Setting Sail on Stormy Waters: On the Role of 

Organizational Ethnographers in the Age of 

Financialization  

Galit Ailon  

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract 

Current financialization marks a broad cultural shift in the economy. It 

also marks a cultural shift within organizations. Primarily, it seems to 

challenge the status of profit as an ultimate measure that no logic 

transcends, sanctifying in its place the concept of ‘shareholder value’. This 

article discusses this transformation and argues that it has two major 

implications for organizational ethnographers. First, it holds the potential 

for overcoming the traditional suspicion towards ethnography in the 

fields of business and management, and the accompanying wariness 

towards the type of social reflexivity that ethnography entails. Second, it 

raises new questions to be asked of the ethnographic method and how 

new cultural issues might be examined.  

 

Keywords 

Financialization, organizational ethnography, organizational culture, 

profit, shareholder value 

 

 

 
Page 1 of 16 
 
JBA 2(1): 33-48 
Spring 2013 
 
© The Author(s) 2013 
ISSN 2245-4217 

www.cbs.dk/jba 

 



Journal of Business Anthropology, 2(1), Spring 2013 

 

 34 

A somewhat cynical take on the traditional ethnographic disadvantage 

in the fields of business and management 

Imagine a person who seeks to document his life by collecting receipts of 

everything he has ever purchased.1 This person has piles and piles of 

boxes filled with receipts. He has receipts of every bus and taxi ride he 

has ever taken; every coffee, cake, and fruit he has ever tasted; every 

restaurant, bar, and movie theatre he has visited. When he wants to 

remember what he did in a particular year of his life, where he was, what 

he wore, ate or drank, he pulls out the box for that year and sifts through 

its receipts. When he becomes very, very old, he plans to hire an 

accountant to calculate all his receipts and determine how much his life 

cost him.  

The point of this story isn’t the collection itself. Every collection has 

its charm of aggregation and ordering. The point is the collector’s 

underlying assumption that such a meticulous aggregation of receipts 

constitutes a documentation of life and value. In this sense, the private 

collection represents a much wider cultural impulse (see Strathern, 2000) 

that seems characteristic of a significant portion of the organizational 

world writ large. To a great extent, the organizational world is a world 

that insists on thinking of itself in terms of aggregated receipts (given or 

taken); in terms of an endless flow of price tags that add up to or deduct 

from each other and finally converge to become an end point, a final 

number: the bottom line, be it profit or loss.  

Organizational ethnographies offer a different perspective, but their 

perspective is the exception rather than the rule. Human history within 

organizations has to a great extent been written in terms quite similar to 

the aggregated receipts I’ve talked about.  In the fields of business and 

management, any attempt to add a social perspective to these receipts is 

strikingly restricted. ‘[A] considerable part of what passes for business or 

management studies,’ says Moeran (2005: 12), ‘is based on structured 

interviews that do not usually allow for more than a scratching on the 

surface of corporate organization… This is a pity because corporations are 

a kind of sociological laboratory with histories, cultures, structures, 

hierarchies and values to observe and analyse.’  

Indeed, if we consider the weight of the profit-geared accounting 

logic in organizations – and I mean ‘accounting’ in the broad sense of 

enumerating, measuring, and counting – the very existence of 

organizational ethnographies would seem surprising. The slow, holistic, 

and open research, the focus exactly on those things that cannot be 

counted, the preoccupation with the routine and the everyday – all these 

are quite removed from the dominant logic in organizational worlds that 

                                                        
1 I would like to thank JBA’s anonymous reviews and the editors, Brian Moeran 
and Christina Garsten, for their excellent comments and helpful suggestions. I 
would also like to thank Daniella Arieli and Gideon Kunda for their insightful 
readings of an earlier version of this paper.  



                                                     Ailon / Setting Sail on Stormy Waters 

 35 

have for decades been run in the shadow of managerial measurement 

regimes and schemes for maximizing profit. To a great extent, 

organizational ethnography is a research strategy that manifests and 

seeks to unravel that which its objects of study apparently seek to forget. 

Ethnographers who have experienced what the literature often titles ‘the 

problem of access’ – in other words, those who have had to face the 

typical gatekeeping questions, ‘how is this study practical?’, or ‘but why is 

it important?’, or ‘what’s in it for us?’ – know, I assume, what I mean about 

the power of profit as an ultimate measure that no logic can transcend.  

