Financialization of Everyday Life or Domestication of Finance? Mortgages in Borrowers’ Temporalities, Relationships and Rationalities

• In Event: 384 - Section on Economic Sociology Paper Session. Social Economies of Households

Abstract

How exactly do financial products shift everyday subjectivities? Work on the "financialization of daily life" suggests that the daily encounter with financial products, credit rating systems and new political and media discourses promoting a financial entrepreneurial spirit, lead to the penetration of financial logic into everyday realms that were once free of economic calculation. We find similar theoretical positions by scholars applying notions of performativity (Callon) and governmentality (Miller and Rose) to consumer finance. Our paper revisits these claims, drawing on post-crisis interviews with Hungarian mortgage borrowers, and focusing on three key terrains: time horizons, relationships and rationality. We find that albeit mortgages do carry their own logics (specific time frames, approaches to relationships, and rationalities are required by specific types of mortgages), these logics hardly ever succeed in shaping everyday subjectivities to their own image. We find that finance is partly ‘domesticated’: mortgages are appropriated to existing relationships, temporal structures and rationalities guiding everyday life. New subjectivities emerge and a novel financial logic is applied to everyday life only when the taken-for-granted course of events breaks down: when mortgages are denied, when people face payment difficulties and defaults. In these cases, previous routines of rationality are questioned, relationships are put to (a financial) test, and time frames are re-evaluated according a financial logic. The paper thus fills a gap in understanding the effects of finance, contributing much-needed empirical study and novel theory on the work of embedding finance in the already existing temporal and social structures of everyday life.

Authors

• Lena Pellandini-Simanyi, ELTE

• Zsuzsanna Vargha, University of Leicester

• Ferenc Hammer, Eötvös Loránd University