Summary of Karen Ho's Liquidated

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I first became interested in studying Wall Street in September 1995, when I heard about the massive downsizing of ATT employees. The stock prices of Wall Street investment banks also rose as a result.
#2 The past three decades have seen a shift in the cultural code of business, which is reflected in the corporate landscape and the relationships among layoffs, corporate profits, and stock prices. In this period, which includes the so-called greatest economic boom in American history, the economy has experienced record corporate profits and a long rising stock market, while job insecurity has spiked.
#3 The primary mission of American corporations is to increase their stock prices for the benefit of their true owners, the shareholders. Employees are no longer benefited when the corporation makes a profit, because they are considered outside the corporation’s central purpose.
#4 The ostensible dominance of finance capital has led to a celebration of the stock market and Wall Street financial norms. But how do investment bankers make markets. And how have the severe social dislocations usually attributed to global capitalism been actualized in the form of record corporate profits and soaring stock prices.

Sujets

• Culture
• Social
• Anthropology
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Social Science

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 14 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822509429
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Karen Ho's Liquidated
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17 Insights from Chapter 18 Insights from Chapter 19 Insights from Chapter 20 Insights from Chapter 21 Insights from Chapter 22 Insights from Chapter 23 Insights from Chapter 24 Insights from Chapter 25 Insights from Chapter 26 Insights from Chapter 27 Insights from Chapter 28 Insights from Chapter 29 Insights from Chapter 30 Insights from Chapter 31 Insights from Chapter 32 Insights from Chapter 33 Insights from Chapter 34 Insights from Chapter 35 Insights from Chapter 36 Insights from Chapter 37 Insights from Chapter 38 Insights from Chapter 39 Insights from Chapter 40 Insights from Chapter 41 Insights from Chapter 42 Insights from Chapter 43 Insights from Chapter 44 Insights from Chapter 45 Insights from Chapter 46 Insights from Chapter 47 Insights from Chapter 48 Insights from Chapter 49 Insights from Chapter 50 Insights from Chapter 51 Insights from Chapter 52
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I first became interested in studying Wall Street in September 1995, when I heard about the massive downsizing of ATT employees. The stock prices of Wall Street investment banks also rose as a result.

#2

The past three decades have seen a shift in the cultural code of business, which is reflected in the corporate landscape and the relationships among layoffs, corporate profits, and stock prices. In this period, which includes the so-called greatest economic boom in American history, the economy has experienced record corporate profits and a long rising stock market, while job insecurity has spiked.

#3

The primary mission of American corporations is to increase their stock prices for the benefit of their true owners, the shareholders. Employees are no longer benefited when the corporation makes a profit, because they are considered outside the corporation’s central purpose.

#4

The ostensible dominance of finance capital has led to a celebration of the stock market and Wall Street financial norms. But how do investment bankers make markets. And how have the severe social dislocations usually attributed to global capitalism been actualized in the form of record corporate profits and soaring stock prices.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Wall Street is the central hub of financial institutions and actor-networks that embody a particular financial ethos and set of practices. I focused on the functions of corporate finance and MA within the banks, as they demonstrate the interconnections between financial and productive markets.

#2

The financial culture that I broadly denote by the term Wall Street investment banks does not always map neatly onto particular institutions. I use the designation to broadly signify an ethos and set of practices that continue to be deeply embedded in the intricate network of institutions, investments, and people we call high finance.

#3

The Wall Street culture is indicative of its disappearing acts. Wall Street has been changing its identities and locations constantly, and the millennial crash and record downsizings are a result of this.

#4

The influence and success of Wall Street has generated not only record profits but also volatility, crisis, and a continual existence on the brink of annihilation. Wall Street’s self-annihilation has not so much led to the disappearance of its particular cultural practices or power over American business as it has to constant financial crisis and widening socioeconomic inequality.

#5

The demise of my field site, Wall Street investment banking, in 2008 was not a radical turn of events, but the fairly predictable outcome of a peculiar corporate culture. I examine the structure and formation of investment bankers’ habitus, how they have developed an investment banking ethos that frames and empowers them to impose regimes of restructuring and deal making onto corporate America.

#6

Wall Street investment bankers understand the necessity of constantly performing in insecure work environments not as a liability, but as a challenge. They are trained to view themselves as the best and the brightest, and their lack of employment security serves as a test of their smartness.

#7

However, it is not my intention to assert that the Wall Street financial community, a heterogeneous site itself, single-handedly caused these massive corporate transformations.
Insights from Chapter 3

#1

I used my socioeconomic background and connections with elite universities to break through the barriers of security and public relations. I was first introduced to investment banking as a career option while an undergraduate at Stanford University.

#2

I got a job at a Wall Street investment bank, a strategy with sociological precedent, while still following anthropological ethical norms. I participated in the spring career services recruitment process at Princeton in 1996. I was hired by Bankers Trust New York Corporation, a hybrid investment and commercial bank, as an internal management consultant analyst.

#3

I lived in a two-bedroom apartment share in the Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, which allowed me to pay lower rent than at Princeton. I was able to put on a suit and take the F train into a highly sanitized world of shareholder value proponents.

#4

I was asked to streamline a back office department at BT that played a support role for the investment management front office, processing trades, managing ledgers, and fielding customer accounts. I firmly intended not to recommend any downsizing.

#5

I was able to show that although communications could be improved, there were still as many labor hours needed to complete necessary work as there were people. In other words, the amount of labor was equal to the number of people employed.

#6

I conducted participant observation and over one hundred interviews among investment bankers. I designed a methodology that combined immersion with movement, broad enough to access Wall Street worldviews and practices, but particular enough to understand how such norms were constituted on a daily basis within particular institutions.

#7

I was able to incorporate substantial participant observation during fieldwork, as I did not obtain investment banks’ official permission to hang out within their workplaces. I relied on interviews, some shadowing, and attendance at industry conferences, panel discussions, and informal social events.

#8

I relied on alumni and friendship networks to find out about the business world. While at Stanford, my social network did not include many business types, but I was actively involved in Ethnic Studies organizing as well as various Asian American student organizations.

#9

I was able to assemble a diverse financial crowd at multiple levels of the Wall Street hierarchy. Around 40 percent of my informants were people of color, with a slim majority of them men.

#10

Wall Street’s new rhetoric of market populism via shareholder value was rampant in the late 1990s. It was seen as a primary indicator of the improved economic lives of most Americans.

#11

The shareholder value revolution was not necessarily enriching the average investor, who was also facing unemployment. When I worked at BT, I heard of corporations drastically cutting costs, and their quarterly earnings and stock prices immediately jumped, but research and development suffered, productivity gains were negligible, and shareholder value over a longer time horizon did not increase.

#12

The acquisition of National Cash Register in 1991 by ATT generated massive downsizings and insecurity in the company’s hometown of Dayton, Ohio. The acquisition of NCR was a disaster for ATT, which lost a half-billion dollars in the first nine months of 1995 alone.

#13

The task is not simply to recognize Wall Streeters as subjects in the world, but to locate and critique their worldviews in relation to other cultural models, histories, and voices.

#14

The shareholder value idea is rooted in dominant historical narratives that legitimize Wall Street’s identity as the guardian of shareholder value.

#15

To address the inconsistencies, failures, and ramificat