First, analyze Wall Street’s role in the reshaping of corporate America and its corresponding effects on market formations. In chapter four, Ho attests Wall Street's imposition of neoclassical values onto the modern corporation stimulated the growth of the stock market and public shareholding. This led to liquid companies, being willing to downsize and produce socioeconomic inequality in the name of shareholder value.
Then, how Wall Street helped to instantiate these changes. In chapter four, Ho describes how Wall Street, uses the populist rhetoric of personal economic autonomy and property ownership accomplish to counter state regulation of markets, claim control of corporate governance, and resist worker unrest. In chapter three, Ho documents how the takeover movement forced corporations to imbibe shareholder ideology and made increasing their stock price a major concern.
The only issue I found in the book is the short and nonrepresentative years of fieldwork Ho conducted. Her fieldwork took place in what was then the longest U.S bull market (1997-1999). Even though the author addresses this issue arguing that during this interval several downturns and crises occurred I still consider that extending her fieldwork to 2001, the year when the stock market crashed, would have brought valuable insights into the ethnography.
Thanks to Ho’s examination of neoclassical thought from a historical perspective I was able to question the ideas I championed, something I haven’t done before. By exhibiting the inconsistencies of neoclassical thought I was able to redefine what a corporation is, the responsibilities it has, what work is, and grasp how important work is in how we perceived ourselves. This book has helped me empathize with workers. And this knowledge will guide me when I run my father’s business. I’ll make sure to operate a corporation as they used to and provide long-lasting jobs, fairly renumerated, where the worker feels proud of his work.
Also, this book has made me distrustful of the stock market. I learned that Wall Street has a history of manipulating the stock market for profit at the expense of the individual investor. I’ll decrease the share of stocks in my investment portfolio.
Essay for Inside Work Cultures course at Aalto University.
In the past three decades, the corporate landscape went through a period of increased merger and reorganization activity characterized by an inversive relationship between layoffs, corporate profits, and stock price. This became evident to Karen Ho, author of the book when in 1995 AT&T announced it would split into three companies. This decision gave rise to 77,800 managers receiving buyout offers and almost 50,000 downsized. But paradoxically, the company’s and Wallstreet investment banks’ stock prices rose. Bewilder she wondered, “How could it be that a time of record corporate profits and soaring stock prices could also be an era of record downsizings and rampant job insecurity?”
The author's purpose in this ethnography is to “analyze both Wall Street’s role in the reshaping of corporate America and its corresponding effects on market formations and how Wall Street helped to instantiate these changes.” Wall Street is understood as the concentration of financial institutions and actor networks and corporate America as the large public institutions in the United States.
To try to understand Wall Street culture it's necessary to have a historical overview. This enables us to glimpse into a time when corporate America was able to act independently from Wall Street’s financing and ideologies. It this crucial to understand the ideologies that govern our modern economic thought as contingent and dependent. Only by acknowledging this we can think of Wall Street culture as one of the multiple periods in time and can start thinking and developing alternatives that aim at achieving human well-being and prosperity and do not foster job insecurity and inequality.
According to Steve Faser, Wall Street was a ghost town for at least forty years after the Great Depression. It was a time when the stock market was regulated, and remnants of previous crises made shareholding seen as deceitful and unstable. The public thought stocks were too risky, large funds couldn’t invest more than 50 percent of their portfolios in stocks, and commercial banks couldn’t invest in them at all. For a long time, the stock market was stagnant. Managerial capitalism dominated economic thought, corporations financed expansion and innovation with internal resources, and shareholder value was only of minor concern; stockholders were seen as one of the multiple clients the corporation had, along with employees and customers.
By the 1960s, Walt Street started to gain momentum as the memories of the last crisis faded away, corporations grew steadily, and Wall Street investment banks and institutional investors conducted promotional campaigns to increase shareholding. A dispute between the two dominant visions of capitalism followed. As institutional shareholders assembled substantial equity in corporations, they began to demand shareholder priority and control. The challenge of balancing the public interest with private profit concluded that striving for the latter (increasing the stock price) would accommodate all the goals of the corporation and would ultimately benefit everyone. This triumphant idea has dominated the economic thought for decades and has allowed Wall Street to thrive and subject corporate America to its malpractices. Although unchallenged for a great amount of time, public unrest rooted in rampant downsizings and inequality has motivated authors like Karen Ho to analyze and exhibit the role of Wall Street in producing these times of distress.