And yet, for decades, organizational ethnographers have been 

documenting and analyzing the everyday work-lives unfolding in the 

shadow of managerial profit-making schemes (see Ybema et al, 2009: 3-

4). A great tradition of these anthropologically informed ethnographies 

(see Moeran and Garsten, 2012) have produced in-depth accounts of the 

cultural underpinnings and social implications of the managerial models 

and measurement regimes. They show how organizations are replete 

with political, cultural, and social forces which, on the one hand, 

transcend all the managerial schemes, and, on the other, express the 

hegemonic weight of these schemes. Moreover, many of the findings 

expose the personal and social prices that the profit ideal carries for those 

who work in organizations, or who are in other ways related to them. If 

there is one common theme uniting a diverse set of organizational 

ethnographies such as those of Robert Jackall (1988), Arlie R. Hochschild 

(1983), Michael Burawoy (1979), Gideon Kunda (2006), Christina Garsten 

(2008), and many, many more, it is this: the sanctification of profit as an 

ultimate measure – as the final and absolute figure that all organizational 

processes converge onto and must serve – has implications. Profit carries 

various price tags, many of which are not quantifiable: it demands coping; 

it lays shadows upon experiences of self and other; it shapes 

interpersonal dynamics and weighs down on patterns of communication 

and solidarity. 

But the general impression is that among managerial and business 

scientists, and also among many of those who belong to organizations, all 

this has not really challenged the validity of the eternal questions 

ethnographers often face about 'practicality.' In a context that 

marginalizes the significance of the prices of profit and which excludes 

the textures of employees’ everyday life from its core concept of value, the 

significance of ethnography becomes dependent on researchers’ ability to 

define its contributions in measureable terms, as a contribution to profit.  

This strategy indeed seems increasingly prevalent today. Broadly 

speaking, organizational ethnography has been linked to profit in two 

primary ways, both of which have apparently enabled its increasing (but 

still partial) proliferation. First, there is an acknowledgement of 

ethnographers’ potential marketing-related contributions to furthering 

the understanding of consumer behavior (see, e.g., Malefyt and Moeran, 



Journal of Business Anthropology, 2(1), Spring 2013 

 

 36 

2003). Second, there is an acknowledgement of their potential 

management-related contributions to efficiency.  

While the marketing-based interest seems relatively recent, the 

managerial interest dates back to the Hawthorne studies of the 1920s and 

1930s (Ybema et al, 2009: 3; see also Baba, 2012; Batteau and Psenka, 

2012). Nevertheless, the conceptual basis of management’s interest in 

culture has apparently been secured only after Edgar H. Schein’s (1985) 

published his widely cited book on organizational culture and leadership. 

This interest was, again, predominantly profit-centered. Ever since 

publication of this book, in most business circles when one speaks of 

‘organizational culture’ one refers to the more-or-less collective thinking 

modes that sometimes help and sometimes interfere with profit-making. 

As Westney and Van Maanen (2011: 604) argue, for many practitioners 

and business scholars ‘culture’ is that ‘soft’ and slippery, but nonetheless 

manageable variable ‘that can be dialed up or toned down in order to 

allow people to work more effectively, to design and sell more and better 

products or services, or, to be crisp, to add more to the proverbial bottom 

line.’  

In the context of both the marketing-oriented and the managerial 

interests, there has been, to use Downey and Fisher’s (2006: 19; 18) 

words, a ‘corporate hijacking of anthropology,’ and a ‘phenomenal growth 

in business anthropology.’ Relying upon a long tradition of ‘applied’ or 

‘practical’ anthropology (see e.g., Goldschmidt, 2001; Baba, 2012; Batteau 

and Psenka, 2012: 79-80), and on anthropology’s historical role in 

documenting the native’s point of the view for those interested in shaping 

it and controlling its holders, many organizational ethnographers have 

adopted profit as their application goal. Whether hired by corporations or 

working within the academy, many contemporary ethnographers conduct 

research both in organizations and for organizations, or – perhaps more 

precisely – for the profit-geared productive processes of the settings and 

subjects of their studies (Cefkin, 2009: 27, 17-18). 

As far as the academy is concerned, for organizational 

ethnographers working in business schools or seeking to publish in 

academic outlets designated for the business and management fields, the 

need to package ethnographies as goods that practitioners can clearly 

discern what they ‘can get out of it’ in terms of profit measures seems at 

times an almost unavoidable requirement. The business and management 

fields have pushed all profit-transcending discussions to the margins of 

their disciplinary interest. Add to this the relatively new preoccupation 

with assessment measures within all academic fields, including 

anthropology (Strathern, 2000), and the result is an accounting bind 

doubly constraining.  

Ethnographically, profit’s weight is problematic to the extent that it 

limits access and focus. The status of profit as the final end point that 

knowledge should be developed to serve, or against which all life and 



                                                     Ailon / Setting Sail on Stormy Waters 

 37 

certainly organizational life should be measured, carries the danger of 

marginalizing the importance of whatever might exist beyond profit: its 

implications and the personal and social prices it carries within 

organizations. Millions spend most of their waking hours in organizations, 

but within many of these organizational settings the textures of their 

daily experiences are hardly ‘counted’ in accountings of value. In terms of 

this article’s opening story, a focus on the price tags that are counted 

means rushing through the corridors of everyday organizational life 

without losing sight of the ultimate goal, the element that seems most 

important of all: the piles of receipt-filled boxes. This is what being 

practical is often taken to mean.  

 

Why there is reason to believe that change is coming  

Something is changing from an unexpected direction: financialization. 

