| This dissertation analyzes how financial best-seller readers try to turn themselves into competent and successful economic actors. Based on participant observation, content analysis, and in-depth interviews, the focus of this study is the world of financial self-help, a set of discourses, practices, techniques, expertise, and interactions through which people make sense of their financial lives, their economic behavior, their social position, their family education, their planning, their goals, and their selves. Financial self-help is a social world inspired by best-selling books that encourage individuals to become rich by transforming themselves into individuals with the right conditions to become rich. It rarely contains an easy "get rich quick" formula. Instead, financial self-help practitioners go through a combination of three processes: they reframe goals and definitions about financial success, they develop calculative tools that fit those definitions, and they work on their self in order to prepare it for financial mobility. As an instance of these three processes, I analyze the practice of Cashflow, a board game devised by American financial guru Robert Kiyosaki through which people try to enhance their financial skills and know their self. Through these collectively-experienced processes, financial self-help practitioners seek to adapt their characters, goals and competencies to the challenges posed by neoliberal transformations. Financial self-help provides popular social theories about the transformation of society from industrial or welfare capitalism into financial capitalism and neoliberalism. It tells people that they should educate themselves financially and work hard on their selves to beat their conformist and weak dispositions developed in a previous stage of capitalism, while unleashing their entrepreneurial inner force of freedom. In addition, this dissertation studies how financial self-help products originated in the United States are used in Argentina, a substantially different economy that is nevertheless importing many of them. American financial self-help is globalized through the local work of translation that groups of fans perform in order to make advice thought for one context work in a different economy. |
