From Automated Compounding to Opportunist Timing: Vernacularizing Financial Self-Help and Rationality in Turkey

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 6: Markets, Culture, and Moral economy

Abstract

Finance’s reach has extended into everyday lives as part of neoliberal responsibilization, making individuals the primary bearers of risk through market participation, first in advanced economies and then worldwide. The US financial self-help industry has served as a central cultural infrastructure of this everyday financialization, guiding laypeople through their journey toward becoming retail investors. The popular finance in Turkey emerges within this global context. This study examines how newly emerging popular finance figures in Turkey have reworked financial self-help originating in the US, redefining the contours of financially rational conduct, based on the content analysis of Turkish and American gurus’ bestsellers and the large volume of comments they have received on social media. Our analysis is relational and translational rather than strictly comparative. This framework allows us to identify how the financial self-help in Turkey spreads responsibilization among the Turkish audience, but in the context of persistent inflation and weak trust in institutions. Thus, the prescribed financial responsibility relies on different conceptualizations of time, risk, and wealth. Turkish self-help gurus endorse a rationality exercising “opportunistic timing,” distinct from the financially prudent who embrace “automated compounding” in the US. In return, followers in Turkey often view economic security as an individual responsibility, as do their American counterparts. But handling economic hardship is more about resilience than moral purity, and the marker of wealth is tangible assets rather than net worth accumulated in investment accounts. Our analysis brings economic sociology of financialization and studies of neoliberal subjectivities into a dialogue with vernacularization. This synthesis introduces a global framework that highlights how, and with what consequences, everyday financialization takes on situated forms of responsibilization as it enters a new cultural and economic context.

Authors

• Yalcin Ozkan, Dickinson College

• Osman Savaskan, Marmara University