Jackson, Kimberly M.Hall, Ben2026-08-272026-08-272026https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18599Every day in Aotearoa, as in many parts of the world, budget advisors engage in one-on-one mentoring with individuals experiencing financial instability with the purpose of upskilling clients to help alleviate their precarious financial circumstances. Existing research on budget advisory practice largely focuses on measuring client outcomes and explaining variance between groups accessing budget advisory services. These services are shown to be largely ineffective in alleviating the financial instability characteristic of those experiencing precarity (ongoing economic insecurity) compared to other populations. The purpose of this thesis is to expand on previous findings by investigating how budget advisors themselves construct an understanding of their clients’ precarity, as well as how they understand their ameliorative role. This thesis contextualises budget advisors’ conceptualisations of their work and clients within broader political, economic, and ideological constructions of precarity, recognising how low and insecure incomes are structurally determined through capitalism and neoliberalism. This thesis deploys the concept of bricolage, flexibly drawing on scholarship from across the social sciences, notably including insights from community and societal psychology. Qualitative data was gathered through two semi-structured interviews conducted with each of six budget advisors, in which we discussed their work with low-income clients alongside vignettes that were presented to them for discussion. Analysis of the resulting interview transcripts drew on critical discourse analysis and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine how the participants constructed their role and drew on ideological assumptions within their interviews. This thesis finds that participants draw on a number of ideological constructions and assumptions to make sense of their work with precarious clients. Firstly, they present their role as that of working on correcting clients’ counterproductive mindsets, or sets of internal beliefs, that impede clients’ abilities to meet their responsibilities. Secondly, participants present their clients’ families as playing a significant role in their work, with the term ‘family’ holding a contradictory position as both an ideal for budget advisors to work towards and a reason for the breakdown of this ideal when families undermine clients’ financial goals. Thirdly, participants characterise themselves as providers of important knowledge, consequently constructing precarity as an issue that emerges from a lack of knowledge on the side of the client. These three ideas demonstrate how participants navigate their role as shaped by structural forces that maintain their clients’ financial instability and sit in an antagonistic relation to the aims of the budget advisory role. Budget advisors are shown in this thesis to displace their tacitly acknowledged inability to address the structural determinants of precarity, and instead focus on clients’ individual deficiencies, maintaining a role for themselves and their expertise. This thesis highlights some of the limitations of the participants’ budget advisory role within the current political, economic and ideological context, concluding that more emancipatory possibilities would require an incorporation of precarity’s structural determinants.enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.Thesis