Making Meaning of Asset-Building Discourse: A Bottom up Analysis

Background and Purpose: In recent years, asset-building has become an exceedingly popular approach to reducing poverty. Asset-building programs are designed to improve the long-term economic stability of low-income families through savings and asset accumulation. A substantial body of research has examined the impact of asset-building programs on clients’ savings behavior and what individual and institutional factors are most likely to influence it. There is little examination of how clients understand and experience such programs. There are no studies of the discourse operating in these programs to frame how clients think about the problems of poverty they confront. This paper contributes to the scholarship on asset-building by examining how clients deploy asset-building discourse to make sense of their financial situation and their challenges of living in poverty.

Method: The paper is based on a discourse analysis perspective. Data come from in-depth interviews with low-income clients in an asset-building program in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The sample of clients includes 25 African-American single mothers. Purposive sampling was used to select clients who have been in the program for different lengths of time: 10 newly admitted clients and 15 established clients. Recruitment of participants involved approaching clients at the agency and also placing fliers on the bulletin board in the agency. An open coding approach was used to capture emergent themes from the data, along with a deductive approach to investigate how clients interpret specific keywords associated with the asset-building approach (e.g., assets, savings, and debt). 

Findings: Findings show that clients in the program use neoliberal ideals of self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship, self-discipline, and frugality as they try to ascribe meaning to their experience in the program. Findings suggest that many clients perform the role of the self-sufficient citizen, who seeks to stop relying on government for support and, instead, hopes to lift herself out of poverty. Findings also indicate that some clients present themselves as entrepreneurial actors who are savvy enough to recognize the opportunities that are available for them in the market economy and take advantage of these opportunities. Clients also rely on the neoliberal ideal of self-discipline as they try to explain why before joining the program they were not saving or why, in case they did save, they immediately spent the money. Finally, clients emphasize their frugality as they talk about how they wisely manage their finances and keep expenses low.

Conclusion and Implications: Findings suggest that, despite how some scholars have relied on a “third way“ discourse (between capitalism and social democracy) to portray asset-building, clients speak about the program and their problems of poverty within a neoliberal frame of personal responsibility. Asset-building discourse therefore does important political labor, operating to rationalize and legitimize neoliberal logic that assumes poor people must learn to be successful market actors if they are to avoid a life of economic insecurity. In the process, asset-building discourse averts attention from the structural forces that marginalize low-income families today. This paper highlights the importance of developing antipoverty policy that addresses the structural roots of poverty.