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This paper aims to, by drawing on two decades of field work on Wall Street, explore the recent evolution in the gendering of Wall Street, as well as the potential effects – including the reproduction of financiers’ power – of that evolution. The 2008 financial crisis was depicted in strikingly gendered terms – with many commentators articulating a divide between masculine, greedy, risk-taking behavior and feminine, conservative, risk-averse approaches for healing the crisis. For a time, academics, journalists and women on Wall Street appeared to be in agreement in identifying women’s feminine styles as uniquely suited to lead – even repair – the economic debacle.

The article is based on historical research, in-depth interviews and fieldwork with the first generation of Wall Street women from the 1970s up until 2013.

In this article, it is argued that the preoccupation in feminine styles of leadership in finance primarily reproduces the power of white global financial elites rather than changes the culture of Wall Street or breaks down existent structures of power and inequality.

The research focuses primarily on the ways American global financial elites maintain power, and does not examine the ways in which the power of other international elites working in finance is reproduced in a similar or different manner.

The findings of the article provide practical implications for understanding the gendering of financial policy making and how that gendering maintains or reproduces the economic system.

The paper provides an understanding of how the gendered rhertoric of the financial crisis maintains not only the economic power of global financial elites in finance but also their social and cultural power.

The paper is based on original, unique, historical ethnographic research on the first generation of women on Wall Street.

This study challenges contentions that rights are limiting through an analysis of grassroots rights talk in the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer) community in the 1980s. I argue that rights talk can be an important source of constructing community within local, nonmainstream, noninstitutional spaces through a discourse analysis of a forum for LGBTQ community-building in the past: the letters to the editor columns in Gay Community News. This study enhances law and social movement scholarship on the role of rights in social movements by exploring how rights discourse is employed by everyday people in a noninstitutional community-building venue rarely addressed in contemporary research.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge some of the taken for granted assumptions of contemporary ethnographic practice by exploring reasons for fieldwork and the debt that is owed to those in the field.

Exploring traditional and contemporary reasons for fieldwork and comparing ostensive and performative styles of reporting organization studies.

The argument is that traditional ethnographic approaches do not fit contemporary organizing practices. In their place, a “symmetrical ethnology” is proposed.

More reflective use of labels and terms.

Better communication with practitioners.

Better dialogue with wider circles.

An important and timely critique of ethnography together with a reformulation and a number of suggestions for future practice.

Bosco, Liu, and West's chapter on underground lotteries in rural China is one that begs permission to cross the boundaries between parts of this volume, for it deals with the integration of the Chinese economy with others, and it also poses certain moral questions about the nature of markets and rationality in economic exchanges (see also Suarez, this volume). But the authors, after reviewing the evidence, ultimately conclude that China's underground lotteries must be viewed in relation to that country's phenomenal economic development in recent decades. They show that the rise of illegal underground lotteries in China is tightly connected to the development of the modern capitalist economy there, and that although it seems at first glance to be powered by irrationality and superstition, it actually functions according to capitalist principles – at least as viewed by the participants. They also argue that rural villagers who place bets in them are not mere victims of nonsensical beliefs or of opportunistic “outsiders,” but rather that they are participating in their own way in a system in which luck clearly plays a very large role, but one over which they have little control, and one that is grounded in the historical commercialized economy of China (see also Richardson, 1999). It is interesting to note the way that participants rationalize the lottery and their actions through their assumption that it is rigged – their approach to it is markedly different from that of someone from, for example, Japan or the United States, where such a lottery is assumed from the start to not be rigged. Bosco and co-authors well demonstrate here the importance of viewing a cultural phenomenon as part of a greater whole, and one in a constant state of flux.

IN THE SPRING OF 1989, PETER FISHER, A CLAIMS MANAGER AT AETNA LIFE & Casualty's Middleboro, Massachusetts, claim center, was about to witness a revolution. He didn't realize it at the time, however. He was too busy mollifying annoyed employees and peeved customers.

This article engages the concept of tests–here understood as social tests of collaborative abilities in the interdisciplinary teamwork–to examine how they are central to an applied anthropologist's positioning and influence within an organization.

Presented as an auto-ethnographic methodological exploration, the article takes its point of departure in ethnographic material from the work by Helene Ilkjær as an Industrial Postdoc with an interdisciplinary team of engineers, scientists and designers in a Danish technology start-up company.

Within this ethnographic context, the article examines not only the case of “the manual” to unfold how the dynamics of careful development but also notorious circumvention of manuals came to serve as social tests–moments that fundamentally changed the anthropologist's position within the interdisciplinary team. Analytically, the manual serves as a prism through which it explores the slippery and negotiable nature of the anthropologist's professional position as an Industrial Postdoc–suspended between anthropology “for” and “of” the company, officially employed by the company while also engaged in academic research.

The article offers anthropologists a tool to visualize the different movements and placements within continua of professional positionality while working as applied researchers with(in) private sector organizations.