Daniel Souleles
Daniel Souleles is a cultural anthropologist who studies inequality and difference in social systems and the beliefs that explain, support, or question such social inequity. He is also curious about how unequal social systems change.
Since the Spring of 2015, Daniel has been conducting research on employee owned companies, ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans), to understand how cultures of ownership emerge. How do people learn to be owners and take personal interest in the places that they work, given that most American workplaces don't afford this sort of thinking?
From 2012 to 2014, Daniel did field work on private equity investors, studying how and why they buy, manage, and sell the companies that they do. He also looked at what private equity's wealth and power meant for social relations in the United States. He has a book manuscript and several articles in preparation or under review from this research.
In 2011, Daniel did field work with Catholic Hermit Monks, seeking to understand how they interpreted and acted on the will of God.
In addition to his fieldwork experience and research interests, Daniel has received extensive anthropological methods training in both his doctoral work in applied anthropology and at a National Science Foundation sponsored research institute. He is currently leading a team of graduate student researchers on a collaboratively designed, team project on weight, body image, and social well-being in the Boston area.
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/upcoming-oac-online-seminar-finance-value-and-inequality-april-15
http://savageminds.org/author/daniel/
Since the Spring of 2015, Daniel has been conducting research on employee owned companies, ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans), to understand how cultures of ownership emerge. How do people learn to be owners and take personal interest in the places that they work, given that most American workplaces don't afford this sort of thinking?
From 2012 to 2014, Daniel did field work on private equity investors, studying how and why they buy, manage, and sell the companies that they do. He also looked at what private equity's wealth and power meant for social relations in the United States. He has a book manuscript and several articles in preparation or under review from this research.
In 2011, Daniel did field work with Catholic Hermit Monks, seeking to understand how they interpreted and acted on the will of God.
In addition to his fieldwork experience and research interests, Daniel has received extensive anthropological methods training in both his doctoral work in applied anthropology and at a National Science Foundation sponsored research institute. He is currently leading a team of graduate student researchers on a collaboratively designed, team project on weight, body image, and social well-being in the Boston area.
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/upcoming-oac-online-seminar-finance-value-and-inequality-april-15
http://savageminds.org/author/daniel/
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treat instances of their contrariness as moments in their process of going from non-investors to investors, moments in which they experiment with and learn new social habits, identities and practices. Moreover, we connect this contrariness with a much longer tradition in the formation of an identity and subjectivity as an investor. More than any simple technology of thought to be deployed in a particular
situation, contrarianism is a thoroughgoing mode of framing and understanding life, both in investment contexts and beyond, which we suggest was born between the 1880s and 1940s and has persisted in various forms to this day. This paper offers two instances of how someone becomes contrary, and suggests that contrarianism may be a fairly typical way for humans to make sense of financial markets.
happened in open outcry pits or over the phone, trading now occurs primarly via electronic limit order books. Whereas once traders could have little education and find work as a
consequence of membership in a local insular network, new financial hires are now the most talented graduates of PhD and master’s programs in the hard sciences and mathematics. Even though these circumstances are well attested, knowing is not enough for some to become this new kind of trader. I suggest that the theory of semiotic ideologies—that is, what grounding assumptions people bring to the process of interpreting signs—can be used to illustrate boundary cases of social change in which people are simply unable to learn enough to adapt to new circumstances in their lives. I will show that even though
traders can adopt the appropriate semiotic ideology of markets that their times demand, some of them will never be skilled enough to fully participate. This, in turn, has to do with the nature of change in a capitalist economic system.
organisational psychology consultants see the world in different ways and in fact, paradoxically create different sorts of companies from the same companies, engendering an ontological pluralism. This pluralism suggests that social change can happen on a large scale without persuading everyone there is only one way to see or be in the world. In fact, it’s possible that ESOPs are as successful as they are
because they are a sort social form that exists differently for various people, while still making line employees wealthier than they otherwise would be.
deterministic articulations of habitus. This article, drawing on a two-year
study of private equity investors, offers an alternative analytic frame for
making sense of how private equity people buy and sell companies. It
explores the ways in which private equity people make arguments
persuading one another and the larger public that an investment is
worth making. Important to these arguments are not only substantive
content, the evidence that investors marshal to support a thesis, but
also reflective evaluation of what counts as good evidence, metacommentary. It is in these split levels of analysis that we can appreciate the cultural diversity within finance, Wall Street, and investment banking. I will also suggest that understanding how investors are arguing substantively as well as meta-pragmatically begins to outline a useful theory of culture change within the world of investment banking.
treat instances of their contrariness as moments in their process of going from non-investors to investors, moments in which they experiment with and learn new social habits, identities and practices. Moreover, we connect this contrariness with a much longer tradition in the formation of an identity and subjectivity as an investor. More than any simple technology of thought to be deployed in a particular
situation, contrarianism is a thoroughgoing mode of framing and understanding life, both in investment contexts and beyond, which we suggest was born between the 1880s and 1940s and has persisted in various forms to this day. This paper offers two instances of how someone becomes contrary, and suggests that contrarianism may be a fairly typical way for humans to make sense of financial markets.
happened in open outcry pits or over the phone, trading now occurs primarly via electronic limit order books. Whereas once traders could have little education and find work as a
consequence of membership in a local insular network, new financial hires are now the most talented graduates of PhD and master’s programs in the hard sciences and mathematics. Even though these circumstances are well attested, knowing is not enough for some to become this new kind of trader. I suggest that the theory of semiotic ideologies—that is, what grounding assumptions people bring to the process of interpreting signs—can be used to illustrate boundary cases of social change in which people are simply unable to learn enough to adapt to new circumstances in their lives. I will show that even though
traders can adopt the appropriate semiotic ideology of markets that their times demand, some of them will never be skilled enough to fully participate. This, in turn, has to do with the nature of change in a capitalist economic system.
organisational psychology consultants see the world in different ways and in fact, paradoxically create different sorts of companies from the same companies, engendering an ontological pluralism. This pluralism suggests that social change can happen on a large scale without persuading everyone there is only one way to see or be in the world. In fact, it’s possible that ESOPs are as successful as they are
because they are a sort social form that exists differently for various people, while still making line employees wealthier than they otherwise would be.
deterministic articulations of habitus. This article, drawing on a two-year
study of private equity investors, offers an alternative analytic frame for
making sense of how private equity people buy and sell companies. It
explores the ways in which private equity people make arguments
persuading one another and the larger public that an investment is
worth making. Important to these arguments are not only substantive
content, the evidence that investors marshal to support a thesis, but
also reflective evaluation of what counts as good evidence, metacommentary. It is in these split levels of analysis that we can appreciate the cultural diversity within finance, Wall Street, and investment banking. I will also suggest that understanding how investors are arguing substantively as well as meta-pragmatically begins to outline a useful theory of culture change within the world of investment banking.
and Amsterdam, have chosen to govern their streets. Chicago sold a
seventy-five-year concession to manage street parking to a consortium
of private investors, whereas Amsterdam’s government maintains the
ability to directly govern its streets. In turn, Chicago is an illustration of
how privatization of a common good according to money-lending
logics, far from allowing for flexibility and efficient governance, completely
prevents a city from changing with the times. Chicago has lost
control over its own streets and can no longer decide what their best use
is without paying an extortionate price. Any governing of a shared
communal space that has a broader concern than generating profit for
a private corporation is here effectively undermined by allowing marketized parking. For the purposes of this book, the Chicago/Amsterdam comparison illustrates the limitations of using privatized business actors to efficiently govern shared city space. It also serves as a counterexample to the neoliberal dogma that government should abstain from planning, because their attempts at doing so cannot outperform the market.