Introduction
The “culture of smartness” is pivotal to understanding the work of Wall Street, where smartness is not just individual intelligence but a general sense of superior status. Involvement in the network of ideologies created as a result of the interaction of many institutions, processes, and American culture in general, is a key criterion of smartness. It gives authority and legitimacy to high finance and contributes to the enormous influence of the sector. The ability to impress is important, while business savvy is considered something that can be taught, although recognized as necessary. The best minds in the world are sorted and identified through a certification process, which is crucially backed up by image and performance. It becomes obvious that Wall Street accepts only applicants from elite schools since such students are already prefiltered (Ho, 2009, p. 54). From all of the above, the “culture of smartness” is still more of a “culture of elitism”, providing places mainly to those who attended the right schools.
Discussion
It is assumed that the desire for wealth is the force opposing sexism and racism. On Wall Street, “economic outcome” is seen as a result of skills, merit, and education rather than “external factors” such as race, class, and gender (Ho, 2009, p. 120). Investment banks are greedy to the extent that whoever brings them income will be rewarded equally regardless of other personal factors. However, this issue closely intersects with post-racism and color blindness discourse. It is important to understand that most stable jobs in corporate America were available mainly to middle-class white Americans. Consequently, the cession of employment to the relatively privileged is seen as a decline and is not considered a path worth encouraging. Thus, despite the loud statements, Wall Street promotes sexist and racist orientations even with confidence in the absence of these trends.
Trying to understand the specifics of massive corporate downsizing and socio-economic inequalities on Wall Street, the author turned to financial specialists. According to the overwhelming majority of respondents, shareholder value remains the primary goal for all corporations (Ho, 2009, p. 126). In this regard, there can be only illusions that the company’s task is to improve the situation of the general public. Specialists barely acknowledged that their strict commitment to shareholder value could undermine the productivity and health of corporate clients. Downsizing is considered a fact, not a problem to solve, and massive job losses are a typical result of corporate restructuring. Thus, a large personnel turnover becomes a natural consequence of the focus of investment banks on success, which is unusual in other work areas.
Wall Street investment bank employees are involved in transactions supervised and advised in corporate America, including mergers and acquisitions. Due to the decline in shareholder value, their failures led to huge losses in profits, corporate morale, productivity, and jobs. Subsequently, corporate reconstruction destroyed ideals that investment banks should have protected. Even realizing that the results may not be effective in the long run, many investment bankers continued to maintain a positive view of shareholder value. More experienced investment bankers, who have dealt with countless financial problems and failed mergers, could identify most of their transactions (Ho, 2009, p. 128). There was a contradiction between the “model” of shareholder value and its actual consequences, which sheds light on the peculiarities of financial capital functioning.
A historical and local understanding of shareholder value is crucial to understanding the dramatic changes in capitalism and how corporate values and basic economic assumptions have changed since the mid-twentieth century (Ho, 2009, p. 153). U.S. workers were subject to massive layoffs during the economic boom of the 1990s, even though it helped boost the economy. From the point of view of the leading economic indicators, the economy was developing. Still, from the point of view of wages and jobs, the situation of many people remained tragic. This phenomenon was called “jobless recovery”, and at that time, sociologists had already pondered its contradictions. Now it seems difficult only if we use the terms of past eras for the modern world. Currently, a jobless recovery makes sense only if shareholder value, not social security capitalism, is ideal, and the value of jobs remains the focus of companies.
The theoretical view of corporate goals and values emerged from an economic discipline dominated by the neoclassical tradition. It consists of the fact that individual actions based on economic interests are combined with the help of the “invisible hand” of market forces to achieve the best interests of society as a whole (Ho, 2009, p. 127). The dominant neoclassical assumptions in modern economics are based on these worldviews. Even when the form of the contemporary corporation began to dominate the economic organization, neoclassical theories retained the central role of the individual entrepreneur. This correlates with the author’s view that the revival of shareholder value in the 1980s can be considered part of a long series of neoclassical worldviews.
The culture designated by the term “Wall Street investment banks” does not always correlate with specific institutions. This designation is used for a wide range of ideals and practices deeply rooted in a complex network of institutions, investments, and so-called high finance. Therefore, the proclaimed “death of Wall Street” does not mean the final destruction of Wall Street ideologies or practices. It would be more appropriate to claim that instability and crisis fundamentally characterize a unique culture of liquidity and signal not a decline but the influence of Wall Street values and practices. Wall Street was constantly transformed through mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, and failures, which did not become the end of the investment banking system. Accordingly, the adaptability of workers to extreme cases of the economy and the investment system will be called the ability to liquid life.
The policy of people creating the boom and bust market is both understandable and absurd. Constant surges and instability of banking become part of the economic chain, unchangeable and inevitable, and often it becomes impossible to prevent them from maintaining activity. These risks may be justified on the part of managers, but those who have never come face to face with such a system will not be able to understand this policy. Different values lead to different methods, which makes the side striving for the market’s stability seem inadequate and infantile for doing business.
Conclusion
From a moral point of view, it is safe to agree with critics of the goals of forcing the stock market to jump constantly since the Wall Street system, being initially extremely unstable, continues to encourage economic shocks. It also goes against the interests of employees, depriving them of a stable workplace and stable salaries. However, there are also attempts to resist the tendency to believe in global hype and begin to consider the system of globalization as a set of constructed events. In that case, the global deployment of Wall Street is quite successful. In a political economy that requires constant change, being international is often more about marketing opportunities and potential than being fixed in space and time (Ho, 2009, p. 318). With such a view, the desire for enrichment and development will hardly be called a deception, even when they contradict the interests of the general public.
Reference
Ho, K. (2009). Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Duke University Press.