The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader or Making Markets

The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader

Author: Ash Amin

This Reader brings together the exciting and innovative work that has appeared in the last 10 years in the growing field of cultural economy.

• Brings together exciting and innovative work from the last ten years in the emerging field of cultural economy.

• Contains a substantial introduction by the editors on the main strands and history of the cultural economy approach.

• Shows how the pursuit of prosperity always involves multiple and hybrid orderings that cannot be reduced to either the terms culture or economy.

• Shows that thinking about cultural economy is both a substantive task and a valuable contribution to knowledge.

• Material is organised around different links in the value chain.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
1	A Mixed Economy of Fashion Design	3
2	Net-Working for a Living: Irish Software Developers in the Global Workplace	15
3	Instrumentalizing the Truth of Practice	40
4	The Economy of Qualities	58
5	Inside the Economy of Appearances	83
6	Physics and Finance: S-Terms and Modern Finance as a Topic for Science Studies	101
7	Traders' Engagement with Markets: A Postsocial Relationship	121
8	Varieties of Protectors	145
9	The Agony of Mammon	164
10	Governing by Numbers: Why Calculative Practices Matter	179
11	African/Asian/Uptown/Downtown	193
12	Retailers, Knowledges and Changing Commodity Networks: The Case of the Cut Flower Trade	210
13	Culinary Networks and Cultural Connections: A Conventions Perspective	231
14	Making Love in Supermarkets	251
15	Window Shopping at Home: Classifieds, Catalogues and New Consumer Skills	266
16	What's in a Price? An Ethnography of Tribal Art at Auction	289
17	It's Showtime: On the Workplace Geographies of Display in a Restaurant in Southeast England	307
18	Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses	329
19	Negotiating the Bar: Sex, Money and the Uneasy Politics of Third Space	352
20	A Joint's a Joint	368
21	Marking Time with Nike: The Illusion of the Durable	384
	Index	404

Look this: Authentic Recipes from Vietnam or Raising the Bar

Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street

Author: Mitchel Y Abolafia

In the wake of million-dollar scandals brought about by Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and their like, Wall Street seems like the province of rampant individualism operating at the outermost extremes of self-interest and greed. But this, Mitchel Abolafia suggests, would be a case of missing the real culture of the Street for the characters who dominate the financial news.

Making Markets, an ethnography of Wall Street culture, offers a more complex picture of how the market and its denizens work. Not merely masses of individuals striving independently, markets appear here as socially constructed institutions in which the behavior of traders is suspended in a web of customs, norms, and structures of control. Within these structures we see the actions that led to the Drexel Burnham and Salomon Brothers debacles not as bizarre aberrations, but as mere exaggerations of behavior accepted on the Street.

Abolafia looks at three subcultures that co-exist in the world of Wall Street: the stock, bond, and futures markets. Through interviews, anecdotes, and the author's skillful analysis, we see how traders and New York Stock Exchange "specialists" negotiate the perpetual tension between short-term self-interest and long-term self-restraint that marks their respective communities—and how the temptation toward excess spurs market activity. We also see the complex relationships among those market communities—why, for instance, NYSE specialists resent the freedoms permitted over-the-counter bond traders and futures traders. Making Markets shows us that what propels Wall Street is not a fundamental human drive or instinct, but strategies enacted in thecontext of social relationships, cultural idioms, and institutions—a cycle that moves between phases of unbridled self-interest and collective self-restraint.

Contemporary Sociology - Peter Evans

Mitchel Abolafia's fascinating...book...is a great take on the other side of world finance, on life's most bruising sport—making money—and on how to think about markets as interdependent social structures.

London Financial News [UK] - Ruben Lee

[This is] a great must-read. Abolafia's central thesis is that markets cannot be viewed simply as anonymous fora where nameless economic forces work their mysterious ways to determine equilibrium price-quantity outcomes. Instead, they are better seen as stages on which diverse groups of actors seek to further their own, often conflicting, interests...The view that markets are social constructs has a particularly significant consequence for understanding and reacting to the phenomenon of manipulation. Abolafia's view that manipulation 'arises out of a conflict between buyers and sellers where one side is pressing its advantage', rather than being either a legal definition or an economic phenomenon, is extremely convincing...It is impossibly infuriating that one's assumptions about how the financial world works should be overturned by a mere sociologist.