How to Be a Success in Business: Storytelling and Belonging in Finance

based on the author's keynote address at the 2024 joint annual meeting of the Economic & Business History Society and the Association of Business Historians in York, England

Abstract

In this article based on my keynote address for the joint annual meeting of the Economic and Business History Society and the Association of Business Historians in June 2024, I investigate stories of progress, success, and self-realization told in the context of the field of finance. Focusing on narratives presented in finance films, or visual media that study and represent the culture of finance, I ask what is the self or the subject of finance trying to become? To what it is trying to belong? Noting that many contemporary finance films present finance as an unprincipled, immoral world rife with racism and sexism, I also find a prevalence of stories in the genre of finance films chronicling the meritocratic achievements of outsiders, who overcome discrimination in order to belong. Noting that these narratives function not only to reaffirm the efficacy of financial culture, I argue that civil rights-themed stories of uplift obscure the institutions of American global power that undergird post-industrial capitalism, raising the question what it means to seek self-realization in such a context where narratives of the self are both veiled and do the work of concealing.

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