Malcolm Gladwell's The Power Of Context

In Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime,” he argues that our thoughts and actions are consequences of social influence and material conditions rather than individual psychology and character. In “Biographies of Hegemony,” Karen Ho deepens Gladwell’s emphasis on social and cultural determination by classifying the events that occur on Ivy League college campuses as hegemony; which is the process by which a dominant group, for the purposes of advancing its own interests, gains consent of a subordinate class through the use of intellectual, moral, and cultural encouragement. The big, influential corporations of Wall Street are following this principle by directing the career decision-making …show more content…
In “The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime”, Gladwell says that the “power of context,” and the “tipping point” are the defining factors of an individual’s actions. The “power of context,” as described by Gladwell, is when the context of a person's life has so much power and guidance over how that person acts and lives his or her life; the immediate surroundings of a person can easily shift that person's lifestyle (Gladwell 149 - 162). This idea is used by Ho to explain the behavior of Princeton and Harvard undergraduates. Ho asks: “How do so many undergraduates who enter these institutions without any prior knowledge of investment banking, who once aspired to become, say writers or teachers, ‘realize’ by the time they graduate that they have always wanted to go to Wall Street?” (Ho 170). Her answer to her own question is that Wall Street, in collaboration with Harvard and Princeton, generates a perfect storm of ideological, rhetorical, social, and material allure that, by playing to its targets’ insecurity about their supposedly elite status, overwhelms their capacity for critique and to consider alternatives. “Harvard and Princeton are the ‘prime recruiting ground for all of the most prestigious Wall Street’ (Karseras 2006),” (Ho 169) so Wall Street companies, which are largely comprised of fellow alumni, dominate the students’ environment …show more content…
The students at Ivy League universities are told that they fit into this criterion in order to coerce them into wanting to work at Wall Street. Ho regards the “smartness” of the students being swayed by the successfulness of Wall Street as mostly negative. She does not think that the Ivy Leaguers and Wall Street financiers are as smart as they are believed to be. The fact that “the best,” “the greatest,” and “the brightest” minds in the world can be manipulated and are influencing other students with material swag, massive inundation of recruiting propaganda, recruiting seminars and dinners, peer and alumni pressure, insecurity about status, and big pay is astounding to her. To manipulate someone at such a critical and developmental stage in their life is against what most stand for. College is supposed to be a time were students get a chance to explore the different subjects and careers available to them and decide how they want to make a difference in the world. For students to work hard and reach such high institutions of education, such as Harvard and Princeton, and then to have their ability to choose what they want to be stripped from them is saddening. Gladwell argues that when it comes to individual behavior “the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate