Daniel Souleles
Biographic Data
| ID | 133919 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Souleles |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Souleles |
| SIGNATURE | SOULELES D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Copenhagen Business School |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 105 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
How to Analyze Your Data without Lying about God: 49 Sermons and a Reflection on the Systematic Analysis of Ethnographic Data
Despite often heroic commitments to immersion in a given field context, and despite frequent theoretical fluency in analysis, anthropologists rarely show the steps by which they analyze and interpret their data. Because of this, the validity of anthropological analyses is generally difficult to assess, the reinterpretation of existing studies is often a dubious proposition, and the ethical implications of research sampling strategies are often im…
Kissing Frogs: Do Psychologists and Bankers Live in Different Worlds?
Organisational psychology consultants and valuation bankers are essential to creating employee stock ownership plan companies (ESOPs). However, bankers and organisational psychology consultants see the world in different ways and in fact, paradoxically create different sorts of companies from the same companies, engendering an ontological pluralism. This pluralism suggests that social change can happen on a large scale without persuading everyone…
Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wives, Hide Your Beds: Marriage, Law, and Changing Social Norms in the United States
Another workplace is possible: Learning to own and changing subjectivities in American employee owned companies
Work life in America, as the literature would have it at least, is pretty uniformly miserable. This article will draw on the literature on practice-based learning as well as democratic political change, in order to help show and theorize a way in which capitalist firms form employee owned trusts (an Employee Stock Ownership Plan), and develop an "ownership culture." Employee Stock Ownership Plans with an ownership culture are fairly wide spread, …
Knotty financiers: A comparative take on finance, value, and inequality
Can they all be 'Shit-heads: Learning to Be a Contrarian Investor
This article seeks to explain one of the sensibilities or dispositions that novices learn in the process of becoming financiers, namely, to be a contrarian. We will review investment pitches from an American undergraduate collegiate investment fund, interviews with some members of the club, and field notes from a few of their outings, and treat instances of their contrariness as moments in their process of going from non-investors to investors, m…
The distribution of ignorance on financial markets
In the economists’ old conception of a market, perfection would arrive when all participants had complete knowledge. However, economists and psychologists have lately realized that ignorance and bias more accurately describe the state of human knowledge even around those hallowed moments of transactional decision making. In these new academic stories, these models of irrationality and bias often take the form of basic cognitive features or evolut…
Meaning in the Miscellany of a Cultural Domain
This article compares pile sort data from frequently occurring items in a cultural domain with pile sort data on infrequently occurring items in that same cultural domain. Common practice in free-list analysis has a researcher discard infrequently occurring list items. This article confirms this practice and suggests that there is an underlying structure to both frequently and infrequently occurring list items
How to Study People Who Do Not Want to be Studied: Practical Reflections on Studying Up
In attempts to gain a wider understanding of the social worlds they encounter, anthropologists have exhorted their colleagues to "study up" and pay attention to wealthy and powerful people, not just those at society's margins. Anthropology has met this call. However, anthropologists could stand to be more forthcoming in explaining readily generalizable research strategies for studying people who are difficult to access. This article offers a brie…
Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization
This article suggests that it is advantageous for social scientists to deliberately depart from functionalist theories seeking to explain the expansion of financial instruments and logics across social life. Rather, we identify three causes of financialization from three extant clusters of scholastic activity: an organic political economy that sees finance expanding as a product or by-product of larger state- and imperial-level political struggle…
Anthropology and the Rashomon Effect
Something new: Value and Change in Finance
Ethnographic and social scientific accounts of the financiers that buy and sell companies for profit often homogenize the players in these social dramas, relying on blunt, totalizing definitions of culture or overly deterministic articulations of habitus. This article, drawing on a two-year study of private equity investors, offers an alternative analytic frame for making sense of how private equity people buy and sell companies. It explores the …
The meanings of production(s): Showbiz and deep plays in finance and DIYbiology
Drawing on anthropological theories of play, deep play and games, as well as sociological interaction theories of risk, this paper develops a theory of consequential games. This paper suggests that in the United States much expert or entrepreneurial activity can be seen as a competition over creating the rules of games that others must play. In turn, whatever peril lies in these consequential games is the province of the saps that have to play, a…
