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Abolafia, Mitchel Y. Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1996.
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Table of contents
Abstract
Reviews
Excerpt
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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 the context of social relationships, cultural idioms, and institutions - a cycle
that moves between phases of unbridled self-interest and collective self-restraint.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/ABOMAK.html
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