Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks

Abstract

Many cultural studies theorists and social scientists, by giving emphasis to capitalism's omnipotence, have helped to imagine a world of capitalist totality. In the rush to confront and depict the powerful impact of Western global hegemony, they have often neglected the power-laden political effects of their own representations of this very hegemony. Ironically, these academic representations and critiques sound extremely similar to Wall Street triumphalist discourses of global capitalism, promulgated in much of the business and financial literature. In this article, I demonstrate the strategic investment that both social theorists and Wall Street investment bankers have in the analytical frameworks of the global that rely on an overarching construct of global capitalism well a seductive rhetoric of the global.' Given this often-unacknowledged overlap between my informants and my discipline, promoters and critics of capitalism, respectively, I explore the politics of academic knowledge production on globalization and capitalism. To what extent do critical theorists, despite their professed awareness of the contingencies, constructed effects, and productive strategies of global capitalism, take capitalist pronouncements at face value, allowing representations of globalization to stand for the world as it instead of querying the multiple internal contradictions, complexities, and implosions in their specific worldviews and practices? It is precisely because of these concerns that I came to study Wall Street investment bankers primary actors in the globalization of U.S. capitalism.2 By directly accessing the key agents of change on Wall Street, a site widely deemed to be the epitome of the global, I confront anthropology's conceptual and methodological tendency to approach globalization a taken-for-granted macro context and an abstract process too big for ethnographic endeavor. I make the case for an ethnographic engagement that tracks the global cultural action grounded in specific practices and locales that can be thickly described.3 To begin this research, I worked for a year a management consultant at a Wall Street investment bank to learn the language of finance. After I left my Wall