Don't mix Paxil, Viagra, and Xanax: What financiers' jokes say about inequality
This article makes use of theories of humor and play to analyze a corpus of jokes private equity investors tell about the work that they do. Private equity investors, at the time of a field project I conducted from spring 2012 through summer 2014, managed aboutUS$3.5 trillion in mostly other people's money, to buy and sell whole companies as investments. By just about any measure, they're wealthy and powerful (they have lots of resources and can …
Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization
This article suggests that it is advantageous for social scientists to deliberately depart from functionalist theories seeking to explain the expansion of financial instruments and logics across social life. Rather, we identify three causes of financialization from three extant clusters of scholastic activity: an organic political economy that sees finance expanding as a product or by-product of larger state- and imperial-level political struggle…
How to Study People Who Do Not Want to be Studied: Practical Reflections on Studying Up
In attempts to gain a wider understanding of the social worlds they encounter, anthropologists have exhorted their colleagues to "study up" and pay attention to wealthy and powerful people, not just those at society's margins. Anthropology has met this call. However, anthropologists could stand to be more forthcoming in explaining readily generalizable research strategies for studying people who are difficult to access. This article offers a brie…
The distribution of ignorance on financial markets
In the economists’ old conception of a market, perfection would arrive when all participants had complete knowledge. However, economists and psychologists have lately realized that ignorance and bias more accurately describe the state of human knowledge even around those hallowed moments of transactional decision making. In these new academic stories, these models of irrationality and bias often take the form of basic cognitive features or evolut…
Don't mix Paxil, Viagra, and Xanax: What financiers' jokes say about inequality
This article makes use of theories of humor and play to analyze a corpus of jokes private equity investors tell about the work that they do. Private equity investors, at the time of a field project I conducted from spring 2012 through summer 2014, managed aboutUS$3.5 trillion in mostly other people's money, to buy and sell whole companies as investments. By just about any measure, they're wealthy and powerful (they have lots of resources and can …
Knotty financiers: A comparative take on finance, value, and inequality
Another workplace is possible: Learning to own and changing subjectivities in American employee owned companies
Work life in America, as the literature would have it at least, is pretty uniformly miserable. This article will draw on the literature on practice-based learning as well as democratic political change, in order to help show and theorize a way in which capitalist firms form employee owned trusts (an Employee Stock Ownership Plan), and develop an "ownership culture." Employee Stock Ownership Plans with an ownership culture are fairly wide spread, …
Something new: Value and Change in Finance
Ethnographic and social scientific accounts of the financiers that buy and sell companies for profit often homogenize the players in these social dramas, relying on blunt, totalizing definitions of culture or overly deterministic articulations of habitus. This article, drawing on a two-year study of private equity investors, offers an alternative analytic frame for making sense of how private equity people buy and sell companies. It explores the …
The meanings of production(s): Showbiz and deep plays in finance and DIYbiology
Drawing on anthropological theories of play, deep play and games, as well as sociological interaction theories of risk, this paper develops a theory of consequential games. This paper suggests that in the United States much expert or entrepreneurial activity can be seen as a competition over creating the rules of games that others must play. In turn, whatever peril lies in these consequential games is the province of the saps that have to play, a…
Can they all be 'Shit-heads: Learning to Be a Contrarian Investor
This article seeks to explain one of the sensibilities or dispositions that novices learn in the process of becoming financiers, namely, to be a contrarian. We will review investment pitches from an American undergraduate collegiate investment fund, interviews with some members of the club, and field notes from a few of their outings, and treat instances of their contrariness as moments in their process of going from non-investors to investors, m…
Meaning in the Miscellany of a Cultural Domain
This article compares pile sort data from frequently occurring items in a cultural domain with pile sort data on infrequently occurring items in that same cultural domain. Common practice in free-list analysis has a researcher discard infrequently occurring list items. This article confirms this practice and suggests that there is an underlying structure to both frequently and infrequently occurring list items
Anthropology and the Rashomon Effect
Something new: Value and Change in Finance
Ethnographic and social scientific accounts of the financiers that buy and sell companies for profit often homogenize the players in these social dramas, relying on blunt, totalizing definitions of culture or overly deterministic articulations of habitus. This article, drawing on a two-year study of private equity investors, offers an alternative analytic frame for making sense of how private equity people buy and sell companies. It explores the …
