In the recently published Making Markets; Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street, Mitchel Abolafia of the Department of Public Administration and Policy looks at three subcultures that co-exist in the world of Wall Street: the stock, the bond and future markets.

Through interviews, anecdotes, and the author�s skillful analysis, we see how traders and New York Stock Exchange specialists negotiate the perpetual tension between the short-term self-interest and long-term self-restraint that marks their respective communities, and how the temptation towards excess spurs market activity.

Abolafia spent years as an observer on the trading floor. �As an anthropologist would study the natives of a far off island, I studied the Wall Street natives,� he says.

Making Markets is really an ethnography of Wall Street Culture, offering a complex picture of how the market and its denizens work. Not merely masses of individuals striving independently, markets appear here as socially constructed institutions in which the behavior of traders is suspended in a web of customs, norms and structures of control. Within these structures we see the actions that led to the Drexel Burnham and Salomon Brothers debacles not as bizarre aberrations, but as mere exaggerations of behavior accepted on the Street.

Surprisingly, Abolafia did not encounter much resistance when doing research for the book. One bank refused outright to let him in and there was some trouble on the trading floor. The New York Stock Exchange Board of Directors voted, however, and he was allowed to observe.

In the wake of million-dollar scandals brought about by Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and their like, Wall Street seems like the province of rampant individualism operating at the outermost extremes of self-interest and greed. �But this,� Abolafia suggests, �would be a case of missing the real culture of the Street for the characters who dominate the financial news.�

Making Markets shows us that what propels Wall Street is not a fundamental human drive or instinct, but strategies enacted in the context of social relationships, cultural idioms, and institutions. This is a cycle that moves between phases of unbridled self-interest and collective self-restraint. �I was always interested in the energy and excitement of Wall Street,� Abolafia said. �You always hear about the scandals though, and I wanted to find out what exactly occurred.