‘Finance is a whole other language’: women’s moneytalk and class
Abstract
Money, like language, mediates social relations. One method very open to analyse
various modalities of language and money in social interactions is through their
semiotic mediations. Semiotics, a study of signs and symbols, is useful in this study for
examining the meaning and social context women place on finances. Using data from
12 focus groups with 114 women of varying income, culture and age, we investigate the
effect of income on the language used by women when talking about their financial
lives. Five themes were applied to test semiotic variation between income groups: 1)
relationships within the family 2) financial worries; 3) financial decision-making; 4)
concrete use of money; and 5) financial futures. We found major disparities in money
talk between lower and higher income groups across all themes. Lower income women
have a greater focus on concrete, denotative meanings of money involving day-to-day
financial matters than higher income women. Lower income women were less likely to
talk about financial worries and financial futures than higher income women. The
differences found reinforce the view that women are not an homogenous group and
these differences need to be taken into account by policymakers and others interested in
improving the financial outcomes of women.
Introduction
Motivating most sociological lines of inquiry into household money practices and
power relations is an underlying question: ‘what is the meaning of money in women’s
lives?’ Our paper aims to contribute to this diverse research field by analysing how
income levels impact the ways women talk about money. Two foundational
propositions are made.
Firstly, that women’s talk about household financial
management, decision-making and control have specific semantic orientations that are
shaped by social relations of class, gender and race (Edwards 2002). We focus on the
first social relation, drawing upon Bernstein’s thesis that because class relations ‘act
selectively upon what is said, when it is said, how it is said’, different speech systems or
codes tend to be generated (Bernstein 2003: 114).
Secondly, that money is no neutral object devoid of meaning which simply operates as a
technical exchange medium between utility-maximising individuals. Rather, money
mediates the interactions between people and so has cultural, political and social content
(Ingham 2001: 307). Money is a social relation, the characteristics of which differ
depending on ownership and exchange mechanisms (Wennerlind 2001: 557). In other
words, money means different things to different people, according to the
socioeconomic, gendered and racialised circumstances, objectives and ideals that
govern their actions.
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This paper applies the underutilised theoretical framework of semiotics to reveal the
divergent meanings attributed to money and financial decisions by different groups of
women. Semiotics is a study of the role of signs and symbols, especially within
language, and how they refer to the ideas and material objects within a culture. In the
following section we describe how language and money semiotically mediate social
relations. Our empirical analysis is based on an Australian study which involved
discussion groups with 114 women from varying income, cultural and age groups1. To
respond to the question: ‘what is the effect of income on the language used by the
women talking about their financial lives?’ we applied a very simple method of word
analysis based upon some key themes identified in the household economy literature,
such as talk about financial decision-making and time. Our findings support the
contention that differences in income levels tend to either mute or help articulate
women’s money-talk.
Review of literature
Intra- and inter-household economy studies
The impact of total available income in the household economy can be considered in
two ways: the internal financial effects on the practices and ideas among those in a
household or the comparative influence of higher and lower incomes upon domestic
lives across households. Because most women experience intersecting forms of
oppression (such as gender and class) to varying degrees of intensity both research
projects into the household economy are needed (Ritzer 2007: 204).
The first field of research, intra-household studies, centres on how the relative financial
differences within families tends to simultaneously reflect, reinforce and conceal
women’s disadvantages. These studies have increasingly focused on uncovering the
conflict between the normative view of a loving relationship based on equality and
specific money management practices that often express unequal power relations
(Vogler, Lyonette & Wiggins 2008) (Evertsson & Nyman 2009). Levels of total
household income are identified as having some influence on the common distinction
made between strategic (usually male) control of financial decisions (the power to make
a decision or veto their partner’s decisions) and day-to-day money management. In
low-income households, money management is simply another domestic chore and is
thus feminised. Managing money is viewed as only becoming a source of power when
income is high enough to enable ‘real decisions to be made’ about spending and
allocating money (Vogler, Lyonette & Wiggins 2008: 119). In higher-income
households, therefore, the literature points to a greater tendency for men’s involvement
in both strategic and day-to-day money management practices (Burgoyne et al. 2006;
Pahl 1989; Vogler 1998). Even when wives earn more than their husbands the
disruption to the male breadwinner model anticipated by resource theories of power
rarely occurs. Instead, women with higher incomes than their husbands ‘are often at
pains to protect the man’s normative status as head of the household’ (Burgoyne, Clarke
& Burns 2011: 687). Singh and Bhandari’s (2012) study of inter-generational money
flows among Indian families finds, however, that different levels of income have little
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impact on the dominance of men’s control of both strategic and day-to-day financial
decisions.
