The Making of Investor Subjects in Anglo-American Pensions

Abstract

An individualisation of responsibility and risk is underway in US and UK pensions, as both state and employers scale back insurance commitments that expanded during the post-1945 era. Approached from the perspective of the Foucauldian-inspired governmentality literature, this neoliberal reworking of responsibility and risk across state and occupational pensions is characterised by the summoning up of the responsible individual worker as an entrepreneurial investor subject. Collective insurance, as a technology for constructing, managing, and pooling ‘risk’ as potential danger, is sidelined in favour of the promotion of individual investment to calculate, embrace, and bear ‘risk’ as opportunity or reward. As pension guides produced by state agencies for popular consumption illustrate, only financial market investment appears as capable of providing the individual with a secure and ‘free’ retirement. Contradictions in neoliberal government ensure, however, that the investor as a subject position that is called up in this discourse is not simply an identity that is performed by individuals.