Mention the word “anthropologist,” and most people envision a professor outfitted in khakis, living in a tent, and observing a small community in a remote part of the world as it goes about its daily life. Karen Ho, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, decided instead to study a vastly different community: Wall Street deal-makers and investment bankers. The results of her research will be published in the forthcoming: Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, from Duke University Press.

Ho took a year off from her graduate studies at Princeton and landed a position as a business analyst at Bankers Trust, which now is part of Deutsche Bank. (Admittedly, Ho’s anthropology education might seem like a hindrance when it came to landing a banking position. However, her Princeton pedigree helped her get in the door. “Wall Street mainly recruits from a few elite universities,” she notes. “In many ways, when you’re from an elite university, there’s this halo effect.”)

Ho’s interest in Wall Street was piqued in the 1980s, when she saw companies’ stock prices rise even as they laid off thousands of employees and embarked on serial restructuring programs. “My initial reaction was that this was a contradiction. Constant restructuring doesn’t necessarily mean that productivity is up,” she says. more

I’ve noted a couple of times in recent weeks that as states feel the economic squeeze, they’re looking around for new sources of income, including sales taxes on Internet commerce. Robert D. Kugel has noticed the same trend, and in this month’s issue of Business Finance he argues that “this should serve as a reminder that if your company isn’t already using software to do a more efficient job of determining what it owes in sales and use taxes and finding more effective ways of minimizing them, this time has come.” more

Here in Texas, we’re closely watching swine flu developments, as we all should be.

Recent media coverage, including this Washington Post article, has taken past media coverage to task for being too overblown and panic-mongering before the nature of the flu’s transmission is clear.

I agree that the 24-hour news cycle is an unhealthy model begging for disruption; however, I think that this reaction is a natural and necessary part of our global, national, organizational, and personal flu response.

We all need practice in responding to new flu outbreaks, and that holds true for readers responsible for corporate business continuity management (BCM) capabilities. Here are three “beyond the media hype” points on the current flu outbreak from a BCM perspective … more

As of late this morning, the Centers for Disease Control had confirmed 64 cases of swine flu in five states across the U.S.: California, Kansas, New York, Ohio, and Texas. Fortunately, the Centers hadn’t yet recorded any deaths.

The situation appears more serious in other parts of the globe. Mexican authorities yesterday had confirmed 26 cases, including seven deaths, according to the World Health Organization.

In addition, the WHO had raised the pandemic alert phase from three to four. In this phase, human-to-human transmission of the disease has been verified. This means the likelihood of a pandemic, or an epidemic that crosses geographical barriers, has increased, the CDC notes. more

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP recently announced the awarding of $700,000 in grants to colleges to accelerate the preparedness of U.S. accounting students for the anticipated adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Jean Wyer, partner and leader of college and university relations for PricewaterhouseCoopers explains how PwC expects college programs to play a key role in IFRS knowledge transfer. ###