Book Review: “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street” by Karen Ho (original) (raw)
Related papers
A 12-year ethnography illustrates how two investment banks' participative work practices entrapped bankers in indiscriminate overwork, and what the evolving consequences were for the banks and the organizations that the bankers joined subsequently. The banks' participative work practices eliminated all visible organizational controls. Invested in the task, the bankers collectively designed work practices that benefited the banks, but had the unintended consequences of intensifying work pace and habituating bankers to indiscriminate overwork that they experienced as self-chosen. Prior organizational behavioral research predicts outcomes only for about one year. During this time, the banks benefited from the bankers' hard work. Starting in year four, the practices' extremes produced opposite effects, namely declining performance because of body breakdowns, and cultural distance, because depleted bodies made it impossible for bankers to work in culturally normative ways. The bankers carried this pattern of overwork and subsequent breakdowns into the organizations that they joined subsequently, where they introduced the banks' practices.
Beyond the Dialectic Between Wall Street and Main Street: A Materialist Analysis of The Big Short
In this essay, we provide a materialist analysis of Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short. We contend that while, on one level, the film appears to be a celebration of several idiosyncratic traders on Wall Street who use rhetorical invention to outwit the industry, on another level, the film can be read as a genealogically informed account of the biopolitical relationship between the oikos and the polis and Main Street and Wall Street. We conclude by advocating for an account of the 2008 financial crisis that is sensitive to the historically overdetermined relationship among rhetoric, politics, and economic power.
Reframing Finance: From Cultures of Fictitious Capital to De-regulating Financial Markets
2016
Financialization – the leverage and promotion of anything to be turned into a tradable product – and its cultures are what Haiven addresses in his book Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Like many authors before him, he indicates that financialization is not only reduced to the transformation of currencies, goods, loans, etc. into tradable financial products such as swaps and futures, but that culture itself is under transformation and is being turned into an object of financial capitalism. The book’s opening sentence states the aim of the book very clearly: He wants to re-theorize financialization. In Haiven’s words financialization refers to ‘the increased power of the financial sector in the economy, in politics, in social life and in culture writ large’ (1).