About the universality of a concept: is there a financialization of daily life in France?

Abstract

Based on the French case, this article aims to challenge the concept of "financialization of daily life". This notion does not perfectly describe the transformation of money management experienced by French households; compared to other developed countries, their money is kept at a remove from financial markets, particularly as the French retail banking system, built in the 1960s, is designed to "definancialize" and the French welfare state maintains its protective position. The French economy is nonetheless deeply financialized, with great consequences on job and income instability. Public authorities tackle the problem from this angle, with policies increasingly focused on households' money. Social work is expected not only to be an intermediary between individuals and social legislation, but to aid households in navigating their engagements with commercial entities. This leads us to claim that public intervention is becoming monetized. Resumo: Tomando como referência o caso francês, este artigo propõe colocar à prova a noção de financeirização da vida cotidiana, expressão que não descreve com perfeição as transformações nas formas de gestão do dinheiro experimentadas pelos lares franceses os quais, comparativamente aos lares de outros países desenvolvidos, mantêm seu dinheiro à distância dos mercados financeiros, da mesma forma como o sistema bancário varejista francês, constituído nos anos 1960, foi projetado para "desfinancializar", e que o estado de bem-estar francês se mantém na posição de protetor. A economia francesa, no entanto, se encontra profundamente financeirizada, o que gera instabilidade no emprego e na renda. Sob esse ângulo, as autoridades públicas abordam o problema adotando políticas cada vez mais focadas no dinheiro doméstico. Espera-se que o serviço social não seja apenas um intermediário entre os indivíduos e os direitos sociais legais, mas que ajude os lares a administrarem seus compromissos com as instituições comerciais. Isso nos leva a afirmar que a intervenção pública tornou-se monetarizada.Palavras-chave: Financeirização da vida cotidiana. França. Economia doméstica. Serviço social. Crédito.

Reluctant financialisaton: Financialisaton without financialised subjectivities in Hungary and the United States

“…This was originally due to the qualitative nature of the FoEL literature, using single-sited ethnographies and interviews, with the vast majority of studies conducted in the UK and the US. These were later complemented by studies outside of these contexts, such as France (Lazarus, 2017), Italy (Di Feliciantonio, 2016), the Czech Republic (Samec, 2018), Poland (Lewicki, 2014), Hungary (Pellandini-Simanyi et al, 2015), Chile (Gonzalez, 2015), Israel (Ailon, 2019;Weiss, 2015), Argentine (Fridman, 2017), China (Maso, 2015), and Singapore (Lai, 2016(Lai, , 2017, among others.…”

“…First, they showed that neoliberal discourse is less successful in producing neoliberal subjects in some contexts, while more successful in others. Several studies documented what we called ‘reluctant financialisation’: resistance to financialised subjectification and governance mechanisms (Coppock, 2013; Di Feliciantonio, 2016; Fields, 2017; Gonzalez, 2015; Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage, 2017, 2019; Weiss, 2015) or partial adoption of some elements of the financialised mind-set, yet in appropriated and contested ways (Gonzalez, 2015; Hillig, 2019; Lai, 2016, 2017; Langley, 2014; Lazarus, 2017; Lehtonen, 2017; Pellandini-Simanyi et al., 2015; Samec, 2018).…”

“…Most of these studies, however, theorised differences compared to the US/UK studies as additions to or corrections of the general theory of the financialisation of everyday life, rather than in relational geographical terms. An important exception is the work of Jeanne Lazarus (2017) that discussed why the subjectivities associated with financialisation are different in France compared to the US and the UK. She highlighted the different structure of the French retail banking system, the French welfare state and public policies as key to these differences.…”

Toward a relational sociology of credit: an exploration of the French literature

“…Furthermore, we believe that French theoretical traditions and ways of assessing credit issues are key to understanding the French path to financialization. Unlike in Anglo-American countries, the financialization of savings, personal insurance, and pension plans is still low-though it is growing-and has yet to emerge as a political issue (Lazarus, 2017). For now, the effects of financialization are mostly considered through the prism of the destabilization of work that it produces (Chambost, 2013), but not through the financialization of daily life.…”

Microcredit and repayment in Colombia

“…On one hand, people could have been equipped and trained with the financial calculative technologies (formulas, devices, algorithms), but their actual uses of them did not match with the expected idea or goal. On the other hand, the fact that people find creative and adaptive uses of financial products, services, and techniques in their social lives also tells us that the financialization of everyday life (Martin, 2002;Lazarus, 2017) is not necessarily a process through which finance erodes social bonds of communities or exploits their social capital as assumed by feminist and Marxist critical approaches (see Rankin, 2011;Roberts, 2014;Federici, 2014;Green and Estes, 2019). In fact, those effects of financial governmentality that I illustrated through cases studies and conceptualized as overflows, excess or productive engagements Bank W is one of the most important microfinancial institutions in Colombia with more than 30 years in business, the third highest profit rate among microcredit institutions (Asobancaria, 2017), and the second bigger share at national level among private MFIs (nearly 5% of total market share).…”