Other intra-household literature questions whether concepts such as decision-making
are particularly useful ways of understanding the gendered dynamics of the household
economy (Evertsson & Nyman 2009; Goode 2010; Nyman 2003). Rather, subjectivity
and domestic relationships are analysed as practices which are ‘constantly being
constructed and reconstructed’ (Dixon & Wetherell 2004: 175). For example, in
Evertsson and Nyman’s (2009: 38) study of Swedish couples they propose that the
practices of ‘doing gender’ and ‘doing couples’ in everyday life is built more on ‘a
chain of non-decisions than on a chain of decisions…as long as it works and makes
sense’. The fact that organising and managing the family’s finances often remained
gendered and was financially disadvantageous for women was occluded by the
perception that the tasks were simply a practical division of labour. The authors
comment that ‘external circumstances’ such as caring and paid work circumscribe ‘what
options are perceived as possible and thereby limit the possibilities as well as the need
to negotiate’ (pp. 49-51). Unfortunately they do not include total household income
levels as one of these ‘external circumstances’.
Fewer studies focus on income effects at an inter-household level. Eroğlu (2009)
examines the intersections of class and gender in her study of income allocation among
a group of poor Turkish households. Men’s anticipated, and overt, mechanisms of
financial management and control were found to be partially subverted by women’s
covert keeping of secret kitties (pp. 69-75). More significantly, Eroğlu raises an
interesting challenge to the intra-household ‘systems of management and control’
approach by revealing a ‘general tendency for both spouses’ to jointly minimise
household deprivation in their income allocation decisions (p. 75). Hohnen (2007)
makes insightful comparisons between low-income Swedish and Danish families and
prevailing neo-liberalist ideas of money. She links consumption studies with financial
exclusion literature to analyse the relationship between the amount of money,
conceptualisation of money and financial practices within and across households. Her
finding that financial timescales among middle class families are not only longer than
those in poorer households but are of a ‘different kind’ is especially persuasive (p. 758).
Different levels of income structure ‘financial time’ as more distant and abstract in
higher-income families, who experience little of the cyclic spending patterns in lowerincome households whose receipt of small monthly payments concretely alter the value
of money in the latter weeks of the month as their finances tighten (pp. 758-760).
Semiotics and money
Semiotics studies the role of signs and signalling as part of social life. The assumptions
and concepts that permit systematic analyses of symbolic systems were developed in the
early 20th century by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American
pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (Chandler 2007: 18-34). Although initially based on
language, this tradition of scholarship expanded into investigating the meaning,
experience and knowledge communicated through the use of other sign systems, such as
art, music, architecture, gestures, clothing, and material possessions.
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A sign is composed of an expression (a signifier), such as a word, and a content (the
signified) or something that is seen as completing the meaning of the expression. For
example, the word smoke is an expression linked conventionally with cigarettes and
cancer as a content. The process of connecting a sign’s expression and content is
inherently social and requires an interpretant or context for the signifying event to have
meaning (Cullum-Swan 1994: 466). When the interpretant changes, signs change
meaning. Behind any idea or feature of the social world is yet another interpretant.
Saussure held that a semiotic inquiry of language focuses on a system of symbols that
expresses ideas and meaning ‘within a self-contained network of elements that signify
only in relation to each other’ (Wennerlind 2001: 559). Because signs have multiple
meanings, it has been conventional in semiotics to restrict the range of meanings of
expression content to three levels. Semiotic analyses identify and connect the
denotative (definitional and literal), connotative (socio-cultural) and mythical meanings
condensed in a symbol. The strength of a semiotic analysis is that it may uncover, for
example, connotative meanings, experiences and knowledge that are not immediately
apparent using standard interpretative discourse. The process of questioning the
dominant meaning of symbols may reveal, for instance, ‘previously veiled or obfuscated
power relations’ (Wennerlind 2001: 559).
Particular groups which are socially stratified by class, gender and race, or
geographically cohered into communities, will therefore tend to have characteristic
ways of using the language (Hasan 2005; Holmes 1997). Bernstein investigated how
social conditions engender different ‘ways of living’ through a particular lens—the
‘semantic orientations’ of working class and bourgeois society in Britain (cited in
Edwards 2002: 529).
