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Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
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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. 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. 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 compensation structures, prestige and the ruse of shareholder value. 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. The author exposes how elite undergraduates are immersed in a culture promoting finance as the only legitimate job, how educational pedigrees reinforce the financial world's self-image—while the actual jobs remain rigidly hierarchical (stratifying women, people of color and non–Ivy League graduates), highly unstable and isolating, encouraging a culture in which making money is the only value. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Review
“Liquidated is a must-read book for anyone interested in how legions of recruits from Ivy League colleges come to espouse and enact the twisted bundle of class interests and market ideology that constitutes neoliberal capitalism.” (Kathryn Dudley American Studies)“Liquidated is an interesting description of many of the practices and orientations that exist in large investment banks, one that confirms what the reader may suspect: that these institutions are forcing-grounds for the sort of hubris and invulnerability that goes with the phrase ‘Masters of the Universe’, the incomprehensible money that sales staff receive, and the idea that they are ‘doing God’s work’. It also, however, indicates the reverse of the strength of the social studies of finance. Liquidated may help explain why those in investment banks think and operate in the ways that they do.” (James G. Carrier Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)“[A] unique portrait of the industry that asks pertinent questions about constant change, job insecurity, and the banker’s identity. . . . Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street asks many questions that those who work in the investment field should ask themselves. . . . 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 Financial Analysts Journal)“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)“Ho's study shows the intense competitiveness that is instilled in these primarily Ivy League recruits even before they are finished with their Bachelor's degrees. And she examines the myth that stockowners and companies are best served by maximizing shareholder profits. If anything, this book gives faces to the people who work in that abstract entity called Wall Street that seems to affect our world so much of late. I highly recommend it, especially if you have no idea how the world of high finance operates.” (James Franco The Huffington Post)“The book contains many wonderful insights, and is a veritable mine of quotations from Wall Street participants. . . . The book is, moreover, extremely well written throughout . . . . [A]n informed and informative text.” (Brett Christophers Environment and Planning A)“[E]ngaging and hard to put down. . . Karen Ho’s book is a must-read for anyone contemplating joining one of the major global banks. . . . Actually, even faculty of our elite schools are starting to question why so many of their graduates end up in finance. Karen Ho’s book should be required reading for students and faculty at these schools.” (Ben Lorica Quant Network)“After several decades when anthropologists at last overcame their inhibitions concerning the study of money, Karen Ho’s book . . . seems to mark a coming of age for the contemporary discipline. . . . The intelligence of its author shines through Liquidated. . . . I found it rewarding to read and reflect on, a landmark in the burgeoning anthropology of money.” (Keith Hart American Ethnologist)“Although written for a mostly academic audience, the book becomes easily digestible because of the summaries Ho adds in each section. She connects well the main theme throughout any areas of the book. Ho’s views should not be considered ‘anti-Wall Street’ but viewed as an analysis of Wall Street’s effect on the American community and the financial markets. This book should be read by Wall Street investment bankers and corporate managers to better understand the social values and responsibilities of corporations and the role that they play in the American community.” (Linda Kee-Koa International Examiner)“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)
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Product details
Series: a John Hope Franklin Center Book
Paperback: 392 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press Books; unknown edition (July 13, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822345994
ISBN-13: 978-0822345992
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.9 out of 5 stars
54 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#295,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Karen Ho is an anthropologist who worked briefly for an investment bank on Wall Street in the 1990s. Her work was cut short by a downsizing, but she later returned to Wall Street to do field research for a PhD. Her topic: the culture of investment banking. Much of her research was based on interviews with relatively junior analysts and associates; eventually her dissertation was recycled into "Liquidated." The book is packed with interesting insider information about how investment bankers are recruited on Ivy League campuses, how they toil away like slaves in cubicles, and how their lives are warped by the values of greed, competition, and always looking smart. At one point the author says that investment bankers go through life "always looking for the next Harvard" -- which sums things up nicely. If some young person you know is thinking of a career on Wall Street, give him or her a copy of "Liquidated".The book debunks the myth that capitalist markets are like laws of nature, irresistible and beyond moral judgment. In reality, markets are made up of people who have ideologies, interests, networks, and power, all of which shape markets. It is hardly a coincidence, for example, that Wall Street's ideology of "shareholder value" and its mania for corporate restructuring dovetail nicely with the fee-based compensation system of investment bankers. Unfortunately, I couldn't give the book five stars. For one thing, it is dense with anthropological jargon. Even worse, it pretends to offer a grand theory of how finance has shaped global capitalism, even though the author lacked access to top Wall Street managers and to the big company CEOs in the "real economy" who supposedly bow to their demands. To understand how Wall Street fits into the broader economy, we need to know how the big dogs think and network, not the boys and girls in the cubes.
