Investing for Retirement: The Structural Power of Finance and Anglo-American Occupational Pensions.

The paper focuses on recent changes in the organisation of Anglo-American occupational pension schemes, analysing these changes in relation to the structural power of finance. It offers a constitutive reading of the structural power of finance that stresses the discursive, decentred, calculative and productive features of power relations. The discourse and institutions of asset management are identified as key to the power relations at work in the investment practices of Anglo-American pension funds. Under asset management, occupational pension saving becomes a form of largely speculative investment that is only indirectly and marginally concerned with plant or production. The paper also explores the current crisis of ‘final salary’ pension schemes. It argues that the tactics of state managers and the corporate sponsors of schemes in the course of the crisis are framed by commitments to actuarialism and ‘shareholder value’ respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]