How should we reform Wall Street? The conventional wisdom is slash the mega-bonuses and bring on the regulators (not to mention taxpayers). But what about the culture of Wall Street itself? The Ivy Leaguers who work 11- and 12-hour days, seven days a week? The insistence on shareholder value above all else? What role did those things play in the meltdown? And are they fixable?

Karen Ho, an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota, sets out to answer these questions in her recently-released book, "Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street Culture." Originally a dissertation that Ho started as a grad student at Princeton in the mid-1990s, "Liquidated" approaches investment bankers much as Ralph Linton approached the hill tribes of Madagascar. She goes to work at Bankers Trust (which was subsequently acquired by Deutsche Bank) for a year to observe her subjects (sleeping under desks, refusing to be seen brown-bagging lunches), debriefs them and once the economy begins to unravel in 2007, updates her material to make it timely.

Ho’s main finding: Coddled investment bankers, who come from privileged, educated backgrounds, don’t or can’t empathize with the people whose lives are affected by layoffs, mergers and economic downturns. Because of their good-old-boy networks, the bankers find jobs easier than the rest of us, and get paid better for doing it. In Ho’s view, Wall Streeters push as many deals through as possible during their day and assume the rest of the U.S. work force operates as they do. They have adopted the growth of shareholder value as their primary motivator, which Ho sees as misplaced. Instead, she argues that management, employees, and shareholders should drive advancement in business

Ho spoke to SmartMoney about her first-hand experience on Wall Street, and what she learned.

You spent several years studying Wall Street culture, even working an investment-banking job. As an anthropologist, how would you sum up that culture?

I would say that the culture is one of expediency and one of liquidity… This culture actually comes at the nexus of a few things. One, the elite biographies and social networks of investment bankers. Two, the culture of these particular workplaces. These converge to actually help to produce the kinds of markets that, I would argue, are prone to crises.

What do you mean by liquidity?

Wall Street looks favorably upon institutions that are constantly changing, constantly restructuring, where many of the corporate assets are seen as liquid sites for short-term shareholder appreciation.

When I say liquidity I also mean particular culture on Wall Street, a culture that has constant job restructuring, constant job changes… This particular model of the liquid worker becomes a model that has been used for workers throughout the U.S.

How does that system cause problems?

Investment bankers are paid through a bonus compensation system. And the bonus compensation system is not premised on the quality of the deals that the investment banks actually give to their corporate clients – the bonus is actually based on the number of deals that are pushed through at a given time.

Many bankers live in an environment of constant change… They're actually culturally incentivized to push through the deal, even though they might not think that it's going to improve long-term corporate productivity.