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Introduction
Welfare policy discourse plays an important role in shaping how marginalised groups are identified and how poverty is addressed (Elwood and Lawson, Reference Elwood, Lawson, Lawson and Elwood2018; Garrett, Reference Garrett2017). Over the past few decades, welfare policy discourse in the United States and the United Kingdom has been dominated by the idea that public assistance traps people, women in particular, in a ‘culture of dependency’ that prevents them from exercising ‘personal responsibility’ and harms economic growth (Edin and Shaefer, Reference Edin and Shaefer2015; Garrett, Reference Garrett2017; Wilson and Huntington, Reference Wilson and Huntington2006). Welfare policy discourse in the current era has suggested that people can be empowered to overcome their poverty and revitalise their communities by participating in market-based activities and taking advantage of financial opportunities that open to them (Berndt, Reference Berndt2015). In recent years, partly as a response to the diminishing role of public assistance and the growing emphasis on the market, a newly ascendant welfare policy discourse has emerged – asset-building. Garnering support in many Western countries, asset-building discourse rests on the assumption that poverty can be reduced through savings and asset accumulation that are essential to promoting families’ long-term financial well-being (Prabhakar, Reference Prabhakar2009; Schreiner and Sherraden, Reference Schreiner and Sherraden2007).
There has been growing interest in the study of the discursive aspects of social welfare policy (Prior et al., Reference Prior, Hughes and Peckham2012). This body of research has adopted a top-down perspective that analyses how contemporary discourses of welfare and poverty (e.g. welfare mother discourse) are produced and enacted by powerful actors, such as journalists, policymakers and human service professionals (e.g. Askheim et al., Reference Askheim, Christensen, Fluge and Guldvik2017; Herbst, Reference Herbst2013; Wilson and Huntington, Reference Wilson and Huntington2006; Woolford and Curran, Reference Woolford and Curran2013). The literature has paid little attention to how poor subjects understand and use these discourses and how they are affected by them. In particular, while ‘asset-building talk’ is pervasive today in discussions of welfare and poverty, we know little about how people in poverty rely on this discourse to reimagine themselves and their financial predicament. Seeking to fill this lacuna in the literature, the current study conducts a discourse analysis of 24 interviews with low-income, non-white female participants in a US matched savings programme to examine how people in poverty draw on asset-building discourse to make sense of their economic marginalisation and future possibilities. In doing so, the study contributes to two bodies of research – one analysing the ways in which contemporary discourses of welfare and poverty govern social actors, and the other investigating the operations and impact of asset-building strategies.
The neoliberal subject as an entrepreneur of herself
It is widely acknowledged that social welfare policy is a system of principles, guidelines and procedures that provides material resources and services to impoverished groups in society. However, social welfare policy also operates as a set of discourses that establish political truths about who is poor, why people are poor and how to act against poverty (Elwood and Lawson, Reference Elwood, Lawson, Lawson and Elwood2018; Prior et al., Reference Prior, Hughes and Peckham2012; Schram, Reference Schram2015). Enacted in narratives, stories and metaphors, welfare policy discourse positions impoverished groups in the social order, identifies them as ‘other’ and conveys cues that shape public perceptions toward these groups (Garrett, Reference Garrett2017; Schneider and Ingram, Reference Schneider and Ingram1997). It provides people (poor and non-poor) with a subject position from which they make sense of poverty and take actions to overcome it. Social welfare policy discourse, then, is dialectical: it works from the top down, constituting marginalised groups and positioning them in the social order, but it simultaneously works from the bottom up, as it becomes enacted and negotiated by social actors in actually existing social relations (Hacking, Reference Hacking2004).
Discourses of poverty and welfare reflect the broader political-economic rationality of their time. Neoliberalism is considered the dominant political-economic rationality of our particular era (Cummins, Reference Cummins2018). Neoliberalism is much more than just laissez-faire capitalism. Under neoliberalism, the economic logic of the market has been extended to ever-growing domains of human life previously thought of as non-market domains (Brown, Reference Brown2015; Cummins, Reference Cummins2018; Lemke, Reference Lemke2001). Government bureaucracies, nonprofit organisations, communities and individuals are reconfigured as economic actors who are measured in economic terms and metrics.
In the current study, we focus on one key feature of neoliberalism: the fabrication of entrepreneurial subjectivity. Foucault (Reference Foucault2008) conceives of neoliberalism not just as an ideology or economic theory promoting market rule and unfettered accumulation of capital but also as an ‘art of government’. Foucault treats neoliberalism as a form of political rationality that operates by means of discourses to produce the mentalities and modes of self-discipline required for the continued operation of the neoliberal project. He argues that, in the neoliberal era, the state, with NGOs on its side, deploys covert techniques in order to fabricate a distinctive political figure conceptualised as an ‘entrepreneur of himself’. He explains:
In neo-liberalism. . . there is also a theory of homo oeconomicus. . . Homo oeconomicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself. . . the stake in all neoliberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as partner of exchange with a homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings (Foucault Reference Foucault2008: 226).
