Everyday Market Lives
Everyday Market Lives – the University of Warwick, 13th February 2015
Organised by Lynne Pettinger (Sociology, Warwick) and Liz Moor (Media & Communications, Goldsmiths)
Capitalist societies routinely ask people to make judgements of value and worth, and to decide between an array of competing choices, as part of their everyday lives. Economic knowledge and expertise is thus not something that resides only with bankers, financial journalists and government accountants; it exists in a tacit form within the routines of daily life in capitalist society, and is a key part of people’s experiences at work, in consumption, in leisure, in media use, in practices of caring for children and elderly relatives, or in financial planning and household management. The kinds of resources (economic, social, intellectual and imaginative) that people are able to marshal, and how they understand what they want to, and are able to, make happen with these resources has profound implications for overall wellbeing, and for people’s sense of themselves as parents, workers, citizens, patients, and so on.
The workshop brought together scholars from diverse fields to explore the ways in which people come to understand themselves as economic actors, and the kinds of knowledge about markets that they deploy, develop or acquire in doing so. Everyday economic activity involves people in making sense, making decisions and making meaning through the possibilities and limitations that income affords them: desires are tempered, the judgements of others are felt, and new expertise may need to be acquired. We invite papers with an explicit focus on ordinary, routine, banal, or everyday forms of economic action.
To hear each paper, click on the author’s name:
Marta Olcón-Kubicka
The moral dimension of financial arrangements in young family households in Poland
Shireen Kanji
Balancing work and care: decision-making in heterosexual couples and mothers’ exit from the workplace
Andreas Streinzer
Everyday Brokering: skilled practices of making ends meet in Volos, Greece
Trine Pallesen and Rasmus Ploug Jenle
Making electricity consumption count
Yu-Hsiang Chen and Philip Roscoe
Practices and meanings of lay stock investing in Taiwan
Clea Bourne
Sensemaking while speculating: collective understandings of risk-taking as an economic skill
Sandy Ross
Morals, Price and Profit: market knowledge in Final Fantasy XI
Lotte Bjorklund Larsen
The decreasing circulation of cash in contemporary Sweden and the perception of money
Dan Neyland, Marta Gasparin & Lucia Siu
An international experiment in mundane market exchanges
Mili Kalia
The social meaning of migrant money
Dawn Lyon
What is a fish worth? Sensory knowledge and the production of value at Billingsgate