1st Edition
Households and Financialization in Europe Mapping Variegated Patterns in Semi-Peripheries
Households and Financialization in Europe develops a processual, relational and critical transdisciplinary approach to household financialization in Europe, utilizing a range of national and local case studies. It does so by drawing on debates in Marxist, feminist and radical IPE, anthropology and other fields.
The book explores the household as simultaneously a micro-level social institution specializing in social reproduction, distribution and other activities; a building bloc of larger economic and social structures; and an object of multiple systems of power/knowledge. Putting this conceptualization to use in original research, the authors identify geographically and historically situated ways in which financialization transforms households and their relationships with the wider economy and society. The book traces these transformations in case studies of variegated financialization in Eastern and Southern European (semi-) peripheries where households have faced particularly severe financial issues since the global financial crisis, such as over-indebtedness and asset devaluation. Key themes recurring throughout the book include: the key role of housing in household financialization, the co-constitutive relationship between financialization and social and spatial inequalities, specific patterns in the relations of financial actors and households in semi-peripheries, and the implications of semi-peripheral forms of real and financial accumulation for household financialization.
With its transdisciplinary approach, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of finance, financialization, household economics, international and global political economy, uneven development, economic anthropology, and economic sociology.
The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license.
Introduction: Households and Peripheral Financialization in Eastern and Southern Europe
Marek Mikuš and Petra Rodik
Section I: Collateralization of Social Ties
1. Within and Beyond the Household: Spanish Mortgage Debtors’ Tactics to Cope with Financialization in a Semi-periphery
Irene Sabaté Muriel
2. "I would not be a loan guarantor even for my blood brother": Financialization of Inter-household Solidarity and the Privatization of Risk in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Zaira T. Lofranco
Section II: Spaces of Financialized Housing and Reproduction
3. Semi-peripheral Financialization and Informal Household Solutions: Embedded Scales of Uneven Development in Hungarian Urban Fringes
Ágnes Gagyi, Csaba Jelinek, Zsuzsanna Pósfai and András Vigvári
4. The Strange Non-death of the "Normal" Household: Ciudad Valdeluz and Homeownership Across the Economic Cycle
Natalia Buier
Section III: Financialized Households in Public Discourse and Culture
5. Household Credit in the Making and Breaking of Greek Households: Two Decades of Financialization
Aimee Placas
6. "For the sake of consumer protection": Blending Paternalism and Neoliberalism in the Discursive Financialization of Households in the Czech Republic
Tomáš Hoření Samec
Afterword
Jeanne Lazarus
Biography
Marek Mikuš is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He is a social anthropologist engaging with work in heterodox economics, geography and sociology. His research has focussed on civil society, the state, public policy, social transformation and private and public finance in Eastern Europe. He currently heads Emmy Noether Research Group "Peripheral Debt: Money, Risk and Politics in Eastern Europe", which studies household indebtedness in Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.
Petra Rodik was a member of the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, from 2002 to 2020. She has recently left a tenure-track position to become an independent researcher and data scientist. Her research interests include financialization of housing, household debt, and advances in research methods.
"[Households and Financialization in Europe] opens a new way of thinking and widens our knowledge about semi-core and semi-peripheral financialisation. It enriches the theoretical understandings of processes of financialisation from a household perspective, providing rich cases to serve as empirical base for further theoretical development. The reader is constantly challenged to expand the categories of 'family’, 'household', family ties', social network’, confronting the wide empirical variety coming from the semi-peripheral countries studied. The methods used inspire all readers to understand the logic of a set of different disciplines (sociology, anthropology, geography etc.) and offer a good example of multidisciplinary research under a common theoretical agenda."
Gabor Nagy, Research Centre for Economic and Regional Studies Budapest, Hungary, writing in the International Journal of Housing Policy, 22.1, 2022
