Hire Purchase in a Free Society.

Harris, Ralph; Naylor, Margaret Ailsa; Seldon, Arthur

doi:10.2307/2550786

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Although somewhat of an imitated competence, as Bourdieu (1984) theorised, my contention is these processes can enhance an individual’s stores of capital, with enough potential to affect class position, for three main reasons. First, as participants indicate, credit emancipates individuals from fixed income and fixed patterns of consumption (Harris et al, 1961), making it possible to maintain consumption of a class from which they do not wish to fall, or simulate consumption of a class to which they may not yet belong (Sullivan, 2008). Second, these credit practices can signal ‘privileges and advantages’ in users’ ‘social life’ (Jarness, 2017, p. 361), which would not be possible if it were inaccessible.…”

Section: Discussion: Borrowed Identities and Changing Class Positioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is evidence suggesting that these mechanisms are rudimentary to contemporary forms of governance (Payne, 2013). Inequality, and the meritocratic and individualising discourses explaining its ‘causes’, are deployed to spur economic and cultural activity (Harris et al, 1961; Meadowcroft, 2008; North, 2005). The stress on ‘making success and failure visible’ is intended to destabilise and unsettle ‘any certainties over class positions’ (Latimer & Munro, 2015, p. 428).…”

Section: Discussion: Borrowed Identities and Changing Class Positioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He also recognises how the ‘competitive struggle’ over ‘legitimate’ culture produces ‘pretension’: in other words, affected behaviour, intended to give an appearance of greater importance and/or status than a social position commands, or would be permissible without access to credit. Indeed, without access to credit, spending is limited by financial resources generated from wages, investments and/or profits from capital investment, which mould patterns of consumption (Harris, Naylor, & Seldon, 1961).…”

Section: Class Struggle Reflexivity and The Role Of Credit In Consummentioning

confidence: 99%

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Borrowed identities: Class(ification), inequality and the role of credit-debt in class making and struggle

Sparkes

2019

The Sociological Review

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Class analysis has re-emerged as a pertinent area of enquiry. This development is linked to a growing body of work dubbed cultural class analysis, that utilises Bourdieu’s class scheme to develop rich understandings of how culture and lifestyle interacts with economic and social relations in Britain, generating inequalities and hierarchies. Yet cultural class analyses do not properly account for the way individuals resist their relative class positions, nor the role of unsecured credit in facilitating consumption. This article contributes to this area by examining how unsecured credit and problem debt influences consumption and class position amongst individuals with modest incomes. Drawing on 21 interviews with individuals managing problem debt, this article details how class inequality emerges through affective states that include anxiety and feelings of deficit. It also shows how these experiences motivate participants to rely on unsecured credit to consume cultural goods and engage in activities in a struggle against their class position, with the intention of enhancing how they are perceived and classified by others. The findings indicate that cultural class analyses may have overlooked the symbolic importance of mundane consumption and goods in social differentiation. This article further details how these processes entangle individuals into complex liens of debt – which lead to over-indebtedness, default, dispossession and financial expropriation – illustrating how investigations of credit-debt can better inform understandings of class inequality, exploitation and struggle.

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Section: Discussion: Borrowed Identities and Changing Class Positioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussion: Borrowed Identities and Changing Class Positioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Class Struggle Reflexivity and The Role Of Credit In Consummentioning

confidence: 99%

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Borrowed identities: Class(ification), inequality and the role of credit-debt in class making and struggle

Sparkes

2019

The Sociological Review

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“…Within the British context of this time, consumer credit was certainly less developed economically and culturally (Ford, 1988); while Americans remarked on the wonder of the instalment plan, the British layered credit behind the legal myth of hire purchase. Nevertheless, Ralph Harris and his colleagues (1961), at the pro-market Institute of Economic Affairs, sought to advance an unequivocal defence of consumer credit. Harris et al ., echoing Seligman’s earlier advocacy, argued that hire purchase was effectively a new kind of saving, an investment even, through which consumers were able to use a household durable good as they accumulated money towards its outright ownership.…”

Section: Freedom Realized: Credit and Economic Welfarementioning

confidence: 99%

Debt, consumption and freedom

Marron

2015

History of the Human Sciences

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The article explores a range of social scientific representations of credit and debt in the United States and Britain and how these have been organized around the problem of freedom. On the one hand, credit is projected as productive, embodying and securing liberal values of individual autonomy and self-determination. On the other, debt is portrayed as consumptive, ensnaring the individual, subverting her or his will and undermining the capacity for self-determination. The classic cultural injunction against consumer borrowing is captured under the rubric of the Puritan ethic which portrays indebtedness as contrary to the values of individual freedom and autonomy; however, it is shown here how the meanings attached to credit and debt have always been ambiguous in practice. Over the 20th century, and continuing today, a number of economic writers have attempted to legitimize the development of consumer credit by demonstrating how it contributes towards freedom and security. However, it is shown how these accounts shift in response to changing economic discourses as well as credit's growing pervasiveness. In contrast, sociological writers have tended to criticize the accumulation of debt as damaging to both individual autonomy and societal welfare. Again, these accounts also manifest a notable change in emphasis over time in response to shifting constructions of the problem of social change. Finally, recent empirical work is drawn upon to demonstrate the ways in which freedom itself can be a contingent and contextual element in the production of consumer credit.

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“…In 1941, the Commonwealth Board of Inquiry into Hire Purchase and Cash Orders made the first estimates of outstanding hire-purchase credit during 1936-40, based on an incomplete survey among dealers and finance companies (Chancellor et al 1941, 18-20). For 1944/45-1960/61, various authors made estimates of outstanding hire-purchase credit (Arndt and Shrapnel 1951;Shrapnel and Runcie 1955;Low 1960;Harris, Naylor, and Seldon 1961;Runcie and Burke 1969;Runcie 1969) on the basis of the annual reports of large publiclyowned finance companies. To this, the authors added approximations of credit extended by retailers.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consumer credit in Australia during the twentieth century

Eng

2008

Accounting, Business & Financial History

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This article surveys the growth of consumer credit in Australia during the twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War. Until the 1970s, the regulation of Australia's financial market caused formal consumer credit to be provided mainly by finance companies under hire-purchase contracts, largely for the purchase of cars and household durables. Deregulation of the financial market since the 1960s allowed banks to gain a dominant share in the market for personal loans. Quantification of long-term trends is difficult, but broad estimates suggest sustained growth in per capita indebtedness during 1945-2007.consumer credit, finance, household expenditure, history, Australia,

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Hire Purchase in a Free Society.

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Borrowed identities: Class(ification), inequality and the role of credit-debt in class making and struggle

Borrowed identities: Class(ification), inequality and the role of credit-debt in class making and struggle

Debt, consumption and freedom

Consumer credit in Australia during the twentieth century

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