![Liquidated - [美] Karen Zouwen Ho](https://static.book345.com/covers/s/9780822345992.jpg)
From Publishers Weekly
The timely question, What caused the current global financial crisis? provokes answers usually aimed at the level of institutions and the more abstract market logic. Ho's refreshing ethnography of the daily lives of Wall Street investment bankers takes another tack and outlines a web of practices, beliefs and structures that may be vital to understanding what keeps the market system in place despite built-in instabilities. Ho, a former business analyst and now an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, unpacks constant downsizing, high risk/high reward job liquidity, shortsighted compensation structures, prestige and the ruse of shareholder value. Her keen eye for the significance of space illuminates workplace narratives, e.g., segregating staff by floor, function and prestige; constant and lavish recruiting events at Princeton and Harvard; and anticlimactically tawdry office space for most workers. The author exposes how elite undergraduates are immersed in a culture promoting finance as the only legitimate job, how educational pedigrees reinforce the financial world's self-image—while the actual jobs remain rigidly hierarchical (stratifying women, people of color and non–Ivy League graduates), highly unstable and isolating, encouraging a culture in which making money is the only value. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"We're pretty familiar with the economic rationale for the regime of cost-cutting and downsizing throughout corporate America in recent decades. But Karen Ho's research greatly enriches our understanding of how Wall Street's own peculiar culture of transient relationships and relentless competition has contributed to the shareholder revolution. And, along the way, her interviews and fieldwork offer a very revealing picture of the mind of Wall Street. A fascinating and important book." Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer " Karen Ho has picked an excellent time to publish her fascinating new study...patient ethnographic analysis has produced a fascinating portrait that will be refreshingly novel to most bankers...Ho peppers her account with revealing eyewitness stories...Most fascinating of all is her account of how Wall Street becomes deluded by its own rhetoric about "market efficiency"...I, for one, would vote that Ho's account becomes mandatory reading on any MBA (or investment banking course); if nothing else, it might be more entertaining than the other texts that bankers swallow so uncritically." Gillian Tett, Financial Times, 2nd October 2009
Karen Ho is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.
- "和气商业理论（the doux commerce theory）是18世纪兴起的一种理论，认为利益会驯化欲望，商业温和无害，可以去除贪图享乐的恶习。——译注"
- "将霍夫曼与塔利的观察结合起来，就是我的观点。正是投行家异常显赫的主体性——他们的精英履历、经验和等级表现——在低效率的美国企业和过时的金融技术中授权并合法化了自身的权威。深入到华尔街的组织文化之中可以看到，特定的性情是被建构出来的，所以投行鼓励银行家们投身于激烈的交易决策制定之中，并将市场应变能力视作他们优越激烈的交易决策制定之中，并将市场应变能力视作他们优越性的标志。这些结构化的实践在缺乏面向未来战略规划的情况下就落实了，并且被股东价值的额意识形态合理化，反过来又借力于持续的全球化吹捧、营销和杠杆操作，只是为了使投行实现增长和占据主导地位的目的。独特的金融意识形态和交易使得华尔街为首的金融繁"
- "在1998年和CNN旗下的钱线栏目（MoneyLine）的采访中，[美林]当时的首席执行官大卫·曼斯基谈到了公司的全球扩张战略，……"
- "精英主义的交流互动 他们被宣称是“最优秀和最聪明的”。他们会很快习惯来自同龄人、父母、求职者和全社会的尊敬、给予他们的地位和钦佩的赞赏。那些最迷恋和依赖于他们所拥有的公认的“精英圈”资格的人，总是想方设法保留并继续享用他们早已习惯的高地位，尤其当毕业即将到来。 就像一位《每日普林斯顿人》的学生作者德文·彼得森观察到的关于“精英工作的诱惑和缺陷”那样：“四年的时间里，我们一直享受着自己是最优秀学校的孩子的事实，在这个历史上最精英、绝对强大的国度，这些投行企业为我们提供了一种保持我们在社会上优势地位的方法，通过提供其他职业不能提供的通向财富与权力的途径。” 华尔街能够如此有效地推销自己，是因为他们"
- "“这不是投行的错。这是因为我们整日忙于奔波来取悦他人，以至于很难清楚我们自己真正想要的东西。” 很多学生意识，投行和咨询已经占据了他们对未来的期待，阻碍了他们对“我们处在世界中的位置和特权”这一问题的反思，因为对紧握特权的渴望已经在这种招聘过程中自然化了。 如果一个人的人生目标是使得“资产数百万的企业变得更加富有”，这是一回事，而如果一个人的目标是“如果不进入高盛，就不幸福”，那这就是另外一回事了，但问题的难点就在于学生很难质疑或者反思他们真正对什么有热情，更不用说反思与他们已有的特权相矛盾的事情了。"
- "My[13] particular strategy in “studying up,” to break through the barriers of security and public relations, was based on institutional kinship.15 To enable this research, I leveraged my socioeconomic background and connections with elite universities–the only sites from which Wall Street investment"
- "As[21] I have footnoted,[note 16] all of my informants have been given pseudonyms, and although I struggled with whether or not to disguise the financial institutions themselves, I ultimately decided not to. First, the project focuses on Wall Street investment banking culture broadly conceived; as s"
- "In[23] parallel, I also encountered Jesse Jackson’s “Wall Street Project,” a division of his Rainbow / ᴘᴜꜱʜ coalition based in New York City, articulating a strategy of incorporating African-Americans and other excluded groups into the stock market. This project, founded in 1997, began as a coalitio"
显示全部
Together, Somehow
Dreams of Flight
Mekong Dreaming
Necropolitics
Improvising Medicine
In the Shadows of the State