Governing by emotions in financial education

ABSTRACT

In line with previous research, we consider financial education to be a form of governmentality in the age of financialization. Applying sociological theory of emotions, we investigate the role emotion play in the attempt to govern citizens in Swedish financial education. The material consists of interviews with organizers of the Swedish Like Your Personal Finance educational network and observations of one of its courses, Secure Your Financial Future. Analyzing how citizens are taught financial literacy, we highlight key emotions and feeling rules that promote the financial rationality permeating financial education. The results show that the course establishes a narrative of the world economic situation that responsibilizes citizens for their own financial security and welfare, employing feeling rules about: boredom, fear/anxiety, trust/distrust, and fun, which constitute the financially rational subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial education
• emotion
• financial rationality
• governmentality
• financialization

1. Introduction

Since the 1980s, private households and national economies have become increasingly intertwined with global and complex financial markets. This development is described as financialization (Belfrage and Kallifatides 2017; Epstein 2005; Langley 2008; Lapavitsas 2011; Martin 2002; Stenfors 2014) and as the “financialization of everyday life” (Haiven 2014; Langley 2008; Martin 2002). In the wake of this development, citizens’ lack of so-called financial literacy or financial capability has become a topic of public concern (see, e.g. OECD INFE 2011). Consequently, “financial education,” with the aim of increasing the “financial literacy” of populations, has been offered as a solution (Lusardi 2008; Lusardi and Mitchell 2014). In the early 2000s, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched an ongoing initiative, encouraging its member countries to promote financial literacy among citizens (OECD 2005, 2013). According to the European Banking Authority (2018), financial education initiatives have been undertaken in 84 countries to address a wide range of issues such as mortgages, insurance, stocks and bonds, consumer rights, and pensions. Financial literacy is argued to have “important implications for welfare” because it implies the “ability to process economic information and make informed decisions about financial planning, wealth accumulation, debt, and pensions” (Lusardi and Mitchell 2014, 6). The importance of financial literacy as an “essential tool” enabling citizens make financial choices (Lusardi 2008) is strongly underlined by both national and international bodies promoting financial education (Finansinspektionen 2015; OECD 2005, 2013).

However, as research on financial education shows, the expanding discourse on the “need” to educate citizens on issues of finance is problematic (Clarke 2015; Lazarus 2020; Marron 2013; Weiss 2020). Financial literacy is defined by the OECD as “a combination of awareness, knowledge, skill, attitude and behaviour necessary to make sound financial decisions and ultimately achieve individual financial wellbeing” (OECD INFE 2011, 3). This definition first presumes that financial literacy in itself leads to individual financial well-being and thereby disguises other causes for a lack of “financial wellbeing” (Lazarus 2020; Weiss 2020). Second, it is assumed that becoming financially literate and hence achieving individual financial well-being depends on correcting behavior for individuals to achieve the “awareness, knowledge, skill, attitude and behavior necessary” to navigate financial markets. The definition thus responsibilizes individuals for their financial position and assumes citizen involvement in financial markets and products to be a common good. Of course, this is not an ideologically neutral, but rather, a neoliberal understanding of how to ensure the well-being of citizens (Lazarus 2020; Weiss 2020; Wolf 2018). Likewise, the notion of “sound” decisions indicates a specific form of rationality consistent with this neoliberal understanding. Financial education can thus be understood as a form of neoliberal governmentality (Clarke 2015; cf. Foucault, Senellart, and Davidson 2007; Marron 2013) that seeks to foster financial subjects as “entrepreneurs of themselves” (Foucault and Senellart 2008, 270; cf. Langley [2014]), i.e. financially rational figures always looking to maximize returns. Thus, financial education is both an instrument for and an outcome of the financialization of everyday life (Haiven 2014; Harmes 2001; Langley 2006, 2008; Lazarus 2020). Financial education is also a way for welfare states to compensate for declining welfare services by transferring responsibility from the state to the individual citizen (Clarke 2015).

In this paper, our interest lies in how financial education in practice encourages citizens undergoing financial education to internalize what Van der Zwan (2014, 102) describes as its “new norms of risk-taking” and to “develop new subjectivities as investors or owners of financial assets.” Questions concerning the extent to which this attempt succeeds or how the effort is received by the participant’s lies beyond the scope of this article.

The ambition to change people’s awareness, skills, and attitudes is not a modest one, and it does not merely imply the provision of knowledge, as actually acting on it requires feelings (Feldman Barrett 2017; Roeser 2012). From the theoretical perspective of the sociology of emotion, attitudes are emotionally invested assessments, skills are embodied practice (Scheer 2012) enabling a “feel for the game.” Awareness accords with a theory of emotions: cognitive attention oriented by emotions. In other words, emotions such as interest, curiosity, fear, and hope, as well as subtle emotions of taste/distaste or pleasure/irritation, allow discrimination between relevant and irrelevant information (Barbalet 2001; Damasio 2000; Morton 2010). Thus, for example, doing what we believe to be “the right thing to do” requires us simultaneously to feel that it is the right thing to do.

In line with a growing body of research, we argue that is important to understand the cultural, emotional, and affective aspects of financial subjectivation (see, e.g. Deville [2012, 2014]; Deville and Seigworth [2015]; Haiven [2014]; Halawa [2015]; Langley and Leyshon 2012). Therefore, we address the underresearched role of emotions in state-sponsored financial education (see Fridman [2014] and Kim [2017] on the role of emotions in private financial education). In this article, we use sociological theory of emotions to investigate the role of emotions in the Swedish financial education network Like your Personal Finance showing how emotions are enacted and drawn upon in the attempt to motivate, constitute, and orient the kind of rationality specified by the OECD definition of financial literacy. Drawing on specific emotions to motivate action and behavior implies that the notion of financial literacy contains tacit norms about which feelings should be felt and expressed in relation to external objects, such as financial markets and products, i.e. feeling rules (Hochschild 1983; see also Barbalet [2001]).

In 2010, the Swedish government initiated the educational network, titled Like Your Personal Finance, that combined private and state actors as organizers and lecturers in financial education courses with the goal of educating citizens about financial literacy. The courses sometimes targeted specific groups (such as the “young and unemployed”) with specific messages about how to save or invest their money, but courses targeting the wider population on a wide spectrum of themes were also offered. Our analysis focuses on one such general course in basic financial knowledge – i.e. the basic skills, attitudes and behaviors of financial literacy – called Secure Your Financial Future. It is one of the courses most commonly offered by the Like Your Personal Finance network. The analysis aims to answer the question of which emotions are drawn upon to motivate, constitute, and orient the financially literate subject? Which feeling rules can be identified, and how are these embraced and enacted by course organizers and teachers?

With theoretical support from the sociology of emotions, we show that the attempt to shape financial subjects through education entails an attempt to direct and shape emotions. “The conduct of conduct” (cf. Foucault et al. 1991) works through push (fear) and pull (the pleasurable and enjoyable reward of freedom and self-realization) factors.

