Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.90 (601 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0822345994 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 392 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-09-03 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. Recruited from elite universities as “the best and the brightest,” investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. 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. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. 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. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. 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
Her keen eye for the significance of space illuminates workplace narratives, e.g., segregating staff by floor, function and prestige; constant and lavish recruiting events at Princeton and Harvard; and anticlimactically tawdry office space for most workers. Ho's refreshing ethnography of the daily lives of Wall Street investment bankers takes another tack and 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. From Publishers Weekly The timely question, What caused the current global financial crisis? provokes answers usually aimed at the level of institutions and the more abstract market logic. (Aug.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. . Ho, a former business analyst and now an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, unpacks constant downsizing, high risk/high reward job liquidity, shortsighted
Joyous said I highly recommend it for those who want to be better informed. A very interesting book. Explains a LOT about Wall Street. I highly recommend it for those who want to be better informed, especially in this political season. Make you candidate read and respond to it in their policy prescriptions.. Real Insider Tips from Wall Street Donna G. Storey Karen Ho's fascinating study is provocative on so many levels, beginning with her courageous project to "study up" and analyze the culture of some of the most powerful men (and a few hardy women) in the world. On some level, I think everyone with a 401K buys the myth that The Market is an abstract force, rather like a moody Judeo-Christian god, rewarding and punishin. William R. Neil said The "SmartestBulimic Culture of Expediency"in the World. Anthropology has done many things over the years for citizens of the "first world" trying to understand allegedly "exotic" cultures. It has shown us the humanity beneath the too easy stereotypes about foreign lands and cultures, and often revealed their surprisingly complex systems of practices and values. It has also held up a mirror to "modern" world values - one w