About

Karen Ho is a Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on cultural studies of finance capital, finance, globalization, and capitalism. She employs ethnography, feminist studies, and political economy approaches to explore these themes within the context of the United States and comparative race and ethnicity. Her work examines how financial systems and economic practices influence social and cultural dynamics, contributing to a deeper understanding of capitalism's role in shaping contemporary societies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Finance
• Law
• Sociology
• Neoclassical economics
• Classics
• Economic growth
• Business
• History
• Political economy
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• Afterword of ‘Financial frontiers': towards conceptualizing finance that engages both power and contingency

  Journal of Cultural Economy · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Finance

  The critical and interdisciplinary scholarship analyzing finance, and specifically the relationship between financialization and inequality, has ballooned over the past twenty years. The increasing power and influence of financial and investment values, practices, policies, and networks have worked to leverage existing inequalities and construct novel regimes of accumulation that have increased socioeconomic precarity and dismantled socioeconomic protections for most. This fraught and unequal landscape has reinvigorated scholarly research and discussion on the role of finance in capitalism and on finance's relationship to other historical processes of inequality. Not surprisingly, much of this work on finance has faced similar questions and pitfalls as the critical scholarship on capitalism, namely, how to represent, analyze, and account for finance's power and influence without over-empowering, totalizing, presuming, or rendering inevitable finance's ability to remake the world in its own image. This Afterword engages this quandary, arguing that a dual approach is necessary – one that simultaneously shows finance's local contingencies, historical specificities, and unexpected trajectories alongside an approach that demonstrates finance's catalyzation of longstanding unequal structures produced through racial capitalism and colonialism to intensify contemporary inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• Réponse commune des autrices de Gens : Manifeste féministe pour l’étude du capitalisme aux questions adressées par Paola Juan et Anne-Christine Trémon

  Terrain · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access

  1. Quelle a été l’impulsion initiale à la rédaction du Manifeste Gens ? Pourriez-vous nous dire ce qui vous a attirées dans le format « manifeste » ? Gens est né d’un constat que nous partagions toutes : il existait un nombre important de travaux théoriques en anthropologie sur le capitalisme n’étant pas reconnus ou cités en tant que tels. Au lieu de cela, les apports anthropologiques sur le capitalisme se cantonnaient au statut d’exemples ou d’illustrations spécifiques de grandes théories su...

  PublisherDOI

• Gens : Un manifeste féministe pour l’étude du capitalisme

  Terrain · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  1. Qu'est-ce que GENS? Notre titre indique une redéfinition majeure des significations historiques et multidimensionnelles du terme « gens ». Gens se réfère initialement au concept romain d’unité familiale liée par un ancêtre masculin commun et a été étendu à des distinctions sociales telles que la lignée aristocratique. Il a été transformé par Lewis Henry Morgan pour fonder l’étude anthropologique de la parenté et pour révéler les origines matriarcales « authentiques » de la communauté (Trau...

  PublisherDOI

• The Housewife and the Home: Stone Age Economics and Insights For US (and Global North) Economies

  2021-01-01

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  Theorizing from the Global South is often understood to provide key insights into alternative perspectives and cosmologies excluded and effaced from Western modernity. Theory from ‘below’ is usually framed as providing ‘local’ variations and difference from hegemonic, neoliberal economics and societies of the Global North. While this article recognizes the importance of this approach, it is also crucial to move beyond these conceptual and spatial separations and hierarchies. This article proposes that insights and theories from Global South social economies not only shed light on those excluded from the dominant social economies of the Global North, but also on the taken-for-granted workings of formal economics itself. In addition to contemporary critical scholars of racial capitalism and feminist substantivism, one only has to look towards Marshall Sahlins’s ground-breaking Stone Age Economics to recognize the possibility that the “housewife’s perspective” and the understanding of social economies forged in so-called “primitive economies” are necessary to unpack and better analyze Global North economies. The insight that all economic transactions are always already social relations is precisely what is problematically erased in the local cultures of the Global North. Taking inspiration from Sahlins’s remarkable analysis of how “anthropological economies” engage supply and demand, this article shows its applicability in examining US housing markets.

  Publisher

• In the Name of Shareholder Value: Origin Myths of Corporations and Their Ongoing Implications

  Seattle University law review · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Law and economics

  Part I of this Article analyzes some of the contemporary critiques of, and debates around, shareholder value in order to illustrate why many of these contestations demonstrate underlying gaps or problematic assertions in the history and politics of shareholder value, especially if they are delimited by the narrow legal frames and neoliberal assumptions of corporations. It also provides the context necessary to explicate and ground why shareholder primacy and ownership assumptions are historically and legally flawed, and how financial values and assumptions continue to be championed (and financial power elided), despite the recent implosions of shareholder value. Part II expands upon several leading scholars’ work in showing the paradoxical and ahistorical nature of the shareholder ownership assumption and the conflation of primary and secondary financial markets. Throughout, this Article attempts to differentiate and disentangle multiple problems with the shareholder value interpretation by emphasizing Wall Street’s undue influence, the myth and ideology of shareholder value primacy, and the intersections between them.

  Publisher

• 3. Wall Street Historiographies and the Shareholder Value Revolution

  2020-11-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 4. The Neoclassical Roots and Origin Narratives of Shareholder Value

  2020-11-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Markets, myths, and misrecognitions: Economic populism in the age of financialization and hyperinequality

  Economic Anthropology · 2018-01-01 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Finance, crisis, and Hollywood

  2017-12-12 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The Hollywood "Wall Street movie" has long dramatized the practices and effects of hubris, conspiracy, and excess in destabilizing American corporations, cornering financial markets, and engendering financial crisis. Wall Street passions and machinations have always been key narrative drivers in this genre, and it might well be assumed that film has, for its own purposes, exaggerated some of the more sensational aspects of the finance industry. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, however, it has become unclear whether Hollywood's focus on the "economic" desires and fantasies of elite white men has been hyperbolic at all. Recognizing finance's continued grip on the global economy, this chapter examines the politics of critical visual representations of finance, launched in the wake of the Great Recession, in order to analyze the extent to which they challenged and/or maintained dominant financial norms and assumptions.

  PublisherDOI

• Book Reviews Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street.

  2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Karen Ho is a member of the Faculty of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Among her research interests are feminist studies and finance, globalism, and capitalism. In Liquidated, she brings concepts and research methods from these areas to a timely and absorbing study of the culture of Wall Street's most iconic investment banks. She studied these institutions between 1996 and 1999, a period of the longest bull market in our economic history. She examines Wall Street's rise to dominance and then argues, quite convincingly, how Wall Street was able to effectively impose a model of shareholder value on corporate America that resulted in not only greater instability in financial markets but also significant costs of corporate restructuring, especially in terms of reduced employment for the middle class and negative returns for shareholders.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Sylvia Yanagisako

  2 shared

• Anna Tsing

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  2 shared

• Laura Bear

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, University of Minnesota
• Graduate-Professional Teaching Award, University of Minnesot…