‘Present-day capitalism,’ write Pryke and du Gay (2007: 339), ‘is 

increasingly financial in its character. At almost every turn… private 

finance, its markets and their effects are working their way into most 

areas of everyday life.’ Indeed, the facts that there is a broad ‘shift in the 

economy towards a finance-centered system’ (Davis, 2010: 75; Davis, 

2009; Langley, 2004), and that financialization has become a prime 

trajectory in that accumulation increasingly occurs through financial 

channels (Krippner, 2005), have entailed a pervasive financial ‘shift in 

worldviews’ and ‘sensibilities’ (Davis, 2010: 79). 

This shift in worldviews and sensibilities entails a challenge to the 

ontological status of profit as an ultimate measure and end-point in 

organizations. This challenge is twofold. First, financialization is 

increasingly subordinating ‘profit’ to a partially interrelated figure – 

‘shareholder value’ – whose cultural and economic status has been 

strengthening since the 1980s (Ho, 2009; Davis, 2009). Today, financial 

markets have to a great extent ‘re-formatted the institutions of the 

corporate economy and oriented corporations toward shareholder value 

as their guiding star’ (Davis, 2009: 5). Indeed, as Ho (2009: 122-123) 

explains in an ethnographic study of Wall Street bankers, while 

‘“shareholder value” continues to be a black box,’ in the post-millenary 

era it has also ‘become a part of mainstream every-day discourse.’ Today, 

she continues, it is generally taken-for-granted that shareholder value 

‘should be the main goal for all corporations,’ and that ‘stock prices… are 

the focus and the measure of corporate health and success’ (pp. 126, 153). 

In other words, the survival of corporations is seen today as 

increasingly dependent upon the price that financial actors in stock 

markets are willing to pay for a stock. Interestingly, while related to the 

concept of profit, the price of a stock is also becoming significantly 

removed from it, so that the financial world increasingly problematizes 

the link between profit and stock price. Different studies of financial 

markets repeatedly show that the prices of financial commodities, 



Journal of Business Anthropology, 2(1), Spring 2013 

 

 38 

including stocks and their derivatives, are increasingly seen as a 

barometric measure of and a means for articulating and manipulating the 

collective expectations and constantly shifting social ‘mood’ of the market 

(see in this regard, e.g., Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2000; Langley, 2010; 

Zaloom, 2009: 256-266). Notions of prices as reflecting ‘real,’ ‘absolute,’ 

or ‘objective’ economic value that is directly based upon profit are 

increasingly subordinated to perceptions of these prices as representing – 

above all – the social dynamics and interpretive moods of market 

participants.   

Given the fluidity, ambiguity, and heightened pace of financial 

trading, financial prices are thus ‘momentary markers of approximate 

valuations’ based on specifically social information and scenarios that 

transpire between market participants (Zaloom, 2003: 2). The stock 

market’s underlying rationale of making shareholding liquid – in other 

words, of making stocks easily convertible into cash or other stocks – 

implies that stock prices represent a particular set of values historically 

divergent from corporations (Ho, 2009: 184). For example, as Ho (2009: 

185) further notes, ‘the price of a stock can be stratospherically high or 

“undervalued,” yet correspondingly little has changed in the corporate 

organization itself.’ In this context, the market-based ‘social emotions’ 

(Pixley, 2004) that were once deemed ‘irrational’ (see, e.g., Kindleberger, 

1989) in the sense of leading to price distortions – the collective fear, 

euphoria, mania, panic, and so forth of stock market participants – are 

increasingly seen as the prime determinants of prices and gain 

considerable attention within financial markets. Indeed, the marketing 

efforts of ‘investor relations’ professionals (see Zuckerman, 1999) are 

directly geared at affecting them.  

As financial prices become dependent upon market mood swings 

influenced, at least in part, by ‘investor relations’ efforts and by the social 

dynamics occurring amongst market participants, they become much 

more loosely coupled to some clear notion of an objective corporate value 

as represented by the figure of profit. In a sense, then, financial markets 

are increasingly characterized by a reflexive awareness of  the 

interpretive space that shapes stock prices in a constantly changing kind 

of way that is not always or directly linked to profit. 

The second way in which financialization undermines the status of 

profit as an ultimate measure in organizations is related to the recent 

sensational financial crises, and the accounting debacles of quite a few 

well-known organizations (see, e.g., Ailon, 2011; Boje et al, 2004; 

Williams, 2008). These debacles have raised public awareness of 

accounting’s significant degrees of interpretive freedom. Although 

retrospectively interpreted as unique and deviant events (e.g., Ailon, 

2011; 2012; Williams, 2008), these sensational debacles have nonetheless 

also publicly illustrated the extent to which the bottom line may not be as 

clear cut and straightforward as it might at first appear. They have 



                                                     Ailon / Setting Sail on Stormy Waters 

 39 

brought to the surface the fact that – like other types of assessment and 

measurement outcomes – it, too, rests on considerable creative license 

and interpretive space (see, e.g., Strathern, 2000).  

