Old Wine in New Bottles: Translating Finance for an International Elite

How do elite professionals earn the trust of wealthy clients across vast cultural divides? To address this question, the present study foregrounds the role of relational innovation and improvisation, as opposed to planned, strategic institutional change. This reasserts the theoretical significance of individual agency and interpersonal interactions over structure. To support this argument, the study draws from an 18-nation interview study of wealth management professionals, and their creation of a "globalized localism:" spreading the asset-holding trust from its roots as a tool of medieval English landowners into a mainstay of contemporary international finance. Through interviews with 65 practitioners in Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia-Pacific, this paper offers a model of the ways that deeply-embedded and deeply local cultural practices can spread to become internationally institutionalized. The findings contribute to the literatures of economic sociology, globalization, the professions, and cultural capital.