In the following section, we review the critical literature of financial education and financialization of everyday life. This is followed by a literature section on emotion, emotion in finance and financial rationality and financial subjectivation to build a framework and point of departure for our analysis. Thereafter we describe our methods, materials, and main analytical concepts. We then proceed to the analysis, which is structured around four main themes found in the material: boredom, fear/anxiety, trust/distrust, and fun. These emotions are all tied in with the construction of financial rationality. Finally, we summarize and discuss our findings.

2. Financial education, financialization, and emotions in finance

The OECD promotion of financial education in its member countries assumes that financial education is a means of empowering citizens and creating more resilient household economies. This assumption has been heavily criticized by scholars in an array of disciplines, such as anthropology, economic sociology, law, and political economy. Willis (2008, 2009) demonstrates that financial education does not actually improve people’s ability to secure their private finances by participating in financial markets, but is at best, an attempt to bridge the knowledge gap on the complexities of financial products between financial actors and everyday consumers. The claim that knowledge of finance and “good” financial behavior will lead to “good” financial outcomes has no supporting evidence (Willis 2009). Clarke (2015) argues that rather than empowering consumers with financial knowledge and competency, financial literacy education essentially teaches consumers “resilience thinking,” motivating them to consume financial services and products to ensure their own economic security, even though markets will fail. Financial education is thus essentially about consumers learning to fail. At worst, as argued by Wolf (2018), the assumptions behind financial education are mere (neoliberal) ideology, teaching people “to act (…) so that consumer behaviour is in line with what apologists of financial literacy education consider to be rational” (Wolf 2018, 12–13), and where rational behavior is “that of the informed customer who surveys the market attentively” (Wolf 2018, 12).

From this critical perspective, financial education it is not a neutral endeavor, but rather, one that contributes to the naturalization of a particular ideological discourse of financial markets (Lazarus 2020). Scholars argue that the increasing focus on citizens’ financial literacy is best understood in relation to the financialization of everyday life, a development whereby financial markets play an increasingly important role in personal finances via the extended use of financial products such as mortgages, credit products of all kinds, and pension savings schemes (Beggs, Bryan, and Rafferty 2014; Gonzalez 2015; Lazarus 2020; Montegary 2015; Pellandini-Simányi, Hammer, and Vargha 2015). Some scholars of the financialization of everyday life argue that this development also cultivates financial subjects. For example, Haiven (2014, 519) argues that the financialization of everyday life asks us to “become highly competent and self-educated managers of our personal risk portfolio” to manage aspects such as debts, credits, stock trading, and future pensions. Discussing the pension reforms in Canada, the UK, and the USA, Harmes (2001) argues that these have resulted in the rise of an “investment culture” through which the interests of workers are joined with the interests of financial capital, obscuring class asymmetries and reinforcing financial capital’s hegemonic power. Thus, in addition to entailing the material and structural reshaping of the conditions of citizens’ economic welfare, financialization is a form of governmentality that orients everyday life practices in line with financial rationality, pushes low- and middle-class people into the financial market, and strengthens the hegemonic power of late (neoliberal) capitalism (Harmes 2001; Krippner 2005; Langley and Leyshon 2012; Lapavitsas 2011; Leyshon Thrift 2016).

Studies of financial education conducted in the context of financialization show that financial education can be understood as both a consequence of and instrument for the financialization of everyday life (see, e.g. Finlayson [2009]; Lazarus [2020]). In addition, such studies often conclude that financial education is a form of “advanced liberal governmentality” to shape “the conduct of consumers” and make them self-governing financial individuals (Marron 2013, 491, 492; see also Clarke [2015]; Lazarus [2020]; Wolf [2018]). Financial education is arguably a distinct type of governmentality pertaining to the financialization of everyday life.

In the present study, we seek to contribute to such Foucault-inspired studies of financial education as a form of governmentality. Acknowledging there is a “need for the analysis of the ‘indirect’ mechanisms of rule that are of such importance in liberal democratic societies: those that have enabled or have sought to enable government at a distance.” (Miller and Rose 2008, 33) we investigate the role of emotions in in Swedish financial education.

2.1. Financial rationality, subjectivity, and emotion

As other scholars have argued, ideas from behavioral economics have gained increasing influence in the age of financialization (Langley and Leaver 2012). Behavioral economics research has focused on “social context” as hindering economic rationality and misleading subjects in their financial decision-making (Barberis and Thaler 2003; Ritter 2003; Smith, Richards, and Shelton 2015; Thaler 2000). These ideas have also influenced the rationale of financial education (Lazarus 2020; Marron 2013; Wolf 2018), explaining consumers’ shortcomings as behavior problems, biased as they are by their feelings and attitudes. This view stands in stark contrast to that of the social sciences, were social context is explained as “the main determinant of social organization.” (Lazarus 2016, 28).

Plentiful sociological and anthropological research has been published on economic action, following Granovetter’s (1985) famous argument concerning the embeddedness of economic action. Examples of such research are Zaloom’s ethnographic study (2003) of finance traders, as they rely on physical senses and “feelings” on the trading floor. Another example can be found in Vollmer, Mennicken, and Preda’s (2009) review of social studies of finance, discussing among other topics “financial cognition,” which they argue is based on social interaction, financial models, and technical instruments etc. Vollmer, Mennicken, and Preda (2009) also suggest that sociology of emotions research in finance has raised the possibility that emotion and cognition are not in opposition. In addition, following the concept that economic action is embedded, Bandelj (2009, 348) argues that emotions matter in economic action “because they result from, and are influenced by, interactions that an individual has with other social actors during economic processes.” Nevertheless, as Berezin puts it: “the idea that the economy displays rationality and regularity remains powerful” (2009, 336). In a study of so-called high-frequency traders, Borch and Lange (2017) show that traders often consider emotional attachment to be problematic in their work, and that traders believe that using algorithms will prevent emotional interference. However, they show that emotions are inherent in trading and that emotion does not disappear through the use of algorithms. Nevertheless, the domain of high-frequency trading leads to the reconfiguration of the ideal trading subject and the use of self-disciplinary techniques to regulate emotions in line with assumptions about non-emotional decision-making. In a similar vein, Zaloom (2009, 246) research on the usage of the so- called “yield curve” as a predictive instruments in finance, show that “[t]he reflexive character of financial devices provides fertile ground for emotions.” To conclude, while the idea of “pure” economic rational action remains powerful, behavioral economics have argued our social context and feelings distorts rational action. However, as the above research convincingly demonstrate: these conditions and human properties should not be understood as biasing but rather as essential to action, economic as well as otherwise. In accordance with the sociological theory of emotions, emotions play an essential role in finance (for an excellent review of different approaches to emotion and economic action, see Bandelj [2009]). From this perspective, emotion and reason are not in opposition, but rather, are entwined and mutually supporting human faculties. Emotions are both causes and effects of social action and interaction (Barbalet 2001; Burkitt 2012; Illouz and Finkelman 2009). In addition, emotions convey information that humans would be unable to gather or assess through their cognitive faculties alone (Morton 2010); they motivate, direct, and orient attention and action in complex dialectics between thinking, feeling, and doing. As argued by Barbalet (2001, 60), there is no such thing as non-emotional action – even instrumental rationality relies on “particular facilitating emotions which function to motivate instrumental action, such as pride in one’s expertise and skill, satisfaction in one’s work, distaste for waste of material and time” (Barbalet 2001; Pixley 2009). In the financial sphere, for example, Pixley’s (2004, 2009, 2012) research has shown that firms rely on emotions of trust and distrust to make decisions while facing future complexity and uncertainty. When these firms are hit by failure, trust is replaced by fear (cf. Barbalet 2001, 2011; Hardin 2001; Harrington 2012; McGeer 2004; Shapiro 2012).