Thus, this is a time when the survival of an organization 

increasingly depends on the way in which analysts, speculators, investors, 

and financial traders interpret the impact of the bottom line – as well as of 

the future, yet unknown, bottom lines – on the stock price. This is also a 

time characterized by an increasing awareness of the indeterminism of 

calculations in financial statements. Indeed, the financial age seems to 

mark a historical moment in which the economic mathematical obsession 

has become so extreme that it exposes its own impossibility: the 

instability and ambiguity of that which has until now been deemed ‘exact’; 

its susceptibility to manipulation; the way that every number is a 

narrative; the lack of closure of the figures taken to be ‘final.’ To use 

Zaloom’s (2006: 142) words, ‘fluid’ financial numbers lack the status of 

definitive statements. In contrast to the ‘firm’ numbers that have been 

foundational for accounting, financial numbers undermine notions of 

numerical stability and transparency: they turn numbers into objects of 

interpretation rather than of calculation.   

Perhaps paradoxically, then, finance brings the interpretive space 

surrounding numbers into awareness. It problematizes notions of 

numbers as self-contained and context-free (see Crump, 1990, esp. p. 

147). In a sense,  finance thus entails an anthropological sensibility. 

Indeed, anthropologists of finance have begun to note parallels of form 

between anthropological knowledge practices and technocratic/financial 

knowledge practices in banking and accounting (Maurer, 2002; Riles, 

2006), going so far as to identify ‘para-ethnography’ – the reflexive 

endowment of information with social perspective and meaning – as an 

inherent part of financial sense making (Holmes and Marcus, 2006).  

The increasing financial emphasis on the ‘fluid,’ interpretive, and 

malleable foundations of the ‘firm’ numbers and ‘exact’ figures seems part 

of a wide and encompassing cultural change. As Zygmunt Bauman argues, 

‘liquidity’ is the metaphor of our time. Until not long ago, he maintains, 

the modern era’s characteristic search for ‘lasting solidity, a solidity 

which one could trust and rely upon and which would make the world 

predictable and therefore manageable’ (Bauman, 2000: 3),  had involved 

‘shedding the “irrelevant” obligations standing in the way of rational 

calculation of effects, as Max Weber put it…’ (ibid., p. 4). In contrast, ‘the 

present-day situation emerged out of the radical melting of the fetters and 

manacles rightly or wrongly suspected of limiting the individual freedom 

to choose and to act’ (ibid., p. 5). Thus, Bauman notes, patterns of 

dependency and interaction are now malleable to an extent not 

experienced by past generations: 

It would be imprudent to deny, or even to play down, the 

profound change which the advent of ‘fluid modernity’ has 



Journal of Business Anthropology, 2(1), Spring 2013 

 

 40 

brought to the human condition. The remoteness and 

unreachability of systemic structure, coupled with the 

unstructured, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics, 

change that condition in a radical way and call for a rethinking of 

old concepts that used to frame its narratives.  

(Bauman, 2000: 8) 

Profit seems to be one of those narratively pivotal concepts. In the 

cultural context of ‘liquid modernity,’ and more specifically of the 

financial ‘liquidation’ of the old corporate ‘solids,’ profit loses its power 

and status as an ultimate measure in organizations.  

For organizational ethnographers this might actually mean a form 

of liberation. It might mean a welcome release from the ‘solid’ regime of 

calculation which has long hindered their access to organizations and 

limited their ability to bring to attention anything that transcends the 

final goal of calculation, namely profit. As the interpretive space that has 

long sustained the dominance of profit is revealed and brought into 

awareness, there seems to be a corresponding space exactly for the sort 

of studies that view the interpretive space surrounding profit as the focus 

of their inquiry. Now there might actually be a chance for organizational 

ethnographers to be heard: To raise awareness of the complex layers of 

meaning sustaining the supposedly ‘practical’ or ‘real’ world, and to 

broaden the meaning of the concept of value so that it could include the 

prices of profit as well.  

I don’t want to sound naïve or present the financial turn as Utopian. 

In Liquidated (2009), an ethnography of Wall Street bankers, Karen Ho 

shows how the sanctification of ‘shareholder value’ creates a situation in 

which the dismantling and realigning of corporations as a means for 

creating this ‘shareholder value’ have become routine on Wall Street. 

They give rise to an unstable and shaky employment world that is 

increasingly cast in the image of the financial market to which it is 

subordinated. Indeed, ‘employees, located outside the corporation’s 

central purpose, are readily liquidated in the pursuit of stock price 

appreciation’ (Ho, 2009: 3). In this sense, the loosening of the power and 

status of ‘profit’ as the ultimate measure, and its replacement with an 

uncertain, unstable, peripatetic ‘shareholder value’, is nothing but a 

replacement of one sanctified number with another, which carries its own 

social and personal prices.  

