WALL STREET

Wall Street Survivor Stock Simulation

Wall Street Survivor Stock Simulation

Introduction

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, as promulgated in much of the business and financial literature (Fraser, 2005).

Discussion and Analysis

Given this often-unacknowledged overlap between my informants and my discipline, as 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 is" 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 as primary actors in the globalization of U.S. capitalism. 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 as a taken-for-granted macro context and as an abstract process too big for ethnographic endeavor. I make the case for an ethnographic engagement that tracks the global as cultural action grounded in specific practices and locales that can be thickly described.

In the argument below, I juxtapose representations of global capitalism by two investment banks headquartered in New York City with academic representations of globalization and late capitalism. In a marketing and recruiting brochure, J. P. Morgan, a prestigious investment bank, declares: "We act as a global problem solver for our clients, moving ideas and insights seamlessly across time and space. Our experience in markets around the world gives clients unparalleled access to insights and opportunities" (J. P. Morgan brochure 1995:centerfold).

In its 1995 annual report, Merrill Lynch, one of the largest and most profitable investment banks in the United States, proclaims, "Merrill Lynch is singularly positioned and strategically committed to global leadership as the preeminent financial management and advisory company". In its 1994 annual report, it unabashedly boasts, "Our global scope and intelligence allow us to respond to opportunities and changes in all markets and in all regions. We serve the needs of our clients across all geographic borders".

Consider now some of the representations of globalization by Marxist cultural theorists and social scientists. Frederic Jameson's writings on late capitalism describe it as a "dimly perceivable," "nonhuman" logic, whose global "network of power and control [is] even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp". Such discourses construct global capitalism as an all-powerful monolith, albeit clothed in a postmodern lingo-the language of flows, decenteredness, and ...