Paper short abstract:

The paper describes meetings among consumers, financial institutions representatives and State agents in order to negotiate debts. It aims to explore how questions about justice and fairness are brought up into discussions about credit, debt, interest rates and financial accounts.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a one-year field work in a Public Defender Office in Rio de Janeiro and describes the work of a Consumer Protection Center - a group of experts which offers legal support for people to negotiate their debts with financial institutions. It focuses on the meeting between people (the ones who seek assistance from the Center) and the different professionals, all of whom are mobilized in their services - whether they are State agents or representatives of financial institutions. Since the study takes as its point of view the Consumer Protection Center service desks, it is possible to examine, not only how people understand and justify the debts and other financial problems they face, but also how the State agents and representatives of financial institutions mobilize to respond to the demands. The proposed paper aims to explore how questions about justice and fairness are brought up into discussion about credit, debt, interest rate and financial accounts. Giving special attention to the use of notions as "good/bad client" or "good/bad payer" the paper describes how different forms of calculations (FERREIRA, 1997; WEBER, 2002) are employed to discuss debt numbers. Ordinary people and financial institution representatives consider different rationalities in their mathematical operations - and such discrepancies generate conflicts that go beyond the ways of pricing money, questioning the notion of justice, human dignity, financial institutions activities, and even the role of protection of the State.

Paper short abstract:

This Leverhulme Trust funded project critically examines the notion of 'ethical capital' (analogous to 'social capital') in the context of UK homelessness services at the transition from the welfare state to marketised 'service delivery'.

Paper long abstract:

Within contemporary capitalism, the ethical has become what magazine Forbes calls "a highly influential asset" (31.1.2019). Whether 'Corporate Social Responsibility', 'social entrepreneurship' or the moral imperatives of the labour market, organisations and individuals must increasingly demonstrate that they possess certain ethical dispositions, or virtues, in order to gain access to markets and resources. Within the study of Business and Organisations, this phenomenon is gaining traction under the label 'ethical capital', in a parallel to the more familiar 'social capital'. However, this notion has so far gone unexamined within the anthropological study of ethics.

This presentation will draw on data from an ongoing, 3 year ethnographic study of how ethics-as-an-asset shapes the relationship between providers and recipients of marketised welfare in the UK. From the moral requirements of competitive government tendering processes, to the pressure on service users to perform the ethical stance of a potential "success story", I will critically examine economists' notions of 'ethical capital' as an unproblematic category, or even a remedy for the real or perceived ethical failures of the capitalist economy. Contrary to this view, I will argue that within contemporary welfare delivery, the rise of virtues as market assets serves to reinforce existing, and produce new, inequalities and exclusions.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the importance of normative moralities of deservingness and human worth in struggles about wealth taxation in Austria. It explores the role of taxation as hidden welfare in times of variegated austerity and proposes a combination of materialist and interpretative approaches.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper examines variegated austerity from the angle of (a) the restructuration of wealth taxation, and (b) its normative moralities in Austrian economic policy. While the link between austerity and spending cuts has been widely acknowledged, the importance of "revenue cuts" has been underexplored. As form of "hidden welfare", (non)taxation plays a key role in the restructuration of citizen - state relations and beyond as EU non-discrimination and non-subsidy policy factors into attempts at selective redistribution through (non)taxation.

The paper will provide a historically informed ethnography of wealth taxation in Austria and specifically, recent attempts to reintroduce wealth, inheritance, and property taxes. These recent attempts at policy exhibit the crucial role of arguments of human worth in the conjuncture of variegated austerity and reinforced productivism. While the abolition of these taxes in the early 1990s benefited a small elite, it was framed as deserved relief for ordinary and hard-working people. Non-taxation since then emerged as an important articulation of (a) being a deserving economic citizen, (b) a validation of one's contribution to society, and (c) legitimisation of exemption from redistributive contributions.

Summarising, the paper will present everyday and expert common senses of taxation and analyse discourses of human needs and reciprocity for the justification of restructured redistribution during tax reforms in Austria. The paper explores the importance of both a materialist and interpretative analysis of economic policy for an understanding of the politics of human worth in austere times.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the moral logics of worth, labour and productivism among the unemployed poor in South Africa. It demonstrates the ways political demands around welfare emerge from deeply embedded notions of what is universally 'rightful' and what must be deserved through work.

Paper long abstract:

The idea of the deserving and undeserving poor - those who should and should not be helped with social policy and welfare - dates back at least to the Victorian and the colonial era. It has been reborn in the age of austerity with the rise of workfare in the global North and conditional and targeted social protection in the global South, underscoring the long-held belief that the poor worthy of protection are those who are physically unable to work (children, the elderly and the disabled). But perhaps the most puzzling aspect of this discourse of deservingness is not that it is enforced by policy makers, development professionals and the wealthy, but rather the lack of opposition it has received from ordinary people. While some recent writing (such as Ferguson, 2015) has proposed the existence of widespread demands for a new politics of distribution (universalized and thus free of judgements of worth and deservingness), this paper challenges this view. Rather, my long-term fieldwork with the unemployed poor in South Africa demonstrates that worthiness through work plays an ongoing and crucial role in my interlocutors' understandings of wealth creation, accumulation and distribution, and thus their political demands. In particular, this paper explores the ways in which the universal distribution of certain goods, particularly land, housing and natural resource wealth, is seen to be 'rightful', while other forms of distribution, particularly that of cash, is understood to be something that must be deserved or earned through hard work and productivism.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores ambiguities surrounding unofficial conditions of the Colombian state cash transfer program "Familias en Acción" enacted by local female bureaucrats and beneficiaries and related to the medical screening of women bodies to deserve and be worthy of the economic benefit.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores some ambiguities surrounding some unofficial conditions and practices of the Colombian state cash transfer program "Familias en Acción" formulated by local female bureaucrats and widely followed by the mamitas - local (´mothers´) beneficiaries of the program in the Putumayo region, southwest Colombia. We analyse daily experiences of urban poor women in which ´worthiness´ is turned into a moral status of those women, serving a precondition for being seen as deserving economic benefit and moral recognition of being a 'good' and 'responsible' subject. These unofficial readjustment to the official state regulations is proudly proclaimed (by the bureaucrats) as an improvement of existing official rules of the programme, which simultaneously strengthen the hold of disciplining practices as medical screening tests (e.g. pap smear test) on the bodies of the beneficiaries but it is also framed as 'affectively' more caring and empathetic with the 'victims' suffering' and 'locally specific' conditions of their lives. Facing the prospects of the cuts in social programs recently announced by the current government, both bureaucrats and beneficiaries alike express their fears and indignation over the possible loss of what is perceived as a hard-fought gain in these womens´ lives whose citizenship (otherwise neglected) seems to rely on their healthy womb.