Nonetheless, while ‘shareholder value’ represents an economic 

regime that might currently be no less harsh or problematic than earlier 

regimes, it is perhaps more easily susceptible to the ethnographic gaze, 

and more potentially attentive to ethnographic sensibilities and to the 

type of socially-attuned findings that they bring to light. As anthropologist 

Maurer and Intel’s Mainwaring (2012: 183) illustrate in an account of 

their collaboration, business organizations’ financial focus seems to 

harbor ‘a willingness to experiment with different disciplines and 



                                                     Ailon / Setting Sail on Stormy Waters 

 41 

methodologies.’ Indeed, ‘[i]n money and finance, our work helped tell a… 

story, about a system that could make, handle, manage money and finance 

in a more humane way, or to serve human agendas’ (ibid., p. 190).  

Indeed, the recent growth of the field of the anthropology of finance 

further indicates that financialization might involve a more welcoming 

environment for organizational ethnographers. Quite a few recent 

ethnographic studies have been conducted within organizations by 

anthropologists of finance. These include Riles (2011) who studied an 

investment bank; Holmes (2009) and Abolafia (2010) who studied central 

banks; and Zaloom (2006) and Miyazaki (2003) who studied 

futures/securities trading firms. These and other anthropologists of 

finance have tended to focus on the organizations’ financial-market 

dealings rather than on their inner organizational realities. But the fact 

that they obtained anthropological access, and the socially attuned 

findings that they then reported, indicate at least some potential new 

possibilities for organizational ethnographers, too, in these and other 

types of organizations. In this sense, the development of the field of the 

anthropology of finance in the last decade and a half might be said to 

mark the contours of a new space that is opening up for organizational 

ethnographers as well. 

Thus, my argument is not designed to be Utopian so much as 

practical – but practical in an ethnographic sense. The subordination of 

the logic of production to the logic of financial circulation (LiPuma and 

Lee, 2004) represents a deep cultural change that challenges not only 

managerial schemes but also the dominance of schematic thinking. It 

brings to awareness the existence of an interpretive space that for all too 

long and all too often has been denied or schematized as a problematic or 

slippery variable, minor in relation to the ‘solidity’ of numbers. In this 

sense, subordinating the logic of production to the logic of financial 

circulation may represent an opportunity for a type of listening that 

organizational ethnographers usually have not received in business and 

managerial circles. 

 

New questions to be asked  

Anthropologists LiPuma and Lee (2004), two amongst a growing group of 

anthropologists studying the development and significance of financial 

culture, have argued that the changes brought about by and through 

financialization signify a new stage of global capitalism. Production 

processes still represent a central and core moment in this new stage of 

capitalism, but a moment increasingly subordinated to financial 

circulation processes; to the rising power of speculative capital. One 

prevalent expression of this is the significant strengthening of finance 

departments within corporations. As Lipuma and Lee (2004: 91-92) 

comment with regard to the financial arms of major corporations:  



Journal of Business Anthropology, 2(1), Spring 2013 

 

 42 

Originally designed to help customers finance the purchase of the 

products manufactured by the industrial division and to 

implement insurance hedging strategies, these financial arms are 

now growing faster than their manufacturing cousins and also 

becoming increasingly disconnected from production in that their 

financial activities, products, and global presence bear a much 

stronger resemblance to investment banks and to hedge funds 

than to divisions of conventional manufacturing firms. … And as 

global financial circulation, crowned by the derivatives markets, 

has mushroomed, the growth rates and profitability of these 

financial divisions have become significantly greater than those of 

their once predominant manufacturing parents.  

Another prevalent organizational expression of financialization is to be 

found in shareholder-value oriented theories of ‘corporate governance,’ 

which portray the increasing structural dominance of financial logic 

within organizations. In these theories, ‘the corporation [is] no longer 

portrayed as a tangible institution with an inside and an outside, as in the 

industrial-managerialist days’ (Davis, 2009: 21). He continues: ‘Rather it 

[is] a network, a “nexus of contracts,” organized in such a way as to 

promote the creation of shareholder value.’   

The loss of the production-centered view and production-centered 

structure is an inner-organizational expression of the changing 

connection between profit and corporate survival. In the context of the 

rising dominance of the shaky and largely unpredictable speculative 

capital, the deepest foundations of the thought practices and meaning 

systems within organizations are being transformed.  

This process opens up many new questions for organizational 

ethnographers and entails new challenges. What happens in 

organizations when ‘firm’ numbers become ‘fluid’? What happens when 

the interpretive links between effort, profit, economic value, and stock 

price – all traditional links between means and ends – are problematized 

and rendered insecure? What happens in a cultural context that opens up 

these links for reflection; that renders them floating social constructs 

rather than stable, taken-for-granted, and absolute ‘truths’? What 

happens when the interpretive links between what people actually do – 

their actual work hours, effort, sacrifices – and the sanctified end figure 

become obscure and visibly open to interpretation and reconsideration?  

