Dr Gillian Tett, Anthropologist and Assistant Editor, Financial Times
While I was recently reading Karen Ho’s excellent ethnography of Wall Street, Liquidated, I was struck by a passage where she describes the difficulty that besets any anthropologist who is trying to conduct research on bankers. In the venues where anthropologists used to work a few decades ago – such as remote, thirrd world societies – a researcher could often simply pitch up, and observe the social group, confident that those subjects of research were less powerful than the anthropologist. But in modern finance, that power balance reversed: Wall Street or City bankers tend to be much more powerful than anthropologists, and bankers will almost never let outsiders through their doors, to conduct research (unless those aliens are management consultants conducting research which is paid for, and controlled, by the bank itself.) Thus the idea of ‘pitching your tent in the hall of JP Morgan’ is utterly ludicrous, as Ho points out; an anthropologist would probably be ejected by security guards long before any research occurred.
Some tenacious anthropologists have managed to duck around these constraints, usually by virtue of getting a job inside the bank, through a mixture of subterfuge or happy accident. Ho did that (although she later supplemented much of that research by conducting formal interviews along networks of Wall Street contacts) Caitlin Zaloom, an American anthropologist, also gathered fascinating ‘insider’ material by working on a trading floor for a period. Meanwhile, Horacio Ortiz, an Argentinian post graduate conducted some fascinating research on structured finance by working at three Paris-based financial institutions.
However, for my own purposes – working as a journalist with an anthropologist eye – I have often used another route to get access to the banking world: attending investment banking conferences. Every year, the banking community stages a plethora of these events, which tend to be very ritualistic in nature. To outsiders, these events can often appear deadly dull, if not almost pointless; indeed, that is how some bankers themselves sometimes portray them. However, in practical terms, these investment banking conferences play a role inside the banking system that partly echoes the function played by marriage rituals in other social groups.
Most notably, banking conferences – like marriages – provide a chance for a social group to assemble iin one place, in a way that reaffirms their common identity and enabled them to forge new alliances, often in opposition to others. It also provides a forum for the group to restate their core assumptions and ideas in a manner that allows the group to reproduce and disseminate a cognitive map, over time. Some of this is done overtly, and self-consciously, with power-point presentations on a podium, or deliberate, carefully chosen branding and marketing campaigns. However, the most powerful forms of intellectual ‘reproduction’ occur through more informal means: the gossip around the bar about bonuses (that reinforces the dominant assumption that bigger pay is tantamount to success); the use of complex mathematical language to discuss credit (which makes it acceptable to talk about money for hours on end, without ever mentioning a human being); the sartorial conformity, as bankers all wear chinos and expensive watches/ear-rings (which underlines the idea that wealth is unifying source of identity, but only when it is not overtly displayed); the widespread use of speaker ‘biographies’ (which also stress the common educational, quasi-kinship bonds that link the group), or the use of ‘on-the-record’, or ‘off-the-record’ conventions for journalists, (which reinforce the assumption that bankers have a right to control information flow to the outside world.)
However, the other feature which makes investment banking conferences oddly similar to marriage rituals is that they are also one of the few occasions when ‘outsiders’ have a chance to slip into the banking world, and properly observe the interactions of the group, and the way that they discuss and display themselves. This is not always possible: just as some weddings might be limited to a tiny group of invited guests, some conferences will tightly control the members, and ban outsiders, such as the media. Yet, the bar to entry can often be overcome, since investment banking conferences are so big, and bankers are meeting away from their own, private space in the office or trading floor. So I, for one, plan to keep attending as many of these events as possible – only this year, in a symbolic nod too the new mood of austerity, the conferences are no longer being staged in holiday resorts such as Barcelona, Cannes, Boca Raton or Las Vegas (which used to be hot destinations of choice), but instead in the more humdrum, ’serious’ locations of Washington, or Edgware Road, London.
daniel.beunza | 06-Nov-09 at 11:29 am | Permalink
Great post. I could not agree more. No point in pitching tent. Even if one gets a desk and a computer (as I did, after two years of fieldwork), it’s not clear how you learn from just from hanging out.
However, you do not need to get a finance job. Not if you are willing to turn the research relationship upside down. In the knowledge intensive economy, the ethnographer can be the analyst and confidant of any nerdy banker with a graduate degree. They listen to you as much as you listen to them.
Here’s how I do it. (1) Identify a very senior person in the firm (and this is typically in a conference, as Gillian suggests). (2) Email them for an interview. They’ll go for it. They’re love to reflect upon their own job. (3) Be very very prepared, pose hard questions, nicely. Make them think. (4) Try and meet people on your way in and out of the interview, get their card, contact them. (5) Write back immediately with selected notes from the interview. (6) Repeat step 2. Eventually, interviews give way to controlled observation. The bankers’ ability to control you quickly wears out. And you’re set.
I wish Gillian’s post (and Ho’s thoughts) were read by every ethnographer. The “Samoan tradition” (to call it something) is just not useful in a knowledge-intensive economy. By the same token, the imperative to get a job just to do a bit of research must sound very discouraging. But with the right methods, Wall Street is as close to ethnographers as any tropical island. We just need to learn the ways of the natives.
hartk | 06-Nov-09 at 3:08 pm | Permalink
I am sure we can agree that first-hand experience is crucial, especially for an ethnographer. But I want to make a plea for the value of reading in anthropology. In the early years of this decade I hit on the idea of writing about Wall Street on the basis of the avalanche of tell-all books that came out on individual banks from the mid-80s and increasingly in the 90s. Every major bank had one: Salomon Bros, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Bros, Drexel Burnham Lambert and on and on.
They were written by employees who later thought better of it or by investigative journalists who went undercover. The titles tell it all: Liar’s Poker, FIASCO, April Fools, Greed and Glory on Wall Street, Den of Thieves etc. What struck me was the underlying similarity between all these accounts, as if they were myths reflecting a deep common structure.
The story seemed to be that the deregulation of finance had unhinged any behavioural restraint in the culture of banking. Binging was normal. Politics at the top was cut-throat. Any residue of ethical practice was a joke. Thus Frank Portnoy describes the excesses of an annual clay-pigeon shoot at Morgan Stanley and recalls that team leaders told their traders to go out and KILL, not the competition, but their own clients!
Of course, the whole thing was underwritten by the obscene and unaccountable wealth suddenly made available to 20-somethings and all the way to the top. What interested me was how quickly a transformation at the level of political economy was realized as micro-sociology. The Barclays employees who spent £4000 (I forget exactly how much) on wine for lunch were just reproducing this culture of excess in what were quite conventional ways at the time.
The point is that this was common knowledge and the spate of published inside stories provided ample evidence of what was going on. Yet this material was passed over for analysis by anthropologists and sociologists, never mind by the economists. My study did not see the light of day, partly because I was hesitant to risk my professional reputation by relying on a genre of popular literature, partly because it was a chapter in a grandiose book that ended up not being written.
Even ethnographers read other people’s monographs for comparative purposes and occasionally things written by non-anthropologists. We teach students this way. Do anthropologists rely too much on first-hand knowledge (’fieldwork’) for their intellectual authority? Getting your own foot in the door isn’t the only route to learning about finance.
By the way, Gillian, it is interesting that J.P.Morgan was not a victim of one of these books; and that somehow fits with the account you give of them in Fool’s Gold, a bit more staid than the others and not so newsworthy.