Abstract
As the government bailout of three large UK banks was announced, the City of London breathed a sigh of relief and the mantra ‘too big to fail’ rang out across 24-hour news channels up and down the country ad nauseum. The 13th October 2008 was arguably a symbolic ‘moment’ in the unfolding narrative of the financial crisis in the UK, a notable juncture at which the everyday perception of economic order was recast and the myth of market meritocracy began to dissipate. In the weeks, months and years following this ‘moment’, as widespread public scrutiny of capitalism begun to hold sway in Western nations, phrases such as ‘quantitative easing’ became emblematic of the crisis and came to form the basis of a whole new lexicon used to interpret it. Whilst the dictionary grew, newly popularized terms: ‘sub-prime’, ‘junk-bonds’ and ‘sovereign debt’ inter alia became increasingly exposed as metanarratives for the Frankenstein capitalist system of today. This newfound lingua franca, gleaned from the discourses of the powerful, revealed that behind the tangled web of abstract economic systems, the elite were, in essence, making the rules up as they went along. The reality of neo-liberal free market capitalism, supposedly meritocratic by virtue of an entrenched frosty dispassionateness, was revealed to be more akin to the stifling, miasmatic confines of a bazaar, in which rabbit warren networks of states, financial institutions and wealthy individuals beg, steal, barter and borrow. In the videogame world that is the global economic system it seems that there is always a cheat code to allow the privileged few to map out new virtual worlds and keep on playing.
While the plot unfurled, the unforgiving economic conditions that we bared witness to increasingly came to be viewed as product of the deplorable actions of a handful of powerful institutions around the globe. Desire for an explanation of the causes of the financial crisis was not satiated by the light salmon pink pages of the Financial Times, nor could it be appeased by policymakers. Instead, the blood thirst was quenched, as is so often the case in times of societal upheaval, by laying blame with groups of individuals. At this time ‘banker bashing’ entered our vocabulary, a term infinitely more intelligible than ‘quantitative easing’ and much more reflective of the growing public need to satisfy a burning schadenfreude. Used to describe everything from pub-talk to organized acts of protest such as the Occupy movement, ‘banker bashing’ became a byword for indicting financial services professionals as responsible for making everything that was solid melt into air. All of a sudden the much-maligned traffic warden was no longer the ‘most hated’ occupational group in Britain, they had been superseded almost overnight by the parading hordes of bumptious bankers.
Bankers’ public, albeit slight, fall from grace was celebrated with festival like gusto and their ubiquitous condemnation created a beguiling sideshow to the spectacle of the global financial crisis. Bankers were the perfect bogeymen and they duly obliged in fulfilling this role (with a little help from the media) as a string of high profile ‘PR gaffes’ weaved some memorable moments into the unremitting narrative of the financial crisis. Trader Alessio Rastani’s proclamation that ‘Goldman Sachs rules the world’ and former Barclays Chief Executive Bob Diamond’s ‘big boy’ email exchanges are two notable media storms which are a case in point. The newfound interest in the lives of bankers in the public domain arose alongside a refreshed academic focus in the area, prompting a timely resurgence of ideas sympathetic toward new economic sociology. Akin to the public concern with the sullied goings-on of the individual agents and financial institutions seemingly instrumental in the causation of the financial crisis, scholarly work has attached primary importance to the study of how individuals and organizations contribute toward the social construction of markets. In light of the recent financial crisis, debates are now being swayed toward perspectives inspired by social constructionism and the notion that ‘individual and institutional processes mutually influence each other’ has become an endearing theoretical foci for many (Abolafia, 1996: 9).
A particularly fruitful area of the literature in the last few years has been the Wall Street context as seen through the lens of the ethnographer. In this review essay, three well-known monographs that fit this mould will be reviewed. Upon consideration of the import of social constructionist ideas in this research area it is unsurprising that ethnography has become a favoured methodological approach amongst some scholars, orienting the researcher as it does toward bridging emic-etic concatenations between bankers, institutions and markets. Value is also to be discovered in the ethnographic approach’s ‘comfortable in its own skin’ standpoint vis-à-vis subjectivities and ‘researching with an agenda’ as studies of Wall Street carried out in such a way are always unlikely to yield a vapid or uninteresting account of everyday life. Luckily, each book discussed here delivers on this front, each an enjoyable read, richly descriptive and telling of what it is like to live in the pressure cooker world of high finance from a diverse range of perspectives.
