‘Elephants can’t gallop’: performativity, knowledge and power in the market for lay-investing

Abstract

This paper examines lay-investment in financial markets (investment by members of the general public) as a practice performed by marketing knowledge. It follows the market studies programme to examine a problem that puzzles researchers in finance: Why do lay-investors remain in the market despite their poor returns? Using a qualitative study of lay-investors in the United Kingdom, it considers the devices, ‘agencements’ and discourses that structure investment behaviour. It uses Foucault’s writing on governance under neo-liberalism to suggest that investors are constituted as self-entrepreneurs, sustained by antagonism to professional investors, heterodox market beliefs and a consumer allegiance to investment styles and products. Marketing knowledge is inscribed in market devices and structures market relations. Finally, it suggests that self-discipline and confession are normalising technologies that help investors cope with difficulties and losses in the market. The paper develops theoretical linkages between the literatures of performativity and governmentality.

Keywords:

• market studies
• performativity
• marketing
• bio-politics
• Foucault
• lay-investor

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of this special issue and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at Macro Marketing 2013. Omissions and inaccuracies remain the author’s responsibility alone.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philip Roscoe

Philip Roscoe is Reader in Management at the School of Management, University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the formation and organisation of markets and on processes of economisation; empirical sites include online dating, lay-investing, organ transplantation and alternative economies. He has a PhD in management from Lancaster University, an MPhil in medieval Arabic thought from Oxford University, and a BA in theology from the University of Leeds. He has published in Accounting, Organization and Society, Business History, and The Sociological Review. In 2011 he was one of the winners of the inaugural AHRC BBC Radio 3 ‘New Generation Thinkers’ scheme; his book I Spend Therefore I Am was published in February 2014.