He found that low-income communities were more likely to use ‘concrete, descriptive
and narrative’ forms of speech expressing ‘the pressures of the here-and-now’, whereas
middle class (and aspiring middle class) speech codes tended to a more elaborated,
abstract and analytical form of discourse (Bernstein 2003: 100). Social semiotics applies
various methods to analyse the complex and changing interplay of these shared and
contested sociolinguistic norms within particular speech communities so that ‘light may
be shed on the question of how such stratification is maintained’ (Labov 1966: 186).
There are profound semiotic parallels between language and money. Each is a symbolic
system that serves as a means of communicating social knowledge between participants.
Both are discursive systems where the meaning of a symbol is interpreted by making
reference to the system within which the symbol operates. Both language and money
are social relations which mediate the meaning of the symbols used. A word has
meaning in speech or writing. Money, at a denotative level, is the medium of
communication between property owners in market exchanges. At a connotative level,
money becomes a ‘universal category’ which mediates more complex social relations
(Fine & Lapavitsas 2000: 367). The monetary symbol therefore communicates a
multiplicity of meanings depending on the economic, social and cultural context
mediated by the money-relation.
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Viewed from this perspective, money is a discursive space in which power relations are
acted out well beyond the immediate cash-nexus (Wennerlind 2001: 568). Money is a
universal category, a ‘blank screen’ upon which other social relations ‘project
themselves’ (Fine & Lapavitsas 2000: 367). A semiotic analysis of money-talk among
diverse groups in society provides one lens to identify how their social meanings of
money may differ, and suggest reasons why.
Methods and materials
Participants
Twelve focus groups with women (N=114) were conducted in 2012 in major Australian
capital cities, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and a regional town in Victoria – Bendigo.
Purposive and snowballing sampling techniques were employed to recruit participants
(Gobo 2004: 448-449). A wide range of individuals and organisations likely to have a
large number of female members were approached. These include: women-dominated
trade unions representing nurses, teachers, public sector workers, service industry
employees, and women working in textile, clothing and footwear industries; women’s
financial planning networks and professional industry associations; women’s advocacy
groups; community organisations; financial counselling bodies; organisations servicing
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders; and academics and students. Most organisations
that were contacted responded positively and used a variety of strategies to distribute
information about the research and encouraged those who received the information to
also distribute it. These included Facebook pages, email lists, individual phone calls,
leaflet displays in offices and front counters, and advertisements in organisational
publications like newsletters. Participants were offered a $50 store voucher as
compensation for their time.
Although using non-probability sampling methods, the sample was reasonably
representative of women in the Australian population. Respondents born overseas
comprised 32 per cent of the sample, compared to 26 per cent of the overall population.
The two most common age brackets of the respondents were 31 to 40 (25 per cent) and
41 to 50 (22 per cent), only slightly younger than the mean age of 46 for Australian
women targeted by the research—18 to 84 years of age (data derived from ABS 2012a:
Table 8). Fifty-six per cent of focus group participants had some waged work—a very
similar proportion to the 54 per cent of Australian women who are employees (ABS
2012c: 279). On average, waged participants indicated their mean gross annual income
to be within a $51,000 to $60,000 bracket — slightly higher than the Australian average
female employee total earnings of $42,890 (ABS 2012b: 5).
The focus groups were designed to reflect aspects of the general and diverse financial
experiences and attitudes of Australian women. We categorised the focus groups as
either specific or general. There were five specific groups. Participants in three
specific focus groups had particular cultural backgrounds: Arabic-speaking; Vietnamese
background; and Aboriginal participants. The other two specific groups were
comprised of single mothers and aged pensioners. Participants in these five groups had
low incomes. The mean annual income of Vietnamese-speaking and Age pensioner
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participants was in the $21,000 to $30,000 bracket. Participants in the other three lowincome groups reported a mean income range of $11,000 to $20,000.
There were seven general focus groups with participants who had no overall cultural or
age group specificity. One characteristic that did distinguish them was that the mean
income of participants in each of these groups was in the $51,000 to $60,000 bracket. In
comparison, the average income of specific focus groups was one- or two-fifths that of
the general focus groups. As we are interested in analysing the difference in money-talk
by socioeconomic status, we refer to the specific groups as low-income groups and the
general groups as higher-income.