The earliest Wall Street ethnography to be briefly discussed is Abolafia’s (1996) ‘in the pits’ study of the trade-off that bankers negotiate between opportunity and restraint, in balancing profit maximization on the one hand and the stability of one’s employment, organization and the market on the other. Published more recently, Liquidated by Karen Ho (2009), critically explores the embeddedness of market ideologies in Wall Street banks; a book which sits alongside Melissa Fisher’s (2012) account of the first wave of Wall Street Women and the struggles they faced in carving out banking careers in the masculine world of 1960s New York. These three different Wall Street ethnographies show variation in their substantive thematics but are united by certain commonalties, for example, the centrality of meritocracy to bankers’ self-concept is a theme that emerges in each of the books, so too is the authors’ adoption of social constructionist ideas. At the heart of each of these studies is the notion that the lives of bankers, through their involvement in shaping and being shaped by markets, in some way affect the lives of us all. I will start by considering Ho’s (2009) book first.
According to Ho (2009: 39–72), bankers’ curious relationship with ‘the market’ and a fetishization of ‘value’ take root before they even set foot in the door of a gleaming Wall Street bank. These observations are made in chapter 1 of her book, as she explores the tiresome world of on-campus recruitment, encountering what she describes as a ‘culture of smartness’ amongst Ivy League cohorts. Ho (2009: 52) discovered that entry into elite US educational institutions stimulated an objectification process whereby the agent becomes ‘one of the smartest people in the world’ by association. Investment banks savvy to this latent neurosis bombard Ivy Leaguers with propaganda proclaiming that only a career on Wall Street is befitting of ‘such smart people’. A process of self-commodification then occurred in which ‘smartness’ and the market ‘value’ thereof came into conversation with feelings concerning self-worth, which in turn oriented students toward a Wall Street career as the only source of self-validation.
Campus recruitment of this type served to reinforce ‘the culture of smartness’ within Wall Street too, creating thorny divisions of labour between front-office and back-office employees and between Ivy Leaguers and non-Ivy Leaguers (Ho, 2009: 73–121). These dynamics induced what can only be described as mild psychosis regarding work, meritocracy and climbing the ladder. Non-Ivy Leaguers were often back-office or mid-office employees many of whom became insecure about their personal lack of ‘smartness’ and overcompensated through ever-longer hours. Their front-office, oft Ivy League counterparts, perceived mid and back-office workers as lazy and lacking in commitment and demarcated themselves through a pathological commitment to hard work. Front-office workers also viewed consumption as a way of differentiating themselves from colleagues of a lower status, for example, bringing lunch from home considered a strict no-no, so too was wearing training shoes during the journey to and from work because to do so implied a longer daily commute and thus representative of living in the more impoverished outer boroughs of New York (Ho, 2009: 121). Damagingly, these cultural dynamics acted to perpetuate and reproduce the cycle of hard work on Wall Street.
In her fieldwork, Ho (2009: 87) encountered many respondents who rapidly became disillusioned with the perverse cycle of overwork characteristic of the industry that she dubs the ‘white-collar sweatshop’. Ho (2009: 92) discusses the exploitative nature of the ‘grunt work’ which junior employees endure alongside the many hardships women and ethnic minorities in both front and back-office roles contended with. Two back-office informants, described as ‘junior-ranking women of colour’, were said to occupy ‘precarious positions’ because the prestige of their roles was ‘too fragile to withstand the weight of racial and gender lumping’ (Ho, 2009: 120). Similarities can be discerned in the difficulties Fisher’s (2012: 29) informants faced at the start of their careers on Wall Street. The first wave of Wall Street Women were ‘double outsiders’ as women and as lesser-educated graduates; ineligible to attend elite educational institutions in the 1960s, meaning the former naturally infers the latter. In contrast to some of Ho’s informants, who jettisoned Wall Street careers after experiencing discrimination, Fisher (2012) found that many of her respondents, despite starting their careers in junior back-office roles, managed to work their way up the career ladder by developing formal and informal professional networks in order to mutually bolster each other’s careers through collaboration and mentoring. Despite the prevalent spirit of activism present during the period under discussion, Fisher (2012: 15) found that very few of her respondents were involved in radical feminist politics and most made conscious efforts to separate their professional identities from their ‘identity as feminists’.
