An Anthropologist on What’s Wrong with Wall Street
by ilene - July 22nd, 2009 5:48 pm
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An Anthropologist on What’s Wrong with Wall Street
Courtesy of TIME, by Barbara Kiviat.
In 1996, Karen Ho got a job on Wall Street. The student of anthropology, who would later go on to get her Ph.D., was fascinated by how even in the midst of an economic boom, corporate downsizings were rampant — and how each time a company announced a major layoff, its stock rallied. What she found from her perch at Bankers Trust — and later in interviews with people at firms such as Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Salomon Brothers, Kidder Peabody and Lazard — was that it wasn’t just an ideological commitment to boosting shareholder value that drove decisions to merge, break up and restructure companies, but also the work culture of Wall Street itself. Ho, now a professor at the University of Minnesota, talked with Barbara Kiviat about her findings, presented in Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, and how she thinks the recent financial collapse has — or hasn’t — changed things.
What do you mean when you say the American worker has become liquid?
I mean that there’s constant job insecurity, constant downsizing, constant restructuring, a constant need to retrain to have an adaptable skill set and be flexible. In a sense, job security and stability have been liquidated.
And that comes from Wall Street?
What I found in my research was that in many ways investment bankers and how they approach work became a model for how work should be conducted. Wall Street shapes not just the stock market but also the very nature of employment and what kinds of workers are valued. These firms sit at the nexus — they are the financial advisers and sources of expertise to major U.S. corporations and institutional investors — and from this highly empowered middle-man role, what they say has a lot of influence. The model that came to be dominant in the 1980s was one of constant change. The idea is that there’s a lot of dead wood out there and people should be constantly moving, in lockstep with the market. If a company isn’t constantly restructuring and changing, then it’s stagnant and inefficient, a big lumbering brick.
And you think that attitude follows from the way Wall Street works?
What a lot…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.