To date, the role of emotions in financial education remains underresearched. Kim’s (2017) study of the moral and emotional aspects of financial subjectification in a private financial education program in South Korea is an exception. Kim’s (2017) study shows how the “gurus” of finance use emotions to create attachment to both the education program and financial markets. The financial education program provides attendees with an emotionally charged moral foundation for legitimizing engagement with financial markets. This moral foundation is built on the critique of being enslaved and “hurt” by capitalism. Becoming a financial “freeman” by engaging in financial markets and products, in other words “thinking like the rich,” is presented as the only solution to capitalism’s enslavement and the “hurt” it has caused (see also Fridman [2014]). Although not researching financial education, other scholars have shown that financial subjectivation is an ongoing “affective and operational logic” (Deville and Seigworth 2015, 2). Deville’s research (2012, 2014) demonstrates that debt collectors, through the process of affective captation, try to keep defaulters attached to their debt. For instance, conversations between debtors and debt collectors contain moments “designed to stimulate discomfort, anxiety, panic” in the debtor (Deville 2014, 477).

To summarize this literature review and starting point for our analysis, we argue that financial education to enhance citizens’ financial literacy and capacity to act according to a financial rationality can be seen as part of the ongoing financialization of everyday life. In addition, we argue that financial education is a form of governmentality intended to mold citizens into financially self-governing subjects. The focus on emotions in the analysis of financial education is relevant and important because it demonstrates how the financially literate subject of financial education is not “rational” as opposed to “emotional,” but rather emotionally oriented, consistent with the rationale of financial logic. As we shall see, emotions are inherent in and conducive to this rationality and are thus an intrinsic part of governing in financial education.

3. Method

The data used in the analysis are part of a larger project studying the Swedish private–public financial education network Like Your Personal Finances. In 2008, responding to the OECD initiative to stimulate the development of financial education in member countries, the Swedish government commissioned the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) to educate citizens on financial matters (Cf. Engdahl, Pettersson, and Larsson 2019). As a result, in 2010, the FSA collaborated with interested nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and private finance actors to create the Like Your Personal Finances financial education network. To date, the network has over 80 members, including all the large Swedish banks, several debt collection companies, smaller private financial actors, trade unions, interest organizations, and authorities. Ever since the network was established in 2010, it has educated citizens all over Sweden about finance, claiming a shared interest of supporting citizens in achieving greater “financial self-confidence” and financial capability.¹ Course topics include financial products, consumption behavior, consumer rights, excessive debt, pension saving, budgeting and investing, and much more.

Like Your Personal Finances is an ambitious initiative in several respects. First, it uses a broad variety of pedagogical formats and tools, such as Facebook groups, podcasts, and apps, and encourages upper secondary schoolteachers to download free education material from the network website to teach financial literacy in their classes. The network also reaches out to potential stakeholders such as municipalities, authorities (e.g. the Unemployment Agency), trade unions, and other organizations, offering them free financial education courses tailored to their recipients, thereby identifying specific participant groups and tailoring the courses to what the network believes they need to know. One frequent strategy of the network is to “train the trainer,” which means educating people (e.g. civil servants, teachers, union representatives) who in turn regularly meet a variety of social groups, such as immigrants, students, older people, trustees, or different categories of employees. The expectation is that this approach will have a ripple effect, spreading financial knowledge throughout society.² Through all of these means, the network targets a very wide range of citizen groups, from the general public of all ages and stages in life to so-called “at-risk groups.” The Swedish version of financial education stands out in the European context with its many face-to-face courses where participants and educators actually meet (European Banking Authority 2018).

The courses offered by the Like Your Personal Finances network were studied using ethnographically inspired methods. Data were collected between May 2017 and April 2018 using the techniques of audio-recorded semi-structured interviews, group interviews, and field notes from participant observation during courses. The field notes include small talk and conversations with lecturers, organizers and participants during observations, as well as notes on body language, tone of voice, and topics of conversations. In addition, policy texts, educational material, and other documents of relevance to the courses were collected and analyzed, including OECD policy documents on financial education, course folders, education binders, and PowerPoint slides.

A total of 14 interviews (including three group interviews) were conducted, lasting from 1 to 2 h and involving 27 people (course participants, organizers, and lecturers). Participant observations took place during four courses for 2 days each, targeting different groups and in courses on different subjects. Furthermore, participant observations were conducted during a workplace seminar (studying the “ripple effect”) and a network meeting (involving private and public actors). All participants consented upon being informed about the purpose of the project and the terms and conditions of their participation in accordance with the principles of ethical social scientific research listed by the Swedish Research Council.³

The present analysis mostly uses data collected from participant observation at the 2-day course Secure Your Financial Future, including its educational material and data from interviews with two state organizers of the Like Your Personal Finances network. Secure Your Financial Future was selected because it is one of the most frequently held courses; it targets the general public and can be described as a course in basic financial knowledge. It can thus be seen as representative of what the network considers to be the basic skills, attitudes, and behaviors required for financial literacy.

3.1. Analytical concepts and method of analysis

Author 1 conducted the first round of coding interviews, field notes, and texts by sorting and highlighting all perceived expressions of emotions, such as facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and laughter, as well as verbal expressions of emotions such as the claim that “finance should be fun!” In this phase of qualitative research, as well as earlier during activities such as fieldwork and interviews, the researcher used her own judgments to understand the actors and situations in the field, which is true for all kinds of qualitative research as well as research on emotions. Interpreting and understanding emotions is part of researchers’ and lay people’s everyday knowledge, and of course, the researcher would be lost in the field without the experience and knowledge gained from living and interacting with others (Aspers 2007; Wettergren 2015). Bergman Blix (2009) discusses the use of what she calls “emotional participation” as a methodological tool, arguing that reflecting on one’s own emotions can generate insight into the situations and people under observation.