Given this historical overview, I proceed by analyzing two of the most fundamental cultural traits of Wall Street.
Elitism and culture of smartness. This is one of the tools Wall Street uses to legitimize its global authority in the financial markets. Wall Street achieves this in multiple complementary ways. Its main strategy is by recruiting only from the most exclusive universities, e.g., Ivy Leagues, especially Harvard and Princeton. Investment banks recruit using a quotas system for particular universities to guarantee an exclusive diversity. The reason is that students studying in these institutions are already prefilter. Reputedly, they have the skills Wall Street is looking for, e.g., ambition, leadership, history of excellence and achievement, interpersonal skills, etc. Technical expertise or a background in finance are secondary. They can achieve this by carrying out aggressive recruitment campaigns and alluring students with the “perfect lifestyle” abundant in wealth and power. “Recruiters visit the university virtually every week, even on weekends; they show up in the greatest numbers at career forums, panel discussions, and social events; their advertisements for information sessions, “meet and greets,” and free drinks and hors d’oeuvres dominate the campus newspapers daily; their company literature and application forms are easily accessible either at campus locations or online.” (Ho, 2009, p.44).
High risk/High reward. This is a term the author allots a cultural trait in investment banking that consists of a social contract the employee gets into when accepting a job at an investment bank. “When things are great, you are going to do well, you get paid well. When things are bad, you have no job” (Ho, 2009, p.44). Investment bankers’ compensation splits into salary and year-end bonuses. For a first-year analyst (the lowest front office position) the bonus amounts between 25% and 43% of the total pay. And as the employee becomes more senior, the bonus increases much faster than the salary does. Reaching the point where the bonus is a multiple of the salary. The bonus is based on performance. Performance is determined by the number and size of deals executed. This compensation scheme is problematic because the investment banker gets compensated regardless of the impact on the corporation and society. “In an environment of job insecurity and compensation for short-term performance, investment bankers are induced to make the most out of the present—practices which often lead to mortgaging the future. Wall Street, then, in helping to construct a market bubble” (Ho, 2009, p.).
I conclude that the author succeeds in meeting the objectives of the study. To evidence this assessment intelligibly I must split up the author’s purpose statement and scrutinize each aim individually.
First, analyze Wall Street’s role in the reshaping of corporate America and its corresponding effects on market formations. In chapter four, Ho attests Wall Street's imposition of neoclassical values onto the modern corporation stimulated the growth of the stock market and public shareholding. This led to liquid companies, being willing to downsize and produce socioeconomic inequality in the name of shareholder value.
Then, how Wall Street helped to instantiate these changes. In chapter four, Ho describes how Wall Street, uses the populist rhetoric of personal economic autonomy and property ownership accomplish to counter state regulation of markets, claim control of corporate governance, and resist worker unrest. In chapter three, Ho documents how the takeover movement forced corporations to imbibe shareholder ideology and made increasing their stock price a major concern.
The only issue I found in the book is the short and nonrepresentative years of fieldwork Ho conducted. Her fieldwork took place in what was then the longest U.S bull market (1997-1999). Even though the author addresses this issue arguing that during this interval several downturns and crises occurred I still consider that extending her fieldwork to 2001, the year when the stock market crashed, would have brought valuable insights into the ethnography.
Thanks to Ho’s examination of neoclassical thought from a historical perspective I was able to question the ideas I championed, something I haven’t done before. By exhibiting the inconsistencies of neoclassical thought I was able to redefine what a corporation is, the responsibilities it has, what work is, and grasp how important work is in how we perceived ourselves. This book has helped me empathize with workers. And this knowledge will guide me when I run my father’s business. I’ll make sure to operate a corporation as they used to and provide long-lasting jobs, fairly renumerated, where the worker feels proud of his work.
