Katarina Sjöberg

The Wall Street Culture: market actors and popular media discourses

This article concerns Wall Street financial actors and how these actors construct a culture. The focus is twofold: on the one hand, prevailing discourses that provide a popular ideational setting and frame for Wall Street financial actors and their activities; and, on the other hand, how these actors perceive themselves and their work. The perspective used parallel understandings of financial markets as cultural and social phenomena, stressing that professional finance cannot solely be understood in terms of structured economic mechanisms with relatively clear causes and effects. The findings point out that in a sociocultural system cherishing moneymaking as a strong value orientation, financial actors are given the means to both influence and direct money transactions and investments, as well as to preserve the prestige attached to such activities. At the same time, this orientation also provides them with the means to build images of themselves and their work, incorporating these as part of their self-identification.This article concerns Wall Street financial actors and how these actors construct a culture. The focus is twofold: on the one hand, prevailing discourses that provide a popular ideational setting and frame for Wall Street financial actors and their activities; and, on the other hand, how these actors perceive themselves and their work. The perspective used parallel understandings of financial markets as cultural and social phenomena, stressing that professional finance cannot solely be understood in terms of structured economic mechanisms with relatively clear causes and effects. The findings point out that in a sociocultural system cherishing moneymaking as a strong value orientation, financial actors are given the means to both influence and direct money transactions and investments, as well as to preserve the prestige attached to such activities. At the same time, this orientation also provides them with the means to build images of themselves and their work, incorporating these as part of their self-identification.

Redefining the Past, Taking Charge of the Present, Appropriating the Future; the Hokkaido Ainu Case

In the early 1980s, the point in time my interest in the Hokkaido Ainu began, it was more or less generally accepted among social scientists that the Hokkaido Ainu constituted an extinct or shortly extinct group of people. This perception is a scientific construction based on ethnocentric views, portraying the Hokkaido Ainu as a primitive and backward people, freezing their life-style in an obscure past and placing their ethnic identity in the context of extinct races. This misconception of a people and their ways is nourished and supported in social and political rhetoric in Japan. Among other things, it aims at upholding the notion of Japan as inhabited by one homogenous group of people, namely the Wajin, the majority ethnic group in Japan.1 Even though, this state of affairs fallouts in much hardship and suffering for the Hokkaido Ainu, it has discouraged them neither from challenging the hierarchical and holistic identity of the Wajin nor from practicing and taking part in activities belonging to their cultural tradition. In recent times, the Hokkaido Ainu have joined the global community of indigenous peoples.