httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9rUzLoKpfs
For several years, anthropologist Karen Ho worked at an investment firm on Wall Street. Her experience there resulted in her dissertation Liquefying Corporations and Communities: Wall Street World Views and Socioeconomic Transformations in the Post-Industrial US. Today, Time released a brief interview with Ho, in which she discusses her thoughts on what’s wrong with Wall Street: a transient, fast-paced culture built around self-interest, constant change and the reality of impending layoffs. Though, Ho reminds us, layoffs for investment bankers aren’t the same for average Americans. The former almost always, at least until very recently, land on their feet whereas the latter often don’t. In reference to this culture of layoffs and the overwhelming influence Wall Street has on the rest of our culture, Ho claims the American worker has been liquidated
…there’s constant job insecurity, constant downsizing, constant restructuring, a constant need to retrain to have an adaptable skill set and be flexible. In a sense, job security and stability have been liquidated.
What I found in my research was that in many ways investment bankers and how they approach work became a model for how work should be conducted. Wall Street shapes not just the stock market but also the very nature of employment and what kinds of workers are valued. These firms sit at the nexus — they are the financial advisers and sources of expertise to major U.S. corporations and institutional investors — and from this highly empowered middle-man role, what they say has a lot of influence.
On the topic of layoffs and how they can actually be a form of creative destruction, Wired published an article on Monday describing the culture of Silicon Valley and how, much like the Wall Street Ho describes, it is built around “Worker mobility [that] gives the tech industry fluidity, velocity, and energy.”
As it happens, that lack of loyalty has been a key driver of the Valley’s rapid innovation over the past three decades. AnnaLee Saxenian, author of Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, puts it this way: “Job-hopping, rather than climbing the career ladder within a corporation, facilitates flows of information and know-how between individuals, firms, and industries. When combined with venture capital, it supports unanticipated recombinations of technologies and skill.” In other words, we have Twitter today because a bunch of engineers who were trained at other companies quit their jobs and brought their expertise to Evan Williams’ side project. It’s like biology: In an ecosystem where microbes are promiscuously swapping genes and traits, evolution speeds up.
Very interesting view of the changing techno- and financescape. I know from my own experience I’ve very much enjoyed the freedom that comes with freelance and consulting work. I’ve had chances to share what I know and learn from some amazing people, gaining precious skills in the process. And I’ve often thought about the most appropriate way to build a life around this free radical-esque existence. Perhaps we are witnessing the nascent stages of the 21st century workforce, free from the constraints of suffocating bureaucracies. Sounds nice, at least in the tech sectors. Witnessing its incredible innovation and growth, I’ve admittedly become more of a fan of deregulation in this area. However, I’m a bit uneasy about such behavior among those whose actions influence and impact directly or indirectly practically every dimension of our lives on such a (to perhaps misuse the term) hegemonic scale. Yes, I think it’s good that our country’s financial sector is characterized by constant innovation and adaptability. But when the actors primarily responsible for making the system work are incessantly worried about their next layoff and are only concerned with garnering for themselves the largest bonuses possible before they get axed, I’d also like to think there is some degree of accountability on their behalf to prevent them from making short-term, high-risk decisions in order to quickly capitalize on their own self-interest. Decisions which might ultimately put our country in jeopardy, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
Ho comments on what she would like to see changed
I would hope that folks in the Obama Administration would somehow link bonuses to long-term corporate productivity or long-term shareholder value — long-term meaning four to five years instead of five months or a year — and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act [that separated investment and commercial banking]. These are big reforms, but they’d give you a more stable landscape to make even more changes. Part of what I learned is that the very kinds of daily practices that created the boom in the first place — wanting to book as many deals as possible for short-term bonuses, a workplace structured so that they’re knowingly not there for very long — paved the way for the bust. I talked to bankers who said, “When we do deals like this, we’re probably at the top of the market.” They knew. It’s not simply that busts always follow booms.
I’d love to get a discussion going around this. What are your thoughts?
via What’s Wrong with the Culture of Wall Street? – TIME.
Tagged: anthropology, culture, economics, financescape, labor, politics, wall street