When conducting fieldwork or transcribing field notes from participating in financial education courses, acknowledging and asking myself questions about my own feelings made me reflect on the role of emotions in financial education. While participating in Secure Your Financial Future, for example, I found myself feeling concerned about my own lack of financial skills, doubting my own efforts to secure my personal financial future according to the recommendations of the financial education lecturers. Thus, using my own emotions as “sensitizing devices” and “clues” while critically reflecting upon them has benefited the analysis (Wettergren 2015).

As we worked inductively, the second round of coding generated four main sub-categories of emotions: boredom, fear, (dis)trust and fun; these categories are the basis of the chapter structure in the analysis below. The sociological theory of emotion was applied to understand the emotions that educators draw upon, presumably to motivate, inform, and orient the financially literate subject. We also identified feeling rules (Hochschild 1983) pertinent to the financialization discourse. Hochschild (1983) coined the concepts of “feeling rules” and “display rules” to account for situated and context-specific norms about what to feel and how to express it. She termed people’s efforts to comply with feeling and display rules “emotion management.” As we will see, to be a financially capable subject, one is encouraged to work on feelings of insecurity and fear and evoke feelings of fun. This then implies feeling rules about fear (which should be “rational”) and fun (which you should feel).⁴ At stake in our analysis was the identification of the implicit or explicit feeling rules in financial education – that is, which feeling rules do educators communicate to make their students financially capable subjects?

One way to grasp the emotions and feeling rules involved is to look at how emotions or emotional states are invoked. Reddy’s (Reddy 2009, 99) concept of emotive is a useful analytical tool here. Emotives are statements people make about their emotions that do not necessarily or perfectly describe their emotional state, but rather explore a desirable emotional state. The desired emotion is thus tentatively evoked by stating and/or performing it. In our empirical material, an example of this was seen when an educator shouted, “Isn’t this fun?” addressing a group of listeners the educator presumed found financial instruments uninteresting. Emotives thus function as tools for emotion management that are simultaneously applied to the self and others; they are, in Reddy’s (2009, 105) words, “instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful.” In our analysis, we are not interested in whether emotives are successful, only in what they tell us about feeling rules and desired emotions.

We used the emotive concept to not only identify and code explicit utterances about emotion, but also code narratives conveying implicit emotional states without making explicit emotional claims. Thus, when coding the field notes, we asked questions such as: “What emotions are implicitly conveyed in the narratives presented at the course, such as ‘the decline of economic development’”? and “How are the attendees encouraged to feel about this development?” The narrative approach to analyzing emotions suggested by Kleres (2011) directs attention to emotion and narrative as mutually constitutive in the sense that when an event is narrated, the descriptions of actors, actions, conditions, and context evoke emotion in both the storyteller and the listener. Our analysis of course material thus involved coding “who acts how to whom and what happens. (…) Anger episodes, for instance, involve elements that together form a scene of faulty, unfair behaviour by others” (Kleres 2011, 189). In our case, an anger narrative would also be coded as a feeling rule about anger.

In summary, interview transcripts, field notes, and educational material were thematically coded for explicit emotions and emotions conveyed implicitly by narrative, and feeling rules were identified by coding norms about emotions expressed as emotives that could be utterances, narratives, or physically expressed in some way (e.g. rolling one’s eyes).

The analysis below focuses on four main emotional themes evoked by the emotives of the course – obstructing, motivating, orienting, or rewarding emotions of the financially capable subject: boredom, fear, trust, distrust, and fun. The abbreviation SYFF in parentheses after an excerpt stands for the financial education course Secure Your Financial Future.

4. Results

4.1. Out of boredom, feel the fear

The reader may have already noticed the emotive title of the Like Your Personal Finance network, which communicates the desired emotions of liking and interest and a feeling rule to like one’s own personal finances. The title recommends overcoming a certain dislike, as if personal finances are not usually liked. Counteracting boredom and dislike as sources of potential resistance to learning about finance are indeed at the heart of the network, and this is one reason why it is a collaborative project where private and state actors join forces – private actors are fun. As one organizer vividly explained, the network engages private finance celebrities – such as financial advisers known from TV – as lecturers to attract people to the courses:

I mean, if I’m going to attend a course and meet eight authorities … [drops her shoulders, rolls her eyes, drops her jaws, mouth open]. It should be fun! I usually say that we have the rock stars of finance with us. (Field notes)

The facial expression noted in the excerpt conveyed intense boredom and disinterest, emphasized by the exclamation that the course must be fun. The name of the network is thus conceived to evoke interest in a public that is likely to be uninterested in subjects such as private finances because they find them boring; the names of the courses offered by the network follow a similar pattern. The Secure Your Financial Future course suggests that feelings of security and finance are closely related. It also suggests the opposite; that not knowing whether one’s future is secure may be a reason to feel insecure.⁵

We find the emotives embedded in the structure of the course and teaching methods. Attendees are instructed to feel in certain ways. In the beginning of the course, fun is not an emotive, but rather – in line with the course title – feelings of insecurity and fear. Fear signals a threat to the self; feelings of insecurity, such as anxiety, are milder forms (Barbalet 2001; see also Scheff [2011]). As long as the source of fear is in the future as opposed to the immediate present, it is a powerful emotion to motivate precautions against the threat as long as it remains merely worrisome (Wettergren 2015). Proceeding to introduce Secure Your Financial Future, the lecturer, representing a state authority, discussed reasons to be concerned about current economic developments in Sweden:

The PowerPoint slide shows a graph of economic development from the seventeenth century until the year 2000. The curve shows economic growth from the nineteenth century to the year 2000, then a steep fall in the economic development after 2000: it is clear that we now have the same level of economic development as in the seventeenth century. The lecturer, a strict, articulate, and well-dressed woman in her 40s, explains in a clear and matter-of-fact tone of voice: ‘The world has changed.’ She tells us how saving money has become increasingly important. She talks about ‘the old days,’ when we lived in an agrarian society. Back then, ‘savings’ might look like having one pig one year and then two pigs the next. One could store seed in the barn. During the nineteenth century and over the course of industrialization, we have had fantastic economic growth. In the 50s and 60s, all you needed was a job and a salary, and you could take out a loan. You only needed a job to get a pension. But, from the 70s onward, economic growth has declined to 2% today. The lecturer proceeds to enumerate a list of current concerns: ‘We cannot expect the interest rate on mortgages to remain at zero percent. We don’t know what pension payments we will get. We borrow a lot of money. A lot of people don’t have a financial buffer. We live longer. In the old days, we started working at a young age, but today we expect the state to support us while we ‘find ourselves’. Then, at the age of 30, we start working for our pension. That will not hold!’ she says. (Field notes, SYFF)

This introduction establishes insecurity through a narrative sequence describing a span of over 300 years to tell us that we have probably never been less secure in terms of savings and the future of our private finances, not to mention our future pensions. We can no longer rely on pigs and seeds or economic growth rates to secure people with “just a job and a salary” as in the mid-twentieth century. It is not explicitly expressed, but the narrative of how “we” live today and “we expect the state to support us while we find ourselves” implies that “we” are naïve.

