The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment: Political Imaginaries of Shareholder Value

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Horacio Ortiz

The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment

Political Imaginaries of Shareholder Value

Horacio Ortiz

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English

Columbia University Press
23 November 2021

Development economics

The financial industry derives its legitimacy through the claim that it acts in the interest of shareholders. A vast international network of funds, banks, insurance companies, brokerages, rating agencies, and regulatory agencies defends its status by asserting that market mechanisms determine a company's true value and therefore enriching shareholders contributes to the socially optimal allocation of capital. Is this how stock prices are determined in practice? What does stock valuation reveal about the supposed efficiency of markets and what it means to act on behalf of shareholders?

Horacio Ortiz provides a critical analysis of the social institutions and practices that produce and regulate stock pricing and valuation. He examines how financial professionals evaluate and invest in listed companies, unraveling the contradictory definitions of financial value that shape their behavior. Ortiz demonstrates how ideologically laden notions of investing skill and efficient markets are central to the everyday practices of financial valuation, as well as how they function to justify the broader system. He scrutinizes the technical aspects of valuation and investment, their place in social relations within and among companies, and their relation to state regulation in order to demystify how the financial industry presents prices as truths that the rest of society must accept.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among stock brokers and investment management companies in New York and Paris, this book shows how the political imaginaries that underpin financial markets are central to producing, sustaining, and legitimizing global inequalities.

By: Horacio Ortiz
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780231201193
ISBN 10: 0231201192
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 23 November 2021
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgments 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

Horacio Ortiz is a researcher at CNRS, Centre d’études français sur la Chine contemporaine (CEFC), and an associate professor at the Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University.

Reviews for The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment: Political Imaginaries of Shareholder Value

It 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 1990s Since 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 Extremes This 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 Markets