Financier culture forms inside a homosocial world of risk norms and chronic overwork.

Evidence

It is also for this reason that recent anthropological accounts of the financial sector likewise tend to avoid Marx, though they are more attentive to the broader sociological patterns that influence financial speculation and are reproduced by it. For instance, Caitlin Zaloom’s (2006) studies of financier culture have revealed the way financiers internalize a culture of risk management and are guided by an imagined relation to a highly circumscribed future. She also illustrates the way that norms and patterns of belief and behaviour are created and sustained within the largely (though not exclusively) homosocial world of financiers, and the importance of these norms to what we might call the reproduction of the financial industry (see also Czarniawska 2005; La Berge 2010; Prügl 2012). Similarly, Karen Ho (2009) has illustrated the way that financier culture is driven by a cult of “smartness” and chronic overwork and a form of hyperindividualized competition and inhumane flexibility. Ho illustrates how, in the name of “shareholder value,” the financial sector has imposed these norms on the rest of society through its influence over corporations and governments. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 87

Categorization

• XREF: Karen Ho’s ‘cult of smartness’ and shareholder value norm-imposition connects directly to the reader’s financialization-of-culture research program culminating in deWaard. — connects to: The finance culture took root in the upper-middle class. — Neil Fligstein & Adam Goldstein, The Emergence of a Finance Culture in…, 65; Culture operates at the core of the financial services industry — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 575; Wall Street’s liquidity-obsessed culture depends on the liquid, disposable lives of its own bankers — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 174 (+1 more)
• SEED: The way a Wall Street working culture (overwork, smartness cult, hypercompetition) got imposed on the whole society via ‘shareholder value’ is a strong essay angle on how elite workplace norms become cultural norms.

Broader Connections

• Culture operates at the core of the financial services industry #expands (0.72) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 575