The institutional construction of the UK's asset-based welfare system, outlined in the previous chapter, where direct welfare provisions solely provide poverty relief (disciplinary mechanism) while workplace pensions and personal investments are intended to mitigate future risks (regulatory mechanism) has been accompanied by media discourses constructing norms of asset accumulation. Whereas the disciplinary mechanism influences behaviour through making some activities costlier than others, such as risking old-age poverty when not saving for retirement, norms operate through creating interests and desires individuals seek to adhere to. This chapter therefore unpicks interviewees’ discursive interaction with institutional changes and norms constructed in the media. It thus responds to a gap identified in the literature where previous studies have tended to focus either on institutional changes and secondary data (Langley, 2006, 2007; French and Kneale, 2009; Maman and Rosenhek, 2019) or on qualitative research (Coppock, 2013; Lai, 2017; Pellandini-Simanyi and Banai, 2021). Despite depicting individuals as important actors in the financialization of daily life, the Foucauldian-inspired literature has tended to exclude individuals’ interaction with the discursive and institutional practices constructing investor subjects. As a result, analyses of the financialization of daily life have resulted in an apparent contradiction, on the one hand suggesting, based on secondary data, that individuals become investors (Martin, 2002; Davis, 2009), and on the other hand arguing, based on empirical data, that ‘finance is domesticated’ (Pellandini-Simanyi et al, 2015, p 733) – that is, individuals reject the subject position of the everyday investor.

This chapter combines these two approaches, exploring first the construction of asset norms in the media before unveiling how interviewees engage with these norms discursively. The analysis of media discussions uncovers the macro-level discourses which constitute asset norms and how these come into being, ‘establishing what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal, and necessary’ (Foucault, 1991, p 76). Within this macro-level discourse analysis, references to financial behaviour and any of its constitutive parts within the texts were identified and examined to identify elements giving meaning to asset norms (Talib and Fitzgerald, 2016). In line with the dichotomous discourse employed in the policy discussion presented in Chapter 3, the everyday asset manager subject is constituted in the media discourse by establishing asset accumulation, on the one hand as a mechanism to gain freedom and prosperity (agency discourse) and, on the other hand, as a necessity (non-agency discourse).