Foucault's neoliberal subject is ‘a behaviouristically manipulable being’ (Lemke, Reference Lemke2001: 200) who is profit-driven and competitive. Brown (Reference Brown2015: 10) claims that the neoliberal subject ‘is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its (monetary and nonmonetary) competitive positioning and with enhancing its portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues’. In other words, through multiple discourses circulating in our present era, neoliberal rationality constitutes people as self-governing subjects who bear responsibility for themselves and participate in various market-based activities in order to enhance their own human capital, which is the primary source of their earnings.
Echoing Foucault's work, a growing literature closely examines processes of financialisation and their penetration into everyday life. The concept of financialisation has been used to describe the growing dominance of financial markets and financial institutions in every sphere of human endeavor (Langley, Reference Lemke2010). One influential strand of this literature suggests that specific hegemonic discourses (e.g. discourses of personal responsibility and risk-taking) shape people's understandings of their role in contemporary society according to financial logics (Lai, Reference Langley2018). These discourses form the ‘entrepreneurial financial subject’, who embraces market risks and deploys various financial practices that aim to ensure long-term household security (Langley, Reference Lemke2010). However, the critical role that asset-building discourse plays in processes of financialisation, and its impact on how poor subjects cope with their dire circumstances, have been largely overlooked in this literature.
Also drawing inspiration from Foucault's theoretical insights, critical social welfare scholars have paid much attention to the ways in which poor subjects in the neoliberal era are constituted and constructed through interrelated discourses. One strand of this literature has examined the ways in which powerful actors (such as the media, intellectuals and politicians) produce and enact discourses of poverty and welfare that tend to focus on certain populations (Askheim et al., Reference Askheim, Christensen, Fluge and Guldvik2017; Fraser and Gordon, Reference Fraser and Gordon1994; Garrett, Reference Garrett2017; Herbst, Reference Herbst2013; Schram, Reference Schram2000; Wilson and Huntington, Reference Wilson and Huntington2006). For example, Fraser and Gordon (Reference Fraser and Gordon1994) investigate the history of dependency discourse, showing how the prevailing moral-psychological meaning of welfare receipt has been socially constructed in the US. Relatedly, Schram (Reference Schram2000) investigates the ways in which the figure of the welfare queen, which identifies African-American mothers as cheats and delegitimises welfare use by them, has become a cultural icon in recent decades. Conversely, drawing on official policy documents, Askheim and his colleagues (Reference Askheim, Christensen, Fluge and Guldvik2017) show how a social rights-based discourse in Norway constructs members of some groups (e.g. older people or people with disabilities) as full citizens. Another strand of this literature has examined how discourses of poverty and welfare translate into governing mentalities for frontline workers, who implement policies on the ground and are in relations with people in poverty (Houser et al., Reference Houser, Schram, Soss, Fording, Haymes, Vidal de Haymes and Miller2015; Suvarierol, Reference Suvarierol2015; Taylor et al., 2018; Turgeon, Reference Turgeon2018; Woolford and Curran, Reference Woolford and Curran2013). For example, Houser and her colleagues (Reference Houser, Schram, Soss, Fording, Haymes, Vidal de Haymes and Miller2015) show how caseworkers in the US enact barriers discourse in ways that individualise the structural conditions that their low-income clients confront. In Canada, Woolford and Curran (Reference Woolford and Curran2013) find that caseworkers in social service agencies use business language as they discuss how they do their job.
Despite its many important insights, we identified two gaps in the literature on the discursive aspects of welfare policy and poverty. First, this literature has focused on the governance of poverty and poor subjects in traditional social assistance programmes and welfare offices. Yet the social construction of poverty and the constitution of poor subjects today occurs in new welfare arenas that did not exist in the past. Second, little attention has been given to the perspective of poor subjects: that is, how those on the bottom experience these governance processes and respond to them. The few exceptions include Gowan (Reference Gowan2010), who finds that homeless men partake of competing discourses of homelessness that promote varying degrees of personal affirmation and self-denigration. Studying low-income mothers, McCormack (Reference McCormack2005) shows how they construct themselves as ‘good’ mothers by employing the discourse of ‘intensive mothering’ and resisting the discourse of the ‘welfare mother’. The current study extends earlier work by shifting the attention to the asset-building arena, investigating how asset-building discourse shapes poor subjects’ understanding of their poverty challenges.
