Alexandra Ouroussoff

Summary

My area of research is the anthropology of political economies. My forthcoming publication, 'Breaking the Liberal Paradigm: the coercive power of credit' Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium.  (August, 2026) examines how increasing international investor dependency on sovereign and corproate credit ratings assigned by just three U.S. based credit rating agencies has inadvertently bestowed rating agencies with the power to set historically new standards for capital allocation. Analyses of the criteria on which rating agencies base their assessments of the likelihood of future defualt expose the gulf between investor interests and two core components of liberal orthodoxy: democratic sovereignty and free market competition. 

In The Function of Finance: An Ethnographic Analysis of Competing Ideas (2018) * I continued to explore my central finding of 2010 namely, that during the 1980's institutional investors concept of risk changed, leading to an unprecedented transformation in capitalism's dynamic structure. The two major co-ordinates of the transformation, the shift from contingent to calculative risk within the international investor community along with its increasing dependency on three U.S. based rating agencies prompted a new imperative to monopoly, very different from the familiar neoclassical and Marxist accounts of this tendency. An unforseen consequence of the imperative was to successfully reconcile the tension between monopoly and competitive capital to the benefit of profit. The paper also tackles the question of why this change in capitalism's dynamic structure, well understood by economic elites, has not made its way into mainstream academic discourse. 

Wall Street at War: the secret struggle for the global economy (2010), translated into French in 2013,**  was the result of four years of international fieldwork funded by CATL (1998-2001) under the auspices of the then Department of Accounting & Finance, London School of Economics. The final settlement of a dispute with the London School of Economics enabled funding for further research from 2002-2004. The book is an ethnographic account of a conflict between corporate leaders who are being pressured into acquiescing to investor demands to isolate their markets from risk, and credit analysts whose primary task is to impose these demands. The war to which the title refers, is between irreconcilable definitions of productive capital, one derived from contingent risk - no risk, no gain - and the other from calculative risk where risk constitutes a major threat to profit. The book is a monographic demonstration of the transformative effect of the conflict on capitalism's primary dynamic, now driven by investor interests. 

   Here is Karen Ho talking about my book Wall St. at War in 2010. 

A previous work, ‘What is an Ethnographic Study?’ (Berg, 2001)***. drew on twelve months' fieldwork in three public service unions about to embark on the largest and most complex merger in British trade union history. I examined the historically specific values of the rank and file of each union, comparing these perspectives with the official rhetoric of their union leaders with the aim of   a) anticipating points of tension likely to emerge during and following the merger  b) contributing to the development of a democratic structure that would enable fair representation to all rank and file members. Fieldwork (1992-1993) was carried out in union branches across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

As a post graduate fellow at the London Business School, I examined the discontinuity between business theory and experience as understood by business executives taking part in the MBA programme.  Click here for my letter published in the Financial Times criticising the remit for academic research in business schools.

Acting as consultant to the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee of the House of Lords (1992), I analysed and reported on what were then seen as advances in Japanese management practices. Click here for an article on this project published in The Independent. 

Earlier research focused on collectivities within one multinational corporation ( workers in three factories, their managers and executives) and how each collective perceives its relation to the other and to the economy as a whole (PhD, University of London, 1988). Some of the research results were published in Illusions of Rationality; false premises of the liberal tradition, Man, Vol.28, no. 2, June 1993.

 I am also interested in ways in which anthropologists can use psychoanalytic insights to develop a theoretical understanding of the social reality of unconscious experience. The considerable problem of perceiving collective unconscious processes has been a central theme in my fieldwork. A critique of psychoanalysis as interpreted though liberal political philosophy appeared in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute(1998).

* Accounting, Economics & Law, de Gruyter. Special Issue edited by Matthias Thiemann, August 2026

* In The Making of Finance: New Perspectives from the Social Sciences, Chambost, Isabelle; Lenglet, Mark; Tadyeddine, Yamina, (eds.) (Routledge, London, UK,)

** Polity Press, 2010, subsequently translated into French and published by La Maison de la science de l’homme as Triple A : Une anthropologue dans les agencies des notation, (2013) Anthropolis; Series editors, Abeles, Marc and Petric, Boris

***In Inside Organizations, Eric Hirsch and David Gellner (eds) Berg, 2001

Qualifications

• PhD Social Anthropology (University of London) Supervised by Jean la Fontaine, Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics
• BSc Social Anthropology (London School of Economics)