Focus group design
In this paper, the unit of analysis for the focus groups is language, rather than the
individual participant. We sought to explore how participants expressed their thoughts
about money and how they carried out their financial activities. Voloshinov’s (1987: 21)
approach informed our analysis of speech genres and how they are structurally linked to
economic and social circumstances.
The aim of the focus groups was to encourage dialogue, recollections, arguments and
energy, while giving broad shape to these discussions with subject-specific elements.
The focus group general discussion involved conversations about participant’s relations
with money in the past, present and future. At the conclusion of the discussion,
participants also completed a short demographic survey. The facilitators encouraged
participants to enter into narrative accounts of a financial event or motive in their lives,
using as prompts three types of questions suggested by Kielhofner and Mallinson (1995:
65):



what the participant saw as a significant change in their experiences (e.g. how
was your life better or worse?);
about their hopes and fears (e.g. how did it happen that you felt that way?); and,
to compare their recollection of the particular event or circumstance (e.g. what is
the difference between then and now?).
Analysis
Language-use may be investigated in many dimensions, such as by sound differences
and patterns (phonological), ways of constructing sentences or word threads
(grammatical), specific word usage (lexical), or as a complete discourse (Hasan 1996).
We restricted our analysis of how Australian women’s financial circumstances were
intimately connected in their money-discourses to the lexical—single word usage and
frequency rates. Selected quotes illustrate the findings from this analysis. We also
limited our focus to one variable - income disparity.
The traditional disciplinary divide between content analysis and semiotic analyses has
weakened in recent years. Content analysis is a deductive, quantitatively oriented
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technique by which standardised measurements are applied to defined units (usually
words) to characterise and compare documents (Cullum-Swan 1994: 464). Semiotics is
presented as an inductive, qualitative method of analysis of how meanings are formed
through symbolic systems. However, more recent strands of linguistics (such as social
semiotics and Critical Discourse Analysis) often apply both methods in their studies
(Camerini, Diviani & Tardini 2010; Ruddock 2006; Vann 2009; Vlieger & Leydesdorff
2011).
Transcripts of the twelve focus groups were stripped of the facilitators’ voices and split
into two texts reflecting higher and lower income earners. The seven general focus
groups were amalgamated into one text (higher income earners) and the five lowerincome groups (single mothers, Aboriginal, Vietnamese-background, senior and Arabicspeaking) merged into the second specific group text.
Using NVivo9 software, the two texts were mined for what Popescu (2009: 95) terms
the ‘thematic concentration’ of selected keywords. Word frequency is seemingly a very
simple property ‘laying on the surface of the text’ (Popescu 2009: 1). Counting the
occurrence of particular keywords is not, of course, an end in itself but a method used to
analyse the discursive content of a text (Kirk 2009: 17).
To explore discourse as social practice, five themes were applied to test semiotic
variation between general and specific group participants: how intimate and family
relationships were discussed; financial worries; decision-making involving money; talk
about the concrete ways money informs the immediate pressures participants face to
pay for food, transport, health and other costs; and plans and hopes for their financial
futures;. The first theme about family and intimate relationships was used to test the
study’s assumption that little semiotic variation would be found between general and
specific groups. Given that all participants were asked to discuss their family
upbringings and current relationships, we anticipated that keywords such as ‘mother’,
‘father’, ‘daughter’, ‘son’ for example would be mentioned with equal frequency by
both groups. The importance of investigating if such a culturally and demographically
diverse sample was open to comparative methods required establishing if at least one
discourse of daily life—namely family and intimate relationships—was common across
the two texts. The other four themes had a financial focus to uncover: (a) whether lower
income group speech codes were more frequently marked by ‘concrete, descriptive and
narrative’ keywords expressing ‘the pressures of the here-and-now’ than those of
general group participants; and (b) if general group speech codes more frequently
contained elaborated, additional, abstract and analytical keywords (Bernstein 2003:
100).
Results and discussion
To compare word usage rates between and within general and specific texts, keyword
lists were developed around the five themes (see Table 1). Content analysis of three
themes (worry-talk, decision-making and concrete-talk) is illustrated by two circles, the
areas of which statistically reflect the proportion of words in a list spoken by general
and specific group participants. Inside each circle a cloud analysis of within-group
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word frequency rates of a particular list illustrates their relative usage or ‘weight’. Two
themes (relationship-talk and future-talk) are analysed but contain too many keywords
to be clearly illustrated by circles.
