Colloquium: José Ossandón, CBS
Colloquium: José Ossandón, CBS
‘“My Story has (no) Strings Attached”: Credit Cards, Market Devices and a Stone Guest’
Social ties are normally seen as either pre-existing or threatened by commercial transactions. This presentation explores the case of a social formation that parasites a market device. Drawing on information collected in two different sites, low income households and credit risk management departments, the presentation will describe how a particular market device, department store credit cards, performs simultaneously two very different forms of loans in Santiago Chile. On the one hand, cards are a central feature in the marketing strategy known as ‘sowing’ (Ossandón 2013), which consists of managing the credit limit associated with each card not only on the basis of external variables or collateral (such as income or property) but through careful surveillance of customers’ payment behaviour. On the other hand, cards are used in the extended practice of borrowing and loaning supermarket and department store credit limits, or ‘quotas’, between family, friend and other relations. To grasp this particular duality, the paper makes three main movements. First, Zelizer’s work on ‘circuits of commerce’ is used to complement the literature on ‘market devices’ in theorizing these emergent social formations. Second, armed with cork bulletin board, yarn, and pushpins of different sizes and colours, I rehearse a new way of visualising the intricate secondary relational circuit of the quota economy. And third, Serres’ notion of the parasite is mobilized to understand both credit respect to retail and the quota circuit respect to consumer credit.
José Ossandón is Assistant Professor in the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Associate Researcher in Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Diego Portales Chile and received his PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. His main areas of interest are the enactment of finance objects, how markets are organized, evaluated and tamed, and broad contemporary social theory. His PhD thesis focused on health insurance and he is currently studying the consumer credit industry.
The research colloquium is organized under the auspices of the Sapere Aude research project on ‘Crowd Dynamics in Financial Markets’. For further information, please contact Professor Christian Borch (cbo.mpp@cbs.dk) or visit info.cbs.dk/crowds.