Retail Investing in an Inter-Generational Perspective: From the Frugal Socialist Selfhood to the Entrepreneurial Post-Socialist Selfhood
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2026 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Přiložené soubory | |
| Popis | This submission stems from my ongoing dissertation research of collective representations (Chiapello 2006) surrounding the recent surge in retail investing in the Czech post-socialist context. It offers a preliminary look into my in-depth interview and ethnographic data. Concretely, I focus on weltanschauung around investing (Mannehim 1952: 33–83) that is framed generationally, that is framed through different significant events experienced during life-cycle phases of the given generations. Seen through a Polanyian perspective (Ther 2022), the government’s steps to usher in the neoliberal transformation represent some of these events. The state as a harbinger of neoliberalism (Konings 2018) echoes in hopes as well as disillusions of the coupon privatisation (Babička 2022; Rameš 2021) or discourses around the recent pension reform and establishment of the long-term investment product instrument (abbreviated as “DIP” in Czech) that contribute to generational differences. Beyond the policy-related events, my research partners recount personal experiences that strengthened the younger and weakened the older generations in their naturalization or favouring retail investing, a perspective that reflects the view of financialization as a gradual encroachment and a growing importance of finance in everyday life (van der Zwan 2014: 111–114). The generational differences in approaching investing then gain not their portrayal according to assumed aptness, assuredness or circumstantial necessity, but in the image of a progressive betterment of society (cf. Weiner 2007: 3). Both „catching-up“ (Ozolina-Fitzgerald 2016) and “deservingness” (Hilmar 2023) frames, which were quite prevalent, were accompanied by a framing that celebrates investing as, paraphrasing one of my research partners, gradually learning to live and breathe capitalism, progressively from a generation to generation. This portrait hails the capitalistic worldview as not only a dominant and hegemonic mode of engaging with the world, but as a weltanschauung that is desirable and perusable beyond its perceived necessity. |