Internalizing responsibilized financial behavior: Self-determination among older individuals in the United States

In their financialized daily lives, individuals are expected to take responsibility for their financial futures. Yet, as a growing segment of the population, older individuals face questionable state resources, evolving retirement and pension systems, and other threats to financial security (e.g., market and other crises) that present challenges to meeting such expectations. Using 23 semi-structured interviews, we investigate how older individuals in the United States represent their financial behaviors relative to their financial experiences. Using self-determination theory, we find that older individuals represent their financial behaviors as ‘responsibilized’ based on fundamental needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In their formation of responsibilized financial behaviors, older individuals present themselves as self-determined subjects who take care of themselves financially and are not a financial ‘burden’. In internalizing such behaviors, we find that older individuals convey a range of calculative practices and accounting technologies that underlie their responsibilized financial behaviors and financializing trends encountered throughout their lives. Rather than being purely intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, perceptions of financial behaviors appear as both enabled and disciplined by the socioeconomic system that individuals face.