Sharing, Saving, and Living Well on Less: Supporting Social Connectedness to Mitigate Financial Hardship

Abstract

This paper contends that problems such as poverty and economic disadvantage are equally social in their nature as they are economic. As such, a social frame of reference is helpful in design. Using a qualitative approach, we study the ways 13 Australian households living on a low income manage, organise and interact in their everyday financial activities and what this means for designers of technology that might assist them with this. We highlight the highly social nature of many practices concerned with managing and saving money. We provide implications for how these practices may be supported through fostering social connections and how informal and sharing economies may be leveraged to provide value to those experiencing financial hardship. An argument is made that classifying an otherwise heterogeneous population based on income alone is reductive. In response we propose a rationale for amending the "low income" demographic classifier, incorporating a broader measure we tentatively term Social-financial Connectedness which captures the importance of social connections in overall financial wellbeing and identifies people's capacity to live well and share, irrespective of their financial circumstances.

Prosocial exchange systems: Nonreciprocal giving, lending, and skill-sharing

“…This means that scarcity and personal agency are both constraining factors for the potential emergence of transitivity in the network. The consequence is that chains of actors are more common than circuitous donation patterns, which supports previous research (Snow et al, 2017) that further research into the socio-economic status of participants in sharing systems is required. However, if the notion of community is premised on interaction rather than directionality of transfer, we can symmetrise the graph (make it undirected) and look for evidence of nascent community structures created through cliques (instances where everybody in a group interacts with each other).…”

“…However, it has nonetheless not received much empirical scrutiny despite calls for analysis of the new social configurations of people using prosocial exchange systems (e.g. Snow et al, 2017). An example of local items (either for borrowing or available for free) and skillshare opportunities visible to users in a UK city is presented in Figure 1.…”

Rethinking saving: Indian ceremonial gifts as relational and reproductive saving

“…One might believe relational and reproductive saving to be limited to exotic populations, excluded from western modernity. Yet it seems that in the global North, too, saving circuits and calculations practices among the poor escape from the control of reformers, bankers and social workers (Perrin-Herredia 2013; Snow et al 2016). Just because the rich, by and large, intensively use banking services does not mean that they escape the constraints of social reproduction: it is just that their social reproduction is partly based on accumulation logics, to which banking finance contributes intensively, while also being embedded within complex, sophisticated social bonds (Ho, 2009).…”

Systematic framework to assess social impacts of sharing platforms: Synthesising literature and stakeholder perspectives to arrive at a framework and practice-oriented tool

“…The sharing economy is said to foster economic empowerment [ 55 , 132 ] through job creation, greater income, and increased financial independence [ 49 , 133 ]. Resource owners can earn money by providing access to goods and services [ 114 , 134 ]. Studies are emerging that demonstrate how sharing platforms provide real-time flexibility to earnings and potentially lead to higher hourly wages [ 135 ].…”