Workshop/CfP - Households and Peripheral Financialisation in Europe, 22-23 February 2018, Germany

The burgeoning work on “everyday finance” or “popular finance” attends to the increasing involvement of ever-wider, non-elite sections of society with financial devices, markets and narratives. This literature tends to evoke “the household” as a prominent but under-theorised category of analysis. This is particularly problematic since mainstream economics and financial expert knowledge treat households as self-evident and bounded units of economic statistics and modelling, risk assessment and management, further aggregated as the “household sector”. Economic anthropology and economic sociology, on the other hand, see the household as the unit of social reproduction in which individuals pool resources and adopt common strategies that are informed by socially constructed dispositions. Building on these traditions, this workshop aims to unpack the mutually and dynamically constitutive relationships between socially, historically and geographically situated households and financial markets, including the shifting articulation of increasingly financialisedreal-estate assets with social relations of interdependence in the household.

Taking stock of the variegated nature of financialisation, we propose acknowledging multiple patterns of peripheral financialisation − such as those in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and super-financialised small economies like Ireland or Iceland − and exploring both their similarities and divergences. While under-represented in the everyday finance literature and shaped by diverse historical trajectories, these societies exhibit patterns of financialisation different from those of Anglo-Saxon and European core countries, such as extraversion, dependence on capital inflows, high rate of foreign ownership in financial sector, and a recent expansion of household debt from a relatively low base and often in high risk forms such as FX loans. These tendencies are co-constitutive with a set of broader conditions, such as under- or deregulation of housing provision and finance (often recently privatised), high rates of homeownership, undeveloped (social) renting, retrenched welfare states, and a prominent redistributive and welfare role of the family.