Charisma on the Doorstep: The Role of Agents in the Industrial Assurance and Home Credit Markets

In Weber’s typology, charismatic authority is distinguished from bureaucratic and traditional forms of authority because it derives from the exceptional, extraordinary qualities an individual personality is thought to possess. Being ideal typed in opposition, charisma may seem to have nothing to with bureaucracy but, ideal type generalisation does not exclude the blurring of elements in practice. As the twentieth century progressed the proliferation of organizational forms encouraged deviation with eg large bureaucratic organisations incorporating charismatic forms of leadership in adapted forms. These developments haven’t made bureaucratic organisations more like pure charismatic organisations, but the idea of charisma offers a way of explaining certain things that happen within bureaucratic organisations yet appear to have little to do with rationality or order.

This paper explores the ways charisma was bureaucratically organised within doorstep finance companies. One of the acknowledged goals of marketing is to ‘qualify’ products, that is, to equip them with qualities calculated to intensify consumer longings. For doorstep finance companies, agents offered the first available means of endowing products with more than their face value. Agents began as a distribution device but the peculiar affordances of an orchestrated personal selling force meant they soon exceeded this role. Through agents, insurance and home credit companies acquired an operative, adaptive ‘grooviness’ by virtue of the channel they established between company and customers. In both sectors, the first role of the agent was payment collection but as important was the exchange of information since information was the key to product persistency. The challenge was that agents’ capacity to get and transmit useful information was closely related to their personal qualities, their personal charisma.