Restoring Social Creativity to Immoderate Publics: The Case of the Financially Incontinent Citizen

Abstract

The ‘financially incontinent citizen’ is a recent phenomenon and is increasingly the focus of policy-makers: international, national and local as well as the financial services industry. The social construction of the financially profligate consumer-citizen was produced in the merger of social democratic and neoliberal discourses in political economy as well as the success of neoliberalism in aligning itself with media and public consensus. This paper (1) provides an examination of the production of the profligate citizen in neoliberal policy-making and reveals the more recent roles behavioural economics and psychology have had in developing the means to define behavioural standards and guidelines to remedy the ‘defective autonomy’ of consumer-citizens; and (2) argues a sociological counter-position drawing on the recent turn to pragmatist theories of social action, and empirical studies, that emphasize the forms of social creativity and innovation that actors in rapidly changing lifecourse scenarios develop. The complexity of the lifecourse can also be too challenging, but the remedy is not the remediation of a ‘defective’ actor.