In front of the attendees lay the education text binder that all participants get when attending the course, echoing the lecturers claims: The world has changed […] in 1860–1970, the industrial revolution made growth skyrocket, and we had growth rates as high as six, seven, or eight percent per year. When the economy grows that fast, we do not really need to care of our money; our ‘mistakes’ are automatically repaired. Since the 1970s, we have been back at two percent yearly growth. This means that we can no longer afford to make the same ‘mistakes’ with our money, as these mistakes are no longer automatically repaired. Instead, we have to make our own choices to make our savings grow. (Field notes SYFF and course binder)

The text in the binder did not simply reflect, but rather reinforced and detailed the world described by the lecturer; people make economic mistakes but they can afford to as long as growth repairs their failures to act rationally; this has now come to an end. Today, making conscious and rational financial choices is not an option, but a must. Emotives about the desired feelings of insecurity were thus conveyed during class through the lecturer’s words, posture, tone of voice, construction of PowerPoint slides, and binder text. It was made clear that these new and serious “de facto” circumstances of rapidly changing economic development required attendees to adjust their money management accordingly.

Having established the decline in economic growth to be a fact requiring individual precautions, the lecturer continued to build alarm by adding other features to the narrative of the changing world of economic development. These features had the common requirement to be responsible and capable financial subjects to meet the present challenges:

She tells us why we must know more about finance and take more responsibility for our own current financial situation: ‘the compelling freedom of choice,’ the ‘complexity and quantity of financial products,’ ‘digitalization,’ ‘the banks’ low interest rates,’ and ‘the humbug and scam out there’ (referring to private financial actors wanting to rob people of their money). All of these features, according to lecturer, make financial knowledge crucial to enable citizens to live the kind of life they want, and to create economic safety. (Field notes SYFF)

As this excerpt shows, the emotives shift during the lecture. Having established reasons to worry and feel insecure, the narrative of the changing world proceeds to direct attention to ways to prevent future misery and the emotive of hope. Thus, fear should not result in despair and withdrawal (Barbalet 2001), but rather, in preventive action. The crucial point of the course is to direct attention from fear of financial investments to interest and curiosity in financial knowledge. Thus, the attendees were told that they can avoid repeating the “mistakes” made in industrialized (old) society by taking advantage of the possibilities of financial markets, making their money grow, and securing their own financial welfare: “[I]t provides safety, but probably also more money in your pocket” (SYFF text binder). The know-how of financial products was presented as a source of hope to regain control and safety, and more than that, the hope of wealth.

Consistent with the rationality of the financialization of everyday life, the way to secure one’s future is therefore to act in one’s presumed financial best interests, namely by making financial investments (Haiven 2014; Van der Zwan 2014). The emotives of fear/worry and hope/safety are intended to create interest in a presumably disinterested public. Moreover, fear/anxiety direct attention to potential solutions, which are presented as financial knowledge and engagement. The most prominent feeling rule thus far in the course is the fear of inaction, tied to naïve and irrational expectations of future private finances to be fine without engagement in financial markets. One should feel worried about one’s own future personal finances. Having reached the point where this is presumably clear, the emotives of building reasonable senses of trust and distrust to manage and expel fear were introduced.

4.2. Trust in finance

Trust is emotional in our view (Barbalet 2011), as it involves confidence in the assessment of one’s knowledge and confidence in what may happen based on such knowledge. Trust can be placed in different objects, such as individuals or institutions (see Rothstein and Stolle 2008). As in previous research on finance and emotions (see, e.g. Pixley [2009]; Shapiro [2012]), trust is explicitly stated to be of paramount importance in OECD arguments for the necessity of financial education. According to the OECD (2013, 11), financial education is “critical to restore trust and confidence in the financial system, promote financial stability and provide the necessary public backing to financial reforms.” Apparently, a public trust problem looms on the horizon, so financial education is not only in people’s own best interest; public trust is important if political reforms in tandem with financialization are to be considered legitimate (Rothstein and Stolle 2008). Cultivating citizens’ confidence and trust in finance and financial products through education is in the interest of the financial system as a whole.

Trust in our case of Swedish financial education must be established on several levels and in multiple dimensions. First, trust must be established in the actual organization of financial education. The collaboration between the state and private actors in the Like Your Personal Finances network is important from the above perspective because state actors guarantee an “objective” approach. Given Swedes’ high level of trust in state authorities (Rothstein and Stolle 2008), making the network a state initiative and involving state actors is a way to attract public trust and high legitimacy. As we saw in the previous section, the private finance actors – the “rock stars” – were supposed to bring fun to the event, while the state relied on boring seriousness.⁶ Seriousness is emotional composure that often accompanies the construction of bureaucratic objectivity (Bergman Blix and Wettergren 2018).

The different roles of the state and private actors were reflected in the lecture topics. The topic of lectures from representatives of state authorities involves the rules and regulations of welfare security, such as how the pension system works, direct questions on consumer laws and rights, and budget issues. By contrast, private financial actors were responsible for the themes of saving with financial products – “making money grow.”

While PowerPoint slides from state authorities have headings such as ‘How is the pension paid out?’ or ‘A small debt can get big,’ private financial actors’ PowerPoint slides had headings such as ‘How to make money on the stock market?’, ‘When should I buy and sell?’, and ‘The way to make more money’ (Field notes SYFF)

Second, tied to trusting the legitimacy of the network is the dimension of trust in financial markets. As we saw in the previous section, given the genuine insecurity of weak economic development, hope in regaining financial security was channeled into learning about financial investments. Further into the curriculum of Secure Your Financial Future, attendees were given more specific instructions by lecturers to think of saving money in the long and short term to satisfy different needs at different stages of life.

It is important to create a ‘buffer,’ short-term savings with money readily available in case something unexpected happens and you need money quickly. While ‘buffer money’ should be saved in a bank account, long-term savings, on the other hand, should be saved by buying ‘riskier’ financial products such as funds and stocks. (Field notes SYFF)

However, given the risk, why save money in the financial market at all? In an information folder titled Save – Borrow issued by the Like Your Personal Finance network, we are informed that that a common question is: “Is the stock market dangerous?” The answer is as follows:

The stock market is like a shop window mirroring what everyone believes about the economy. Regardless, the economy will develop at its own pace. Even if many have found the past decade economically worrying, world economic development has never been stronger. Since 2000, the entire world economy has grown by 53 percent. From this perspective, the fact that some countries have had economic difficulties is a minor problem. (Information folder Save - Borrow)

The perspective of this excerpt stands in stark contrast to the narrative presented in the previous section of declining economic development as a concerning social fact. What this excerpt implies is different levels of experience – the local and particular (individual) on one hand, and the global and universal (the world) on the other. The former entails a short-term perspective and thereby some risk-taking, while the latter – the economy – is depicted as eternal and sublime. Like any force of nature, the economy develops at its own pace, out of reach of human agency. Paradoxically, insofar as the stock market is tied to the economy and economic development, the first sentence in the excerpt suggests a human, but at the same time, magical dimension – the market is mysterious; it relies on people’s beliefs, yet it evolves beyond human reach.

