Financial Education is about Everybody’s Self-Regulation: Financial Literacy as a Moralizing Project

• In Event: 601 - Section on Economic Sociology Paper Session. Open Topic

Abstract

A crucial component of the financialization of everyday life is the individualization and marketization of risk management. This implies the constitution of a subject exhibiting particular cognitive and normative dispositions considered as necessary to participate in the financial sphere in a responsible manner.
The constitutive dispositions of a financially capable actor are currently specified through the concept and practices of financial literacy. This relatively new institutional field is engaged in the constitution of a subject that conforms to the financialization of the economy at the macro-institutional level; a subject who has the knowledge and capabilities deemed necessary to properly handle individualized financial risks.
In this paper we analyze programs of financial education currently conducted by several state agencies in Israel, examining the notions, principles, causal accounts, and norms of conduct that they articulate and disseminate. The analysis indicates that moral concerns and themes occupy a central place in the messages imparted through these practices. Notions of individual self-reliance, responsibility, self-discipline, prudence, rationality and calculative capacities are presented not merely as valued instrumental resources, but as key moral imperatives for the subject both towards oneself and towards others. Through these notions, programs aimed at promoting financial literacy confer moral meanings to practices of personal finance, thereby connecting financial matters to the domain of moral virtues. Offering a representation of particular modes of action in the financial sphere as a constitutive component of morally virtuous personhood, these practices contribute to the insertion of financialization ideational and institutional logics into everyday life.

Authors

• Daniel Maman, Ben Gurion University-Negev

• Zeev Rosenhek, Open University-Israel