Also, this book has made me distrustful of the stock market. I learned that Wall Street has a history of manipulating the stock market for profit at the expense of the individual investor. I’ll decrease the share of stocks in my investment portfolio.
January 9, 2012
An interesting read on the culture of investment bank(s,ers,ing) and how the narrow field of backgrounds and ideologies feeds a cycle of behaviors seen alternately as being right or being the only possible actions. Assumptions about how "the market" behaves are held as gospel, alongside a knowledge that the investment banks are "the market." Boom and bust cycles are the inevitable result of personalizing gain and socializing risk, and that is the name of the game for investment bankers.
The primacy of "shareholder value" as the espoused goal of banks' dealings with corporate America at large is also discussed and questioned. The term means—if anything: making changes to a business which affect the market perception, increasing the price of stock in the short-term. The actual health and productivity of a corporate client is at best a secondary concern for banks, as their incentives are fees made from coordinating as many deals (good, bad or indifferent) as possible.
The view of shareholders as the real (and only) stakeholders of a corporation is also traced and explored, with reference to the decision in Dodge v Ford Motor Co providing a legal foundation on which much ideological lumber has been laid.
As an ethnography, there is insight into the culture of investment banks based on the author's field work in the late nineties and communication with contacts since that time. While this is helpful in contextualizing how a 22-year old feels they deserve $200,000+ a year for their labor, these stories of privilege and entitlement weren't particularly novel to me. More interesting was how these employees are portrayed as unique and the "smartest" people in the labor pool, but treated as a renewable and expendable resource, with the constant influx of graduates from Ivy League schools and highly regarded MBA programs ready to replace any that burn out or are cut loose.
While the topic is deeply interesting and this is a relatively accessible work for a layperson, it's also very dry and longer than seems necessary (clearly, academic work.) There were a number of excerpts attributed "Fraser, 2004" that seemed more artfully constructed, so I expect to read his Wall Street: America's Dream Palace in the near future in hopes it might be better suited as a recommendation for others.
The primacy of "shareholder value" as the espoused goal of banks' dealings with corporate America at large is also discussed and questioned. The term means—if anything: making changes to a business which affect the market perception, increasing the price of stock in the short-term. The actual health and productivity of a corporate client is at best a secondary concern for banks, as their incentives are fees made from coordinating as many deals (good, bad or indifferent) as possible.
The view of shareholders as the real (and only) stakeholders of a corporation is also traced and explored, with reference to the decision in Dodge v Ford Motor Co providing a legal foundation on which much ideological lumber has been laid.
As an ethnography, there is insight into the culture of investment banks based on the author's field work in the late nineties and communication with contacts since that time. While this is helpful in contextualizing how a 22-year old feels they deserve $200,000+ a year for their labor, these stories of privilege and entitlement weren't particularly novel to me. More interesting was how these employees are portrayed as unique and the "smartest" people in the labor pool, but treated as a renewable and expendable resource, with the constant influx of graduates from Ivy League schools and highly regarded MBA programs ready to replace any that burn out or are cut loose.
While the topic is deeply interesting and this is a relatively accessible work for a layperson, it's also very dry and longer than seems necessary (clearly, academic work.) There were a number of excerpts attributed "Fraser, 2004" that seemed more artfully constructed, so I expect to read his Wall Street: America's Dream Palace in the near future in hopes it might be better suited as a recommendation for others.
Read
March 5, 2016Ho writes the book that I think I would have written, had I been born in different circumstances. She was a graduate student in the Ivy League and she saw her peers go into the Street, so she did what any good anthropologist would do – she went native to study the flora and fauna of Wall Street.
In it, she looks at the prevailing orthodoxies of the natives and tries to debunk them, amongst these are shareholder value and the benefit of so many hours at your desk (free food and a car service help these brave souls). Ho was able to take the job because of her pedigree, and she used it to build connections –she was an excellent networker, I bet she has all the hot LinkedIn connections. In the book, she goes through the process from recruitment to disillusionment, She was able to do this since her own job was made redundant at a point before she wanted it to be, but then she did fieldwork to learn more about the natives.
