Socio-Legal Discussion Group: Mistrust the State, Trust the Market: Possible Impacts of Policy Debate Around a Pension Reform on Meaning-Making among Czech and Slovak Retail Investors

The presentation seeks to provide grounds for discussion based on a working paper draft called „Mistrust the State, Trust the Market: Shifting Ontological Security among Czech and Slovak Micro-Investors” from my ongoing dissertation research.

Theoretically, the project approaches investor discourses from a perspective of cultural sociology, which focuses on meanings and meaning-making as explanatory of social action and structuring (Alexander & Smith, 2003). The project includes interviews with individual retail investors and fieldwork notes from various investor events, meet-ups, and conferences. The preliminary findings show that investors entrust what Giddens (1990) called ontological security to institutions of global capitalism rather than the local welfare state system. This reorientation is especially pertinent regarding the pension system – securing one’s pension becomes a personal responsibility that the welfare state cannot be trusted with.

The preliminary interpretation within the draft is that this reorientation of ontological security reflects self-responsibilities and individualisation of neoliberal selfhood encased in a distinctly post-socialist framing. However, while this interpretation certainly has its backing in the data, the temporal context of my data collection complicates it. During my data collection, pension reform was passed, and the process was intensely publicly debated. The public debate at the time was full of claims about the unsustainability and inefficiency of a previous version of the welfare state pay-as-you-go pension system, which made a reform a supposed necessity.

I want to discuss with the discussion group precisely the possible impacts of public debate around pension reform on how retail investors frame their future pensions and the necessity to have private investments on top of the welfare state-based pay-as-you-go system. I want to suggest three main topics of discussion. First, on theoretical intersections between socio-legal studies and cultural sociology, where “law [is seen] as a cultural toolkit or repertoire upon which actors draw to orient strategies for action”(Yazdiha 2017: 1) that may frame this issue. Second, how could we think about the impacts of debates around the legislative reform on what research partners shared with me? Third, how could the impacts of the legal context be verified in further research?