To allow a statistically meaningful comparison between groups, a number of data issues
needed to be addressed. The total word count (stripped of facilitators’ voices) of the
general group text (N=75,693) is far more than the specific group text (N=38,554).
There are two reasons for this disparity. There were seven general focus groups and
five specific groups. Also, the average duration of a general focus group discussion was
80 minutes compared to 65 minutes for the specific focus groups. To take account of
these differences we assumed that a similar number of words would have been spoken
by general and specific participants if there were an equal number of groups with the
same durations.2 The total word count of the specific group text was increased by a
factor of 1.96 (38,554 x 1.9633 = 75,693).
Table 1 details the keywords counted in the five themes, the raw number of words, an
adjusted count for the specific groups (raw figure multiplied by 1.96), and the total
keywords. The final two columns identify the proportion of these keywords spoken by
participants in each group text.
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Table 1. Keyword themes and results
Theme and
Keywords
Weighted
proportion of
Raw word count Adjusted
count for Weighted keywords spoken
specific total (N) (per cent)
General Specific groups
General Specific
groups groups
groups groups
Relationship-talk
we he she his dad family her us
him husband children mother father 2898
daughter sister child son girls girl
sisters families daughters sons
Worry-talk
worry scared worried hopeless
scary worse fear anxiety worries 80
worst pessimistic scare worrying
anxious fears scares scariest worsen
Decision-making talk
74
decisions decision decided decide
Concrete-talk
bill bills car shopping shop shops
food clothes electricity phone eat 196
gas fridge shoes cook petrol
butcher fruit vegetables eating wash
drive sausages washing water
Future-talk
adviser advisers advisors fund funds
future goal goals imagine invest
invested
investing
investment
investments investor investors invests 369
pension pensions perspective plan
planned planner planners planning
plans rainy retire retired retiree
retirement retiring scheme schemes
super superannuation
1872
3669
6567
44.1
55.9
28
55
135
59.3
40.7
16
31
105
70.5
29.5
239
468
664
29.5
70.5
77
151
520
71.0
29.0
Relationship-talk
A word list of the most common nouns and pronouns participants used when talking
about their families and intimate relationships was developed (N=6567). This data
provided a basic validity check that, despite a range of socio-demographic differences
between general and specific focus group participants (such as income, cultural and age
factors), there would be little difference in ‘relationship-talk’ word frequency rates. We
found that while both groups had closer usage rates than those found in the other four
themes, specific group participants nevertheless recorded a significantly higher
weighted proportion of relationship words (55.9 per cent) than those in general groups
(44.1 per cent).
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Further analysis shows that the most likely contributing factor to this disparity is that
less than 40 per cent of higher-income participants had dependent children in their care
compared to 66 per cent of lower-income participants. It is understandable, therefore,
that keywords ‘child, children, daughter, daughters, son, sons, girls and girls’ were
found to be more likely spoken in low-income groups (64.0 per cent as a weighted
proportion) than by higher-income participants (36.0 per cent).
However, usage of all other relationship keywords (we, he, she, his, dad, family, her, us,
him, husband, mother, father, sister, sisters, and families) were very similar—47.3 per
cent for general groups and 52.7 per cent in specific groups—lending strong support to
the assumption that income levels or other demographic factors do not unduly influence
relationship-talk word frequency rates. Significantly, each group also placed nearly
equal weight on how frequently they mentioned each word.
We are not claiming that the cultural differences between the groups had no impact on
the financial rhetoric of participants. Of the 63 women participating in general focus
groups 58 spoke only English at home. In contrast, 20 of the 51 women in the specific
focus groups spoke a non-English language at home. Rather, we only make a far more
provisional claim—that the cultural differences between the groups is unlikely to
invalidate the effect of income within the overall patterns of money-talk to which we
now turn.
Worry-talk
Participants in general groups more frequently used words as denotative expressions of
their worries (59.3 per cent) compared to low-income participants (40.7 per cent). For
example, a participant in a general focus group talked of their financial fears in these
terms:
I wanted to find somebody to talk to about how to invest and I couldn't find
anybody. I sent e-mails to women, financial planners, and got no response
from anybody and I gave up. I got books out, trying to understand buying
property and went oh my God, this is so scary.