What this book reminds me of most of all is the book by Kevin Roose from a couple of years that got a lot of notice, “Young Money”. That book lacked in its breadth since it only really examined the situations of five or six people, where Ho tries to generalize her experience, and in my reading, she is much more effective than Roose was. The problem is that Roose had experience writing for a popular audience every day. Though this book has been through edits, it is still very much an academic book in the soft sciences / arts. I had seen the word “problematize” several times and it was only about half way through I thought I should keep track of that word as a proxy for how “Academic” the book was. A skilled editor could have cut half the book and made it a much more effective popular book. Ho could have done the press and maybe even had a TED talk. Talk about a missed opportunity! But for what it is, the book is very successful and very compelling for catching a brief period in time that will probably only differ in degree of the levels of tech for the next generation, no matter the humiliations that come about from recessions not foreseen or even caused by the financial sector.
In it, she looks at the prevailing orthodoxies of the natives and tries to debunk them, amongst these are shareholder value and the benefit of so many hours at your desk (free food and a car service help these brave souls). Ho was able to take the job because of her pedigree, and she used it to build connections –she was an excellent networker, I bet she has all the hot LinkedIn connections. In the book, she goes through the process from recruitment to disillusionment, She was able to do this since her own job was made redundant at a point before she wanted it to be, but then she did fieldwork to learn more about the natives.
What this book reminds me of most of all is the book by Kevin Roose from a couple of years that got a lot of notice, “Young Money”. That book lacked in its breadth since it only really examined the situations of five or six people, where Ho tries to generalize her experience, and in my reading, she is much more effective than Roose was. The problem is that Roose had experience writing for a popular audience every day. Though this book has been through edits, it is still very much an academic book in the soft sciences / arts. I had seen the word “problematize” several times and it was only about half way through I thought I should keep track of that word as a proxy for how “Academic” the book was. A skilled editor could have cut half the book and made it a much more effective popular book. Ho could have done the press and maybe even had a TED talk. Talk about a missed opportunity! But for what it is, the book is very successful and very compelling for catching a brief period in time that will probably only differ in degree of the levels of tech for the next generation, no matter the humiliations that come about from recessions not foreseen or even caused by the financial sector.
Read
July 21, 2010“Ho’s refreshing ethnography of the daily lives of Wall Street investment bankers . . . outlines a web of practices, beliefs and structures that may be vital to understanding what keeps the market system in place despite built-in instabilities.”--Publishers Weekly
“Karen Ho has picked an excellent time to publish her fascinating new study . . . of Wall Street banks. . . . As field-sites go, Wall Street is not classic anthropological territory: ethnographers typically work in remote, third-world societies. . . . Ho nevertheless embarked on her study in classic anthropological manner: by blending into the background, listening intently, in a non-judgmental way – and then trying to join up the dots to get a ‘holistic’ picture of how the culture works. That patient ethnographic analysis has produced a fascinating portrait that will be refreshingly novel to most bankers.”--Gillian Tett, Financial Times
“Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street asks many questions that those who work in the investment field should ask themselves. Is constant change at investment banks wrong? Or is it an intelligent way of operating in a competitive, rapidly changing global business? Wall Street firms that succeed over the long run are adept at quickly shutting down business units that prove to be nonstrategic and starting new ones. As for job insecurity, it leads investment bankers to morph instantly into successful job hunters and mobile survivors. Although many in the financial industry will not agree with Ho’s hypotheses and conclusions, they will be challenged by the questions she raises and enthralled by the body of fieldwork she presents.”--Janet J. Mangano and Martin S. Fridson , CFA Institute
“The book’s great strength lies in Ho’s careful observation of the means by which people succeed or fail on Wall Street, as she punctures many of the assumptions about how markets work.”--Keir Martin, Times Literary Supplement
