The Weight of Credit: Relational Work and the Politics of Savings Mobilization

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 1: Relational Work

Abstract

States have long mobilized resources from society to finance war, welfare, and development. While fiscal sociology emphasizes that such extraction often provokes public resistance, research on credit politics highlights the “political lightness of credit,” suggesting that credit programs can expand with limited opposition. Yet both literatures overlook what happens when the state seeks not only to allocate credit but also to mobilize it directly from people’s savings. Drawing on archival sources, this paper compares four savings programs in Taiwan and South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, varying by target population (workers versus students) and political weight (heavy versus light). Adopting a relational-work perspective, it argues that credit’s political weight hinges on relational alignment between state-defined earmarks and households’ earmarks. When program designs resonate with households’ saving purposes and moral expectations, mobilization generates consent and remains politically light. When earmarks conflict, consent erodes and savings policy becomes a site of contestation. By integrating relational work into fiscal sociology and credit politics, the paper clarifies when credit mobilization and allocation remain politically light—and when they become politically heavy.

Author

• Joonsik (Joon) Kim, University of Toronto