Search

Foreign-currency denominated mortgages, payable in local currency, blew up the Hungarian economy in 2009 and resulted in ongoing debt crisis. The now-established theory of performativity typically asks how an economic theory succeeds in creating its world, often a newly designed market. Reversing the question we ask how a market outcome-the rise of forex mortgages-might be linked to theories, without a 'winner.' To what extent did the diverse theories held by policy-makers, regulators and bankers shape the market to confirm these very theories? We present preliminary results from our ongoing larger project on the creation and transformations of the Hungarian mortgage market, using policy archives and interviews with regulators, bank executives and borrowers. We argue that most markets are outcomes of performation struggles (Callon)-multiple theories vying to become performative. We identify groups by their social-technical assemblages-their market theories, technical proposals and capabilities-noting that some theories are non-economic, and that groups theorize about each other's role ('banks'/'market', 'households'/'families', 'regulators'/'the state'). Theories get the chance to become performative when they (1) are promoted by actors with institutional or symbolic power to enroll others into their program; (2) require socio-technical assemblages compatible with existing ones; (3) allow for polysemic assemblages to accommodate multiple agendas. The observed market results from "fragmented performativity": theories get incorporated then abandoned, and intersect with each other, leaving partially realized assemblages-laws, financial institutions, subsidies, borrowers-in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How exactly do financial products shift everyday subjectivities? Work on the "financialization of daily life" suggests that the daily encounter with financial products, credit rating systems and new political and media discourses promoting a financial entrepreneurial spirit, lead to the penetration of financial logic into everyday realms that were once free of economic calculation. We find similar theoretical positions by scholars applying notions of performativity (Callon) and governmentality (Miller and Rose) to consumer finance. Our paper revisits these claims, drawing on post-crisis interviews with Hungarian mortgage borrowers, and focusing on three key terrains: time horizons, relationships and rationality. We find that albeit mortgages do carry their own logics (specific time frames, approaches to relationships, and rationalities are required by specific types of mortgages), these logics hardly ever succeed in shaping everyday subjectivities to their own image. We find that finance is partly 'domesticated' in the household: mortgages are appropriated to existing relationships, temporal structures and rationalities guiding everyday life. New subjectivities emerge and a novel financial logic is applied only when the taken-for-granted course of events breaks down: when mortgages are denied, when people face payment difficulties and default. In these cases, previous routines of rationality are questioned, relationships are put to (a financial) test, and time frames are re-evaluated according a financial logic. The paper thus fills a gap in understanding the effects of finance, contributing much-needed empirical study and novel theory on the work of embedding finance in the already existing temporal and social structures of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that financial incentives are a crucial means of reconciling divergent interests has taken center stage in debates around the financial crisis, and it has long been fundamental to management practice. Commentators widely agree that bankers' incentive schemes encouraged undesirable or unethical behavior such as mis-selling and overselling of financial products. Underlying explanations of incentivization is Agency Theory, which has risen to prominence in economics, political science, accounting and finance as a theory of motivation in asymmetrical information. Instead of expanding or dismissing Agency Theory, the paper looks at a certain kind of performativity (Callon 1998; MacKenzie and Millo 2003) of this non-neoclassical economic theory. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at two types of banks in pre-crisis Hungary, the paper analyzes a large universal bank's program to move its employees' activities "from serving to selling", which involved bonuses for quantities sold, initially controversial among employees. The paper compares this to the baseline case of personal financial advisors in a Multi-level Marketing scheme who sold statesupported home loans purely by commission. There, financial incentives were the primary reason why people joined, yet they resisted meeting clients. The paper shows that having incentives to increase sales (as a strategy of gaining market share) required an iterative process of setting up a whole behavioral infrastructure, and an increasingly technical control of employee's interactive work. The paper contributes an organizational underpinning of seemingly financial motivation: a data-based measurability of work and other efforts at "alignment" is what shifted banking representatives to sell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interactional foundations of markets as it examines a puzzle in banking technology. Customer Relationship Management was introduced at a Hungarian bank to personalize clerks' interactions with clients. The software assembles customer profiles and calculates individualized sales offers. However, as bank clerks interact with software and client at once, the outcome is standardized—they offer the same set of products to everyone. To explain this result the paper asks how interaction accomplishes market exchange and complements the structural orientation of economic sociology, including the latter's sampling bias (selecting accomplished transactions as opposed to all buyer-seller interactions) and view of social relationships (as independent variables rather than market outcomes themselves). Using observations of bank-client encounters and interviews at a bank, the paper provides fine-grained analysis of the interaction process, finding that the very properties of face-to-face interaction reverse personalization via technology and result in standardized financial offers. As bank clerks interact with the software-generated client profile and with the client in person, they develop strategies of inserting products into the interaction. The paper contributes to the theory of markets in two ways. First, interaction dynamics structure market exchange because the specific spatial and temporal order of interaction enables and constrains the possibilities for exchange. Second, social relationships and fleeting impersonal transactions are not mutually exclusive ways of doing exchange. Rather, interaction between buyer and seller entails both anonymous calculative and familiar-trusting elements. This allows us to de-emphasize the analytical distinction between "social" and "economic" aspects of markets. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper sets out to investigate how mass banking products and individual needs are reconciled in practice. It rests on the ethnomethodological presumption that market coordination is a fragile process, which participants must sustain continuously from situation to situation. The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork at a Hungarian bank, where I observed encounters between bank clerks and clients. The expanding banking market of Hungary showcases banks' efforts to render consumers compatible with the available products through client profiling and individualizing the product offer. Clerks work with software, Customer Relationship Management, that calculates the proper strategy for any individual customer based on her known banking habits. By focusing on the bank clerks and the technology surrounding them I advance Michel Callon's concept of formatting of economic agents in several respects. I argue that formatting is not a two-way but a three-way process among not only the bank and the consumers, but also the clerks. The client is assembled on the CRM screen and clerks are expected to perform accordingly. Formatting, however, reaches its limits as clerks dispute the software's judgment with their situational knowledge of the client. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the importance Hungarian advertiser give to the West, and their efforts to become educators of their countrymen. The profession is trying to define its identity under influence of the Western countries. The advertisers are providing a bridge between their society and the West. They are trying to balance their power and scope in the global market. They are trying to renegotiate their market stand and balance it with artistic independence. They are in efforts to gain materialistic and artistic freedom from their customers and clients.

How do organizations foreclose and dismiss information that contradicts their optimistic expectations of the future? We examine this question through the analysis of prediction narratives across three types of organizations - banks, regulatory and the parliament - in the context of the foreign currency mortgage crisis in Eastern Europe, using archival research and interviews. We suggest that the EU convergence narrative, fused with an orientalist geographical imaginary, was central in dismissing warning signs of the crisis. This narrative interpreted growing indebtedness as 'catching up' with Europe, de-emphasized exchange rate risk through a belief in European convergence, and precluded crisis scenarios originating in the coveted EU. Our findings contribute to theories of how economic expectations are formed, stabilized and maintained by developing the concept of 'spatializing the future', denoting practices that handle uncertainty by charting the future as movement in concrete geographical or abstract space, along externally verifiable pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]