The meanings of production(s): Showbiz and deep plays in finance and DIYbiology
Drawing on anthropological theories of play, deep play and games, as well as sociological interaction theories of risk, this paper develops a theory of consequential games. This paper suggests that in the United States much expert or entrepreneurial activity can be seen as a competition over creating the rules of games that others must play. In turn, whatever peril lies in these consequential games is the province of the saps that have to play, a…
Don't mix Paxil, Viagra, and Xanax: What financiers' jokes say about inequality
This article makes use of theories of humor and play to analyze a corpus of jokes private equity investors tell about the work that they do. Private equity investors, at the time of a field project I conducted from spring 2012 through summer 2014, managed aboutUS$3.5 trillion in mostly other people's money, to buy and sell whole companies as investments. By just about any measure, they're wealthy and powerful (they have lots of resources and can …
Meaning in the Miscellany of a Cultural Domain
This article compares pile sort data from frequently occurring items in a cultural domain with pile sort data on infrequently occurring items in that same cultural domain. Common practice in free-list analysis has a researcher discard infrequently occurring list items. This article confirms this practice and suggests that there is an underlying structure to both frequently and infrequently occurring list items
How to Study People Who Do Not Want to be Studied: Practical Reflections on Studying Up
In attempts to gain a wider understanding of the social worlds they encounter, anthropologists have exhorted their colleagues to "study up" and pay attention to wealthy and powerful people, not just those at society's margins. Anthropology has met this call. However, anthropologists could stand to be more forthcoming in explaining readily generalizable research strategies for studying people who are difficult to access. This article offers a brie…
Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization
This article suggests that it is advantageous for social scientists to deliberately depart from functionalist theories seeking to explain the expansion of financial instruments and logics across social life. Rather, we identify three causes of financialization from three extant clusters of scholastic activity: an organic political economy that sees finance expanding as a product or by-product of larger state- and imperial-level political struggle…
Can they all be 'Shit-heads: Learning to Be a Contrarian Investor
This article seeks to explain one of the sensibilities or dispositions that novices learn in the process of becoming financiers, namely, to be a contrarian. We will review investment pitches from an American undergraduate collegiate investment fund, interviews with some members of the club, and field notes from a few of their outings, and treat instances of their contrariness as moments in their process of going from non-investors to investors, m…
The distribution of ignorance on financial markets
In the economists’ old conception of a market, perfection would arrive when all participants had complete knowledge. However, economists and psychologists have lately realized that ignorance and bias more accurately describe the state of human knowledge even around those hallowed moments of transactional decision making. In these new academic stories, these models of irrationality and bias often take the form of basic cognitive features or evolut…
Another workplace is possible: Learning to own and changing subjectivities in American employee owned companies
Work life in America, as the literature would have it at least, is pretty uniformly miserable. This article will draw on the literature on practice-based learning as well as democratic political change, in order to help show and theorize a way in which capitalist firms form employee owned trusts (an Employee Stock Ownership Plan), and develop an "ownership culture." Employee Stock Ownership Plans with an ownership culture are fairly wide spread, …
Knotty financiers: A comparative take on finance, value, and inequality
Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wives, Hide Your Beds: Marriage, Law, and Changing Social Norms in the United States
Kissing Frogs: Do Psychologists and Bankers Live in Different Worlds?
Organisational psychology consultants and valuation bankers are essential to creating employee stock ownership plan companies (ESOPs). However, bankers and organisational psychology consultants see the world in different ways and in fact, paradoxically create different sorts of companies from the same companies, engendering an ontological pluralism. This pluralism suggests that social change can happen on a large scale without persuading everyone…
How to Analyze Your Data without Lying about God: 49 Sermons and a Reflection on the Systematic Analysis of Ethnographic Data
Despite often heroic commitments to immersion in a given field context, and despite frequent theoretical fluency in analysis, anthropologists rarely show the steps by which they analyze and interpret their data. Because of this, the validity of anthropological analyses is generally difficult to assess, the reinterpretation of existing studies is often a dubious proposition, and the ethical implications of research sampling strategies are often im…
Economics (7 works) · Business (5 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · History (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Finance (3 works) · Law (3 works)