Habitusand Cultural Capital in the Field of Personal Finance

Abstract

Key concepts drawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu – in particular, habitus and cultural capital – which have been widely used to analyse the fields of education and the arts, are applied here to the sociologically neglected field of personal finance. The cultural project to promote marketization has not created an informed public of sovereign consumers rich in cultural capital. On the contrary, the development of commodified mass-market financial products and services implies a lowering of the threshold not just of economic but also of cultural capital needed for their acquisition. Financial scandals, such as the widespread misselling of personal pensions in the UK from the mid-1980s, typically involve in Bourdieu's terms an ‘objective complicity’ between a wide variety of stakeholders – including the government, employers, financial service providers, industry regulators, and financial advisers – and private investors whose habitus and lack of cultural capital prepare them for cooperation in their own exploitation.