Horacio Ortiz

Financial value: Economic, moral, political, global

Based on participant observation, this paper analyzes the professional everyday of employees of the financial industry. For them, giving financial value to a social activity means determining technically the monetary revenue that can be obtained from it. But it also means including it in a hierarchy of access to credit, according to liberal moral and political considerations found in financial regulation and financial theory, aiming to create efficient markets where individual investors would meet, leading to an optimal allocation of global monetary resources. Thus, this case shows that everyday practice in the financial industry challenges the opposition, found in Weber and in neo-liberalism, between an economic value (in the singular) and moral and political values (in the plural). Following Mauss and current trends in the anthropology of money, the paper concludes that the concept of value should not be an analytic tool, but is part of the object we study, as one of the ways in which the people observed make sense of their own practice.

Financial Professionals as a Global Elite

In the last 30 years, the issuance of stocks and bonds has become the main source of financing for companies not only in the United States and Europe, but also in India and in many other countries in the developing world. In addition, the issuance of sovereign bonds has become an unavoidable element of state budgets, as we know them today. The financial industry, responsible for attracting the funds and allocating them among these different aspirants to global credit, is thus at the center of a global distribution of resources. In this chapter, I will develop a notion of elite that attempts to grasp the specific relation of power in which the financial industry operates today. In particular, I will attempt to clarify how the professionals of the financial industry, responsible for a global distribution of resources that they effect through their everyday procedures, can be thought of as central to a political process.1 To do so, I will draw on the work of Marcel Mauss, in particular the way in which he attempted to understand financial flows as constitutive of specific social hierarchies in a geographical space that went beyond that of official political groups, and with a temporal horizon that, spanning generations, superseded the limits of each individual’s life. This will help to explore the specific place of the financial industry in a global social space in which it produces hierarchies in the access of credit.

A political anthropology of finance: Profits, states, and cultures in cross-border investment in Shanghai

Based on participant observation with financial professionals working for a mergers and acquisitions consultancy company in Shanghai, this essay shows that they conduct these transactions by mobilizing imaginaries of “profits,” “states,” and “cultures.” These imaginaries concern professional and nonprofessional life and are multiple, sometimes contradictory, and mutually constitutive. This shows that the analytic claim about a “real economy,” against which financial practices would be gauged, misses the multiple meanings whereby these practices make sense for those who carry them out. The article proposes instead a pragmatist approach of money, whose political import would be to focus on how the practices and meanings of financial professionals, as they channel money to certain activities at the expense of others, contribute to produce global social hierarchies in the access to monetary resources.

Business schools, the anxiety of finance, and the order of the ‘middle tier’

ABSTRACT Financial imagination plays a fundamental, yet ambivalent role in the establishment of hierarchies within and between business schools, and in business life at large. This study examines this process in the ‘middle tier’ of business education: that is, in the social space in which students and instructors understand themselves to occupy a ‘mid-range’ position within an order of excellence and success. Largely articulated through business school rankings, this order strongly relies on the centrality of the financial curriculum, proficiency in which is understood as both a proxy for smartness and a sign of moneymaking capacity. In the ‘middle tier’, this order manifests in the form of an anxiety: an order that, though legitimate, is thought not to be attained, or hardly attainable. The study draws from ethnographic investigation in a ‘middle tier’ business school with attention to how finance is made sense of in relation to an alternative curriculum, and in connection with the aim of ‘making it to the top’. A comparison with a ‘top tier’ business school allows furthering understanding of how the order of business schools relies on the anxiety of finance in order to reproduce an acquiescence to dominant financial imagination.

Los imaginarios de “inversores”, “mercados” y “valor” en la distribución del dinero por la industria financiera: un estudio de caso sobre los derivados de crédito

Este texto se basa en una encuesta por observacion participante como asistente al analisis financiero en una multinacional de gestion de fondos de inversion en 2004 en Francia. La compra de derivados de credito, basados en creditos inmobiliarios en Estados Unidos, por parte de empleados de una multinacional francesa, a cuenta de sus clientes extendidos en otros puntos del planeta, integraba miles de personas en una serie de interdependencias financieras, cuyas jerarquias y violencias estaban administradas por empleados como los observados en el estudio de campo. El texto muestra que la distribucion social del dinero a traves de estas practicas debe ser entendida como el resultado de las logicas organizacionales dentro de la empresa y dentro de la red comercial en la que se inscribe. Estas practicas profesionales estan coordenadas de manera global, de una empresa a otra, y de una jurisdiccion a otra, a traves de imaginarios comunes segun los cuales los beneficios monetarios son una “creacion de valor” que resulta del encuentro de “inversores” en “mercados eficientes”. Estos conceptos articulan no solo los discursos politicos que se utilizaron para justificar los cambios reglamentarios en la industria financiera en los ultimos treinta anos, en Estados Unidos, Europa, y muchas otras jurisdicciones, sino que tambien se encuentran en la definicion minuciosa de las formulas matematicas, las metodologias y los organigramas de las empresas financieras. Por ello, los profesionales tambien movilizan estos discursos tambien funcionan para darle sentido y justificacion a su practica cotidiana. El texto muestra la diferencia que existe entre esta practicas profesionales y burocraticas y los conceptos a partir de los cuales se las justifica. De esta manera, el texto contribuye a una critica de las reglamentaciones y de la organizacion de la distribucion del dinero por la industria financiera, en el marco global de sus operaciones.