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This article investigates the cultural perceptions and the common sense held by Finnish mutual fund managers on the very wealthy and the rich in times of growing inequalities and increased wealth accumulation at the top. By studying the financial intermediaries on the shop-floor level, who embody the promises of popular finance, the article describes how fund managers working for the small investors make sense of the inequalities caused by financialization. In the research interviews analysed in the article, the mutual fund managers perceive the rich as a necessary and salutary part of the contemporary economy, whose function is to be and behave better than the financialized markets. This common sense concerning the rich helps to legitimize increasing wealth accumulation at the top, so that the fund managers’ perceptions of the rich embody an ideological coalition between the working financiers and the super-rich rentiers, a coalition that contrasts starkly with the promises of popular finance. publishedVersion

Family wealth and cross-generational wealth accumulation have recently interested scholars across the social sciences. Debates concerning the economic role of the wealthy now commonly recognise that one dynamic supporting economic inequalities is wealth accumulation across generations. To understand the social dynamics through which dynastic family wealth has managed to persist, this article analyses the social meanings that members of wealthy families attach to their wealth and how these meanings contribute to their class-making. Drawing from 26 in-depth interviews with members of super-rich Finnish families, the article analyses how a dynastic class is actively made and supported by specific social meanings and practices that the inheritors attach to their wealth. By exploring how wealthy heirs produce social meanings and practices that facilitate their wealth accumulation and reproduction as a class, the article contributes to recent interest in elites and social class.

This article examines the moral boundary work of wealthy Finnish entrepreneurs belonging to the country’s top 0.1 per cent of earners. Through 28 semi-structured interviews, we show how these members of the wealth elite construct moral boundaries to legitimise their growing distance from other income groups in a Nordic welfare society. The super-rich entrepreneurs construct self-identities based on hard work, persistence and normality, draw moral boundaries between lazy and hard-working people and create moral distance between themselves and wage earners, the unemployed and public-sector workers. At the same time, these wealthy elite entrepreneurs challenge the moralities of Nordic welfare society. We thus posit that moral boundaries and boundary work should be explored as legitimising discourses embedded in the relations of economic and political power.