However, beyond beliefs, the long-term perspective is one of relentless growth, albeit at a slower pace than that in the twentieth century. The market is risky in the short run, but can and should be trusted in the long run. Pixley (2009) argues that trust in finance increases tolerance of an uncertain future and counteracts fear of loss. When citizens are advised to invest and save their future pension money via financial markets, the advisors cannot promise that this will secure their future, rather, it might ruin it; therefore, trust is crucial.

As we see, the emotive of trust is first built into the organized partnership between state and private actors constituting the Like Your Private Finance education network, and second, into the narrative of different spatiotemporal (local/global, long-term/short-term) perspectives on the market. In the next section, we see that trust is further differentiated between market actors, including the weak and fallible self, who need to be “known” and disciplined.

4.3. (Dis)trust in self

The attendees of financial education are not always or entirely encouraged to overcome their fear or distrust. As mentioned above, financial education lecturers talk about “the humbug and scam out there,” meaning that not all financial products and services are tailored to meet people’s needs, despite seeming to do so. That the financial market itself is trustworthy does not mean that every actor on the market can be trusted⁷ or that all financial products are bargains or meet individual financial needs. Therefore, financial rationality entails the emotional and cognitive ability to discriminate between what and who to trust or distrust. As one lecturer explained, financial education aims to help attendees to:

… get a feeling for what is accurate and what is … a bit tricky out there. For example,  … if someone calls and tells you ‘We will take care of your pension premium for you’ [rolling her eyes]. A bit like that … self-preservation. Nothing is free. It sounds a bit sad to have to talk about it repeatedly, but that’s how it is. Do not ever think that anyone out there [on the financial markets] wants to help you only out of goodness. (Interview 3 NGO lecturer)

Rolling her eyes, the lecturer in the quote demonstrates the naivety of believing that financial actor is “out there” to help you; that anything can be “for free.” The market can be trusted, but in doing so, attendees must learn that everyone must fend for themselves. As stated in the quote, “a feel” for what is “tricky” and what is “accurate” is the key to financial rationality. However, knowledge and feelings about what is in one’s own financial best interests cannot be conveyed by the course; instead, it is a question of personal preference. The NGO lecturer cited above continued explaining the aim of financial education as follows:

… that you yourself, as an individual, shall be able to make your own decisions. That you will have enough ‘meat on your bones’ to be able to [say]: … ‘Yes, I choose to do this or that with my money, and the consequences will be this or that.’ Then no one else will be able to tell you what you should do. You’re going to get information [in the course] about what you can do and then you make the decision yourself. (Interview 3, NGO lecturer)

No one can or should tell you what to do, and everyone on the market acts in their own interest. Therefore, apart from the fact that according to the worldview established at the course, people must take responsibility for their future economic safety, preferably by acting on the financial market; this raises the question of how they are to navigate the pitfalls.

Echoing previous research about “gurus” (Kim 2017) in financial education, learning to orientate oneself on the financial market is presented as ultimately a matter of finding out about one’s own financial self and manage one’s emotions. The course encourage introspection:

The attendees are encouraged to ask themselves what level of uncertainty and risk they are willing to accept, how much money they are prepared to invest, and for how long. According to the lecturer, this is related to the fact that if profit on investment falls, this is not necessarily something to fear – one should remain calm and not run off selling investments owing to a temporary downturn on the financial market. (Field notes SYFF)

The course offers no tests of personal risk levels, but learning about one’s so-called “risk tolerance/risk appetite” is repeatedly stressed, as shown in the following excerpt:

The lecturer (who works in a bank) tells us that it is not until one knows one’s own risk tolerance that one will know how to act on financial markets, and what products to buy. He shows a PowerPoint slide: ‘Saving and investing has to do with two things: 1. Finding your own risk preference, and 2. Selecting and weighting financial instruments.’ (Field notes, SYFF)

Another lecturer from a bank explained:

‘Knowing one’s risk tolerance determines one’s preferences.’ His PowerPoint slide asks: ‘When should I buy and sell?’ The lecturer answers: ‘Buy when the risk in your portfolio is lower than your risk appetite’ and ‘sell when the risk in your portfolio is higher than your risk appetite.’ He goes on to explain how the term ‘risk’ captures the fact that the stock market goes up and down, but this is something to take advantage of by buying when prices are low and selling when they are high. However, he warns, this requires the capacity to endure, and not sell, when the value of your investment falls. One of the course organizers is sitting and listening beside me. Suddenly she leans towards me, and whispers: ‘If one can play it cool, that is. Sometimes I buy badly to harden myself,’ and continues to explain that she does this to stretch her risk tolerance. She says she has to do it because she is so ‘addicted to safety.’ (Field notes SYFF)

As the excerpt shows, the trickiness of the financial market is referred to as personal risk tolerance; movements up and down on the market are normal, and it is merely how one reacts to seeing investments reduced that is at stake. Again, the market can be trusted, but the weak point is irrational fear. In other words, the self and its emotions ought to be distrusted and disciplined (cf. Borch and Lange 2017), countered by endurance. At the end of the excerpt, the fact that an organizer confides in the researcher about how she exercises her risk tolerance and hardens herself exemplifies the struggle to discipline one’s self and internalize the emotional constitution of the financially capable subject. The feeling rules are clearly that one should not be afraid but calm, and should distrust the weak and “safety-addicted” self. While the explicit emotive in this part of the course calls for trust and calmness, an emotive of distaste of weakness is arguably hinted by the lecturer and clearly enacted by the organizer’s confession, as if the difference between success and failure on the market was a matter of personal character (cf. Harrington 2012) and moral worth. From an emotion-sociological perspective, this need for introspection and self-discipline pertains to shifting the reference points of the self (Collins 1988), entailing the deconstruction of emotional attachments to habituated practices (Scheer 2012).

While learning one’s risk tolerance suggests that people are different and not everyone is suited for taking great risks with their money, high risk – if successful – may entail higher returns than a low-risk investment would ever do. In this vein, knowing what kind of financial subject one is also involves knowing the kind of life one wants to live. As explained by an organizer:

Those attending courses come there thinking, ‘Now I will get all the answers.’ But there aren’t any answers in private finance! It depends entirely on how you want to live your life! [­­­—] And sometimes someone asks a question like: ‘But what is right?’ Well, there isn’t anything right. [—] There are only different perspectives. (Group interview, organizer 2)

This interviewee later clarified in the interview that “everything in life is about money … about how to afford to live” (Group interview, organizer 2). In other words, one’s wish for money should serve as horizon to discipline risk tolerance and ultimately, one chooses one’s own level of wealth.