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Figure 1 Worry-talk
Higher-income focus groups
Lower-income focus groups
N=135
At first glance, the finding that higher income participants more frequently expressed
financial concerns than lower income participants seems unexpected, even
counterintuitive, given that poverty increases personal stress and hardship. Particular
low-income groups such as single parents have the highest levels of financial stress
(Harmer 2008, 48) and mental health issues (Loxton, Mooney & Young 2006) among
Australian households.
Our results, however, are supported by studies of emotional stress which show that there
is a generally socially accepted perception that higher income earners experience
greater levels of stress than lower-income earners (Heslop et al. 2001). One reason for
the public holding this opinion is that lower-income earners simply talk less about their
levels of stress. For example, Harkness et al (2005: 126) claim that low-income clerical
workers place self-imposed limitations on their stress-talk about what ‘is possible to
say’. Our findings therefore support the Harkness study that income is likely to be a
major determinant of levels of worry-talk.
Financial decision-making
Significant disparities were found in the proportions of talk women had in discussing
financial decision-making, though the sample size is small (N=105). Over 70 per cent
of decision type words were raised among higher-income groups. General focus group
participants talked in an active, self-directed way about making financial decisions:
I suppose I'm much more of an over the horizon thinker than my husband. So, I
manoeuvre him to that part, and he does the sort of “How we going to get there?”
We would decide together that, as you know, it's about time we got another
property or something. But, in terms of cars, holidays, some major expenses I
have the ideas and I drive it and he’ll work out the details.
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I have a stockbroker but I make my own decisions really, and then I run
them by [my husband]. I do some indirect investing through You Trade or
whatever.
Figure 2 Financial decision-making talk
Higher-income focus groups
Lower-income focus groups
N=105
In contrast, low-income participants were far more likely to signify their (relative lack
of) financial decision-making when talking about the social meaning of money in their
lives. Within this more restricted speech code, participants were far more likely to use
denotative terms in the passive and past tense such as ‘decided’. Furthermore, the
decision-making talk was often attributed to their partners:
And then he decided to buy a house
Before I got married I was working full-time. I owned my own car. I had
money in the bank for a deposit on a house and then I got married. Now,
don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trade my kids for anything, I love my kids
completely, and whatever they need, if I can afford it they can have it, but
once I got married, that was it. That savings was gone because he was a
slacker who decided “Oh, I'll take a day off here, I'll take a day off there”,
and so the savings to make up for the loss of wages to pay the bills slowly
dwindled.
On one hand, these findings reinforce previous research showing that low household
incomes leave women with a reduced role in economic decision-making (Burgoyne et
al. 2006; Pahl 1989). On the other hand, however, the findings question whether intrahousehold studies one-sidedly emphasise domestic practices and beliefs to be the cause
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for this reduced decision-making role among low-income women rather than also as the
effect of the intensification of women’s oppression due to its class intersections.
For example, Vogler (2005: 3), citing Rake and Jayatilaka (2002), considers that one of
the main reasons couples find it difficult to talk about money may be ‘precisely because
inequalities in control over and access to money threaten to reveal the myth of
egalitarian partnerships’. Similarly, Burgoyne et al (2006: 620-621) point to three
factors which reduce women’s financial decision-making: the source of household
income; how money is managed due to the level of income; and beliefs and
expectations about marriage. While all are important, greater recognition is needed that
low household income per se has a general and decisive impact on women’s financial
decision-making practices. In other words, ‘doing decision-making’ is heavily refracted
by class.
Concrete Talk
There were marked differences in speech codes between higher and lower income
groups when financial discussion turned to the concrete pressures of the ‘here-and-now’
participants faced. Lower-income women were far more likely to discuss their
immediate financial circumstances and practices. One way they did so was by talking
about their regular purchases and costs. A word-list was developed to capture the
products and services participants most talked about (N=664). As a proportion of key
words spoken, general group participants only infrequently mentioned these words
(29.5 per cent).
Figure 3 Concrete-talk
Higher-income focus groups
Lower-income focus groups
N=664
Both groups placed relatively equal weight on the most commonly used words (car,
clothes and food) though lower-income women raised phone bills relatively more
frequently. The following interaction between participants in one specific group
typifies the day-to-day, descriptive character of their narrative:
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Participant 1: I would not ration but when I go grocery shopping, the first
place I go to - - and it's not easy for everyone because they don't all live out
that side of town but I drive to the Golden Circle factory. Now, you can get
a shopping trolley there for about $50 worth of stuff and they have
everything, not just fruit. They have coffee, they have toiletries. Like frozen
meals, they're 3 for 5 dollars. Now, you can't do that at the supermarket…
Participant 2: Yes, it's a bargain this place, out there.
