Abstract
Lisa Adkins’s The Time of Money made me think again about a puzzling empirical situation.
Some years ago, I conducted interviews with risk managers of retail firms in Chile. The interviewees kept talking about las dueñas de casa (housewives). As they proudly explained, unlike traditional banks that would not lend to people with no formal income, these managers had figured out that low-income or incomeless housewives were actually very profitable customers (their cards could be used both in installment purchases and cash loans). This meant, I learned later, that housewives performed relatively better than other groups within the context of a risk management technique that industry insiders called “sowing.” Sowing consisted of issuing credit cards with a very low credit limit to almost any potential customer and then slowly extending the limit of the cards of those who proved to be good payers. Sometime after, I worked on a study of how people in low-income households use credit instruments, and I learned that behind the housewives’ success there was a more complicated story. As the borrowing limit increased with its use, the cards’ available credit became something of a financial resource on its own. Cards were not only used by those whose name was on the card; they were used by family members, neighbors, and friends, and cardholders had to manage this complicated network.
The Time of Money made me think about all this again. It certainly helped that while I read the book, Chile entered into a massive social revolt in which, among many other things, many supermarkets and department stores were looted and burned down. Not only did this book remind me about all this, it also made me realize that even though I tried to analyze this situation myself (Ossandón 2014, 2017), there were many important aspects that I did not understand properly. What The Time of Money does is provide a novel way to theorize how households, gender politics, and financial economies intersect today.
If you are reading this in the United States, it might be helpful to say a few words about what type of book this is. This is a text written by a sociologist—Adkins is professor of sociology at the University of Sydney and has previously held positions at sociology departments in the United Kingdom—and it is about economic issues. It is a book of economic sociology. But this is a kind of economic sociology that is very far from anything you will find within the tradition of the “new economic sociology” often associated with Granovetter. Nor is it the type of sociological study, often conducted in Europe, after the work of Callon. Neither is it the type of research you might associate with Zelizer. What Adkins does is part of a different tradition of sociological studies of economic issues. This is a type of work, developed mostly in the United Kingdom, that could be associated with the group of people behind the journal Theory, Culture and Society. Work in this tradition shares a combination of political economy kinds of questions—what is the current phase of capitalism?—with a particular emphasis on the creative use of conceptual tools from cultural theory.
The book has five chapters. Chapter One is about time. The main source here is Bourdieu’s theory of practices. From this perspective, practices are not only situated in time, but different forms of social practices produce different temporalities. Adkins mobilizes Bourdieu to argue against the traditional assumption that financialization would simply be in opposition to social time. Instead, sociologists should attempt to understand how finance produces new ways of temporalizing social life. Finance is not anti-social, but is a social force that transforms the time we live in.
Chapter Two is about money. The main source here is Simmel. Adkins’s suggestion is that money’s main function today is less working as a universal means of exchange (an instrument that constructs equivalences), and more as a commodity. The last chapters use the concepts developed in the first chapters to analyze three problems.
Chapter Three argues that in a context of securitization, the household is not simply an asset (i.e., property, a collateral) and household customers are not simply debtors. The home becomes a source of monetary flows, and financial speculation today is less about canceling debt on time and more about the ability of financial firms to keep this flow going. It is in this context that financial firms around the world have started to target precarious women as a profitable source of monetary flows.
Chapter Four discusses forms of politicizing. Adkins polemicizes with feminist activists that focus only on wage inequality. Forms of politics inherited from Fordism, in which struggles were oriented to improve wage and labor conditions, do not recognize new sources of exploitation. Today, Adkins argues, activism should consider how domestic life and financial work intersect and the unequal forms of financial risk exposure this creates.
Chapter Five is about the politics of activation. The argument is that austerity policies are not simply a response to financial crises; they show the way households are managed today. Here, Adkins discusses contemporary unemployment systems in which those without a job do not simply receive benefits but are continuously activated. Unemployment becomes a capital that has to be put to work.
The Time of Money is not flawless. As mentioned, it is a book of a particular sociological genre, and it is fair to read it in that context. It does not report on the result of fieldwork or other forms of data collection. The main purpose is to develop concepts to think about contemporary capitalism. Sometimes, however, conceptual exploration and empirical description are confused, with the risk of making statements without enough evidence. The problem is that Adkins relies on a very indirect relation to empirics (mostly secondary literature, which is not particularly empirical either, mostly from political economy and cultural theory). This becomes more problematic considering the large number of ethnographic studies of domestic finances that have appeared in the last few years around the world and that could have been used as a source of information for this book.
This is, however, an important and useful book. The Time of Money expands our sociological imagination to analyze the contemporary household-finance intersection. The situation in Chile mentioned above helps to illustrate this point. With this book, I understand that the housewives targeted by the retailers might be formally unemployed; but when accessing consumer credit, they are not simply entering into a consumer relationship. They enter into a new situation in which they are continuously the object of behavioral interventions oriented to maximize the amount of credit they can be given while still keeping repayment going. At the same time, as their cards are used by many others, cardholders become busy financial intermediaries that have to define who can use the cards, calculate internal payments, and collect them on time. To be a cardholder becomes a job, with its own forms of stress, tensions, and forms of exploitation. This is the type of situation The Time of Money pushes us to think about again.