“Karen Ho has picked an excellent time to publish her fascinating new study . . . of Wall Street banks. . . . As field-sites go, Wall Street is not classic anthropological territory: ethnographers typically work in remote, third-world societies. . . . Ho nevertheless embarked on her study in classic anthropological manner: by blending into the background, listening intently, in a non-judgmental way – and then trying to join up the dots to get a ‘holistic’ picture of how the culture works. That patient ethnographic analysis has produced a fascinating portrait that will be refreshingly novel to most bankers.”--Gillian Tett, Financial Times
“Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street asks many questions that those who work in the investment field should ask themselves. Is constant change at investment banks wrong? Or is it an intelligent way of operating in a competitive, rapidly changing global business? Wall Street firms that succeed over the long run are adept at quickly shutting down business units that prove to be nonstrategic and starting new ones. As for job insecurity, it leads investment bankers to morph instantly into successful job hunters and mobile survivors. Although many in the financial industry will not agree with Ho’s hypotheses and conclusions, they will be challenged by the questions she raises and enthralled by the body of fieldwork she presents.”--Janet J. Mangano and Martin S. Fridson , CFA Institute
“The book’s great strength lies in Ho’s careful observation of the means by which people succeed or fail on Wall Street, as she punctures many of the assumptions about how markets work.”--Keir Martin, Times Literary Supplement
December 29, 2014
I read this at the same time as Richistan and Young Money. Like the latter, Karen Ho focuses on Wall Street. She was an anthropology grad student who took a sabbatical to work on Wall Street; her ethnography is based on both her experiences during the year she worked there and interviews with the contacts she made during her work. The language is a bit stilted, but once you get used to it, she has a number of insights. Examples:
* Workers are motivated by being constantly told how smart they are (while being given the most repetitive and uncreative of tasks). Reminds me of the discovery I had back in college, that people will tell you that you're smart or have "so much potential" to get you to work harder, with the academic system being a pyramid scheme built on the labor of students. Wall Street: same deal.
* Good observation about how women, especially minority women, were strong in their condemnation of other women (support staff) who wore sneakers to work and then put on pumps at the office. She thinks this is because they are doubly marked as similar to the support staff and are taking pains to distinguish themselves in dress and actions.
* Wall Street not only thinks its workers are the smartest, but that it as an industry is smarter than Main Street; and for Wall Street, layoffs and immediate rehiring is a normal part of the work experience.
* Wall Street makes money on transactions, so it suffers from the "don't just stand there, do something" bias. It is unable to recommend "stay the course" strategies to the businesses it advises.
* Workers are motivated by being constantly told how smart they are (while being given the most repetitive and uncreative of tasks). Reminds me of the discovery I had back in college, that people will tell you that you're smart or have "so much potential" to get you to work harder, with the academic system being a pyramid scheme built on the labor of students. Wall Street: same deal.
* Good observation about how women, especially minority women, were strong in their condemnation of other women (support staff) who wore sneakers to work and then put on pumps at the office. She thinks this is because they are doubly marked as similar to the support staff and are taking pains to distinguish themselves in dress and actions.
* Wall Street not only thinks its workers are the smartest, but that it as an industry is smarter than Main Street; and for Wall Street, layoffs and immediate rehiring is a normal part of the work experience.
* Wall Street makes money on transactions, so it suffers from the "don't just stand there, do something" bias. It is unable to recommend "stay the course" strategies to the businesses it advises.
March 7, 2013
Although I enjoyed reading this ethnography, I was a bit skeptical of Ho's theories due to her limited time working for Wall Street, the lack of clarity regarding her personal aspirations and reactions to being downsized, her seemingly small informant pool comprised mainly of friends or classmates who were also fairly new to Wall Street, and her lack of hard numbers to back up theories of recruitment and discrimination. After hearing her speak at the U of M and engaging in discussion with her, I feel more confident in her knowledge of Wall Street, financial crises, and social culture; however, I did not get answers to my questions regarding actual hard number statistics to back up the theories. It seemed that much of what she is proposing is based on her experience which I believe to be a very limited view of finance as a whole. I do plan to follow up with her, though, and find out more because I feel certain that her theories are something that individuals both inside and outside of finance should familiarize themselves with, reflecting on the way that our culture has changed and consciously deciding where it is we want to go from here.
