Book excerpt: Markets and Ideology in the City of London is the first fieldwork-based sociological study of how participants in City of London financial markets view the markets in which they work and the market mechanism in general. But it is more than a narrow study of financial market participants because it is also an empirical investigation into how ideologies function and it develops a critique of pro-market ideologies such as 'Thatcherism'. Finally, it is one of a small number of sociological studies into the privileged world of high earners and the wealthy - sociologists too frequently study the powerless and the 'deviant' or 'marginal' groups.