To summarize this section, the emotive of trust in the financial market’s steady growth from a long-term perspective remains the ultimate reference point for the financially capable subject, but one must develop “a feel” for which actors and instruments to trust and distrust. This emotional attunement to the financial market requires risk tolerance, calm endurance, and disciplining the self to live with insecurity. Above all, the feeling rule of trust in the market is coupled with that of distrusting individual actors, including the weak and safety-addicted self. On a theoretical note, trust always involves the risk of broken trust (Barbalet 2001), which is tied to a trusted individual’s failure to deliver, as well as to the truster’s failure to judge accurately. Therefore, broken trust not only entails withdrawal of confidence in the other, but also damages self-confidence. Consequently, the broken trust can be blamed only on one’s own poor choices, not on the abstract and sublime financial market, which exists in a different spatiotemporal dimension, and certainly not on the network, which merely – neutrally, as it were – provides awareness of the rationale of financial markets and some basic knowledge of financial instruments, but does not make them work.

4.4. Finance is fun

In formal interviews, in informal talks during observations, and during classes, organizers and lecturers repeatedly stress the importance of finance education being “fun,” just because “private finance should be fun!” (Group interview, organizer 1). However, if state actors enact emotives of trust in the legitimacy and neutrality of the course, as “part of their political mandate” (Group interview, organizer 1), it is primarily the private actors who perform the emotives of fun. Not only do they make financial education fun, they also enjoy it themselves: “The finance celebrities enjoy [laughter] standing up there!” organizer 2 explained in a group interview. She went on to say that because the private finance lecturers are not paid by the network, those who become involved do so “because they are passionate about spreading knowledge, and in addition, they do it without selling anything!” (Group interview, organizer 2). In a way, financial actors volunteering as lecturers were presented as doing it because they are already exemplars of the financially capable subject, embodying the logic of financial rationality.

The difference between state actors and private lecturers was not only in their subject matter, as we have seen, but also in their ways of lecturing. While public officials generally maintained a serious and restrained style, speaking in a calm and assertive way, refraining from jokes or excessive gesturing, financial market actors often used humor and wit in an attempt to make attendees laugh. During one such lecture on the topic of using financial products, a lecturer from a large bank used the emotive of fun, and – so to speak – “keeping things simple” to encourage attendees to commit to the topic of private financial investment:

The lecturer (a man in his 40s) walks on to the stage. Turning to us in the audience, he smiles and asks: ‘How many live with the belief that shares are a difficult subject?’ A few attendees raise their hands. ‘I’ll explain this to you, and I will make it super easy! It should be fun and simple!’ Several times during the lecture he suddenly pauses, turning to the audience, flashing a big smile at us and shouts: ‘Isn’t this fun? Woohoo!’ lifting his arms up in the air in a gesture of euphoria. Some in the audience laugh. (Field notes SYFF)

As the excerpt shows, the emotive of fun and joy is enacted verbally as well as in body language and facial expressions. Even if this is a strategy in line with the goal of popularizing financial knowledge, it is important to stress that emotives are not necessarily sincere or insincere from the point of view of the speaker; emotives work both ways and are expressed to evoke the uttered state of emotion in one’s self as well as in others. The lecturer seems to enjoy himself, smiling and wanting to share and interact with the attendees. By making them laugh, the lecture on making money on the finance market may indeed become fun.

Fun serves the general purpose of easing communication between lecturer and audience and gaining interest in the topic (cf. Critchley 2002). It was also needed to break the tension and the atmosphere of fear and anxiety created during the introductory class (cf. Fine and de Soucey 2005), where economic decline was presented as an undisputable fact that demanded urgent action from citizens for their own future welfare. Potential tension from the paradox of investing in financial products to secure one’s financial future and feeling safe while knowing that one’s money may be sacrificed to the ordinary “ups and downs” of the market is eased by enjoying investment as a thrill in itself. The lecture described above continued:

The bank lecturer tells us how he manages his financial mistakes by openly confessing that he sometimes loses money. He explains: ‘When trading on the stock market, one has to be prepared to lose money sometimes.’ He stops, pauses, flashes a smile, and asks: ‘Did anyone here join the Telia journey?’ No one in the audience raises their hands. However, he raises his own hand, gives a funny crooked smile, and carelessly shrugs his shoulders. (Field notes SYFF)

The former state-owned Swedish telecom company Telia became semiprivate and was listed on the stock market in 2000, along with an intensive national campaign to buy “people’s shares.” About a million Swedes were persuaded by the campaign to buy, but lost their money when the value dropped shortly after the listing. Today it is a well-known and often ridiculed investment mistake. By admitting and discussing his own financial failure and loss, while smiling and shrugging his shoulders in a joking manner, the lecturer showed the attendees that loss happens; mistakes are not a source of shame, and they are certainly no reason to feel discouraged. Trading is fun, and doing it for fun, even when losing, is nothing to be ashamed, let alone afraid of. Interestingly, he thereby also demonstrated how to respond to broken trust in financial investments. As stated above, broken trust entails self-doubt and damaged self-confidence, and shame over stupid choices may follow (Harrington 2012; Pixley 2012). By figuratively shrugging off damaged self-confidence, the lecturer enacts carelessness. Thus, becoming a financially capable subject is not merely a matter of disciplining oneself by exercising risk tolerance and endurance by staying calm when values drop, it is equally about disciplining oneself to have fun, and when one loses money – because one will lose money – learning to stay light-hearted and continue having fun. In this section, we have seen the emotives of fun and lightheartedness, revealing the feeling rules that engagement in financial markets should be fun and that the financial subject should not feel ashamed or discouraged by mistakes and losses.

5. Conclusion

In this article, we have adopted the sociological theory of emotions to investigate the role of emotions in Swedish financial education, showing that emotions are enacted and drawn upon by lectures and organizers to motivate, constitute, and orient financial rationality in the attendees of financial education. Using the analytical tool of emotives, we have demonstrated how emotions and feeling rules conducive to financial rationality are embedded in the text, talk, and physical performances of lecturers, primarily in the Secure Your Financial Future course. We have also highlighted aspects of this in the general rationale of the Like Your Personal Finance educational network. The most prominent emotions in the analysis have been boredom, fear/anxiety, trust/distrust, and fun, but also some hope and confidence. The feeling rules tied to these emotions need to be understood in their rather confusing situated context.

First, the presumption of financial education, at least in the Swedish case, seems to be that personal finance is boring. Boredom obstructs the financial subject, so the Like Your Personal Finance network strives to raise interest in its courses by arguing that finance is fun. Emotives conveying the feeling rule of fun are primarily enacted in the private lectures. Fun as a feeling rule of financial rationality is enacted by both motivating financial engagement and counteracting the emotions of shame and disappointment from mistakes, losses, or fear of losses on the financial market.

