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Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry
... Holding placards that read "Occupy FINCA," 'Debt kills "Save our homes from banks," and "Humans above profit," the protesters did something very significant on that day. The rural borrowers had traveled over 500 km to attribute blame of their indebtedness to US-led institutions, which had enforced debt-led strategies of capital accumulation (or the growth-cum-debt development model) for the past 30 years (see also Soederberg, 2012Soederberg, , 2014. They drew public attention to the role of international finance in generating rural women's debt bondage, challenging the myth of women's empowerment through microcredit enterprise. ...
... This reflected a global neoliberal strategy for debt-based growth, which recasted marginalized groups as a high-yielding investment opportunity. International donors legitimized their financial practices as a vehicle for women's empowerment (Bateman, 2010;Fedirici, 2014), but in practice they enacted "neoliberal dumping" of risk and responsibility (Maclean, 2012;Soederberg, 2014). This refers to how international finance views women "as less risky investment choices because of innate gendered characteristics, such as the responsibility to nurture and work harder" Soederberg (2014, p. 202). ...
... International donors and investors framed for-profit lending, rather than subsidized credit, as an effective way to combat poverty, empower women, and stimulate entrepreneurial activity. For-profit lending was reinforced by neoliberal cuts to welfare provisions that shifted responsibilities for well-being from the state to individuals through private lenders (Fedirici, 2014;Soederberg, 2014). In 2012, 38% of the population was classified as poor, of whom 75% lived in rural areas and were predominantly ethnic majority Kyrgyz (Mogilevsky & Omorova, 2011). ...
This article offers a first person account of women’s mobilization against banking and microfinance sectors in Kyrgyzstan. It focuses on the key factors for the evolution of the anti-debt movement, and women’s political strategies to problematize interest and to denaturalize the discourse of financial inclusion. For many years, the financial industry has operated a gendered process of neoliberal capital accumulation under the guise of empowerment that has produced tensions between transnational capital and marginalized women. Building upon Bourdieusian ideas on social movements, the study shows the significance of strain and situational definition in the formation of the anti-debt mobilization. The article uses in-depth interviews with the leaders and activists of the anti-debt movement and borrowers to explore how gender, class and capital were intertwined. It contributes to the literature on post-Soviet politics by challenging the dominant elite-centered frameworks, which are inadequate to explain local movements and gendered activism.
... 350). See additionally Soederberg (2014), who makes clear that the so-called freedoms of capitalism have always depended upon objective material relations that are necessarily exploitative, compulsive, and alienating (pp. 15-26). ...
... 43). See alsoSoederberg (2014), who argues that Marx's critique of the political economy does not reduce all of life to economics but points out the social origins and context of economic life(pp. 16-17). ...
Critical pastoral theology has no doubt come to recognize the significance of social formations in the crisis of addiction as a symptom of suffering. This article suggests that how we understand and describe these social formations matters. It argues that our most common approaches to addiction risk reproducing forms of domination via an incomplete notion of freedom in their attempt to clarify the exceptional status of addiction. This can function to obscure the capitalist nature of addiction and the addictive nature of capitalism undergirding our everyday lives. The author argues that addiction is itself a symptomatic expression of capitalist social formations; not merely an individual pathology, addiction names the way our social attachments to objects and to one another become compulsive despite their negative consequences. This critical concept of addiction allows us to see, name, and negate the false promises on which the endurance of capitalism depends. The ultimate aim of this critical approach is to consider how we as caregivers might reflect on and transform these dominating social divisions.
... Competitiveness and acquisitiveness are made virtuous by adults; that is quite frightening for young people as they cannot belong unless they 'win' and unless they 'consume' (Soederberg 2014;Zuboff 2019). What I'm saying is we can to create a counter-narrative, and a counter-story of solidarity, and care for others, which also means care for oneself. ...
Kathleen Lynch is Professor of Equality Studies (Emerita) at University College Dublin, UCD. She played a leading role in establishing the UCD Equality Studies Centre (1990) and the UCD School of Social Justice (2004/5). She has authored many books and articles on all types of equality and social justice issues, especially in education, and more recently on the relationship between care and justice. In this interview, she talks about the experiences and ideals that have shaped her work as an activist scholar: from her formative years in the West of Ireland to her collaboration opening spaces for resisting injustice, such as the Centre for Equality Studies and the School of Social Justice at University College Dublin. She also discusses some of the motivations behind her work on care and affective inequality, including her most recent book: Care and Capitalism (2022). The interview was conducted on April 2018, and was subsequently revised for clarity.
