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This paper draws attention to people’s pension savings and their responses to the increasing calls urging them to engage in practices of calculation about their future life as retirees. Recurring studies report that these calculation exercises have turned out to raise problems to people, provoking – at times – frustration or even indifference among pension savers. But why is that so? Why do people not engage in this kind of calculations? Prior literature suggests that mechanic calculation presupposes a set of conditions. Individual knowledge-based capacity (Lusardi and Mitchell 2007) as well as commensurate translations that enables possibilities for comparisons between different kinds of choices (Espeland and Stevens 1998; Callon & Law, 2005) are but a few conditions that are suggested to be fulfilled in order to make rational calculation feasible. There are situations, however, when calculation is called for and expected to be attended to without controversy, but still turn out as moments where rational principles of calculation do not seem to apply (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Calculating one’s pension might be argued to represent one such situation. Based on our empirical observations, the basis for rational calculation seems to be challenged when pension savers are asked to imagine an existence taking place in a future several decades ahead from the life they lead today. Hence, in order to further explore the reasons to this experienced calculative dilemma, we ask: What role does future play in practicing pension calculations? The aim of this paper is to extend our understanding of the conditions of calculation. The idea is to investigate situations in which calculation entail dilemmas of rationality. To frame the conditions of calculation, we draw on Jaspers’ idea of boundary situations (2010). A boundary situation is a moment in which a person is faced with discrepancies and contradictions that cannot easily be resolved by means of rational thinking. We s

This paper reports from a study of four pension reforms in Sweden over the last century. The paper tests the dominant idea that pension systems as well as accounting technologies are a part of the neoliberal influenced financialization of the private sphere. Although corroborating the proposition about financialization, the paper suggests that programs such as financialization is temporal because they are challenged by obligatory points of controversy. These obligatory points of controversy recur over time as issues that pension systems need to handle with decisions and calculations. The study finds that the obligatory points of controversy, however, are never solved because they interact and are in flux. In Sweden, the three controversies that are repeated are the discussion of demography, finance and ideology. These three issues forces the decisionmaker to answer such issues as “what is it to be Swedish?”, “can we afford this?” and “what is our idea of involvement between of the state/the private sector?”

This paper is concerned with the role of emotions in reading and interpreting financial accounts. Even though people’s capacity to understand accounting to a large extent has been taken as given in the accounting research field, some studies have shown that accounting information nor the ability to interpret it, seldom inhibit any universal meaning. Prior research demonstrates how accounting users tend to engage in various kinds of sense making activities, referred to as “accounting talk”, in which cognitive capacities are developed, helping people translating accounting information into local contextualized knowledge. Whereas previous studies of accounting talk have focused on how the individual’s cognitive resources are developed, this paper broadens the analytical scope to include the emotive resources for making sense of financial accounts. The paper provides a detailed close-up of how pension-savers interpret and react to financial accounts presented to them during individual pension advisory meetings. Informed by a sociological approach to emotions, the empirical results indicate that emotions play several but different roles in people’s interpretations of financial accounts, and should not necessarily be perceived as inhibiting people’s cognitive sense-making ability. In fact, the relation between rational reasoning and emotions in relation to accounts should be understood as a symbiotic interdependence.

This paper comments on the conceptualisation of financial literacy by investigating the way it is defined, problematised, and operationalised in efforts to overcome its perceived impediments. The backdrop of this study is the idea that the financial literacy movement goes hand in hand with the financialisation of society. By reporting from a study of practices of financial literacy, the aim is to problematise prior literature by disentangling the notion of financial literacy from the assumption of a singular capability that, when gained, automatically effects people’s financial practices. The paper draws on recent developments in literacy research, New Literacy Studies, and on its division between autonomous and ideological definitions of literacy. The empirical illustrations originate from efforts made to decrease financial illiteracy among Swedish adolescents and the demand for financial literacy in audit committees. Contrary to earlier studies, the paper demonstrates that financial literacy does not merely refer to an ostensive character that researchers may find lacking among marginalised actors in society. As such, financial literacy cannot be viewed as merely the ability to read and write finance and accounting. Instead, financial literacy is a concept that needs to be situated and studied in practice since what constitutes and applies to it varies with time and place.

Dagens finanansialiserade samhälle ställer allt högre krav på individers ekonomiska ansvarstagande. Den här boken handlar om hur det kommer till uttryck genom olika former av finansiell folkbildning. I tre studier av svenska staten, tv-programmet Lyxfällan och ett svenskt pensionsförsäkringsbolag, beskirver och analyserar författaren hur ekonomisk information genomgår en rad översättningar på vägen från avsändarna till mottagarna. Hon blottlägger de metoder och översättningsmekanismer som de studerade samhällsaktörerna använder i syfte att göra ekonomisk information mer tillgänglig och relevant för människor i deras vardag. Efter vilken mall är då dagens finansiella fokdräkt skuren? Det handar om att fostra aktivt väljande medborgare som förstår sitt ekonomiska medborgarskap inte enbart som en rättighet, utan också som en skyldighet gentemot den egna ekonomiska välfärden. Detta kan vara en utmanande uppgift, visar bokens berättelser.

The ability of accounting to produce effects has been widely acknowledged in accounting literature. This paper argues however that in order for accounting to have an impact on people, its numbers need to be interpretable by its intended users. But what happens in situations where people are considered as inhibited in reading and interpreting numbers? This paper investigates how accounting numbers are presented to individuals believed to be impaired in their ability to make sense of numerical figures. It does so by moving the empirical focus beyond the borders of the professional organisation and into the private sphere of everyday life, examining how a televised financial makeover show re-presents accounting information in order to turn its participants into financially responsible citizens. The paper’s empirical findings give reasons for problematising the conditions under which accounting is able to affect people, concluding that, without taking people’s ability to interpret numbers into account, the possibilities of the numbers having an impact on their users risk falling short.

The issue of how to comply with various needs for financial information is said to have low priority within the financial reporting field. Prior research has demonstrated that rather than aiming at including all sorts of potential users, standard setters for example tend to ignore and exclude everyone but the sophisticated ones. This paper, however, investigates the preparation of financial information intended to be used by different kinds of private investors, sophisticated as well as unsophisticated. Informed by categorisation theory, the paper examines the means whereby a pension insurance company determines how numbers and financial accounts need to be presented so as to come across as useful to different pension saver characters. The paper demonstrates how this inclusion dilemma is connected to practices of relevance building, and that relevance is assumed to be a question of individual sense-making and contextualisation. The paper’s findings problematise the influential power of accounting by implying that a direct impact of financial accounts cannot be taken for granted. Rather, in order for an account to have effects on its intended users, it is assumed that the account needs to be made relevant by means of re-moulding it in accordance with the specifics of its user.