A feminist approach to fintech: exploring ‘buy now, pay later’ technologies and consumer fintechLoomis, Jessa; Cockayne, Daniel
doi: 10.1080/17530350.2024.2323692pmid: N/A
‘Buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) is a financial technology that is reshaping online consumption by allowing users to split payment for goods over 3–4 interest-free digital installments. While the use and value of BNPL has risen dramatically, it, and other consumer-oriented fintech, has received relatively little critical attention. Demographically, the majority of BNPL users are young and women and its negative impacts are disproportionately felt by lower-income groups, making this a specifically gendered financial technology. In this paper we develop a feminist approach to studying fintech, which we use to present a critical analysis of BNPL drawing on data from the US, UK, and Canada. Through this lens, we explore BNPL’s revenue streams, data collection practices, relative lack of regulation, and how these factors function structurally in the digital payments space, to analyze their impact for consumers and retailers in the context of rising consumer indebtedness and the financialization of consumption. We argue that BNPL is a fintech intervention that attempts to shift consumer practices with distinctly gendered implications for social reproduction, household finance, and everyday relations to debt and money.
‘I’m not going to feed the bailiffs’: personal bankruptcy and debtor agency in narrative accounts of struggling debtorsDecker, Anja; Hoření Samec, Tomáš
doi: 10.1080/17530350.2024.2360915pmid: N/A
The article uses the formal instrument of personal bankruptcy proceedings as an illuminating context to contribute to the scholarship on the lived experience of overindebtedness. Through the analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with heavy debtors living in Czechia, we provide a focus on debtor agency, exploring how bankruptcy interrelates with how struggling debtors narratively approach debt and construct their capacity to act. We show that first-hand accounts of (planned) participation in a bankruptcy proceeding contain a surprising number and variety of narratives of agency. Emphasizing the processual character of bankruptcy proceedings, we demonstrate that bankruptcy supports enactments of debtor agency by interfering in the temporal ordering of debt as performed by the struggling debtors, shaping the experiences of overindebtedness also among those debtors who have not (yet) entered the formal process. We show that the narrative constructions of agency as regards bankruptcy are often embedded in a neoliberal discourse of merit and self-responsibilization. While the respondents reproduce a largely depoliticized and individualized account of debt resistance that at times operates with a hierarchization of struggling debtors, disclosing bankruptcy (intentions) to others also evokes spontaneous and unorganized acts of solidarity within personal networks that empower debtors.
Bridging governmentality and economization: temporality as a financialization devicePlummer, Samantha S.
doi: 10.1080/17530350.2024.2370278pmid: N/A
Reflecting and reinforcing the financialization of everyday life, non-profit social service organizations, the primary deliverers of benefits and services in the US, are increasingly incorporating financial education and empowerment into their service repertoires. In this article, I examine and compare how financial educators in two organizations that target different populations/problems – women in (economic) transition and chronically/intergenerationally poor people – give financial advice to their clients. I draw a parallel between what Foucault calls the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and claims by personal finance experts and educators that we are silent about money. I suggest that these claims amount to a ‘money repressive hypothesis’ that gives experts what I call an ‘advisor’s benefit’: the appearance of being freed from silence about money and thus able to liberate others from silence and steer them toward financial wellness. I show that financial educators perform this benefit through temporal frames – meaningful ways of intersubjectively organizing experience in reference to time, that invite different levels and forms of attention to the past, present, and future – of their clients’ problems. Bridging literatures on governmentality and economization, I contend that these temporal frames are disciplinary financialization devices that act in connection with sociocultural constructions of populations/problems to assemble financial subjectivities.
Buy Now, Pay Later technologies and the gamification of debt in the financial lives of young peopleThreadgold, Steven; Shannon, Barrie; Haro, Adriana; Cook, Julia; Davies, Kate; Coffey, Julia; Farrugia, David; Matthews, Benjamin; Healy, Joshua; Burrows, Roger
doi: 10.1080/17530350.2024.2346210pmid: N/A
In many countries Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) services have rapidly become a pervasive option to pay for consumer products both online and instore. Under-regulated and specifically marketed at young people, BNPL services use gamified and social media-like features to create frictionless user interfaces that supposedly resonate with the way young people engage online and in digital spaces, producing specific financialised subjectivities. In this article, we draw upon Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick to analyse young people’s experiences with these products within an Australian context. Importantly, we emphasise how engagement with BNPL services feels and the many ambivalences and antinomies this surfaces around the blurry lines between production and consumption, and the precarious economic positions of many young people. We contribute to research on the financialisation of everyday life and the consumption of credit by analysing the everyday practices of young people’s indebted subjectivities within a public discourse that positions youth as financially irresponsible while debt is ubiquitous and unavoidable for all but the most privileged.
