Speculating on Careless Lives

French, Shaun; Kneale, James

doi:10.1080/17530350.2012.703619

Cited by 53 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Naturally, the sooner the "viator" dies, the quicker (and thus more valuable) the payoff, creating some potentially malign incentives. This can work both ways: in the UK, the "enhanced annuity" provides better pension rates to retirees who have impaired health conditions, including those who smoke, are overweight, or have high blood pressure, under the assumption that those with impaired health condition will not live as long as their healthy counterparts, therefore requiring less annuity payments (French & Kneale 2012).…”

Section: Micro-level Explanations For Financializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Financialization of the Economy

2015

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Financialization refers to the increasing importance of finance, financial markets, and financial institutions to the workings of the economy. This article reviews evidence on the causes and consequences of financialization in the US and around the world, with particular attention to the spread of financial markets. Researchers have focused on two broad themes at the level of corporations and broader societies. First, an orientation toward shareholder value has led to substantial changes in corporate strategies and structures that have encouraged outsourcing and corporate dis-aggregation while increasing compensation at the top. Second, financialization has shaped patterns of inequality, culture, and social change in the broader society. Underlying these changes is a broad shift in how capital is intermediated, from financial institutions to financial markets, through mechanisms such as securitization (turning debts into marketable securities). Enabled by a combination of theory, technology, and ideology, financialization is a potent force for changing social institutions.

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Section: Micro-level Explanations For Financializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Financialization of the Economy

2015

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“…Ben Anderson reminds us that governmentality is not a deadening, certain, force but an enlivening one through which "the contingencies of life must be known, assayed, sorted and intervened on" (2012, p. 65). A similar point can be made about the supposedly calculating, rational life assurance subject (Amoore, 2014;Morris, 2018), or the apparently perverse outcomes that reward "bad behaviour" (French & Kneale, 2012). These recent arguments give us a new sense of the significance of apparently marginal aspects of life assurance like foreign residence.…”

Section: Life Assurance and Governmentalitymentioning

confidence: 82%

Making climate risks work: Governmentality and “foreign residence” in British life assurance, 1840–1940

Kneale

Randalls

2020

Trans Inst British Geog

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Genealogies of life assurance have tended to focus on the governmental possibilities of actuarial calculations of mortality, but the case of foreign residence assurance draws attention to other ways in which British companies calculated climate risk between 1840 and 1940. Drawing on archival research, this paper demonstrates that the extra charges imposed on life assurance policies for foreign residence invited conversations about the risks of climate and mortality in countries beyond Britain, drawing on both contemporary climate science and other arguments about climate pathology. Climate risks, however, had to be made to work for both life assurers and policyholders through far-reaching social-material networks, and firms frequently tinkered with arrangements of people, ideas, and artefacts in ways that enabled a mapping and governing of such risks. Whether ideas of climate circulating in life assurance were believed or not, they had effects and policyholders submitted to them. Drawing on archival material from several British life assurance companies, including some detailed cases of assured migrant lives, the paper explores how companies made risk calculations in ways that had consequences for ordinary decisions and practices. In so doing, the paper contributes to debates about life assurance and governmentality, showing that foreign residence policies enabled businesses to secure their risks in an era of imperial expansion. But this is no simple story of power and imperialism. Businesses constantly tinkered with their policies, drawing on climate science and medical understandings, but only as part of an always messy, changing assemblage.

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“…Financial subjectification takes place as ‘an individual “turns him or herself into a subject” (Foucault, 1994: 126) of finance, engaged in investment and borrowing as technologies of the self’ (Mulcahy, 2017: 224). Embracing responsibly the demands of financialized capitalism, everyday individuals have been made into financial subjects who align their goals with financial policies and manage their affairs as a series of investments and returns (French and Kneale, 2012; Mulcahy, 2017). In this regard, they have been seen as self-governing subjects who take care of their own financial well-being based on individualized cost-benefit calculations (Langley, 2008; van der Zwan, 2014).…”

Section: Theorizing the Networked Financial Subjectmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ecosystem of a ‘wealth-tech’ culture: the birth of networked financial subjects in South Korea

Kim

2019

Media, Culture & Society

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Starting with an online financial community in South Korea, this article explores the simultaneous production of a new form of subjectivity and a networked ecosystem of financial cultures. Using a multi-sited ethnography to track the movements of users as they moved across different spaces, this article finds that users gifted financial information to each other, blended laity and expertise, and reappropriated financial communities into a third place defined as an informal, public place hosting sociable conversations. Through the grafting of prosocial activities (e.g. sharing, gifting, and social networking) onto financial self-management, users were shaped as networked financial subjects and exhibited a distinctive mode of selfhood informed by both financial subjectivity and neoliberal networked subjectivity. At the same time, their practices spawned countless social, convivial groups as well as entrepreneurial financial gurus. By demonstrating the complex webs of on- and off-line groups, programs, relationships, and social networks, this article illustrates how the networked ecosystem of financial cultures brought the markets and commons into coalescence.

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Speculating on Careless Lives

Cited by 53 publications

References 22 publications

Financialization of the Economy

Financialization of the Economy

Making climate risks work: Governmentality and “foreign residence” in British life assurance, 1840–1940

The ecosystem of a ‘wealth-tech’ culture: the birth of networked financial subjects in South Korea

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