Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction: Anthropology Goes to Wall Street  1

1. Biographies of Hegemony: The Culture of Smartness and the Recruitment and Construction of Investment Bankers  39

2. Wall Street's Orientation: Exploitation, Empowerment, and the Politics of Hard Work  73

3. Wall Street Historiographies and the Shareholder Value Revolution  122

4. The Neoclassical Roots and Origin Narratives of Shareholder Value  169

5. Downsizers Downsized: Job Insecurity and Investment Banking Corporate Culture  213

6. Liquid Lives, Compensation Schemes, and the Making of (Unsustainable) Financial Markets  249

7. Leveraging Dominance and Crises through the Global  294

Notes  325

References  353

Index  369

“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

“Karen Ho is my hero. . . . Her ethnography of investment bankers in the late 1990s, Liquidated, depicts the bravado, callousness, and contradictions that are the hallmarks of investment banking culture.”—Mitchel Y. Abolafia, American Journal of Sociology

“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

“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
—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

“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

“Karen Ho is my hero. . . . Her ethnography of investment bankers in the late 1990s, Liquidated, depicts the bravado, callousness, and contradictions that are the hallmarks of investment banking culture.”—Mitchel Y. Abolafia, American Journal of Sociology

“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

“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
—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

“Liquidated is what many of us have been waiting for: a serious ethnographic consideration of finance capital. Using the best kinds of cultural and social analysis, Karen Ho gets inside Wall Street assumptions, turning them around to upend each other.”—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, co-editor of Word in Motion and author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

“We’re pretty familiar with the economic rationale for the regime of cost-cutting and downsizing throughout corporate America in recent decades. But Karen Ho’s research greatly enriches our understanding of how Wall Street’s own peculiar culture of transient relationships and relentless competition has contributed to the shareholder revolution. And, along the way, her interviews and fieldwork offer a very revealing picture of the mind of Wall Street. A fascinating and important book.”—Doug Henwood, editor of the Left Business Observer and author of Wall Street: How It Works and For Whom

“What could be more timely than this fascinating and highly readable investigation of the culture of Wall Street? With Liquidated, Karen Ho takes us into the workaday world of investment banking before the crisis, showing us the roots of the risk-taking that drew lavish compensation packages and brought the world financial system to the brink of collapse. A significant contribution both to the anthropological and wider social scientific literature on financial markets and globalization, as well as to the urgent public debate over the power of financial institutions in contemporary American society.”—Bill Maurer, author of Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States

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