The road out of serfdom: savings and asset accumulation
In the neoliberal era, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle-class to the upper-class. In the US, where our study was conducted, research shows that the top 1 per cent wealth share increased from 22 per cent in 1980 to 39 per cent in 2014 (Alvaredo et al., Reference Alvaredo, Chancel, Piketty, Saez and Zucman2018). Shapiro (Reference Shapiro2017) argues that race has been a central driving force behind this wealth gap. The Institute for Assets & Social Policy, which Shapiro directs, has found that the median wealth of white households in the US was $111,146 in 2011, compared to $7,113 for the median black household (Sullivan et al., Reference Sullivan, Meschede, Dietrich and Shapiro2015). Furthermore, wealth inequality between blacks and whites has worsened over the past three decades: the white-black wealth gap was $245,500 in 2013, compared to only $84,400 in 1984 (Shapiro, Reference Shapiro2017). Research suggests that homeownership is the primary explanation for this widening racial gap. Findings from the Institute for Assets & Social Policy show that homeownership rates for whites in 2011 were 28 per cent higher than the rates for blacks (73 per cent of whites owned a home, compared to 45 per cent of blacks) (Sullivan et al., Reference Sullivan, Meschede, Dietrich and Shapiro2015).
To address this increasing economic inequality, neoliberal social welfare policies and the discourses surrounding them have focused on moving low-income people into the market and immersing them in market experiences (Berndt, Reference Berndt2015; Garrett, Reference Garrett2017). Asset-building is a relatively new innovation in this neoliberal, anti-poverty agenda. Michael Sherraden, who first conceived of the idea of asset-building, argues that people are trapped in poverty because they lack savings and assets which tend to increase in value (Sherraden, Reference Sherraden1991). Given the central role of savings and assets, Sherraden developed asset-building strategies that help the poor save money and accumulate assets for long-term financial stability. Asset-building proponents argue that asset-building and public assistance programmes are two distinctive approaches to reducing poverty. While public assistance programmes are important, they are not effective in reducing poverty over the long run because they emphasise the maintenance of an income needed to continue consuming at a particular level (Sherraden, Reference Sherraden1991). In order to move people out of poverty and promote their economic security, welfare policy should incentivise savings and asset accumulation.
To achieve the goals of asset-building, Sherraden (Reference Sherraden1991) created Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), which is a community-based matched savings programme. Although the initial proposal had universal elements, IDAs today are, by and large, targeted at low-income families (Soffer et al., Reference Soffer, McDonald and Blanck2010). For every dollar IDA participants save, they receive match money (usually 1:2). The matching funds usually cannot exceed a certain amount over the course of the programme. The savings accrued can be used only for asset-based goals that develop the family, including purchasing a home, acquiring post-secondary education or professional training, or opening a small business (Soffer et al., Reference Soffer, McDonald and Blanck2010). In addition to saving, participants are required to attend financial education classes, which cover topics such as buying a home for the first time. Participation in the programme is voluntary and clients have the option to leave at any time. In the US, there are hundreds of IDAs, which are operated by nonprofit local organisations and whose largest source of funding comes from the federal government (Soffer et al., Reference Soffer, McDonald and Blanck2010).
As a discourse that establishes political truths about poverty, asset-building discourse positions poor subjects as market actors who are committed to becoming asset owners by diligently saving. We argue that a critical analysis of asset-building discourse can provide a window into the inner workings of contemporary discourses of poverty that cultivate particular identities and behaviours that are needed to sustain the existing neoliberal order. In other words, we claim that welfare policy discourse today will be misunderstood if we ignore the distinctive contribution of asset-building. Interestingly, despite its centrality in discussions of poverty and welfare, research has not given sufficient attention to the discourse of asset building and the power it exercises on poor subjects. Studies of asset-building programmes, especially IDAs, have been mostly concerned with quantitative evaluation of the programme's impact on savings behaviour (Sanders, Reference Sanders2014; Schreiner and Sherraden, Reference Schreiner and Sherraden2007), factors associated with increased savings (Loibl et al., Reference Loibl, Jones, Haisley and Loewenstein2016; Soffer et al., Reference Soffer, McDonald and Blanck2010), and the programme's long-term effect on asset ownership (Grinstein-Weiss et al., Reference Grinstein-Weiss, Sherraden, Rohe, Gale, Schreiner and Key2012; Shobe et al., Reference Shapiro2017). One exception to this literature is a qualitative study that examines clients’ experience of the IDA programme (Sherraden and McBride, Reference Sherraden and McBride2010). Findings show that clients wanted to save, and attributed importance to saving. Clients also emphasised how the savings they accrued in the programme provided them security and changed their thinking about their goals in life. Sherraden and McBride's study, however, does not adopt a critical perspective on asset-building, failing to analyse the experience of clients in relation to larger structural forces that produce poor subjects and shape how poverty is addressed today. The current study contributes to the growing literature on asset-building strategies by critically interrogating their discursive aspects. It asks: how do poor subjects enact asset-building discourse? What are the implications for how they confront poverty?
Method
This study utilises qualitative design and methods. It employs a discourse analysis approach, which examines patterns of language use in relation to structures of power (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough2013). The main assumption of discourse analysis is that language and talk are central and constitutive features of the phenomenon of interest, and hence are worthy of analysis (Wood and Kroger, Reference Wood and Kroger2000). Our approach to analysing discourse is being premised on the idea that discourse has a dual meaning: it is the statements said or written down in actually existing social relations but also an underlying structure of intelligibility that creates an interpretive context, informing how social actors talk about what they are doing (Schram, Reference Schram2015). In the current study, discourse analysis has allowed us to reveal how asset-building provides a language and narrative that poor subjects use and enact in everyday life to make sense of their poverty and how to overcome it.