Karen Ho's Ethnography Liquidated begins with a dedication "For my daughter and son, Mira and August, in the hope that their generation will see greater socioeconomic equality." I'm not certain that Ho's work here will help create greater socioeconomic equality for the next generation, but reading this book will help you understand how the habitus of Wall Street investment bankers is reshaping the world you live in, and the results are frightening to consider.Liquidated is an ethnography of Wall Street and its tribe of investment bankers. Ho spent time "on the ground" working in an investment bank and used her contacts through this short time (six months) to collect interviews and data regarding how Wall Street views itself in relation to the rest of the world, the hierarchies they create, and how the Wall Street focus on short term profits without long term planning is seeping into corporate America and creating a breakdown of the cultural fabric. What Ho reports on is a fascinating world where the concepts of "smartness" (your academic pedigree) and "hard work" (working in excess of 100 hours each week for years) act as cultural cachet to develop a new vision of the working world. Emblems of the hierarchy created in this culture range from the absurd ("you shouldn't wear suspenders because it looks like you spent too much time on your appearance"[73]) to the very literal (tiered elevators only allow access to certain floors, thus creating segregation between "front" and "back" office employees). An investment banker is considered less a real person and more an interchangeable object based on the college they attended ("we have two MITs, three Princetons, two Whartons, and a Harvard guy" [257]). Ho's assertion in Liquidated is that government deregulation of banking standards (such as the Glass-Steagall Act) has given investment banking greater strength and allowed their practices to become commonplace in all forms of business. According to Ho, "the very influence of Wall Street...has generated not only record profits but also volatility, crisis, and a continual existence on the brink of annihilation" (10) for corporate America; this volatility has led to a constant instability of the economy. Investment bankers live in a world of "high risk/high reward", but this model is not transferrable to the majority of corporations and it's creating an unstable environment where the worth of employees is on par with the inventory of the office supply closet.The chapter entitled "Liquid Lives" was perhaps the most telling of the damage Wall Street is doing to our nation. Ho states:"empowered by their prestige and elite educational pedigrees, their experiences of hard work, the moral high ground and historical purchase of shareholder value, and their role as mouthpiece of investor capital, investment bankers learn to thrive in a corporate culture that is characterized by slash-and-burn expediency(252)."Investment bankers live in a culture of incredible volatility; they are interchangeable commodities, so massive layoffs are common in their industry and they have learned to adapt to this world. This mindset of a "slash-and-burn expediency" is being adopted by other corporations, with disastrous results. For Wall Street, employees are interchangeable and therefore liquid commodities that can be released to increase capital for short term gains. This is a portion of the culture that investment bankers are accommodated to, and they believe it is part of a natural evolution for business to proceed in this manner. Investment bankers are rewarded with large bonuses for the work they do, often in excess of $100,000 annually. When investment bankers are inevitably laid off they have a cushion from their bonuses to protect their livelihood until they find new employment. The problem with corporations adopting this model is that regular workers are not compensated as such, so when a company decides to lay off a department so the executive bonus will increase slightly, the people who are laid off do not have a cushion to protect them in the interim. Wall Street, not understanding the world outside their ivory towers, is unable to see how the concept of liquidity cannot apply to every corporation. Unfortunately Wall Street, and by extension the corporate executives these analysts advise, do not understand any concept besides money and are unable to see the damage they are causing to the world. Ho's assertion in Liquidated is that there is a disproportionate distribution of wealth in the United States. A country founded on the ideals of freedom and prosperity has become a land where a shrinking number of people are accumulating a greater amount of the wealth, while the majority of the nation suffers as a result of the actions of this small group. Through her extensive research and attention to data and details, Ho has shown a great understanding of the culture she has studied. If the purpose of anthropology is to help us understand different cultures, Ho has done a great job in showing the history, mythology, and habits of Wall Street as a culture. The language of Liquidated can be difficult to comprehend at times (to quote the great Slim Pickens: "you use your tongue prettier than a twenty dollar whore" [Blazing Saddles]), but the payoff for your diligence in study is worth the challenge. If you have an interest in understanding how our socioeconomic status as a nation has become so disparate and volatile, then you will enjoy Liquidated.
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