Accumulating the economic capital:Professions and savings

Scholarship in financialisation of everyday life established the subjectivity of the investing and saving subject, yet limited attention is paid to collective subjectivities. The propensity to accumulate economic capital is socially defined, and the social and cultural conditionings in professional domains alongside <br/>the capabilities derived from occupational fields, contribute to management of personal finance. Through the lens of cultural class analysis - an approach that links the systems of social structures with the systems of socially defined dispositions - the paper theorises the mechanism of professional socialisation that underlines professional identities. The paper then examines the saving behaviour of professional groups, identified with reliance on the logics of Bourdieusian theory, and empirically tests the differences in accumulation behaviours of the fractions of the professional managerial class, as part of investigation into financial identities. Using the British Understanding Society survey (2010-2019) data, this paper explores the relationship between occupational membership and personal savings. It finds some significant between-occupational contrasts in individuals’ propensity to save and the levels of savings within the professional-managerial domains. The paper argues that cultural class analysis rooted in Bourdieu’s theory is a valuable perspective for the analysis of financial identities with implications for understanding inequality