Households and Financialization in Europe
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.
Marek Miku 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 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.
RIPE Series in Global Political Economy
Series Editors: James Brassett (University of Warwick, UK), Susanne Soederberg (Queens University, Canada) and Eleni Tsingou (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark).
The RIPE Series published by Routledge is an essential forum for cutting-edge scholarship in International Political Economy. The series brings together new and established scholars working in critical, cultural and constructivist political economy. Books in the RIPE Series typically combine an innovative contribution to theoretical debates with rigorous empirical analysis.
The RIPE Series seeks to cultivate:
Field-defining theoretical advances in International Political Economy
Novel treatments of key issue areas, both historical and contemporary, such as global finance, trade, and production
Analyses that explore the political economic dimensions of relatively neglected topics, such as the environment, gender relations, and migration
Accessible work that will inspire advanced undergraduates and graduate students in International Political Economy.
The RIPE Series in Global Political Economy aims to address the needs of students and teachers.
Urban Displacements
Governing Surplus and Survival in Global Capitalism
Susanne Soederberg
Households and Financialization in Europe
Mapping Variegated Patterns in Semi-Peripheries
Edited by Marek Miku and Petra Rodik
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RIPE-Series-in-Global-Political-Economy/book-series/RIPE
First published 2021
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ISBN: 978-0-367-46455-4 (hbk)
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ISBN: 978-1-003-02885-7 (ebk)
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Marek Mikus and Petra Rodik
Introduction
The past 20-something years have seen a rapid growth of multidisciplinary literature on financialization a concept that encompasses the manifold economic, political and social transformations driven by the increasing power, pervasiveness and complexity of finance in recent decades. If initially less prominently, much of this scholarship underscored the deepening imbrication of non-elite individuals with finance. Some scholars grasped this as a process of the financialization of households financial motives, rationales, and measures becoming increasingly dominant, both in the way individuals and households are being evaluated and approached, and in how they come to make decisions in life (Aalbers 2017: 3). While this formulation stresses ideational and ideological aspects, scholars engaged also with the core material mechanisms of the financialization of households in particular, the massive increase in their financial liabilities and holdings of financial assets (Gonzalez 2015).
However, despite the increasing scope and sophistication of this literature, we argue that its understanding of households suffers from two important weaknesses that this volume seeks to address. First, authors tended to approach the household as an internally undifferentiated and opaque black box, a pass-through mechanism for flows of goods and services in the macro-economy (Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage 2017: 656). They tended to abstract households from their social contexts and make conclusions about average statistical households based on survey data and presumptions about the social content of their conduct (Gonzalez 2015: 783, 785786). Second, most existing scholarship on household financialization adhered to the dominant geographic focus in the financialization literature and focussed on the Anglo-Saxon cores rather than peripheries and semi-peripheries at multiple spatial scales (Gonzalez 2015: 783; Lai and Tan 2015: 76; Murphy and Scott 2014: 73).
