HO, 2005
Situating Global Capitalism: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks
Karen Ho
Links to Relevant CA Lists: Globalization; Business Cultures; Neoliberalism, Subjectivity, Citizenship; Experts, Expertise, and Expert Knowledge; and United States
EDITORS' OVERVIEW
In February, 2005 issue of Cultural Anthropology, Karen Ho analyzes the ways in which Wall Street investment banks proclaim and define themselves as global and project images of their dominance and hegemony. Ho explores the differing versions, uses, and definitions of the global at various sites of cultural production and transmission such as marketing schemas of investment banks, and the process of recruitment, orientation, and training of new employees. The work that it takes to constitute “global presence” is “partial, incomplete, high-pressured, and ephemeral” and even the most seemingly global and powerful actors generate “contradictions, complexities, and implosions.”
Juxtaposing the self-representations of investment banks with academic critics of global capitalism, Ho points out that many cultural theorists and social scientists overlook the heterogeneous and complicated particularities of global capitalism, parallel representations of capitalist promoters they criticize, and thus help to create an image of capitalist totality. Global capitalism is not a “borderless world” whose global power and control relentlessly saturates “any remaining void,” nor is it a “no man’s land” that is “foggy and slushy, impassable and untamable.” Instead, Ho argues, it is “a set of constructed events,” based on a variety of promises, performances, and proclamations which can also become “actual goals with precarious outcomes.” Globalization is “a hope, a strategy, and a triumphalist ideology.” Moreover, within a political economy that requires constant change and flexibility, global strategies of Wall Street investment banks are “context specific, prone to change, and continually unstable.”
Cultural Anthropology has published a number of other essays on globalization and neoliberalism. See Ahmed Kanna’s “Flexible Citizenship in Dubai: Neoliberal Subjectivity in the Emerging 'City Corporation'” (2010); Daromir Rudnycjyk’s “Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia” (2009); and Bill Maurer’s “Due Diligence and ‘Reasonable Man,’ Offshore” (2005).
Cultural Anthropology has also published a range of articles on capitalism and finance. See, for example, Douglas Holmes’s “Economy of Words” (2009); Hirokazu Miyazaki’s “Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques” (2006); and Caitlin Zaloom’s “The Productive Life of Risk” (2004).
About the Author: Karen Ho is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She writes and teaches on capitalism and globalization, cultural studies of finance capital, feminist studies, comparative race and ethnicity, and American culture. Her book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, published by the Duke University Press in 2009, examines the everyday practices and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers and explores how a financially dominant but unstable market system is produced and justified through the structures and strategies of corporations and larger economy. Ho has also published in American Anthropologist: “Disciplining Investment Bankers, Disciplining the Economy: Wall Street’s Institutional Culture of Crisis and the Downsizing of American Corporations”, and in Encypledia of Social and Cultural Anthropology: “Finance.”
MULTIMEDIA LINKS:
Commercial for Merrill Lynch: "First in China"
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpvUz-o2XYA
Commercial for Morgan Stanley: "World Wise"
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19SDI8PksXU
Commercial for JP Morgan: "I work for JP Morgan"
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZDBtmdOgps
Even though Karen Ho conducted her fieldwork before the most recent financial crisis of 2007, her research offers insight into the ways in which financial booms and busts are constructed.
An Interview with Karen Ho on the Culture of Wall Street
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9rUzLoKpfs
LINKS FROM THE ESSAY
Dismantling a Wall Street Club
Merrill Lynch cuts offices in Japan
MORE ABOUT the FINANCIAL CRISIS of 2007
A Year of Financial Turmoil: A timeline of the most pivotal events in the financial crisis.
Wall Street's Money Machine Breaks Down
The crisis of credit visualized
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlvVumYdMGs
ADDITIONAL WORK FROM THE AUTHOR
Finance. Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Ed, eds. A. Barnard and J. Spencer. 2010, Routledge.
Disciplining Investment Bankers, Disciplining the Economy: Wall Street's Institutional Culture of Crisis and the Downsizing of "Corporate America" American Anthropologist. Vol.111(2) June 2009.
Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. 2009, Duke University Press.
Liquidated in the Media
An Anthropologist on what is wrong with Wall Street? Time Magazine.
Brain food: An Anthropologist visits Wall Street. Guardian.
The Anthropology of Wall Street. New York Times Blog.
Liquidated. Financial Times.
Did Wall Street Cause Economic Woes? Smart Money
Elyachar, Julia. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. 2005, Duke University Press.
Fisher, Melissa and Greg Downey, eds. Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy. 2006, Duke University Press.
Miyazaki, Hirokazu. The Temporalities of the Market. 2003, American Anthropologist Vol 105(2)
