Studying Up: Hedge Fund Manager Edition
Today we received the following in our Savage Minds mailbag:
Greetings, anthropologists:
I’m working with a Princeton economics professor on a book that will essentially be an exposé of hedge funds: their origins, inner workings, external impact, and future–or potential demise. Since hedge funds carefully guard a mysterious, cult-like status in the world of finance, we thought it might be useful to incorporate some anthropological insights. But since neither of us has a strong background in anthropology, I’d love to connect with someone who does.
If someone in your network would like to share thoughts or ideas on where to start, I would welcome a call or an e-mail. Thanks in advance and I look forward to hearing from you.
Now I’m not sure what to make of this. I can’t tell if they are genuinely interested in anthropological explanations for the seemingly irrational behavior of people in high finance, or if they just want to use examples of exotic, cult-like behavior in other societies in order to add some “color.” I suspect the latter, but I thought it might be interesting to give them the benefit of the doubt and to see what suggestions our readers might be able to come up. What insight does anthropology offer into the world of hedge fund managers?
UPDATE: Meghan wrote back to thank everyone for the feedback which turned out to be exactly what they were looking for. (I’ve also removed the phone number, as requested.)
P. Kerim Friedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology. Follow Kerim on Twitter.
See the work of Karen Ho (a Princeton anthropology PhD) who wrote Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks (2005)
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I think that Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Duke) by Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee is a really valuable anthropological work on these issues. See:
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/54542811
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Conley & O’Barr’s (1992) Fortune and Folly: The Wealth and Power of Institutional Investing might be useful. The authors did a series of ethnographic interviews (though I’m not sure how much fieldwork) with state and corporate pension fund managers.
Jason Cross (PhD candidate, Duke) described it as “an anthropological perspective on the language, organizational order, and decision-making practices of institutional investors.” (That’s from a 2006 interview with Conley & O’Barr in PoLAR.)
There’s a review on JSTOR here: http://www.jstor.org/view/00251496/dm993973/99p0647l/0
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I read it in a third way, i.e. they want the kind of “inside” information best accessed through ethnography, and would like an anthropologist to do the hard work of “infiltrating” the secretive tribe of hedge funders.
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Thanks to those of you who recommended sources; they are precisely what I was looking for. We already have a substantial body of empirical data that we have gathered and analyzed from the standpoint of behavioral finance, which draws from psychology and other social sciences, but we were just curious as to how an anthropologist would approach similar findings. I’m pleased to learn that financial institutions have already been the subject of ethnographic studies, and look forward to incorporating them into our project.
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See also,
Ellen Hertz, The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market, Cambridge 1998
Caitlin Zaloom, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London , chicago 2006
Bill Maurer, Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason, Princeton 2005
Also, economic sociology, as represented here:
http://www.coi.columbia.edu/ssf/presenters.html
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You might also want to look at James Carrier and Danny Miller, “Virtualism: A new Political Economy
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I tried to trace some links between hedge funds and the smaller-scale patterns and practices of exchange that anthropologists have more traditionally studied in “Moonshine, Money, and the Politics of Liquidity in Rural Russia,” American Ethnologist 32:1(2005), 63-81.
See also Hirokazu Miyazaki’s work on Japanese arbitragers.
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