In the preceding chapters, I examined the processes of cultural change in the British life insurance business since the late 1960s and early 1970s, paying specific attention to the institutionalization of financial evaluation practices rooted in modern finance theory and the consequences thereof. At this point, I hope to have persuaded readers of the usefulness of my approach: to investigate financialization in the making by looking at the social forces that shape evaluation practices in insurance. Evaluation practices enable and constrain particular ways of viewing the world; they shape how we imagine the relations underlying the commoditization of an uncertain economic future and the concomitant long-term promises such as life insurance and pensions. Evaluation practices rooted in modern finance theory foster a particular way of imagining these relations, one that prioritizes a marketbased enactment of ‘economic value’ and the logic of risk-based capital and perceives ‘financial risk’ as an intrinsic part of that commodity. With the introduction of modern finance theory in the life insurance business, in other words, the ‘value model’ (Christophers, 2015) of insurers has changed to incorporate financial risk into the insurance commodity, rejigging the social relations constitutive of private risk sharing arrangements.

Throughout the book, I argued that the uptake in British life insurance of evaluation practices of this kind shaped and was shaped by social forces of two broad kinds: the field dynamics in the life insurance market and in actuarial science and the competition among professional groups over their jurisdictional claims in the insurance business. Following this framework, the process of cultural change may be presented as a triptych.

On the first panel, we see newly established insurance companies challenge the dominance of the large and well-established insurers selling traditional with-profits insurance from the late 1960s onwards. The challenger firms deployed newly available information technologies and innovative marketing strategies to offer a model of insurance that undermined the capacity of the field's institutional structure to restrain competition. This new model of insurance promised to remove actuarial discretion from the insurance contract, tying policyholder's investments directly to the performance of underlying investments.