Comments on: Studying Up: Hedge Fund Manager Edition

By: D Rogers

D Rogers — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:11:52 +0000

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.

By: D.Yates

D.Yates — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:36:55 +0000

You might also want to look at James Carrier and Danny Miller, “Virtualism: A new Political Economy

By: ckelty

ckelty — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:15:09 +0000

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

By: Meghan

Meghan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:07:29 +0000

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.

By: LFB

LFB — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 06:13:47 +0000

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.

By: John Curran

John Curran — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:53:38 +0000

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

By: Jason Baird Jackson

Jason Baird Jackson — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:49:49 +0000

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

By: L.L. Wynn

L.L. Wynn — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:22:29 +0000

See the work of Karen Ho (a Princeton anthropology PhD) who wrote Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks (2005)