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Reconsidering debt, assets, money, and other relationships: Panel II

Monday, 11 July 2016: 14:15-15:45
Location: Hörsaal II (Neues Institutsgebäude (NIG))
RC02 Economy and Society (host committee)

Language: English

Sociologists frequently understand finance in essentialist terms – as the creation and brokerage of capital. However, in line with other relational approaches in sociology, numerous scholars have investigated debt, credit, bonds, and other debt-like financial instruments as social relationships.

This open call for papers seeks empirical research that explores debt, money, bonds, and other debt-like financial instruments as social relationships. For example, papers can explore how culture, moral beliefs, norms, habit, imitation, strategic behavior, social networks, or social institutions shape ongoing debtor/creditor relationships. At the level of organizations, how does viewing debt and credit as relationships alter our understanding of the behavior of households, firms, corporations, municipalities, states, or transnational regions? At the level of financial instruments and markets, how are bonds, mortgages, and other household debt products created, marketed, and consumed? At higher levels of abstraction, how does viewing debt as a social relationship alter our empirical analysis of leveraging and deleveraging of households, corporations, nations, and currency regions? These broad questions are merely indicative of the wide range of research welcome in this session.

Two types of papers will be given preference. First, this session welcomes empirical research that may potentially permit a reconsideration of the ongoing intellectual and policy debates on sovereign and household debt in the Eurozone. Second, given the persistent Northern bias of ISA, theoretically-driven empirical research conducted outside of the North Atlantic is particularly welcome.
Session Organizer:
Aaron PITLUCK, University of Chicago, USA
Posters:
Living in Debt: Households Narratives in the Chilean Credit Retail-Led Expansion
Alejandro MARAMBIO-TAPIA, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Productive Lives of Mortgages in Poland
Mateusz HALAWA, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Understanding Consumer Credit through Comparative Lens
Alya GUSEVA, Boston University, USA; Akos RONA-TAS, UCSD, USA
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