Not only does all this appear to amount to a significant cultural 

change in organizations themselves, but it also seems to be a change that 

calls for new sensibilities; for new ways of thinking and new analytical 

instruments. It is a change which makes it possible to challenge long-

rooted institutions that are based on the sanctification of measurement 

and profit, and to realize that the justification for their existence has been 

destabilized in the context of the current financial flooding of global 

capitalism.  



                                                     Ailon / Setting Sail on Stormy Waters 

 43 

For example, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff have argued 

that in some places in the world a striking corollary to what they refer to 

as ‘millenial capitalism’ has been the proliferation of occult economies. 

‘[F]inance capital has always had its spectral enchantments,’ they remark 

(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000: 310), ‘its modes of speculation based on 

less than rational connections between means and ends.’ Moreover, ‘as 

the connections between means and ends become opaque, more 

distended, more mysterious, the occult becomes an ever more 

appropriate, semantically saturated metaphor for our times’ (ibid., p. 

317). Thus, they argue, ‘[m]agic is, everywhere, the science of the 

concrete, aimed at making sense of and acting upon the world…’ (p. 318).2 

Attempting to conjure up or account for wealth by appealing to 

techniques that defy explanation in conventional terms of practical 

reason and to offer moral discourses and actions sparked by the real or 

imagined production of value through such ‘magical’ means (ibid., p. 310), 

occult economies answer the economic perplexities of our times with 

images of insidious forces and alluring mysticism; of potent magical 

technologies and modes of accumulation. 

Indeed, magic seems to have much in common with attempts to 

mathematically ‘manage’ financial uncertainty. Both represent forms of 

enchantment with the un-known and the pretense and effort to affect it in 

a way that will bring about future results which fit the wishes of those 

who pay or invest. Notions of ‘risk management’ (see Ailon, 2012), with 

their characteristic statistical sophistication and financial technical 

intricacies that only very few seem to grasp (Lipuma and Lee, 2004: 61), 

appear to stem from the same underlying cultural impulses and 

preoccupations as those of its supposedly primitive opposites: magic and 

wizardry. Indeed, like magic and wizardry, they can be put to various uses 

and misuses, including the extraction of gains and the practice of forms of 

power and manipulation outside the realm of organizations and beyond 

their mechanisms of social and regulatory controls. The increasing 

popularity of financial markets thus represents new types of capitalist 

enchantments that are also simultaneously quite old. Indeed, it is 

characterized by an impulse both to tame the unknown and to know it, as 

well as by a tendency to mystify it.  

The big ethnographic question here is: what are the cultural 

changes occurring within organizations in such a context? What type of 

organizational cultures develop in the shadow of these new types of 

capitalist enchantments with the unknown? In the shadow of the passion 

to manage a capricious and temperamental economic future? In the 

shadow of statistical spells and magical mathematics, of the sweet 

temptations and harsh punishments of the financial 'invisible hand'? 

What happens in organizational worlds whose longings and fears are 

increasingly entangled with the panics and euphoria of investors and 

                                                        
2 See also Williams (1980) on advertising as a ‘magic system.’ 



Journal of Business Anthropology, 2(1), Spring 2013 

 

 44 

speculators? What happens when the economic version of Bauman’s 

metaphor of liquidity – liquid money, liquid structures, liquid markets, 

liquidated companies and workforces – casts a growing shadow over a 

world which has traditionally thought of itself in terms connoting a clear, 

ordered, and stable causal logic: a machine, a body, a system, indeed an 

‘organization’?  

As I mentioned earlier, most of the anthropological work done so 

far focuses on financial market culture, and there is hardly enough 

ethnographic work that delves into the ways contemporary 

organizational cultures are influenced by financialization and the 

strengthening of financial markets. Indeed, while many anthropologists of 

finance have conducted their ethnographic fieldwork in organizations, 

their work tends to focus on the market rather than on the organizations 

themselves. Ho (2009), who conducted ethnographic work among Wall 

Street bankers, is somewhat of an exception, as her argument explicitly 

ties the cultures of Wall Street workplaces to market approaches and 

behavior. 

There seems to be a striking need to continue with this line of work 

and conduct anthropologically-attuned studies of financialization 

processes within organizations as well. More specifically, there seems to 

be a need to examine the ways in which financial markets impact and 

reshape the inner logic of means and ends, effort and return, in diverse 

types of organizations. There is, further, a need to place the question of 

value itself at the center of attention (Batteau and Psenka, 2012): to trace 

the processes of its construction, the negotiations over its meaning, the 

types of market images it is tied to, and the ways it is linked to visions and 

concepts of practicality. Moreover, there are other questions to be 

explored: what are the role, power, and place of financial departments 

within organizations? How are they linked to other domains of work? 

Current financial developments, and especially the increasing prevalence 

of the financial prism, open up many new organizational questions. The 

recent growth in anthropological studies conducted within financial 

organizations indicates that now there might be a chance that the barriers 

of entrance and the barriers of attention that organizational ethnographer 

have long had to face might also become a little more liquid.  

