Description
Book SynopsisHoracio Ortiz provides a critical analysis of the social institutions and practices that produce and regulate stock pricing and valuation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among financial professionals in New York and Paris, this book shows how the political imaginaries that underpin financial markets legitimize global inequalities.
Trade ReviewIt is a cause for celebration that this gem of a book is finally coming out in English and in an updated version. A real gift to the reader,
The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment offers both a thick ethnographic description of the moral worlds of the people who inhabit the financial industry and a rich conceptual apparatus to develop a rigorous 'political anthropology' of global finance. -- Marion Fourcade, author of
Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990sSince fieldwork two decades ago, Ortiz has studied and taught in schools of finance. He now researches and teaches the anthropology of finance in China. His empirical observations are fresh and sharp, but his philosophical clarity is outstanding. Market prices do not measure the truth of finance, and its workers’ imaginaries miss out most of humanity. Consequently, global distributive justice is ignored, and the financial crisis is permanent. -- Keith Hart, author of
Self in the World: Connecting Life's ExtremesThis book displays Ortiz’s distinctive combination of hugely skilled fieldwork and theoretical sophistication. Here, for the first time, the insights of this subtle thinker are laid out in full for Anglophone readers. Ortiz’s politically inflected anthropology of finance throws vital new light on everyday practices that profoundly shape today’s world. -- Donald MacKenzie, author of
Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial MarketsThis book still has something important to teach us. Personal, ethical and political imaginaries are at the core of how finance works – we need to take them seriously to understand, critique and influence the financial system. * LSE Review of Books *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Organizational Space of Financial Value
2. Valuation as a Personal Opinion
3. The Truth of Value as the Result of Efficient Markets
4. Financial Value as Political Assemblage
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Index
