Liquefying corporations and communities: Wall Street worldviews and socio-economic transformations in the postindustrial economy

This dissertation, “Liquefying Corporations and Communities: Wall Street Worldviews and Social-Economic Transformations in the Postindustrial Economy” is an ethnography of the new cultural logics of finance as a pivotal site to explore the social and ethical implications of late capitalism in the United States. I argue that it is precisely the expansion and prominence of financial and stock market values that have strongly contributed to the severe social dislocations social scientists have attributed to global capitalism at large: the dismantling of corporate and governmental safety nets, the wave of corporate downsizings and restructurings, the re-inscribing of hierarchical urban and global spaces. I examine the contestations between competing capitalist worldviews and practices of the post WWII era to not only write against assumptions of a singular, static, totalizing capitalist worldview (and homogenous capitalists), but also to allow an interrogation of how Wall Street's financial, stock market values, as a particular capitalist model, triumphed over paternalistic welfare capitalism in the U.S. in the late twentieth century.; Specifically, I explore how the re-aligning of corporate values and priorities to the interests of the stock market, along with the conceptualizing of the U.S. as a “shareholder democracy,” has contributed to the transformation of the traditional American corporation into its stock price, responsible only to Wall Street expectations and an imagined community of shareholders. To understand how the corporation as a social institution whose ties to its multiple constituencies were ceded in favor of the shareholder and liquidated via the stock market, this dissertation investigates the multiple, complex linkages that allowed Wall Street investment banks and other shareholder value advocates to construct this transformation. I demonstrate how Wall Street, by accessing deeply entrenched neoclassical economic assumptions which translated the distributing of capital directly to owners and shareholders as contributing to efficiency and the social good, and by enacting these worldviews in the corporate takeover movement of the 1980s, helped to transform corporations into financial assets to be continually bought and sold. I also contextualize these transformations in the cultural organizations and strategies of investment banks and in the experiences and values of multiple investment bankers.