 

Closing Note 

A confession: throughout this discussion I have tried my best to 

circumvent the oft-traveled road of the critical/managerial divide with its 

rocky ideological topography. I assume that I have been only partially 

successful in this endeavor, and that, from time to time, visions of this 

road’s imposing landscapes – Marxism, neo-Marxism, liberalism, neo-

liberalism, post-structuralism, and so on and so forth – have popped up in 

the minds of my readers. I also assume that my own critical loyalties have 

no doubt been discernible to those who have traveled this road before. 



                                                     Ailon / Setting Sail on Stormy Waters 

 45 

And yet I insist on the fact that my point is primarily ethnographic. 

The transformations brought forth by financialization affect the deepest 

layers of the cultural fabric of organizations. In this discussion, I have 

focused upon their impact on the significance of the concept of ‘profit.’ I 

have argued that financialization has directly and notably challenged the 

status of profit as an end measure in organizations, subordinating it to the 

much more fluid ‘shareholder value.’ I have also argued that 

financialization ‘liquidates’ many of the solidities of the recent past, not 

least of which are the numerical convictions, schematic thinking habits, 

and accounting assurances that all too often have been used to deny or 

marginalize the ‘soft’ and ‘slippery’ interpretive spaces and daily 

experiences to which ethnographers devote their careers.  

I have also argued that these cultural transformations entail a 

practical advantage and an anthropological challenge for organizational 

ethnographers. Practically, there seems to be at least a reasonable chance 

that the obstacles of access and attention that ethnographers have had to 

face for decades will be to some extent lifted. Ethnographers seem 

especially well equipped to wonder beyond profit: to explore the social 

and personal prices that profit entails, and to take note of those aspects of 

everyday life that are not ‘counted’ in accountings of value, even though 

they are of utmost value for any in-depth attempt to document or 

understand organizational life in all its intricacy. Anthropologically, 

financialization implies that there are many new questions to ask. A deep 

cultural turn is under way and its organizational expressions and 

implications have barely been studied.   

So imagine, again, a person who seeks to document his life by 

collecting receipts of everything he has ever purchased. One day a 

financial flood occurs. It overflows his box-filled closet and washes all his 

receipts out to a stormy sea. Ethnographers who want to know what 

happens next must set sail on these stormy waters, and observe. 

 

   

References 

Abolafia, Mitchel Y. 2010. ‘Narrative construction as sensemaking: how a 

central bank thinks.’ Organization Studies 31(3): 349-367. 

Ailon, Galit. 2011. ‘Mapping the cultural grammar of reflexivity: the case 

of the Enron scandal.’ Economy and Society 40 (1): 141-166.  

Ailon, Galit. 2012. ‘The discursive management of financial risk scandals: 

the case of Wall Street Journal commentaries on LTCM and Enron.’ 

Qualitative Sociology 35(3): 251-270. 

Baba, Marietta L. 2012. ‘Anthropology and business: influence and 

interests.’ Journal of Business Anthropology 1(1): 20-71. 

Batteau, Allen W. and Carolyn E. Psenka. 2012. ‘Horizons of business 



Journal of Business Anthropology, 2(1), Spring 2013 

 

 46 

anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation.’ Journal of Business 

Anthropology 1(1): 72-90. 

Bauman, Zygmut. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.  

Boje, David M., Rosile, Grace Ann, Durant, Rita A., and John T. Luhman. 

2004. ‘Enron spectacles: a critical dramaturgical analysis.’ Organization 

Studies: 25(5): 751-774. 

Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor 

Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: The University of Chicago 

Press.  

Cefkin, Melissa. 2009. ‘Introduction: business, anthropology, and the 

growth of corporate ethnography.’ In Cefkin Melissa (ed.), Ethnography 

and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of 

Corporations. NY: Berghahn Books, pp. 1-40. 

Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 2000. ‘Millennial capitalism: first 

thoughts on a Second Coming.’ Public Culture 12(2): 291-343. 

Crump, Thomas. 1990. The Anthropology of Numbers. Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press.  

David, Gerald F. 2010. ‘Not just a mortgage crisis: how finance maimed 

society.’ Strategic Organization 8(1): 75-82. 

Davis, Gerald F. 2009. Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped 

America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Downey, Greg and Melissa S. Fisher. 2006. ‘Introduction: The 

Anthropology of Capital and the Frontiers of Ethnography.’ In Melissa S. 

Fisher and Greg Downey (eds.), Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic 

Reflections on the New Economy. Durham: Duke University Press, pp.1-30. 

Garsten, Christina. 2008. Workplace Vagabonds: Career and Community in 

Changing Worlds of Works. UK: Palgrave Macmillan.  

Goldschmidt, Walter. 2001. ‘Notes toward a theory of applied 

anthropology.’ Human Organization 60(4): 423-429. 

Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: 

Duke University Press.  

Hochschild, Arlie R. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of 

Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.   

Holmes, Douglas R. 2009. ‘Economy of words.’ Cultural Anthropology 

24(3): 381-419. 