... Furthermore, we highlight socio-economic circumstances of individuals residing in unique locations. Particularly, attention is paid to the relationship between debt disposal and socio-economic inequalities, drawing upon the growing post-GFC literature in this area (Barba and Pivetti, 2008;Soederberg, 2014;Dagdeviren et al., 2020). The analysis is based on two major longitudinal household surveys: the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS). ...
While the growth of household debt has been instrumental in the creation of the recent bubbles, debt disposal also plays an important role in shaping the scope and depth of busts. Much has been written about debt and leverage since the 2008 global financial crisis. Debt-downsizing, however, received little attention. Deleveraging has the potential to reinstitute stability but it can also create a drag on economic recovery. This paper investigates the spatial patterns of deleveraging for the first time in the context of English regions, Wales and Scotland based on a multi-level framework that should be applicable to countries and regions beyond these three countries. Using longitudinal household survey data and reconstituting space through this multilevel framework, we show that deleveraging has been highly uneven and short-lived across space and time. This outcome is shaped by three major factors: individuals’/households’ socio-economic position, how their regions are affected by the boom-and-bust cycle and how governments’ crisis management programmes take effect in each region.
... Outro significado atrelado ao crédito é o de liberdade individual (BIROCHI e POZZEBON, 2016), o que pode transformar as condições das famílias de baixa renda (CABRAAL, 2011). Opostamente, Soederberg (2015) acena que o significado do crédito como algo neutro, inevitável e mutuamente benéfico naturaliza uma realidade em que a baixa renda não pode se dar ao luxo de viver sem o crédito, por vezes, caro. Essa segunda visão é conhecida como algo similar a um panóptico, na qual o Estado não promove via crédito um investimento racional, mas estabelece uma dependência perpétua. ...
Nos últimos anos, alguns pesquisadores de Marketing têm alertado para um tema pouco estudado na área: o consumo de crédito. Frente tais questões, essa pesquisa buscou compreender como os idosos de baixa renda se relacionam com o consumo de crédito, direcionando o olhar dos pesquisadores de Marketing para as riquezas dessa relação. A discussão teórica circunda para a baixa renda e sua relação com o consumo; a pluralidade de usos do crédito; bem como o consumo como forma de promulgar a (in)dependência financeira. Metodologicamente, trabalhamos por meio de uma etnografia com 120 idosos de baixa renda, realizada por três pesquisadores, de abril de 2016 até junho de 2018, totalizando mais de 400 horas de campo (1.750 páginas de texto para análise). Interpretamos as narrativas por intermédio da Análise de Conteúdo, em três categorias: (1) Particularidades da baixa renda ao se tornar idoso e usar o crédito; (2) Pluralidades de sentidos atribuídos ao crédito; (3) (In)dependência financeira e de vida do participante via crédito. Em termos de resultados, notamos que o consumo de crédito assume significados para os entrevistados em esferas sociais, políticas, culturais e históricas. Observamos também que não existe um padrão homogêneo de consumidores idosos influenciados só por fatores cognitivos e/ou comportamentais. Em complemento, notamos diferenças entre atores e observadores ao construírem sua própria realidade social e suas percepções seletivas sobre o que se entende sobre o sentido do crédito. Como implicações para área de Gestão e diferente do que alguns estudos anteriores apontam (geralmente em expressões como “Os idosos são”), o que se vê é a desfragmentação social e não a coesão quando o idoso de baixa renda é percebido como consumidor.
... While such factors are important, demand for AFS also operates within a more complex historical, social, political and economic context. Soederberg (2014) highlights the geographically and institutionally specific dynamics at play in the broader service ecosystem, such as the prevalence and characteristics of a country's casual labor markets, domestic consumer protection laws, local variations in social welfare and education provision, the regulatory environment as well as the levels of (and changes in) income and wealth inequality. ...
Purpose
Service captivity is described as the experience of constrained choice whereby a consumer has no power and feels unable to exit a service relationship. This study aims to explore how positive service experiences can contribute to service captivity in the alternative financial services (AFS) sector for consumers experiencing financial vulnerability.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 31 interviews were undertaken with Australian consumers of payday loans and/or consumer leases.
Findings
The authors reveal a typology of consumers based on their financial vulnerability and their experience with AFS providers. Then they present three themes relating to how the marketing practices of these providers create a positive service experience, and, in doing so, can contribute to service captivity for consumers experiencing financial vulnerability.
