The Making of Investor Subjects in Anglo-American Pensions

By Paul A. Langley. 2006

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An individualisation of responsibility and risk is underway in US and UK pensions, as both state and employers scale back insurance commitments that expanded during the post-1945 era. Approached from the perspective of the Foucauldian-inspired governmentality literature, this neoliberal reworking of responsibility and risk across state and occupational pensions is characterised by the summoning up of the responsible individual worker as an entrepreneurial investor subject. Collective insurance, as a technology for constructing, managing, and pooling ‘risk’ as potential danger, is sidelined in favour of the promotion of individual investment to calculate, embrace, and bear ‘risk’ as opportunity or reward. As pension guides produced by state agencies for popular consumption illustrate, only financial market investment appears as capable of providing the individual with a secure and ‘free’ retirement. Contradictions in neoliberal government ensure, however, that the investor as a subject position that is called up in this discourse is not simply an identity that is performed by individuals.

Subfields: Finance, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a86c8c1fa06a327e65a4161daf024c6bfb77459

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Citations in the corpus

Geographies of money and finance II (2012, methodology): “Led by the work of Langley (2006, 2008, 2010), research in this tradition has used a governmentality approach to understand how financial subjects are called forth by the international financial system.”
Round the Houses: Homeownership and Failures of Asset-Based Welfare in the United Kingdom (2015, background): “…finance in the social and cultural fabric of British society (Levitas 1998, Finlayson 2008, 2009) by cultivating ‘subjects who, self-consciously and responsibly, further their own freedom and security through the market in general and the financial market in particular’ (Langley 2006: 924).”
Theorizing practice in economic geography: Foundations, challenges, and possibilities (2011, unknown): “…elites, and firms to produce knowledge, fields of intervention, and governable objects/subjects (e.g., consumers, workers, investors, traders, development experts, urban futures) (Hughes, 2001; Larner, 2002; Murdoch, 2004; Bulkeley, 2006; Rose-Redwood, 2006; Langley, 2006; Larner and Laurie, 2009).”
The Pursuit of (Past) Happiness? Middle-class Indebtedness and American Financialisation (2009, background): “The extensive work of Paul Langley elucidates how AngloAmerican households experience contradictory and competing logics of ‘investor’ and ‘consumer’, where saving for the future by contributing to pension or mutual funds is juxtaposed with borrowing heavily for a house, car and consumer goods to cr”
Financializing space, spacing financialization (2011, background): “His analysis of the securitisation of mortgage finance is strongly influenced by actor-network theory, in as much as he argues that the fusion of global and retail markets may be understood as a lengthening of domestic financial networks as both assets and liabilities become entangled in the capital”
Geographies of money and finance I: Cultural economy, politics and place (2011, methodology): “However, this model relied on householders acting as responsible ‘investor subjects’ (Langley, 2006b).”
Financialization and the Consumer Credit Boom (2008, unknown): “Cultural political economists of finance who draw on the Foucault-inspired category of ‘governmentality’ have similarly focused their attention on the assembly of ‘investor subjects’ (Aitken 2007; Knights 1997; Langley 2006b, 2007).”
Integrating Finance into Global Production Networks (2014, background): “, 2002; HO, 2009; KRIPPNER, 2005), and the ways in which households and individuals are tied into increasingly complicated relationships with the international financial system (MARTIN, 2002; LANGLEY, 2006; FRENCH and KNEALE, 2012).”
House Price Keynesianism and the Contradictions of the Modern Investor Subject (2010, background): “…(Soros, 2008); the site of many of the contradictions of financialised capitalism as the failure of investment banking practices rebound into the commercial banking sector (Langley, 2006); and the precursor to new forms of intervention undertaken by a state allegedly in retreat (Wigan, 2010).”