The research setting is a nonprofit organisation in a large US city where asset-building strategies are particularly prevalent. The organisation delivers a set of asset-based programmes targeted specifically at low-income women in impoverished communities across the city. The flagship of the agency is the IDA programme, which is one of the oldest programmes in the country and is identical to the IDA programme examined by past research. The programme is funded by the federal government and the state, as well as through private foundations.
The data for this study were collected via semi-structured interviews with clients in the programme. Interviews began with some ‘warm-up’ questions about their life history and family background. They then focused on the client's: (1) understanding of the working of the programme; (2) perceptions regarding the philosophy and rules of the programme; (3) interactions with the workers in the programme; (4) financial knowledge and behaviour; (5) economic coping strategies; and (6) ideas about poverty. Interviews provided ample opportunities for clients to express in their own terms how they experience the programme and how they see themselves and their problems of poverty. Interviews were conducted in late 2014 and the first half of 2015. They were recorded and transcribed verbatim.
The sample includes 24 low-income, African American female programme participants. This sample size was sufficient to reflect the range of voices and perspectives of clients in the programme. Purposive sampling was used to select clients: that is, we deliberately chose participants from whom we could learn the most about our research questions. Specifically, we pursued the strategy of ‘typical case sampling’ (Patton, Reference Patton2014), which was aimed at selecting participants who are somewhat ‘typical’ of the IDA programme. One of the caseworkers at the agency conducted a demographic analysis of all clients in the programme. The worker identified the characteristics of an ‘average’ client in the programme: (1) female; (2) African-American; (3) single mother; (4) age 21–55 years old; (5) employed either full-time or part-time; and (6) monthly household income below 150 per cent of the official poverty line. We used these characteristics as the criteria for inclusion and accordingly recruited clients who met them. Participants in the final sample had similar characteristics but had been in the programme for different lengths of time.
Staff members played a key role in recruiting clients who met these sampling criteria. Clients who were new to the programme were recruited by their caseworkers when they showed up at the agency (e.g. to attend a meeting). Caseworkers also recruited established clients who did not visit the agency very often by calling these clients over the phone. To ensure that clients were not vulnerable to coercion, workers explained to clients that they should not feel obligated to participate in the study and that deciding not to participate would not affect their status in the programme.
We employed a two-fold strategy for data analysis. First, inspired by the discourse analysis strategies of Fairclough (Reference Fairclough2013) and Wood and Kroger (Reference Wood and Kroger2000), we read the interview transcripts and traced how asset-building discourse is enacted in our informants’ everyday talk. In particular, we generated a list of keywords associated with asset-building discourse (e.g. savings and homeownership) and flagged speech pertaining to these keywords. We were interested to see not just whether our informants used these terms but how they interpreted them. In the process, we wrote memos which included initial ideas about the analytic themes. Based on these memos, a coding scheme was created that involved four themes pertaining to how our informants talked. To trouble our preconceptions, we also used a grounded approach in order to capture emergent themes from the data (Charmaz, Reference Charmaz2014). Findings were discussed with some of the informants in order to enhance trustworthiness.
Findings
Findings show that the women whom we interviewed enact asset-building discourse by employing four interrelated discursive moves that help them reimagine their economic predicament: self-sufficiency, financial literacy, saving discipline and entrepreneurship.
The Self-Sufficient Subject
Welfare policy discourse in a period of neoliberalism is focused on compelling the poor to engage on their own, with minimal assistance or support, in market-based activities that would move them from reliance on government benefits to self-sufficiency. The neoliberal emphasis on self-sufficiency carries a particular meaning in asset-building discourse, which aims to constitute subjects who practice self-reliance by saving and acquiring assets. Self-sufficiency was central to how our informants talked about themselves and their relations with the IDA programme. Most of the women that we interviewed portrayed themselves as women who are generally responsible for meeting their financial needs and aspire not to rely on government assistance or any other support. They discussed how asset-building is designed to help them ‘support themselves’ or ‘rely on themselves’ and become ‘self-sufficient’ and ‘independent’. In the process, they frequently talked about how asset-building serves as a vehicle for ‘getting off of welfare’ (although some of them relied on it at the time of the interview or in their past). Not one of our respondents mentioned the goal of poverty alleviation. For instance, Tiana'sFootnote 1 goal is to become self-sufficient by practicing asset-building:
I think that [asset-building] is about giving people access to resources that help them become self-sufficient. If you get into this programme and you work towards owning your own home, then the government no longer have to help you and pay for your rent. Self-sufficiency! It's a programme for low-income people to help them become self-sufficient. . . It helps me be self-sufficient, not needing any help. Once I complete this programme and I get to where I'm able to pay my own mortgage, then I'm fine. The only one that can take that away from me is me.
