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[...] "They understand that interns coming in knowing basically nothing - but if you're smart and personable, it's worth it to them to hire you." [...] most do not even know what "financial services" is. "Most are going into finance because they haven't figured out what else they could do," yet "fi…

The forces that push these college students toward investment banking are obviously multiple: the particular college environment, the strength of alumni and peer networks, the cultural linking of success and smartness with Wall Street, the hierarchical narrowing of career options and what constitut…

The "culture of smartness" is central to understanding Wall Street's financial agency, how investment bankers are personally and institutionally empowered to enact their worldviews, export their practices, and serve as models for far-reaching socioeconomic change. On Wall Street, "smartness" means …

[...] My informants proclaimed that the smartest people in the world came to work there; Wall Street, in their view, had created probably the most elite work-society ever to be assembled on the globe. Almost all the front-office workers that I encountered emphasized how smart their coworkers were, …

[...] From the stance of the disenfranchised, financial parameters like the stock price are understood as overtaking other values and affecting differently positioned people unequally. The unequal conflict between the priorities and agendas of the powerful versus the powerless, not to mention the…