Calling to account: Good governance, global financial regularization and the symbolic labor of securities research

There is an increasingly taken for granted global discourse of “good governance” that highlights the need for transparency and accountability. The question is: transparency and accountability from and for whom, and toward what end? This dissertation examines the social construction of “good governance”, particularly as it is expressed in a global discourse of “corporate governance“ that gives primacy to the maximization of “shareholder value” and the promotion of “investor confidence” in the stock market. How is it possible for this kind of political-economic commonsense to be constituted and regularized globally? How is it productive of social meanings and relations of financial accountability, and of socio-political hierarchies in the global political economy? Who and what are empowered or marginalized, included or excluded?; I argue that this socially constructed commonsense privileges institutional investors who are empowered to hold all stakeholders accountable to the expectations, standards and measures of the stock market. This discourse is clearly not socially neutral. But it is misrecognized as disinterested and even scientific. Thus it acquires symbolic power, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, as it regularizes particular social distinctions and exclusions as the “realities” of the global political economy.; But “good corporate governance” is a hybrid discourse that is not free from conflicts, contradictions and contestations. What may now appear to be the regulatory commonsense in Wall Street did not originate from within the financial community itself but was shaped historically by the position-taking, struggles and compromises among socially unequal groups during and after the Progressive era and the New Deal. They are inseparable from processes of legitimization or symbolic production. Professionalization in the stock market has been a central element in these processes of symbolic production, and the emergence of a distinct securities research profession has been a key form of symbolic labor. Research analysts are symbolic laborers occupying contradictory “dominated dominant” positions in the field. While endowed with cultural-economic capital as knowledge workers, they are also subordinated by the conflicts of interest that characterize the conglomerate structure of global finance. These hybridities and tensions thus also provide the discursive-political space for global financial re-regularization.