Interviewer: And that's something you want to achieve? Being self-sufficient?
Tiana: Yes!
As a recipient of rental assistance, Tiana expressed her desire to stop relying on government for support and, instead, support herself. She repeated her aspiration not to rely on government benefits twice during the interview. Tianna assumed that she will complete her transition into self-sufficiency once she successfully achieves her savings goal and purchases a house. The discourse of self-sufficiency in this sense is related to the discourse of welfare dependency, which shapes Tiana's negative views of reliance on public assistance. Another client, Alyssa, articulated why, although she suffers from long-term disability and receives disability benefits, she wants to free herself from reliance on government assistance. She explained her interest in asset-building in highly gendered terms:
Their goals [of the programme] were to have women to be more independent, don't depend on, you know, a man, or not even just a man, but the government. . . I rely on government with my social security and I know, I say, ‘Well, you worked for that. You earned that. You worked all these years’. But that's starting to play thin with me, it's still making me say, you know, it's still not enough for me to progress. That I need to, you know, do something more. . . When you rely on government, I think that you start limiting yourself.
Although she sees herself as worthy of assistance, Alyssa acknowledges the fact that receiving government benefits constrains her and prevents her from overcoming her poverty-related problems. Like Tianna, she views asset-building as a vehicle for achieving independence as a woman and reducing her dependence on the government.
The discourse of self-sufficiency is also related to the discourse of personal responsibility, as the self-sufficient client who does not rely on government assistance is expected to take personal responsibility for her plight and the decisions she makes as a citizen. Madison's goal was to purchase a home with her savings. When asked what she thinks are the goals of asset-building programmes, Madison responded: ‘Responsibility. Responsibility is to make sure you are able to take care of situations that you've created. For me, I have children. I want to make sure that I'm able to take care of them without any assistance from the state’. Although she relies on government assistance in the form of Child Care Subsidy, Madison draws on asset-building discourse to construct herself as a responsible mother who meets the needs of her children without relying on anyone, especially the government, for help.
The financially literate subject
Another key discourse enacted by the women in our study is financial literacy. Asset-building discourse suggests that people in poverty should be financially literate so they can make financial decisions as ‘free’ and ‘rational’ actors. Many of the women reported that, before joining the programme, they were ‘all over the place’, ‘didn't know anything,’ and ‘needed to get [themselves] together’. Women also reported that the programme helped them ‘get it back together,’ ‘look at different things financially’, ‘hold the purse strings’, ‘manage things better’, and be more ‘mindful of [their] budget’. Samantha, for example, draws on asset-building discourse to describe the improvement she made in how she handles her finances: ‘I'm just not all over the place anymore. I used to be all over the place, and I owed everybody. So I've been able to get a handle on my money and credit. You know, it's not totally there, but it's getting there’. Similarly, Trinity discussed how the programme's tutoring changed her financial behaviour:
The programme is there as a learning tool, it teaches you about your finances, it starts teaching you about credit, it starts teaching you how to control your money. . . I now look more closely. I wasn't looking at my credit report, my credit score, I wasn't working on a budget. I wasn't looking at things like that.
The identity of the financially literate client was performed in multiple ways in the interviews. One significant way was through reliance on the language of frugality. Clients who are financially literate are expected to demonstrate frugality: that is, they are expected to carefully manage their finances and reduce their spending as much as possible. Many clients talked about how, as a result of their participation in the programme, they started practicing frugality. For example, Trinity described how she has become more frugal: ‘I'm now more into working on the budget and I'm more into trying to lower my bills as much as possible and cut out things I don't need’. Alyssa also constructed herself as a frugal subject. When asked how the programme influenced her, she responded in this way:
It just made me think about what I'm spending you know. Everything is so high and if you can get free toothpaste, free laundry detergent, free toiletry, you know, that's good. . . I coupon a lot. I got Nutella for 99 cents this week [laughing]. That's a big deal to me, you know.
According to Alyssa, the current economic system leaves women like her no choice but to reduce family spending and live more frugally, something which asset-building has made her more aware of. Like Alyssa, Maria also claimed that she started living more frugally since she joined the programme:
It helped me to keep better hold of my purse strings. . . I feel as though it has taught me to really get a hold of it because me I'd be like ‘okay, this phone is acting up I'm just going to buy another phone’. Where since joining the programme I've been more prone to looking up stuff now.
Other women drew on asset-building discourse to portray themselves as clients who not only minimise household expenses but also teach their friends frugal living skills. Dina, for example, has been busy raising her children and helping them (her youngest son suffers from autism and a bipolar disorder, and her oldest has been in and out of prison). Although she has not worked for a long time and her income is meagre, Dina presented herself in the interview as a frugal client who tries (unsuccessfully) to teach her friends how to handle their finances more frugally:
I have friends that don't value how they spend their money. . . They seem to just buy this and buy that and then after a week they're saying: ‘I don't have much money left’. It's not a value for them. . . I try to let friends of mine know what to do and how to do, but I don't get too far with that. . . I know where my priorities are. I don't have to go out and get a pair of shoes; I've got shoes upstairs. . . I buy what I need. I have girlfriends that are calling and it's like two weeks in the month and they're broke and I'm like ‘emmh’. But I try to help them and tell them what to do.