Second, fear of loss is also presumed to prevent people from engaging in financial investment. Fear is not rejected, but rather, reoriented to motivate instead of obstruct, in a complex narration of a changing world in which financial safety has become an individual concern and responsibility. In this context, economic development is presented as declining, to be stabilized at a level at which inaction will almost certainly result in future misery. Therefore, attendees are instructed to care for their financial future by taking action and to fear the insecurity of inaction. At this part of the course, primarily representatives of the state are the ones who enact the emotives, as they guarantee the neutrality of the narrated world view. Fear of engaging in the financial market is thus redirected into fear of not engaging and fear of future misery. Hope is raised and interest is awakened by realizing the potential of the latter.

Third, the course seeks to establish that the financial market should be trusted. Previous research has shown that the narrative of financial education takes the development of financialization as given (see, e.g. Clarke [2015]; Lazarus [2020]; Marron [2014]); this is a conclusion to be drawn from our study as well. This naturalization of financialization is conducted in a complex narrative where trust on one hand relates to the economy, which is now depicted as sublime and in the long term can be trusted to develop at its own pace. On the other hand, in the short run, the stock market is depicted as fluctuating, reflecting beliefs about it. How can this paradox be understood? According to Foucault, “economic rationality” is

founded on the unknowability of the totality of the process. Homo economicus is the one island of rationality possible within an economic process whose uncontrollable nature does not challenge, but instead founds the rationality of the atomistic behavior of homo economicus. (Foucault and Senellart 2008, 282)

Therefore, in line with this notion of economic rationality, it is by being an “entrepreneur of himself” acting only on his own interest while not taking into account, or even knowing about the totality of the economic system that his interest “converges spontaneously with the interest of others” (Foucault and Senellart 2008, 270). As we have seen in the analysis, the attendees of financial education are encouraged to orient themselves in this paradox through introspection, disciplining the financial self to stay calm and endure the down periods, while learning about – and perhaps learning to stretch – one’s risk tolerance. The feeling rules are to trust the sublime development of the economy and the financial market (existing in their own spatiotemporal dimension) overall, but to distrust the safety-addicted (short-term) self. Distrust should also be directed at “the humbug and scam out there”; everyone acts in their own interest and nothing on the market is free. Meanwhile, no one can advise on what to believe or how to invest – these depend on individual preferences, judgments, and choices. The financial subject should thus nurse a healthy amount of distrust to navigate the pitfalls of the financial markets, while if – or rather when – loss occurs, feelings of shame and disappointment should be managed lightheartedly through a sense of fun.

Similar to previous research, our analysis suggests that the concern of financial literacy is best understood in relation to financialization (Beggs, Bryan, and Rafferty 2014; Gonzalez 2015; Lazarus 2020; Montegary 2015; Pellandini-Simányi, Hammer, and Vargha 2015) and that financial education is a form of governmentality that seeks to shape financial subjects (Clarke 2015; Lazarus 2020; Marron 2014). Likewise, our analysis of ethnographic material demonstrates that the goal of financial education in Sweden is to adjust and encourage citizens to take advantage of financialization, thereby responsibilizing them for their own welfare; we have shown that this is an emotional endeavor. We have also shown that while financial education encourages the attendees to become emotionally engaged in their own personal finance and in the financial market to ensure their own welfare, they are not taught the practical details of activities such as investment. Instead, to become a financial subject, the individual must shoulder the responsibility for his or her own financial choices. However, educated financial subjects have been taught what emotions facilitate financial responsibility.

Based on our analysis of Swedish financial education, we suggest that the use of emotion should be understood as a technology or device of governmentality. In an attempt to achieve financially rational self-reliant subjects, emotions are used to motivate, orient, and reward the financial subject. In line with a Foucauldian understanding of the operation of power in modern society though discrete correction and encouragement, we suggest that this kind of disciplinary power through “normalization” entails an attempt to foster and mold individuals’ emotions. Thus, another conclusion is that although financial education is obviously influenced by behavioral economics and the view that emotions impede rational financial behavior, our analysis shows that the “financial rationality” promoted in financial education is heavily charged with emotions to motivate, orient, and reward the financial subject. However, this may not come as a surprise to the sociologist of emotions because “the representation of emotions under conditions of market capitalism and instrumental rationality ignores precisely the background emotions which are continuous with the operation of the pervasive social institution” (Barbalet 2001, 24).

Our overall argument has been that teaching citizens financial literacy entails more than just teaching them about financial products, budgets, or basic financial concepts. As we have seen, financial education attempts to foster emotional capacities, and our analysis has highlights some key emotions and feeling rules that are conducive to the financial rationality that permeates financial education; these involve emotions that motivate (fear/anxiety, hope), orient (trust, distrust, confidence), and reward (fun, joy). These emotions are not attached to financial rationality per se, but the specific feeling rules concerning the orientation and objects of emotion (e.g. trust the market, fear future personal finance misery) are concrete and specific. In this article, we have sought to improve the understanding of the role of emotions in the financialization of everyday life.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Bengt Larsson and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Pettersson

Jane Pettersson is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Gothenburg. Her research is about Swedish financial education from the theoretical perspectives of economic sociology, sociology of emotions and governmentality theory.

Åsa Wettergren

Åsa Wettergren is a professor in Sociology at the University of Gothenburg. Her research interest is based on the sociology of emotions to investigate the significance of emotions in bureaucratic organizations, social movements and migration.

Notes

1 https://gilladinekonomi.se/om/om-gde/ accessed November 2019. The website describes the background and initiative and the network and its partners; it also provides an overview of previous and upcoming courses.

2 One example of a course using the train-the-trainer method is Pensions and Insurance held for union representatives who are then expected to become local informants about pension investment at their workplaces. Another example is the course analyzed in this article: Secure Your Financial Future. Most face-to-face courses last for 1 or 2 days.

3 http://www.codex.vr.se/texts/HSFR.pdf.

4 Hochschild (1983) actually differentiates between feeling and display rules, arguing that feeling rules relate to what one should feel, and display rules to how feelings should be expressed. For instance, at a Swedish funeral, one is expected to be and look sad, perhaps crying, but not to shout one's grief. This also allows Hoschchild to differentiate further between emotion management (or emotion work) that focuses on changing merely the expression of emotion (surface acting) or changing both the actual feeling and its expression (deep acting). Here we use only the term feeling rules because we are interested in which emotions are expressed, not in the expression per se. Furthermore, adding emotives as tools of emotion management conflates deep and surface acting because an emotive expresses a desired emotional state, but we cannot know whether it is actually experienced by the self and/or the other.

5 Another course is called Dare Talk Money, which seems to suggest that, in addition to boredom, insecurity and lack of self-confidence are at the heart of financial illiteracy.

6 Private and financial actors are not permitted to sell anything during education sessions, but they all present themselves as representatives of their companies, and their company logos are shown on PowerPoint slides during education sessions.

7 To protect consumers from being duped into buying financial products, Swedish law prohibits giving personal financial advice without the authorization of the Financial Supervisory Authority. Yet, there are ways to circumvent the law, and skilled salespersons can still convince someone to buy something they neither need nor want.