Holmes, Douglas R. and George E. Marcus. 2006. ‘Fast capitalism: para-

ethnography and the rise of the symbolic analyst.’ In Melissa S. Fisher and 

Greg Downey (eds.), Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the 

New Economy. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 33-57. 

Jackall, Robert. 1988. Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. 



                                                     Ailon / Setting Sail on Stormy Waters 

 47 

Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Kindleberger, Charles P. 1989. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of 

Financial Crises. Revised Edition. NY: Basic Books. 

Knorr Cetina, Karin and Urs Bruegger. 2000. ‘The market as an object of 

attachment: exploring postsocial relations in financial markets.’ Canadian 

Journal of Sociology 25(2): 141-???. 

Krippner, Greta R.. 2005. ‘The financialization of the American economy.’ 

Socio-Economic Review 3: 173-208. 

Kunda, Gideon. 2006. Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a 

High-Tech Corporation (revised edition). Philadelphia: Temple University 

Press. 

Langley, Paul. 2004. ‘In the eye of the “perfect storm”: the final salary 

pensions crisis and the financialisation of Anglo American capitalism.’ 

New Political Economy 9(4): 539-558. 

Langley, Paul. 2010. ‘The performance of liquidity in the subprime 

mortgage crisis.’ New Political Economy 15(1): 71-89. 

LiPuma, Edward and Benjamin Lee. 2004. Financial Derivatives and the 

Globalization of Risk. Durham: Duke University Press.  

Malefyt, Timothy de Waal and Brian Moeran. 2003. ‘Introduction: 

advertising cultures – advertising, ethnography and anthropology.’ In T. 

De W. Malefyt and B. Moeran (eds.), Advertising Cultures. Oxford: Berg.   

Maurer, Bill. 2002. ‘Anthropological and accounting knowledge in Islamic 

banking and finance: rethinking critical accounts.’ Journal of the Royal 

Anthropological Institute 8: 645-667. 

Maurer, Bill and Scott D. Mainwaring. 2012. ‘Anthropology with business: 

plural programs and future financial worlds.’ Journal of Business 

Anthropology 1(2): 177-196. 

Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2003. ‘The temporalities of the market.’ American 

Anthropologist 105(2): 255-265. 

Moeran, Brian. 2005. The Business of Ethnography. Oxford: Berg.  

Moeran, Brian and Christina Garsten. 2012. ‘What’s in a name? Editors’ 

Introduction to the Journal of Business Anthropology.’ The Journal of 

Business Anthropology 1 (1): 1-19. 

Pixley, Jocelyn. 2004. Emotions in Finance: Distrust and Uncertainty in 

Global Markets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Pryke, Michael and Paul du Gay. 2007. ‘Take an issue: cultural economy 

and finance.’ Economy and Society 36 (3): 339-354. 

Riles, Annelise. 2006. ‘Real time: unwinding technocratic and 

anthropological knowledge.’ In Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey (eds.), 

Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy. 



Journal of Business Anthropology, 2(1), Spring 2013 

 

 48 

Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 86-107. 

Riles, Annelise. 2011. Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global 

Financial Markets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  

Schein, Edgar H. 1985. Organizational Culture and Leadership. San 

Francisco: Jossey-Bass.  

Strathern, Marilyn (ed.) 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in 

Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. 

Westney, Eleanor D. and John Van Maanen. 2011. ‘The casual ethnography 

of the executive suite.’ Journal of International Business Studies 42: 602-

607. 

Williams, James W. 2008. ‘The lessons of “Enron”: media accounts, 

corporate crimes, and financial markets.’ Theoretical Criminology 12 (4): 

471-499. 

Williams, Raymond. 1980. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: 

Verso. 

Ybema, Sierk, Dvora Yanow, Harry Wels, and Frans Kamsteeg. 2009. 

‘Studying everyday organizational life.’ In Sierk Ybema, Dvora Yanow, 

Harry Wels, and Frans Kamsteeg (eds.), Organizational Ethnography: 

Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life. LA: Sage, pp. 1-20. 

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2003. ‘Ambiguous numbers: trading technologies and 

interpretation in financial markets.’ American Ethnologist 30 (2): 1-15. 

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from 

Chicago to London. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.  

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2009. ‘How to read the future: the yield curve, affect, and 

financial prediction.’ Public Culture 21 (2): 245-268. 

Zuckerman, Ezra. 1999. ‘The categorical imperative: securities analysts 

and the illegitimacy discount.’ American Journal of Sociology 104 (5): 

1398-1438. 

 

 

 

 

 

Galit Ailon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology & 
Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She has conducted fieldwork 
on an Israeli-American high-tech merger (published as Global Ambitions 
and Local Identities, Berghahn, 2007), as well as in other organizational 
and market sites. She has published in such journals as The Academy of 
Management Review, Organization Studies, and Economy and Society, and 
may be reached at Galit.ailon@biu.ac.il 

mailto:Galit.ailon@biu.ac.il