Dina claimed that she now knows how to figure out her financial priorities and has strong money management skills. She created a contrast between her actions and the feckless behaviour of her friends, suggesting that their improvidence made life more difficult for them. As a frugal manager of her finances, she tries to help them improve their financial situation by instilling financial literacy and frugality in them.
The disciplined saver
Casting clients as savers lies at the heart of the discourse of asset-building. As can be expected, all of the respondents envisioned themselves as savers and told us that they believed saving is very important. As one woman noted, ‘I think saving is extremely important. . . I feel like I'm growing into becoming a saver’.
Asset-building discourse, however, is about more than just emphasising the importance of saving. More importantly, it operates to position clients as disciplined savers, who save regularly until it becomes a habit. Almost all of the women in the study confirmed that asset-building helped them develop the ‘habit of saving’. One of the women illustrates it well: ‘It's the habit of saving, I think, the programme taught me’. Similarly, another woman said: ‘They [the caseworkers] don't want you to do something fast, fast, fast, and don't learn the lesson. The lesson is how to build something, build the desire and the fortitude to do something over and over and over and over and over again’.
For many women, taking on the subject position of the disciplined saver who practices the habit of saving meant not only that they had to make deposits consistently and on a regular basis but, not less important, that they could not withdraw the money they set aside, regardless of their changing circumstances. In the process, the women talked about the challenges they faced as they struggled not to break the habit of saving. Roselyn, for example, lives with her three children and works full-time. Despite the challenges of making ends meet that she confronts every month, Roselyn emphasised the importance of staying disciplined with the money she saves:
To save, you just have to be disciplined, being dedicated to it. . . I can ‘touch’ the money, but I mentally mark the money as not to touch it. . . I am mentally challenging myself not to touch the money I'm saving in the programme. . . The programme teaches you to have a goal, to be driven to that goal, and learn life-time financial rules, regulations, discipline, whatever it may take. . . If you're not disciplined, the money will fly out of your hand. They say ‘a fool with his money will soon be parted’. I think it's true. For me, it's crunch time. My daughter expects to go to college next year, so it's now or never.
Roselyn constructed herself as someone who, for many years, lacked the self-discipline required to save over time; she was not strong enough. She claimed that asset-building has helped her develop this strength and self-discipline to save habitually without tapping the money, which is critical to achieving her goal of sending her daughter to college.
Ciera is another client who talked about how she did not touch her savings and thus protected her identity as a disciplined saver. Working three jobs, she described how being a disciplined saver who does not tap into her savings affects her relationship with her two children:
My kids want stuff all the time. Sometimes I feel bad. For like this weekend, my kids gonna be going away, but if they were here with me, they'll be here Sunday and they are used to going out. I would have to tell them that we're not going, ‘Well, I couldn't take you out’. We don't have it and that's just what it is. It would hurt me because I can't take them out, but they'll be okay. . . Being a saver, it just helps you mould to be a better person.
Ciera presented herself as a disciplined saver who has never missed a deposit in the programme. At the personal level, taking on the identity of the disciplined saver influences Ciera in contradictory ways. On the one hand, saving on a habitual basis makes her feel bad because it prevents her from providing her children with everything that she would like them to have and, hence, it undermines her mothering in the short run. On the other hand, it makes her feel good about herself and she is confident the trade-off between saving and what is good for her family will eventually be resolved. In any case, Ciera is committed to saving consistently, irrespective of how it affects her mothering in the short run.
Other women spoke about how there were many times in which they needed money given their financial circumstances, but they nonetheless did not miss a deposit nor tap into their savings because they were disciplined savers who refrain from breaking the habit of saving. Madison explained that practicing the habit of saving was so important to her that she sometimes did not pay all her bills: ‘Even if a bill doesn't get paid on time, I still save. For instance, right now, my account is overdrawn’. Similarly, Klevon talked about the challenge of saving consistently while she barely earns enough money to cover her bills and other monthly expenses:
I have rent, I have a car, I have so many other bills. . . you have things that aren't monthly bills that you may want to do, you know, buy an outfit, buy this and that. But you have to save this amount of money each month. . . I always make sure I make that payment [save] every month.
Despite all the challenges, almost all of the interviews show that the discourse of the habit of saving has produced positive changes in the women's feelings. They spoke about how saving made them feel ‘good’, ‘strong’, ‘energized’, ‘awesome’, ‘successful’, ‘confident’ and ‘happy’. One woman, for instance, said: ‘It [saving] feels good because I have some money! (laughs). I don't have millions and billions, but I got a couple hundred dollars’. Another woman explained that ‘saving makes me feel strong and energised and it makes me closer to my goal. It makes me feel right’.