It was discovered that the first generation of female professionals on Wall Street achieved their career objectives early on by subverting dominant masculinities in favour of acting out what can be considered as typically feminine virtues in their day jobs (Fisher, 2012: 27–64). In doing so, women were argued to have counterbalanced many of the traditionally masculine characteristics such as aggression, competitiveness and self-interest usually associated with Wall Street that Abolaifa explores (1996: 169). Fisher’s (2012: 120–135) respondents identified largely with the liberal feminist standpoint as their narratives appear to be grounded in rhetoric surrounding the American dream, individualism and entrepreneurship. Predictably the theme of meritocracy is mentioned here, informants viewing it as desirable from a feminist perspective with regard to achieving gender equity in the workplace but also as a gender neutral concept in terms the value of hard work in achieving social mobility (Fisher, 2012).
Ho and Fisher’s informants’ sensemaking of meritocracy are reflective of Abolafia’s (1996: 189) discussion of moral communities. Abolafia (1996: 26–27) regards the markets as a ‘moral community of institutions’ whereby community stability is maintained through the creation of a level playing field via various regulatory structures, which in turn creates an environment where only the those who master the ‘art’ of trading are able to survive. We see in each account that perspectives on meritocracy pervade the mental space of Wall Street as the market, central to every decision workers make, is constructed as an unseeing eye, blind to anything but hard work, determination and guile. These themes are either subtly or explicitly propagated at micro/meso/macro levels of sociality and Fisher (2012) and Abolafia (1996) arguably provide lucid examples in detailing the grit of Wall Street Women in achieving their career objectives and the guile opportunistic traders employ in order to maximize revenues.
Of the three studies Ho’s (2009) book arguably delivers the more incisive and critical account of the financial markets and capitalist relations of production—a key strength of her work in comparison to the other monographs which advocate more moderate perspectives. Ho (2009: 122–212) relays this position well in chapters 3 and 4 in her critique of the superiority complex Wall Street workers seem to suffer which she argues to have been the catalyst to the shareholder value revolution on Wall Street. This pernicious development heralded job insecurity not only for the employees of Wall Street’s clients in corporate America but amongst Wall Street workers themselves. Workers’ awareness of the precariousness of their labour is mentioned too by Abolafia (1996: 129–151), describing it as ‘heightened vigilance’ in a chapter of his book. The deeply critical perspective Ho adopts is one of the few weaknesses of Fisher’s (2012) ethnography, which seemingly eschews casting a forthright critical eye upon the economic behemoth her informants labour toward in favour of lauding their occupational achievements. Some organizational theorists may perceive this as a boon whereas those more interested in the effect that markets have on the wider social context may find her analyses lacking bite.
The dimension of time forms a leitmotif which bonds the three enquiries, surfacing across a range of different scales as Wall Street workers always seem to find themselves in the throes of ‘time poverty’ in some form or another. We witness the nervy few seconds it takes to complete an important trade with a colleague on the other side of the globe (Abolafia, 1996: 12), the 110 + hour working week that sees some Wall Street workers earning equivalent to less than the minimum wage (Ho, 2009: 85) and the years of difficulty women faced in pursuing gender equality (Fisher, 2012). Time, then, is a revealing trope in these studies and Wall Street too has its own internal clock linked with the pulse and rhythm of the financial markets. Time on Wall Street is experienced dualistically, contrasting between the heady freneticism of the bull market which can feel like mere seconds and the post-crash hibernation in which workers wait for the good times to return feels like an eternity. Today’s Wall Street lull, the catalyst to burgeoning interest in this field, is explored in two of the books as Fisher (2012) and Ho (2009) returned to the field during the global economic crisis to follow up with their respondents.
The authors’ respective exploration of the effects of the financial crisis signals a difference in approach. In chapters 5 and 6 Fisher (2012: 136–174) returns to find a Wall Street which her informants have largely left behind, describing their newfound interest in ‘feminist philanthrocaptialism’ and their various forays into the political arena as she details informants’ expressed preference for the femininities of Sarah Palin over those of Hillary Clinton. Fisher’s strong focus on her informants is in contrast to chapter 7 in Ho (2009: 295–324), which is a reflective account of the vicissitudes of the global financial crisis. Similarly, Fisher and Ho’s accounts of the post-crash world both insinuate something of a resignation to the perpetual cycle of boom–bust crisis capitalism that their informants are an inherent part of. It seems likely that if Abolafia (1996) returned to the field to speak with his informants his chosen themes of restraint and opportunity would be interesting territory to explore in this more subdued period of growth in Wall Street’s rampant history.
