Liquidated: an ethnography of Wall Street * Karen Ho
人类学家Karen Ho通过亲身在华尔街投资银行工作，揭示了银行家如何通过日常文化实践塑造市场逻辑，并指出其不稳定性和对企业的破坏性影响，挑战了市场自然周期的观点。
With the rise of neoliberal capitalism, a hegemonic conception of markets as the most effective and progressive mechanism for delivering economic growth and prosperity has become pervasive, almost unquestioned in financial, corporate and policy realms. However, an emerging literature in the social sciences has begun to engage with the nature, construction and (re)production of markets in order to decentre the market as an abstract agent and powerful force. This ethnography of Wall Street investment banks by anthropologist Karen Ho is a successful attempt at puncturing the aura of Wall Street superiority, revealing its fragilities, contradictions and the often devastating impacts of their corporate cultures and collective actions not only on the financial workers and financial markets, but also the rest of corporate America. The book is written out of the author’s PhD dissertation, in which she analyses Wall Street’s role in the reshaping of corporate America and its corresponding effects on market formations. Ho worked at an investment bank and immersed herself in investment banking circles from 1996 to 1999 to investigate the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers. Her objective is to understand how investment bankers actively make markets, examining the process through which they produce dominant logics of stock markets and Wall Street norms through daily cultural practices. In doing so, she describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified and reproduced through the socialization of investment bankers, the restructuring of corporations (through investment banking practices) and the larger economy. By demonstrating that the remaking of financial institutions during times of crises are constituted by everyday practices and ideologies of investment bankers, the book serves as counterargument to the construction of boom and bust cycles as normal cyclical process of ‘the market’. Her theoretical approach follows broadly the Social Studies of Finance (SSF) school, which argues that markets do not simply emerge out of thin air, but are continually produced and (re)constructed socially with the help of actors who are interconnected in dense and extensive webs of social relations. The book also draws upon a wide range of literatures from economics, geography, sociology, anthropology and business studies.