Participant 1: So, I go there first, and then whatever I can't get there I will
then go to either an IGA before I go to Woollies or Coles because they're
cheaper. The one at Carindale is cheap, the IGA there, and then I go to
Chandler fresh fruit market and I can do enough fresh fruit and veggie for
six of us for a fortnight for about 30 bucks, so I do that, then I go to the
butchers…sausages you buy bulk.
In contrast, when higher-income participants mentioned a day-to-day purchase such as
shoes, they were far more likely to situate the purchase within a connotative speech
code elaborating their personal and social distinction:
It's just nice if you want the 100 dollar pair of shoes you can go get it. You
don't have to think, “Oh, pay day”. I hated that and I always hated it. But,
I'm not a spendthrift at all. But, if I want something—and you know we are
going overseas—I don't care.
It was really instilled like save our pocket money, save little bits of this and
that all along the way, to the extent that when I first started working and my
father realised how much I was spending on gorgeous shoes and all the rest
of the stuff, he actually took my bank book and insisted that I saved, and as
a result of that I had a property at 19.
These findings support the research approach taken by Shildrick and MacDonald that
one aspect of ‘poverty talk’ involves very specific and concrete ways of speaking about
everyday life through the rhetoric of ‘managing’ (Shildrick & MacDonald 2013: 289290).
Future-talk
There was a stark difference in the way participants talked about their financial futures.
Women in the higher-income group used 36 different words thematically concentrated
on their future financial plans and goals. In contrast, lower-income participants
restricted their denotative meanings of their financial futures to 21 words. The most
common word among the lower-income group was ‘pension’ whilst ‘super’3 and
‘superannuation’ were most spoken about by general group participants. More
importantly, higher income earners were far more prone to talk about their financial
14
futures than lower income groups: overall usage of these words was dominated by the
general group (71 per cent).
Those with higher disposable incomes were far more likely to be interested in talking
about their financial futures because they have a greater range of market choices
available to discuss. Their denotative descriptions were linked to connotative meanings
of personal improvement or their social expectations:
I figured that the more I learn about money the more I seem to attract it. So
I've embarked on this mission to educate myself, and I find that I understand
the stock market better. I have some idea of property market investments.
So, recently I made some money so that was thrilling. It's not so much the
money, it's more that, you know…it just gives you more confidence.
I would definitely go to a mortgage broker or financial planner and do lots
of research on the company as well to see the reviews. But it's like I'm a
graduate and I have a job so we bought our property and were thinking of
buying another one and planning to, you know, get married and have
children and start saving for a child.
People say I should pay off the house and I truly wonder why? I don’t know, is it
that
bad if you don’t pay off your house? A financial advisor may say to put it
into Super, but I am trying to decide whether to just go travelling…’
In contrast, immediate and denotative, rather than future and connotative, financial talk
was more relevant to women with less income:
What's in the bank, isn't yours. And then, eventually you retire and are on
the pension.
My future, I've realised that it's looking a bit bleak. I had to take out a loan
to do some necessary work on my home. It's a lower interest one, which is
great, but once again, it's a repayment out of the pension and two weeks'
ago my lovely old car blew up. Not fixable, so I'm having to get a small loan
to buy, hopefully, a decent second-hand car, so financially it's actually
looking a bit ordinary so I'm just thinking, okay, I've got to shop more
carefully for my food. When I get the car I must not travel around too
much.
The groups also differentially attached other connotative meanings to money. A
participant in a higher income group talked about the freedom money can give
through a choice rhetoric:
Well, a financial adviser might say to put it into super and I don't see that as
good advice. I say go to China! [laughter]
15
The low-income participant who talked about her car ‘blowing up’ discussed
money having a connotative meaning using a self-deprecating, lack of choice
rhetoric:
I've also decided that this could just be a sign that I'm going quite mad
[laughter]. I'm going to put aside 10 bucks a fortnight, and I'm either - - and
I've never been to the pokies, never, but I'm either going to buy a lottery
ticket once a fortnight or I'm going to go with that $10 to the pokies. I'm
just going to see if I can pull one because who knows? There could be a
fortune floating around! [laughter]. And meanwhile, I've got two lovely
dogs and if I can feed them and me, I'm all right.
