Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America

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Time, role of the past and varieties of fictional expectations: comments on Jens Beckert’s Imagined Futures

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Who is in charge of family finances in the Russian two-earner households?

Using a recent representative survey and supplemental interviews, we investigate household money management and domestic power dynamics in contemporary Russian two-partner families. During the Soviet period, it was women who typically managed household money. Today, while 45.6% of contemporary Russian two-partner households pool money and manage it jointly, and in about a quarter of families women are in charge, families with men in control of domestic money are on the rise among more affluent spouses who have been married for less than 20 years. While previous work finds evidence for the feminization of poverty in the postcommunist region, we underscore the otherwise hidden aspects of inequality—gendered access to household money among the relative “winners” of the transition: Younger and more affluent families. We place these changes in the context of neoliberal market reforms, including labor market and welfare policy changes and the rise of neoconservative gender ideology.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: National Research University Higher School of Economics "Household Financial Behaviour Monitor." (National Research University Higher School of Economics "Household Financial Behaviour Monitor")Accepted manuscrip

Consumer credit surveillance

This chapter reviews the development of consumer credit surveillance in the United States from the nineteenth century, as the original problem of information asymmetry in consumer lending gave rise to consumer data registries, a process led by merchants, not by financial institutions. Regulations in the 1970s addressing discrimination and data privacy limited consumer credit surveillance, but lately two developments reversed this trend. Aided by banking deregulation and advances in information technology, the use of credit scores expanded beyond lending, while the kind of data used to calculate scores has also widened, turning the credit score into a general measure of character. This results in a pervasive new system of consumer surveillance and control that turns the original information asymmetry upside down, favoring lenders and other corporate actors, including the state, at the expense of consumers. The European Union is trying to limit this system while a full version is currently piloted in China.Accepted manuscrip

Consumer credit in comparative perspective

We review the literature in sociology and related fields on the fast global growth of consumer credit and debt and the possible explanations for this expansion. We describe the ways people interact with the strongly segmented consumer credit system around the world—more specifically, the way they access credit and the way they are held accountable for their debt. We then report on research on two areas in which consumer credit is consequential: its effects on social relations and on physical and mental health. Throughout the article, we point out national variations and discuss explanations for these differences. We conclude with a brief discussion of the future tasks and challenges of comparative research on consumer credit.Accepted manuscrip