Liquidated By Karen Ho Summary

Layoffs are not always the best solution for a decline in company profits. A business must resolve the conflict that exists between their responsibility to meet economic targets and the ethical responsibility of non-maleficence. Furthermore, it must be determined if the layoffs would even maximize stakeholder welfare from a utilitarian perspective (Arce & Xin Li, 2011).

Q1 – What was up with Wall Street? The Goldman Standard and Shades of Gray.

"After the Layoffs, What Next?" is a case study involving the aftermath of the downsizing of Delarks, a Midwestern clothing store chain. In this case Harry Denton, the architect of the downsizing, is able to orchestrate a considerable financial turnaround, but in so doing he alienates most of Delarks' remaining employees and most of Delarks' upper-management. Denton is an inexperienced CEO whose management experience rests solely in managing a national chain's flagship store in New York. Though Denton's restructuring of Delarks' business model will cause Wall Street to take notice and toast Denton's efforts, his inexperience may in the end eventuate in Delarks' collapse. Delark's downsizing was done in a rather abrupt way in which most laid-off employees were entirely unaware that they were about to lose their jobs. The problem Denton unknowingly faced was that the employee-pool at Delarks was very tight-knit where members felt as if they belonged to one big satisfied family, and the unexpected lay-offs caused great distress within the company.

During the times leading up to the power struggle, the power dynamic within Lehman was steadily shifting as trading profits became increasingly more important to Lehman versus traditional investment banking profits. Thus, Glucksman was able to step into the spot light and Peterson became more expendable. Peter Peterson’s core

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind discuss the company Enron’s executives and how success made the executives lose touch with common decencies such as working alongside with women. This piece shows the imbalance with the treatment of sexes in the workplace and how money makes people insensitive to what is around them. The authors want to reach an audience of common people. They use the fall of Enron to warn about what happens when a business is lead with weak morals. McLean and Elkind shift the tone of the passages from exciting stories about the executives, to pointing out how the glitzy lifestyles are a façade to their collapsing business. This strategy makes the reader go from envy to concern about the priorities of the company.

Ho talks about how for the Wall Street people the, “key criterion of smartness is an ability to “wow” the clients- generally speaking, the top executives of Fortune 500 Companies. In this sense, although technical skill and business savvy also help to constitute smartness on Wall Street, they are often considered secondary, learnable ‘on the job.’(167) Ho describes that being smart on Wall Street is being able to adapt and because they are able to do all the things they call secondary learning a process on the jobs they are thought of as being smart and this is where the authority is established. Their dominance is only justified through ability to be elite, which for the most part they establish through being from an Ivy League school and working on Wall Street. According to Ho, Wall Street’s pushes their authority through, the institutional culture of Wall Street broadly conceived, where job experiences and workplace incentives map onto elite biographies investment bankers not only imbibe a particular ideology of holder value and spread it across corporate America, but they are also pushed to refashion and reconstruct the working lives of million in the image of their own.” (168) From Ho’s point of view the notion of Wall Street dominance is based on their ability to influence which provides their view with

Even though the book Sold by Patricia McCormick is a fictional story, the misfortunes that happen to Lakshmi and the girls in sex trafficking take place all around the world. In Sold, the girls at the Happiness House are faced with a myriad of traumatizing experiences that happen in real life to sex victims all around the world. To start off, many traffickers often use verbal and physical violence towards girls to intimidate them into following orders, similar to what Lakshmi and the other girls go through everyday by the owner, Mumtaz, when they disobey the orders given to them while living in the Happiness House. Furthermore, to enter the sex trafficking world, the girls are taken from their poor families who are promised great fortune

Viewing this article through the lens of the platonic framework is significant because it allows one to judge the acts of the Obama administration versus the acts of Wall Street executives in the aftermath of the previous recession. While the executives that are committing the injustice would be the most evil here for not only committing the unjust acts but for also not seeking their punishment and blaming it on low-level management, the administration is worse than the low-level management for the fact that they are not bringing justice either. This makes clear then why Lynch and Yates are attempting to correct this injustice that’s occurring

