‘A direct personal stake’: cultural economy, mass investment and the New York stock exchange

Abstract

Although it is often conceived as a key aspect of neo-liberal globalization, appeals to ‘mass investment’ have actually occupied much longer and more complex historical contexts than are often acknowledged. This paper draws upon archival material of the advertising, educational and ‘cultural’ campaigns developed by the New York Stock Exchange in the immediate postwar period in an attempt to recover one fragment of these earlier lines of force occupied by mass investment. In doing so, this paper pursues a ‘cultural economy’ of the NYSE programs to accomplish two objectives: 1) to foreground finance as something that is culturally constituted, and 2) to underscore ‘capital’ not as a macro-structural entity but as something made possible in the spaces of everyday life and through the processes in which individuals govern themselves in those spaces. Cultural-economic analysis, this paper concludes, can help complicate critical conceptions of ‘finance’ by moving away from epochal analysis and by developing more historically-situated accounts of the financial world and the ‘everyday’ contexts it has occupied.