In contrast, some women spoke about how they felt when they were not able to save, or when they were not able to save the full amount that they committed to saving when they joined the programme. These women told us that not saving had a negative impact on how they felt. In particular, they reported feeling ‘bad’, ‘guilty’, ‘depressed’ and ‘sad’. Klevon articulated how not saving made her feel: ‘It makes me feel bad anytime I'm not able to save. Because I know saving is something I like to do. So not doing it will make me feel a certain way’. Another woman, Jada, described how she felt when she was not able to save in this way: ‘I don't like it; it's living very dangerously’. Alyssa prefers to avoid thinking about not being able to save: ‘When I don't save, I try not to think about it. . . I just put it out my head’.
The entrepreneurial subject
Finally, asset-building discourse offers a welcoming environment for an interrelated discourse of entrepreneurship that constitutes subjects as entrepreneurs who are savvy enough to recognise and take advantage of the opportunities that are available for them to accumulate wealth. Our findings demonstrate how the discourse of asset-building and the discourse of entrepreneurship are closely linked. Our female informants took on the more commonly assumed male identity of the entrepreneur, as they expressed their aspiration to enhance their future value via engagement in various innovative, even risky, strategies in the formal economy. Asset-building discourse, for example, often prompted the women to speak in the interviews about their business plans and their ongoing efforts to turn them into reality. Tamila is one of these women. She lives with her children in a room she rents from one of her relatives. It was important for her to emphasise in the interview that
I'm also an entrepreneur so I'm working on my business ideas. . . I capitalise off my talents. . . I saved and I'm gonna take, like, $500 from my savings and do an investment and see, you know, see what happens, see how it works. . . it's time to take some risks.
Tamila interprets asset-building discourse as suggesting that she should be more entrepreneurial and take more risks in the market. Throughout the interview, she spoke about four different entrepreneurial endeavours that she plans to pursue, hoping they will help her overcome her poverty. Regardless of whether any of her entrepreneurial ventures turn out to be successful, Tamila demonstrates how asset-building discourse remakes clients in the image of the risk-taking entrepreneur.
Alisha, who is a recent graduate of the programme, offers another example that illustrates how an entrepreneurial spirit is embraced by clients in the programme if taking it beyond the norm:
The programme kind of encouraged me to purchase other homes and maybe take them and sell them and fix ‘em up and stuff like that because I know what I'm getting into. . . I'm thinking of buying more homes and like flippin’ them. Buying them, fixing them, renovating them, and selling them or renting them. . . I'm thinking of learning how to write a business plan because I want to open maybe a nursing facility and maybe like a few other things. . . my boyfriend is a contractor so I'll probably get into something with him when he gets his licence. Then, I can get the real estate and get the properties and kind of have him fixing them up, kind of being my handyman so that the money will be going in a circle.
Working more than full-time but still poor, Alisha has come to terms with the reality that the limited opportunities that are available for her in the low-wage labour market would not enable her to climb the socio-economic ladder. Asset-building has emboldened her to draw on the discourse of entrepreneurship, as she describes her plan to increase her meagre income by making smart investments in the market. While Alisha ambitiously spoke about ‘flipping’ homes for profit and even opening a nursing home, Kinsey, who was saving to do some home repairs, was also quite taken with getting involved in market speculation and was interested in pursuing entrepreneurial ventures in the stock market. She said in the interview that ‘a lot of people weren't taught to save, weren't taught to invest. The one thing I would like to know now is how to invest in the stock market’. Another client, Jada, draws hope from the discourse of entrepreneurship while disavowing the structural roots of her predicament: ‘You can't give up, it's a fight to get what you want these days. And it's out there, the money is there, you just gotta find it, and it's a part-time job finding it’.
Discussion
This study has focused on the different ways in which female, low-income clients partake of asset-building discourse. To clarify the findings and to better understand the character of asset-building discourse, the study has built on a theoretical framework that is grounded in Foucault's (Reference Foucault2008) critical understanding of neoliberalism as a political project forming and sustaining entrepreneurial subjectivity.