Hohnen’s (2007: 758) observation that the ‘time of money’ differs in scale and
quality due to income levels accords well with our findings. Lower-income
participants tend to talk about time in immediate and cyclical terms than higherincome participants.
Discussion and conclusions
As economic theories increasingly incorporate aspects of the social sciences, analyses of
markets become intimately connected to cultural, social and psychological life.
However, socioeconomic approaches which seek to amalgamate the non-economic into
the economic face a number of problems. One challenge is to move away from the
most common method of standard economics—centring the individual as the key
analytical building block (Fine & Milonakis 2009: 3). Money is not simply a neutral
commodity which functionally underlies and facilitates individual market exchanges but
a social relation imbued with divergent meanings and practices. An influential example
of what can be gained outside an individualist methodology is Stefanie Sonnenberg’s
ground breaking application of social psychology to develop a discursive approach to
household money management (Sonnenberg 2008). By using language as the unit of
analysis, Sonnenberg explores how the clash between beliefs (domestic financial
equality) and practices (inequitable financial arrangements) are inextricably linked to
the social relations of gender (p. 548).
Social semiotics provides an alternative approach to investigate how financial rhetoric
reflects and reinforces social relations. Carl Wennerlind (2001) acutely poses the
question in the title of his essay, ‘Money talks, but what is it saying?’ Focus group
participants talked of finance being ‘a whole other language’ which, ‘if you are not
switched on and have a background of it…glazes over you’. We find an overall pattern
of responses which graphically suggests that income levels exert an enormous influence
on the way women talk about their understandings of money and financial practices.
Major disparities in money talk between general and specific groups were evident
across all four monetary themes analysed. On average, the gap in word frequency usage
between higher and lower income groups was nearly 40 per cent.
Investigating the variation in semantic orientation between the groups yields some
significant findings. Higher-income women were far more likely to talk about their
16
financial worries, decisions and thoughts about the future than lower-income women.
In a sense this is unsurprising. Having some disposable income is an underlying
precondition for financial choices to be a topic which initiates and leverages discussion.
Nearly all mentions of financial planners and advisers (93 per cent) occurred among
participants in higher income groups (N=45). Lower-income women were less inclined
to raise or talk about their financial worries or plans for the simple reason that they saw
little point in doing so. Rather, their focus was on concrete, denotative meanings of
money involving the practical, day-to-day financial matters of food, clothing, utility
bills and transport – items for which they feel they have some control.
One policy implication arising from this study is that government approaches to
financial literacy are far too narrowly framed, particularly for low-income earners. For
example, the Australian National Financial Literacy operates within the confining
assumption that personal money management per se is the policy problem which
financial literacy programs address. Our research shows, however, that the social
meaning of money in low-income women’s lives is less talked about in the abstract and
more understood in the concrete—as what to buy, where to buy, how to buy and when
to buy. Learning how to save and manage money simply as money is therefore less
likely to achieve policy goals than a focus on increasing financial competencies through
changes in day-to- day monied practices. Such a strategy would focus on improving
knowledge of cheap, quality, locally available products and services as the key means to
improve financial literacy, rather than a nationally generic and far less concrete
approach. Promoting the importance of providing for the future is an equally abstract
concept when the future to low-income women was sometime in the next fortnight.
While there is agreement that improving levels of financial capabilities is important for
all citizens – the methods and arguments for doing so need to be tailored to suit the
needs of different groups.
It is somewhat surprising that a simple mapping of single word counts generates such
rich sources of data. Further research would benefit from applying some of the more
sophisticated techniques available in semiotics to analyse the denotative, connotative
and mythical meanings of money discourses.
Notes
1
The discussion groups were part of a larger study funded by the Australian Research
Council Discovery Project (110103808) exploring the factors underlying women’s
financial decision-making behaviour.
2
There were some differences in the number of words spoken per minute by
participants in the two groups. The general focus group text, stripped of facilitator
voices, averaged 135 words per minute, compared to 120 wpm in the specific group
text. However, most of this difference is due to the facilitators speaking more
frequently to specific group participants. Over 21 per cent of the total specific group
text were facilitators’ words, compared to 17 per cent in the general group total text.
17
3
Short for ‘superannuation’ the Australian retirement fund
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