April 17, 2014
I totally skimmed this book as any good grad student does, but I would still recommend this book. It is more academic than popular press. Even I glazed over a few times with all the academic-speak, but if you can get past that, it is a great dive into the world of investment banking. No, it's not boring at all. Rather fascinating at how easily we buy into the idea that anyone who goes to Harvard is "the best." And then if they work at Goldman Sachs they are "the best." And thus whatever they do at Goldman Sachs must be "the best" and we don't have to worry about it...unless taxpayers have to bail them out of the mess they created. And truly, the investigation into the cult of meritocracy and "being smart" is really what hooked me. One day I may reread this slowly, but for now, a skim will have to do.
March 25, 2011
I read this book chiefly out of a curiosity about the Wall Street. Anthropologists pay much attention to the unfolding of humanity by thoroughly showing how the webs of significance( the culture) are at work. So feel safe if you expect to know this side of the Street. Karen gave a pretty precise desciption to that "culture of smartness". However, when it comes to clarifying and explaining the changes in the macro level, her analysis seem to be weak. How the wall street model really challenges the "cooperation america" model? What's the theoretical implication? What's the uniquess of the fluid capital way of doing business? Further clarification is needed.
January 3, 2015
Must read if you are interested in economic sociology, sociology of financial markets, etc.
Karen Ho provides great insights into the workings and culture of finance. Eventually, it is quite depressing to see how little seems to have changed since the 2008 crisis, and how helpless governments seem to be in addressing the structural problems of financial institutions and financial markets. Also, the book provides a great starting point for those teaching economic sociology, finance and accounting, and marketing, to revise their syllabi that they include issues like 'profit', globalisation, markets, etc.
Karen Ho provides great insights into the workings and culture of finance. Eventually, it is quite depressing to see how little seems to have changed since the 2008 crisis, and how helpless governments seem to be in addressing the structural problems of financial institutions and financial markets. Also, the book provides a great starting point for those teaching economic sociology, finance and accounting, and marketing, to revise their syllabi that they include issues like 'profit', globalisation, markets, etc.
December 1, 2016
Sometimes anthropologists have an extremely annoying way of writing so this took forever to get through, but it was worth it. The research is excellent. If you suspected that investment bankers are rat racing morons, you are correct-- she identifies a lot of the reasons why the entire stock market game is pretty absurd as well, but in particular the way investment banks and bankers screw themselves and the rest of us. Fascinating conclusions and good writing. I'd encourage anyone who is even remotely interested in finance, or who is a blind subscriber to the American system to at least skim this one.
Read
September 21, 2014I was stunned by the introduction of this book! It's so interesting that the author began her research from a news on television. However, the pages which she actively explained about how her ethnography was different from the prior were so boring.
Jump to chapter 1!
The part of recruiting is quite interesting. It seems Ivy league is high class student. It's good to show the relationship or the network of people in Wall Street.
I like how she show us the daily life of banker, how the office space are organized.
Jump to chapter 1!
The part of recruiting is quite interesting. It seems Ivy league is high class student. It's good to show the relationship or the network of people in Wall Street.
I like how she show us the daily life of banker, how the office space are organized.
June 9, 2016
Some quick (and not very well structured) thoughts about this research...
I've got mixed feelings: on the one hand some parts are very interesting and illuminating, on the other hand I have big concerns about the relevance of the qualitative parts for the theoretical conclusions that are presented in the different chapters.
Moreover I wonder about the adecuacy of the interviews as a ethnography technique and to study the matter at hand and to extrapolate to macro conclusions about the finance markets...
I've got mixed feelings: on the one hand some parts are very interesting and illuminating, on the other hand I have big concerns about the relevance of the qualitative parts for the theoretical conclusions that are presented in the different chapters.
Moreover I wonder about the adecuacy of the interviews as a ethnography technique and to study the matter at hand and to extrapolate to macro conclusions about the finance markets...
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