Fashioning the nation in the age of populismMolnár, Virág
doi: 10.1080/17530350.2024.2373158pmid: N/A
Dress and fashion are both an important site and an idiom through which political conflicts, over cultural membership, such as national and ethnic belonging, are played out. In this article, I use Hungary as a case study to map the various ways in which fashion is used today in populist regimes to delineate the symbolic boundaries of the nation by generating powerful material and visual definitions of belonging, identity, sovereignty, community, traditional craftsmanship and shared heritage. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews I conducted in Hungary between 2017 and 2022 with the owners and designers of independent fashion labels that each stress the importance of incorporating ‘traditional’ Hungarian motifs into contemporary everyday wear. I show how these cultural producers normalize radical nationalism and imagine the nation through consumer communities, highlighting the significance of symbolic economies for populist rule. My analysis develops a relational and practice-oriented approach to consumer nationalism, expanding scholarship on the everyday mechanisms through which the national extends into the economic realm.
Culture or commerce? Craft as an ambiguous construction between culture and economyBerta, Ola Gunhildrud
doi: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2229335pmid: N/A
Contemporary craft presents a conceptual difficulty for many Marshall Islanders, who struggle to construct definitions that rely on a clear-cut separation between culture and economy, in which craft is perceived to serve either cultural or commercial purposes. However, this article ethnographically illustrates that craft is an ambiguous construction. Its ambiguity stems from conflicting notions of culture and commerce, which is tied to valuations along the commodity – non-commodity spectrum. Marshallese craft was initially conceptualized locally and externally as something akin to tourist art aimed at an external other – that is, as commercial craft – but has since turned inwards to become culturally meaningful. Yet, despite this conceptual separation between commercial and cultural crafts, Marshall Islanders make, use, and circulate craft in ways that muddles such clear-cut categories. Instead, people see themselves and others as catering to economic and cultural needs at different moments using the same artifacts – a contextual alteration that contributes to a gradual shift in valuation. The ambiguity of craft therefore illuminates the continuous conceptual work of keeping culture and economy separated, a work that itself should be understood as a process of cultural production.
The leftovers: a rural weaving of field care practices, taste and value within a local food-producing networkPerez Fjalland, Emmy Laura; Christensen, Thomas Budde
doi: 10.1080/17530350.2024.2306263pmid: N/A
More than two-thirds of Denmark's rural landscape is comprised of agricultural fields, mostly conventionally used. The wastage resulting from food production has increased throughout the last 50 years. This article is empirically based on an in-depth ethnographic study of Herslev, an organic Danish farm-based brewery specialising in ‘natural beer brewing.’ Herslev uses ingredients grown locally on biodynamic fields, flavours from plants growing in the wild around the brewery, and ‘leftover’ resources from a local rural network of producers. The article analyses its field-factory practices to explore its understanding of the relationships between landscape care, taste, and value. We suggest the concept of the ‘producer-citizen’ as characterising a food producer operating in a pericapitalist form and space, while exploring and negotiating eco-social ethical landscaping.
From ‘take-ism’ to pursuit of newness and originality: design professionals and models of creativity in contemporary ChinaTang, Grace
doi: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2246984pmid: N/A
Chinese innovative workers are often discussed in terms of their exploitation and empowerment within the current intellectual property systems, but little attention is given to their creative processes. Meanwhile, design practitioners are viewed solely as an innovation resource in the field of design thinking. Based on interviews with Chinese interior designers and secondary data, this article provides an analysis that situates their practices and experiences within the intersection of these fields, emphasising practitioners’ accounts of creativity and production of innovative, cultural, and aesthetic forms. Drawing on theories of practice, genre, and post-Bourdieuian analysis of cultural production, this article argues that the valorisation of creativity needs to be understood in relation to the practices in which they engage, within particular contexts of history, organisation, and genre cultures that provide opportunities for the transformation of genre boundaries. Operating within a milieu that saw copying as part of creative process, the practitioners had no agreement on how the work should be understood within the rubric of creativity. Despite this, they aimed for slight differentiation in design, appropriating and rediscovering multi-cultural forms to resist ‘take-ism’ – the imitative culture of copying of foreign decorative elements and styles, while establishing themselves in the commercial world.