Developing the student-citizen of finance

This article examines seven films produced as part of a mid-century NYSE campaign to increase shareholdership and reconfigure the Exchange’s symbolic place within American life. Seen by millions of people in theatrical and nontheatrical venues as well as on television, the NYSE campaign showcases the sponsored film – one of our most prolific, but least studied categories of cinema – in its golden period. Sponsored films masquerading as educationals, they also provide an opportunity to examine the superficially pedagogical strategies adopted by business hoping to induce monetary and ideological investment in capitalist systems. Tracing the Exchange’s attempted cultivation of a particular kind of American economic subject, the student-citizen of finance, I explore how films situate viewers as pupils – subjects occupying a subordinate, dependent position in relation to the films’ authoritative teaching. I then turn to these films’ ‘overorganizing image’ to show how they posit the act of learning as a precondition for participation in the market and, in turn, American democracy; to be a proper member of the nation, viewers must position themselves as the films’ willing students. Familiar to today’s financial media landscape, the student-citizen of finance remains central to the project of fostering individualised economic activity and neoliberal economic citizenship

Citizenship · Democracy · Economics · Ideology · Political science · Position (finance) · Public relations · Sociology · Stock exchange · Cinema and Media Studies · Finance · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Social and Cultural Dynamics

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