Book Review Symposium: Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (original) (raw)
Related papers
Resisting the lure of the paycheck: Freedom and dependence in financial self-help
Foucault Studies, 2014
Based on two years of fieldwork with fans of financial success best-sellers, this article analyzes the idea of financial freedom, which is the cornerstone of popular financial self-help resources. Fans of the genre train themselves and engage in business and investing with the main goal of reaching something that is at once mathematical and a condition of the self. Financial freedom is a specific equation between income and expenses that makes it possible to quit one's job while maintaining an income. But it is also a condition by which one has freed oneself from one's own fears and limitations in regards to money and investing and the need for security. Therefore, all practices directed at increasing one's wealth are also practices of the self that are directed at combating external and internal forms of dependence. The intellectual roots of the problematization of internal and external dependence are explored. The tension between freedom and security is illustrated through the example of the examination of one's family upbringing.
2014
RCCS Annual Review [Online], 6, 102-122, 2014. DOI: 10.4000/rccsar.553 (Electronic ISSN 1647-3175) | The aim of this article is to critically analyze the discourse produced in financial self-help literature (FSHL) within the general context of the financialization process. This analysis uses publications of this genre available on the Portuguese market as empirical material, and is based on the theoretical approach of governmentality studies inspired by Foucault. The first section reviews the concept of financialization, identifying its theoretical and empirical strengths and weaknesses. One such weakness is the lack of attention paid to microsociological aspects, which justifies the need to explore, in the second section, the type of subjectivity related to financialized capitalism. The third section examines the key aspects of this subjectivity, as presented in FSHL, including a framework for the characteristics of these publications, as well as a study of the motives, objectives and ways of putting self-help advice into practice. The final section focuses on the social basis of the texts as discursive tools of neoliberal political rationality.
2019
This article aims at presenting some of the relations and implications of consumption, indebtedness, financialization, and social policies from a sociological perspective. To achieve this, turn to some of our own research, carried on since 2016, on different types of loans granted to Conditional Cash Transfer Programs (CCTs) beneficiaries by private banks which manage the payment of these loans. Within this framework, this article aims at describing the types of loans available for the Asignación Universal por Hijo para Protección Social (Universal Allowance per Child for Social Protection) beneficiaries in Argentina, including both those offered by private banks and by the government institutions which manage the payments. This is an exploratory-qualitative study of the available biographical information on the access and management of loans to Universal Allowance per Child beneficiaries. The argumentation strategy will be as follows: First, we reclaim conceptualizations about social policies; then, second, we describe the modalities of these conceptualizations, such as the CCTs; third, we trace consumption and indebtedness as central aspects of social structures; fourthly, we analyze the modalities of indebtedness available to the Universal Allowance per Child beneficiaries; and we close with thoughts about the emphasis on the mode in which subjects are consolidated, form state actions, as consumers and indebted subjects.
Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 2020
This article investigates how the Argentine subproletariat perceives the recent consumer credit boom, based on several field visits carried out in one of Argentina's industrial hubs between 2007 and 2016. It analyzes the credit boom in relation to the wider social transformations induced by the left ist Peronist governments during 2003-2015 (especially the incorporation of informal workers into the social protection system). It argues the rise of consumer credit is perceived by those who use it with ambivalence. While it has allowed the subproletariat to access a form of consumption that was previously restricted to upper classes, it also exposes this population to a new form of exploitation based on the discrepancy between the (monthly based) time of finance and the (erratic) time of work.
From Finance to Bodies: We Want Ourselves Alive, Free, and Debt Free!
The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020
Since the organization of the first international feminist strikes, Argentina’s feminist movement has used the method of the assembly to produce analyses of the relationship and interconnection between sexist violence and economic violence. As part of that political process, in May 2017, the feministnmovement convened a mobilization, with the slogan “We Want Ourselves Alive, Free, and Debt Free” in the doorways of the Central Bank to denounce the process of massive indebtedness of domestic economies that occurred in parallel to the taking out of debt by the state. From that moment on, a form of fighting back against financialization and the invasion of finance into increasingly more areas of the reproduction of life emerged. Today the feminist movement is questioning access to rights through debt in the struggle against the end of social security extensions (which provided important benefits to housewives and other informally employed women) and in the processes of compulsory urbanization in the peripheries of Buenos Aires. This article seeks to account for the fabric of this political process and its innovative forms of weaving together resistance against the government of finance.