Are financiers neoclassical? Indigenous conceptions of value of private equity players.

Summary Based on ethnographic data and the analysis of a corpus of 48 interviews, this text describes the indigenous conceptions of the value of firms among members of investment funds. Using a pragmatic approach to value judgements, the paper assesses the prevalence of a substantial neoclassical definition of value among these investors, and shows that it is not accepted when they comment on their professional practices, but is used to justify them.