Bridging governmentality and economization: temporality as a financialization device

Abstract

ABSTRACT Reflecting and reinforcing the financialization of everyday life, non-profit social service organizations, the primary deliverers of benefits and services in the US, are increasingly incorporating financial education and empowerment into their service repertoires. In this article, I examine and compare how financial educators in two organizations that target different populations/problems – women in (economic) transition and chronically/intergenerationally poor people – give financial advice to their clients. I draw a parallel between what Foucault calls the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and claims by personal finance experts and educators that we are silent about money. I suggest that these claims amount to a ‘money repressive hypothesis’ that gives experts what I call an ‘advisor’s benefit’: the appearance of being freed from silence about money and thus able to liberate others from silence and steer them toward financial wellness. I show that financial educators perform this benefit through temporal frames – meaningful ways of intersubjectively organizing experience in reference to time, that invite different levels and forms of attention to the past, present, and future – of their clients’ problems. Bridging literatures on governmentality and economization, I contend that these temporal frames are disciplinary financialization devices that act in connection with sociocultural constructions of populations/problems to assemble financial subjectivities.