ABSTRACT

In the UK, individuals are increasingly responsible for achieving an adequate retirement income, yet many people are not saving enough for later life. While we understand some of the structures that lead to differential pensions, we know very little about how people make decisions about their workplace pensions. This is a crucial question as an increasingly financialised landscape means that individuals must make financial decisions about whether to save, how much to save, whether and when to change investments. In this paper, I show that individual approaches to pension provision are not simply determined by structuring variables but are socially and culturally embedded, using qualitative interviews with purposively selected employees from three large private sector organisations. I propose a typology of four approaches to pension decision-making that connect to social and cultural meanings of everyday life, such as life status, identity and relationships. This typology challenges the economic models of rational decision-making that have been used to justify financialisation and highlights the need for later life provision which does not predominantly rely on individuals ability to save, taking into account social and cultural variations in financial behaviours as well as the inherent structural inequalities.

摘要

在英国，个人越来越有责任获得足够的退休收入，但许多人没有为以后的生活储蓄足够的钱。虽然我们了解导致差别养老金的一些结构，但我们对人们如何就其工作场所养老金做出决定知之甚少。这是一个至关重要的问题，因为日益金融化的环境意味着个人必须就是否储蓄、储蓄多少、是否以及何时改变投资做出财务决策。在本文中，我通过对来自三个大型私营部门组织的有目的的选定员工的定性访谈，表明个人提供养老金的方法不仅由结构变量决定，而且具有社会和文化嵌入性。我提出了四种养老金决策方法的类型学，这些方法与日常生活的社会和文化意义相关，例如生活状态、身份和关系。这种类型学挑战了用于证明金融化合理化的理性决策的经济模型，并强调了对不主要依赖个人储蓄能力的晚年生活的需求，同时考虑到金融行为的社会和文化差异以及固有的结构性不平等。