Despite a recent slowdown of the markets, the normalized intensity of a Wall Street career remains an interesting example of the effects this intensity can have is found in informants’ personal lives. Ho (2009: 89) is polemical on the ruinous effect Wall Street can have on workers’ sex lives, proclaiming that working on Wall Street is only for the unattached whilst Fisher (2012: 114) discusses discourses surrounding motherhood. Despite each author witnessing a degree of normalized intensity, they arrive at varying conclusions as to why Wall Street is this way. Abolafia (1996) cites self-interest, Ho (2009) references ideologies and Fisher (2012) flags the import of gendered discourses to such a debate. What this highlights is that social stratification and feelings of inferiority seem to be important drivers of the internal culture of Wall Street and appear to be instrumental in its re/production. In light of this, these studies may be of interest to academics concerned with studying the normalized intensity of work, fast capitalism and more besides for the world high finance is arguably a bellwether for wider changes in work and society.
In studying how ‘personal biographies intersected with the workplace’ Fisher (2012: 88) and Ho (2009) provide an interesting juxtaposition to the traditional view of Wall Street workers that Abolafia (1996: 14–37) presents in his discussion, conceptualizing workers as ‘homo-economicus’. Ho (2009) touches upon race, gender and triple oppression repeatedly in her monograph and Fisher’s (2012) focus on femininities throughout are refreshing insights into the sheer diversity of this occupational group. Fisher’s and Ho’s works then are important texts in challenging the view that Wall Street workers are predominantly male, white, middle-class and driven by self-interest alone, something it might be all too easy to forget. In crafting Wall Street studies it may be tempting to let hagiographic images of Gordon Gekko runaway with the plot but the core tenets of the anthropological approach pays dividends here as everyday life is represented well in each monograph and each author successfully disentangles their work from issues of ‘studying up’ to their informants for the most part.
As is to be expected, each of the three books take slightly different approaches to their ethnography. Ho (2009: 20) is an ex-Wall Street employee and she frames a brief period spent working on Wall Street as the source of her foreshadowed problems. Reflecting on her time on Wall Street, Ho allays suggestions that she went native by stressing her self-image as a closet anthropologist at all times and attempts to establish a degree of ethnographic strangeness by professing that her ‘network did not include many business types’ prior to entering Wall Street. Ho (2009: 15) also describes how she elected to live in immigrant communities away from Lower Manhattan and used public transport to get home rather than company provided taxi cabs in an act of escapism—this arguably a telling vignette of her predisposition toward the tyranny of being a Wall Street worker. Like Ho, Fisher (2012: 20) gained access to Wall Street through her social capital and adopted a snowball sampling strategy in order to get her teeth into women’s networks. Her positionality is clear, she states that she has ‘a passion for women’s rights’ which informed her project to dispel myths surrounding female financiers (2012: 11–17). Her fieldwork was conducted intermittently between the late 1990s–2008 and it is valuable to note from a methodological point of view that unlike Ho and Abolafia she has never been formally employed on Wall Street. Abolafia (1996: 3) ‘yo-yoed’ in and around Wall Street much like the other authors, training as a trader in 1979 and gaining research access to the New York Stock Exchange trading floor in the early 1990s. All multi-sited ethnographies, it appears that each author held little regard for spatial boundaries of their field given that many ‘Wall Street’ banks no longer remain in situ (Ho, 2009: 9). Nevertheless, this a minor point and will no doubt become less and less significant for future ethnographies in this area as scholars may be forced to adopt virtual ethnography as banks become more technology driven.
In conclusion, both Ho’s (2009) and Fisher’s (2012) books should be considered worthy additions to what is currently a burgeoning field of academic interest. Fisher’s historical take on gender adds an interesting dimension to the established literature in this field by authors such as McDowell (1997). Ho’s (2009) book too is an important text for studies of Wall Street and the financial services industry, in particular given that race has remained an underexplored issue, especially in the Wall Street context, barring one notable exception (Bell, 2002). The study of race in this area is no doubt fertile ground for future investigation and it is arguable, given that Ho mainly studied the process of ‘acting white’, that she leaves many questions unanswered. Hence, it would be interesting to see future scholars studying race in high finance or other such workplaces adopt Fisher’s approach and focus upon workers’ associations. Research on the Black Lawyers Association or their Wall Street equivalent for example would be an interesting prospect. Abolafia’s (1996) monograph, now a classic, may be viewed as an entry point to those interested in conducting research upon the financial markets, the Wall Street context or discovering ideas in new economic sociology. Finally, it is worth noting that all three of these works more than adequately describe important aspects of the world of high finance, a world in which above all else ‘greed is good’.