Our findings are consistent with Foucault's (Reference Foucault2008) perspective. The women in our study draw on asset-building discourse to position themselves, first and foremost, as hard-nosed, savvy market actors who take care of themselves and work to enhance their economic and human capital in the mainstream economy. The women view themselves, as Foucault observes, as their own source of capital production outside the home. Asset-building discourse, we argue, participates in the work of financialising citizens, especially marginalised women, and remaking them in the image of homo oeconomicus. In the process, it largely erases class experiences that make market behaviour challenging and problematic for these women. These findings confirm Garrett's (Reference Garrett2017) work, which shows that contemporary discourses treat poverty as an economic and individualised condition of persons. Our findings also indicate that asset-building discourse de-genders economic marginality, as it intensifies the competitive dimension of capitalist market logic while largely overlooking caregiving and homemaking responsibilities. Moreover, although the sample was all African-Americans, issues of race were largely not reflected in their narratives. Our findings therefore suggest that asset-building discourse operates in ways that also reinscribe racial biases and differences (Shapiro, Reference Shapiro2017). In short, we have presented an empirical case for the argument that asset-building discourse (which is a paradigmatic case of social welfare policy in the neoliberal era) plays an important role in constituting economic subjectivity, independent of how one is identified and positioned in society. The gender of subjects, however, could not be simply wished away, as the women in our study (who are all single mothers) take on the identity of the entrepreneur of the self so they could ultimately care for their children and promise them a better future (as the stories of Madison and Roselyn, for instance, demonstrate). In this sense, the women do not see the entrepreneurial identity as undermining or clashing with their identity as mothers over the long run.
In engaging in discourses of self-sufficiency, financial literacy, saving discipline, and entrepreneurship, the women face a key contradiction. The discourses surrounding financial literacy and entrepreneurship draw on a neoliberal logic that casts women as rational economic actors who make informed financial decisions. A savvy entrepreneur, for example, carefully considers the costs and benefits as well as the consequences of each decision she is about to make. Similarly, a frugal woman is someone who wisely manages her finances and prudently prioritises her spending. On the other hand, the discourse surrounding the disciplined saver suggests that women must save out of a habit, without reflecting on their changing circumstances or the consequences of this behaviour. In this discourse, saving is conceived as a habitual behaviour done automatically without conscious or explicit economic computations. Setting aside a set amount of money on a fixed schedule is in many ways the opposite of practicing the reflexive decision-making associated with the discourse of entrepreneurship and financial literacy. Findings indicate that the women often resolve this contradiction by prioritising the logic of the habit of saving, which sometimes comes at a great cost: for example, when they delay paying the bills or go into overdraft.
Our findings also indicate that asset-building discourse is also a positive power in the lives of women. Asset-building discourse is interpreted by the women as potentially opening up financial opportunities and experiences to them. By doing so, it operates to enhance feelings of social inclusion, regardless of whether the women are indeed more included as a result of it. Furthermore, asset-building discourse empowers the women in ways that make them see themselves as worthy citizens. These findings are in line with research on how recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit interpret the programme (Sykes et al., Reference Sykes, Križ, Edin and Halpern-Meekin2015). Our findings, however, are in sharp contrast to welfare research that shows that women receiving cash assistance feel shame and stigma (Edin and Shaefer, Reference Edin and Shaefer2015; McCormack, Reference McCormack2005). Asset-building, however, is not seen as ‘welfare’ and therefore, without that stigma, offers an important lesson in how welfare policy discourse ought to make people feel. It should be noted that the possibility that our female informants’ positive feelings are misplaced certainly looms large as studies show that the average amounts of savings among clients are very low (Schreiner and Sherraden, Reference Schreiner and Sherraden2007) and that the programme has by and large no effect on their asset-ownership (Grinstein-Weiss et al., Reference Grinstein-Weiss, Sherraden, Rohe, Gale, Schreiner and Key2012).
One could argue that a possible limitation to our findings is the sample, which included low-income women who chose and volunteered to participate in the IDA programme. The sample may therefore be biased toward people who already, before joining the programme, hold and express neoliberal ideals in many respects. It is important to note, however, that our study is based on an interpretive approach to research that avoids inferring causality and therefore in no way suggests that the programme made clients think and talk this way.
It is of course possible that the women in our study resist and repudiate the neoliberal identity that asset-building discourse imparts to them. Although questions of opposition and resistance are important and have been explored in the literature (McCormack, Reference McCormack2005; Gowan, Reference Gowan2010), we cannot determine that that is a likely outcome from our data. Instead, we can only present how our female informants partook of asset-building discourse and enacted its contradictions, for better or worse. We also did not determine whether the women in our study actually believe that asset building is the best solution to their economic plight or whether they just pretend to be invested in this discourse. Our analysis, however, does perhaps most significantly enable us to see that asset-building discourse accomplishes important political and emotional labour, reinscribing neoliberal logics which frame poverty as an individual problem that people are responsible for overcoming on their own.
Going forward, our study stresses the importance of studying asset-building at the discursive level. Future research should examine how asset-building discourse is deployed by other demographic groups (e.g. Latino families or African-American fathers). Studies can also examine the ways in which asset-building discourse operates and is enacted in different countries (outside of the US) where such programmes are prevalent. Given that IDAs are only one of a broad range of asset-building programmes implemented today, future research should explore asset-building discourse within the context of different programmes. Studies, for example, can examine the discourse operating in asset-building programmes that encourage tax-time savings. This research agenda could yield valuable insights that would move us toward a broader understanding of asset-building as an anti-poverty strategy. At the practice level, the study highlights the need to foster counter-discourses of welfare and poverty that challenge asset-building discourse's individualisation of poor people's predicament.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their helpful comments.
