High net-worth attachments: emotional labour, relational work, and financial subjectivities in private wealth management

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ABSTRACT Private Wealth Management (PWM) is a market providing financial services to High and Ultra High Net-Worth individuals and families. Here, efforts developed by wealth managers to attach those involved with wealth to financial instruments point to how the financial subjectivities of investor and advisor are co-enacted. So far, cultural economic literatures on the subjectivities entailed with financial markets have mostly produced separate accounts focused on financial consumers or professionals. Drawing on interviews with wealth managers in Lisbon, London, Geneva, and Zurich, this article demonstrates how investor and advisor subject positions co-materialize with the (re)reproduction of market attachments. By enriching a cultural economic heuristic of arts of attachment with insights from economic sociology, two main findings are generated. First, stabilizing customers as investors demands transmitting advice as ‘genuine’ care, rather than commercial interest; secondly, cultivating financial attachments within customers’ frames of intimate ties demands re-organizing how monetary and financial forms are imbricated with family (notably kinship) ties. These findings allow stressing how processes of financialization of wealth do not correspond to an intrinsic, natural involvement of U/HNWIs with financial markets and organizations but demand the occupation of financial subject positions that are critically involved with those of their financial services providers.