Making Markets and Constructing Crises: A Review of Ho’s Liquidated
| Autor: | Alexandra B. Cox |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The Qualitative Report. |
| ISSN: | 2160-3715 1052-0147 |
| DOI: | 10.46743/2160-3715/2012.1786 |
| Popis: | This book review is a beginning academic researcher’s interpretation of the robust methods and rich data Ho presents in her study of investment banking culture and the market in Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009). A unique contribution of the text is Ho’s combining of ethnographic methods in order to practice polymorphous engagement in her study. A weakness of the text is Ho’s lacking autoethnographic analysis of her experience as an Asian American woman on Wall Street. The book will be helpful for a scholarly audience interested in studying rigorous ethnographic methodologies and exploring the culture of Wall Street. Key Words: Ethnography, Polymorphous Engagement, Prefieldwork, Wall Street. In her dissertation-turned-book, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009), anthropologist Karen Ho describes the culture of Wall Street from an insider’s perspective. After being recruited from Princeton and employed at the prestigious global investment firm Banker’s Trust (BT), Ho developed a unique sense of what being a part of Wall Street meant. She left Wall Street after just a year, when she was laid off, to pursue her graduate studies in anthropology and continue the ethnographic research she began as a financial analyst at BT. Through in-depth interviews with all levels of Wall Street employees, from entry-level analysts to senior managing directors and from frontoffice players to back-office support staff, Ho explores the omnipresent practice of downsizing and constant corporate liquidation experienced – and perpetuated – by these individuals and their Wall Street colleagues. She launched her personal experience into a full ethnographic research study in attempt to answer the question, “How do Wall Street investment bankers negotiate the relationship between massive downsizing, shareholder value, and the production of market crisis?” (Ho, 2009, p. 4). More generally, she asks, “How do investment bankers actively make markets – that is, produce the dominant sensibilities of the stock market and Wall Street financial norms through their daily cultural practices?” (Ho, 2009, p. 4). In seven robust chapters and over one hundred detailed and transcribed interviews, Ho interrogates the culture of Wall Street and debunks the market as an elusive concept. Her rigorous qualitative research methods and sheer volume of data convincingly demonstrate a market that mimics the personalities, egos, and practices of the Wall Street investment bankers themselves, and her analysis makes the case for how these individuals have created a financial environment that shapes the way corporate America operates, the way the global economy functions, and even the way individuals live. Ho (2009) introduces her text by justifying her choice to study Wall Street ethnographically and sets the stage for her data presentation and analysis throughout the book. Rejecting the “widespread conception of capitalist globalization as an abstract metanarrative and homogenizing force too unwieldy for ethnographic translation” (Ho |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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