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many commentators attempted to analyze the roots of the conflict from a political or economic perspective. Anthropologist Karen Ho, a veteran of Wall Street as well as an academic, attempted to understand the reason that Wall Street behaves the way it does in her 2009 anthropological study of American finance entitled Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street from a cultural perspective. The central paradox with which Ho begins her book is: " the economy experienced not only record corporate profits and the longest rising stock market ever, but also record downsizings," further concentrating the wealth in America (Ho 2009: 1-2). But how can corporations grow richer as the American public as a whole grows poorer? Corporations no longer view themselves as responsible for taking care of their employees, creating good products, or serving their original mission. Instead, the focus is on generating shareholder wealth (Ho 2009:3). Shareholders, not the larger public, have become the symbolic and real focus of firm strategy. The shareholder "symbolized and 'stood in' for the whole of the corporation and became the sole locus of concern and analysis" during the time Ho conducted her study in the late 1990s and continues to this day (Ho 2009:175)

| #3 Paper- Case study: What is Up With Wall Street? The Goldman Standard and Shades of Gray

Bridgewater Associates is the world’s largest and most successful hedge fund organization, but has a very different culture that you will not find at any other corporation. They follow a radical transparency and truth at all cost theory. The founder, Ray Dalio, believes that his unique culture is the reason for Bridgewater’s success. Through closely reviewing the facts, SWOT analysis, and several options that Bridgewater could do, I recommend that they should not change their culture because it has given them success and a competitive advantage.

Many companies look to salaries and benefits as the first places to cut back when looking to make changes that involve cost-saving. When this happens, it is inevitable that some employees will leave the company to seek employment elsewhere. The employees that remain, whether they stay voluntarily or because they could not find employment elsewhere, are often resentful. Motivation decreases, taking job performance along with it. Employees lose their company loyalty and may even become angry enough to purposefully sabotage the company.

'The Wolf of the Wall Street', written by Jordan Belfort, is a high end structured novel which purely embarks the reader onto a journey exploring one's destined route to social statistic success as well as rotten failure. Self-discovery can possibly conclude to radical reinforcements of amorality, revolting and great human attributes. The story of Jordan Belfort primarily explored these multifaceted concepts through two core values of trust and loyalty. With the benefits of using third person perspective, Belfort can exemplify his past through strong subsidisation of literacy techniques used throughout his novel. Conclusively, Jordan Belfort uses the narration to give his audience a brief insight to his ongoing self-discovery.

The downsizing of a company can affect employees before, during and after it occurs. Employees usually know of a possible downsizing, care of the almighty grapevine, months before it is supposed to happen. Thus, employees may become paranoid and self-absorbed, and their top priority is their own career rather than the bottom line of their employer. This causes them to be unfocused and prevents them from performing their jobs efficiently. Many workers would also be perfectly willing to stab their peers in the back in hopes of keeping their job. Usually when a downsizing is complete, the company is at an all-time low. This is due to the fact that in almost every merger, acquisition or downsize, employees are faced with uncertainty about their jobs before and after the restructure. After a large percentage of downsizes, ten percent of the remaining workforce will easily adapt to the change, while another ten percent will never adapt. Workers who survive the downsize often have feelings of anger, fear or distrust. Further internal problems result from employees who survive with the company, but cannot adapt to their new settings and expectations, and eventually quit their job.

This work will examine the case 'Banking Industry Meltdown: The Ethical Financial Risk Derivatives" and determine which moral philosophy is most applicable to an understanding of the banking industry meltdown and explain the rationale. The case study will be analyzed and white-collar crimes considered as to whether they are different in any substantive manner from other more blue-collar crimes. This study will determine and discuss the role that corporate culture played in banking industry scenario and the response will be supported with specific examples. This work will postulate how leaders within the banking industry could have used their influence to avert the industry meltdown.