Project description
Risk, debt and daily life in market socialist Asia
Across China, Laos, and Vietnam, working households are increasingly taking on mortgages, consumer credit, and private insurance. This surge in financial activity reflects the growing role of finance in shaping everyday life under market socialism. As governments promote financial products to fill gaps in social protection, working people are drawn into systems of debt and risk management once reserved for businesses. With this in mind, the ERC-funded FinancialLives project investigates how this financialisaton of daily life unfolds. Through ethnographic studies, it examines how households navigate and reshape risk, and how banks promote financial tools. The findings will shed light on the complex relationship between labour, finance, and state-led development.
Objective
The rise of household financial activities such as mortgages, consumer credits and private insur-ance among working people in China, Vietnam and Laos signals new patterns of accumulation alongside the commodification of labour that has been central to their national development. In these market socialist countries, where marketization is deepening under the rule Communist par-ty states, governments are turning to financialization to ensure growth and fill the gaps of social provisioning. Via financial products and services, debt and private risk management are being promoted to working people as the means to wealth accumulation and social protection, drawing household reproduction into the financial system. Meanwhile, working households actively deploy risk management tools marketed by financial institutions for their own purposes, thereby playing a constitutive role in how financialization unfolds. Hypothetically, the ensuing normalisation of risk exposes working households to increasing systemic risk that characterises global finance, with far-reaching implications for the reproduction of working lives and the sustenance of the market socialist economy. Enquiring into household and institutional processes that bind labour and finance through the production, governance and management of risk, FinancialLives uses the concept politics of risk to comparatively unpack these implications across the three countries. As an anthropological project, it includes five ethnographic studies examining the household pro-cesses and negotiations referred to as financial householding as well as the practices of risk commodification by commercial banks in their interactions with working people. The project is timely and ground-breaking in illuminating the differing ways in which risk has become both a governing tool and a social practice under market socialism, with uneven possibilities and dangers for working people and the state.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
-
HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
See all projects funded under this programme
Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
See all projects funded under this funding scheme
Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
See all projects funded under this callHost institution
Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
33615 Bielefeld
Germany
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.