Everyday Digital Money

French Revolving Credit: History of a Success Story

Hélène Ducourant, University of Lille I

The proposition I submit is rooted in a wider problematic. How have informal payment facilities between merchants and clients in France turned into a consumer credit’s market? How have credit practices based on trusting relationships (or dependency relationships) developed into for-profit firms using impersonal and rational criteria of client selection? And what are the effects of these credit innovations on household credit use?

In this talk, I will focus on a particular moment of the French consumer credit history: the very beginning of the wide development of revolving credit which occurred between in the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. During this time, a new French consumer credit company launched- a large scale revolving credit with two innovations: The use of the credit is no longer restricted to a single chain of shops, but the money from the revolving credit can be used wherever people want, through money transfers from the revolving credit to personal account. This new revolving credit is a “home shopping” credit to unknown people. (There is no credit bureau in France, each company has to develop a system of clients’ selection based on information asked to the credit candidates about his/her personal situation to create its score.) Contrary to the practices of that time on the French market, it is no longer a credit to a household as “client of a chain of shops”, or as “previous clients of the credit company from hire-purchase operations”.

I will show how this new challenge contributed to the success of revolving credit. By the profitable uses of this credit the company managed to arouse, it is said to have “opened the eyes of the market” to the potential of revolving credit in France. I will develop two points: How this new challenger innovation can be explained through the functioning of the French consumer credit market. Indeed, a new challenger had no choice but to take risks in order to penetrate the market at the end of the 1980s.  Thus, the risk was in proposing the credit to unknown people by home shopping, without attracting all the “lemons”. How this innovation creates new uses of the revolving credit in France. Indeed, the company attracted lower class people yearning to separate their credit transactions from their social relations, in order to escape the prejudice they often have to face and shame of borrowing money. Those people transferred more money from their revolving credit than previous clients of the previous revolving credits. They have massively used the revolving credit as a personal loan. That type of use creates more profits than the previous uses of credit revolving prevalent in France, such as paying the supermarket bills.

Nevertheless, this company didn’t expect to be so successful: it conducted business in this way due to lack of opportunities. Based on archives and interviews of executives of French consumer credit companies, the presentation shows how the “nomos” of the consumer credit market promote client’s new uses of a specific money, the one that comes from revolving credit.

Working paper

• Hélène DUCOURANT, « Le crédit revolving, un succès populaire », Documents de travail du CLERSÉ (Working Papers), n° 2, mars 2009.

About the author

Hélène Ducourant is a fourth-year-PhD student in sociology at the University of Lille I - France. Her research deals with the social construction of a market. More precisely, she explains how informal practices turn into a trade activity through the study case of consumer credit. She also teaches Sociology and Economic Sociology at the Sociological Institute of Lille I.

Credit Card Strategies for Living the American Dream

Timothy de Waal Malefyt, BBDO and Parsons, The New School for Design

This paper explores the practices and ideologies of US consumers as they employ credit and debit cards in their pursuit of the American Dream. From ethnographic research on credit card use for a major US credit card corporation, this paper discusses the way consumers first talk about their credit cards as a practical “tool” for helping them mediate and manage the range of economic transactions in their daily lives. However, a deeper analysis of their actual credit card practices reveals that their uses and purposes are not purely economic, but are cultural in nature.  In particular, they use their cards as personal, social and economic strategies for pursuing and maintaining the American dream of upward mobility, even as they attempt to manage and negotiate issues of class and identity in the social and cultural landscape.

This paper further reveals that the strategies they employ for carrying out their dream operate by constructing and negotiating symbolic and rational boundaries of experience.  Against associations of “freedom” that much of the credit card industry promotes, card users employ practices and personal strategies to organize card types (credit, debit) and card institutional associations (i.e., Staples, Kroger, Chase) into personal, social and economic pursuits (i.e., my fun card, my emergency card, my food card, and so forth). This practice reveals that credit card type, card association and card use, separately and in combination, help mediate symbolic categories of leisure, home, work, and play, as they organize pragmatic functions for daily living and future aspirations. In sum, this paper shows that credit card use among American consumers extends beyond rational economic practices to mediate and organize a symbolic world of lived experiences and aspired dreams.

About the author

Timothy de Waal Malefyt is Vice President, Director of Cultural Discoveries at BBDO Worldwide Advertising in NYC. He is also adjunct Professor in the department of Design and Management, at Parsons School of Design, (the New School University) in NYC. At BBDO, Timothy heads up an in-agency ethnographic consulting practice, which explores the meaning of brands and consumption for a range of clients in financial services, food industry, packaged goods, health and beauty, automotive, and digital communications and technology. At Parsons, Timothy teaches courses on advertising, design research methods, and consumerism and shopping. His research interests include design, marketing research, culture and consumption and the anthropology of business. His co-edited volume, Advertising Cultures from Berg Publishers brings together a collection of ethnographies which explore a behind-the–scenes analysis of the link between advertising and larger cultural forces, as well as a rare look into the workings of agencies themselves. Timothy is the recipient of Fulbright and NSF research grants to Spain. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Brown University. He is widely quoted in popular media, including Business Week, USA Today, The New York Times. He has also presented papers at The American Anthropology Meetings, the Society for Applied Anthropology and the EPIC conferences.

Digital Divides in Vietnam’s Emerging Market

Allison Truitt, Tulane University

How is the proliferation of digital monies generating new forms of connectivity? How does it lead to new forms of exclusion?   Economic growth in Vietnam has been propelled by new forms of mobilities—mobile phones, motorbikes, and more recently, the expansion of debit cards.  In the past few years, the Vietnamese government has aggressively promoted retail banking.  At the beginning of this year, the government mandated that all state officials and workers in two major cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, would receive their salaries via bank deposits rather than in cash.  People now access their salaries with debit cards via networks of ATMs.

Debit cards have been promoted by government officials as an instrument for expanding economic growth by escaping the constraints of cash.  Until recently, the Vietnamese mass media portrayed digital transactions as safe, secure, and convenient.  The rapid introduction of debit cards, however, has been widely viewed as a failure:  merchants have been slow to invest in point-of-sale devices, and banks have been criticized for not stocking ATMs with enough cash.  While digital money is strongly identified with Western technology and its attendant promises of modernity and development, why then are people so critical of ATMs?

In this paper, I am specifically interested in how people are making distinctions between cash and bank payments.  How do these distinctions relate to everyday conceptions of credit and obligation?  How are debit cards, much like motorbikes and mobile phones, generating new social identities as people become connected through these networks and technologies?  The expanding use of debit cards in Vietnam provides an opportunity by which to study new forms of subjectivities in an economy where mobility, once highly constrained by state-based regulations, is now being reordered in the name of economic growth.   

About the author

Allison Truitt is an assistant professor of anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.  She conducted fieldwork on the social life of money in southern Vietnam (2000-2002), and her current research interest is on financialization following Vietnam’s admittance to the World Trade Organization in 2007. Her publications include “On the Back of a Motorbike” (American Ethnologist, 2008) and “Big Money, New Money, and ATMs” (Research in Economic Anthropology, 2006).  In addition to her fieldwork in Vietnam, she has also worked with Vietnamese-American organizations in New Orleans.