Research limitations/implications
The benefits derived from positive service experiences, including accessible solutions, self-esteem, and a sense of control over their financial situation, contribute to the service captivity of some consumers, rendering alternative avenues less attractive.
Practical implications
AFS providers must ensure a socially responsible approach to their marketing practices to minimize potentially harmful outcomes for consumers. However, a systems-level approach is needed to tackle the wider issue of financial precarity. Policymakers need to address the marketplace gaps, regulatory frameworks and social welfare policies that contribute to both vulnerability and captivity.
Originality/value
This research extends the understanding of service captivity by demonstrating how positive service experiences can perpetuate this situation. Further, specific solutions are proposed at each level of the service system to address service captivity in the AFS sector.
... Johnston's article on IFI's support of post-conflict microfinance targeted at women brings these traditions together with feminist attentiveness to hierarchies and power in methodologies. She analyses what Soederberg (2014) terms 'class-based, credit led accumulation' in East Timor and shows how profits from high interest rates are distributed upwards, and how highly gendered debt reinforces unequal relations between socio-economic classes. ...
This paper provides a framework for explicitly linking feminist analysis of global political economy and feminist analysis of war/peace through the concept of ‘gendered circuits of violence.’ The framework connects the gendered economics of peace and war through analyses of standard policy mechanisms promoted by International Financial Institutions and International Organizations—from general debt servicing and lending in post-war recovery to microfinance programmes, extractive resource economics, taxation, budgeting and austerity in the state sector. With gendered circuits of violence as the core concept, feminist political economy analysis transgresses security-IPE-development divides. Gendered circuits of violence are manifest through bodies that are carriers of violence from war zones to areas of alleged peace; through IFIs as distributors of harm and comfort to transnational households; and in the interstitial post-conflict spaces created by remittances, care and debt. Feminist analysis reveals the imbrication of capitalist systems with the intersectional politics of gender and race, and the (re)production and diffusion of violent conflict.
Kathleen Lynch, Profesora Emérita de Equality Studies en University College Dublin (UCD), jugó un papel importante en el establecimiento del Equality Studies Centre en 1990 (Centro de Estudios sobre la Igualdad) y de la School of Social Justice (Escuela de Justicia Social) en 2004/5, ambas en UCD. Es autora de varios libros y artículos, especialmente en el terreno de la educación, la igualdad, los cuidados y la justicia social. Su más reciente libro, Care and Capitalism: Why Affective Equality Matters for Social Justice, fue publicado por Polity Press en 2022. En esta entrevista, habla sobre las experiencias y los ideales que han dado forma a su trabajo como activista intelectual: desde sus años de formación en el oeste de Irlanda hasta su colaboración abriendo espacios para resistir la injusticia. También comenta algunas de las motivaciones detrás de su trabajo sobre la desigualdad en el cuidado y el afecto. La entrevista fue realizada en abril de 2018, y posteriormente revisada para mayor claridad, de ahí que aparezcan referencias a hechos posteriores, como la pandemia de Covid.
Esse artigo relata alguns resultados de uma pesquisa que buscou analisar a forma como o consumo de crédito pode influenciar o bem-estar individual e coletivo de idosos de baixa renda. A revisão da literatura contemplou discussões sobre o consumo de crédito e o conceito de bem-estar individual e coletivo. A pesquisa empírica seguiu os preceitos da Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) e foi dividido em três etapas: a primeira, uma etnografia em um grupo com 120 idosos, espaço no qual também se entrevistou individualmente 30 deles; a segunda, composta por entrevistas individuais com representantes das instituições fornecedoras de crédito, além de um ex-funcionário responsável de um banco internacional e um representante de uma organização de defesa de consumidor; e, por sua vez, a terceira etapa foi realizada por meio de trajetórias de vida com 4 famílias, escolhidas a partir dos 30 participantes idosos iniciais. O material foi analisado por meio da Análise Crítica de Discurso, na corrente proposta por Fairclough. Os resultados apontam que os diversos atores envolvidos no consumo de crédito (incluindo os próprios idosos, suas famílias e os ofertantes de créditos), por vezes, contribuem para afetar negativamente o bem-estar desses indivíduos. Constatamos também que alguns idosos também contribuem para a naturalização dos efeitos nocivos do crédito, como se pôde notar em suas manifestações discursivas.
Research on the conditions that educators have to deal with in order to carry out educational work in Greek public education (Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary).
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