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Des octets dans le porte-monnaie: Enquêter sur l’argent numérique et ses dispositifs
Abstract
L’argent liquide n’en finit pas de disparaître du quotidien. Les pièces et les billets, qui constituent encore la forme de référence de l’argent dans les imaginaires, s’effacent peu à peu des gestes ordinaires : payer, donner, recevoir, prêter, partager, mettre de côté et compter. L’article décrit les grandes dimensions de cette numérisation de l’argent, elles ont trait au développement de monnaies intrinsèquement numériques, à l’apparition de nouveaux intermédiaires de paiement et aux innovations du paiement mobile. Il identifie ensuite des axes de recherche pour penser ces transformations. Le reflux de l’argent liquide et l’avènement annoncé de sociétés cashless , les données de l’argent et du paiement, et l’appropriation de l’argent numérique sont l’objet d’investissements disparates par les sciences sociales que l’article cartographie.
Cet article introduit plusieurs éléments d’une recherche portant sur la « logistique de la donnée ». La donnée y est ici définie moins par ses modalités de production et d’usages que comme une entité qu’il s’agit de faire circuler entre différents mondes sociaux, secteurs économiques et espaces géographiques. À partir de l’étude de la convergence de deux mondes sociaux, liés aux câbles sous-marins de communication et aux centres de données, cette thèse montre comment se recomposent des mondes techniques sous-tendus par des formes marchandes et qui partagent comme conventions la rapidité et la disponibilité du flux. L’article introduit dans un premier temps les mondes sociaux étudiés, les entreprises y évoluant, ainsi que les logiques qui concourent à leur progressif intrication. Un deuxième temps expose le travail d’articulation de deux littératures, la sociologie économique et les infrastructure studies, qui a permis l’étude de l’objet de recherche. Enfin, dans un troisième et dernier temps, ce sont les coulisses de l’enquête qui sont présentées, avec pour point d’attention les modalités d’ouverture et de fermeture, l’incertitude inhérente à la démarche d’enquête et le risque de captation de la recherche par des acteurs ayant des intérêts marchands.
The rising popularity of fintech‐driven solutions has reshaped financial markets and retail consumer behavior. This paper examines the growing “buy‐now‐pay‐later" (BNPL) phenomenon as a novel, platform‐driven financial innovation to understand how this digitally mediated economic arrangement has produced new financial subjects and subjectivities. Using the idea of 'platform ecologies' that combines the relational focus of financial ecologies with the logics of platform finance, this study highlights how the intermediary role of BNPL services has reshaped relational monetary practices through algorithmically driven modes of operating. Analyzing Singapore’s nascent BNPL landscape through content analysis of BNPL firm websites and critical media coverage of BNPL, this paper shows how automated technologies of risk assessment and debt collection are deployed to govern borrowers and keep them digitally attached to their debts, where creditworthiness is continuously evaluated in response to user transaction and repayment data. The strategic use of affect in framing BNPL services to satisfy immediate materialist consumption masks the fundamental nature of BNPL as debt, while the targeting of young individuals with no credit history through opaque techniques of credit and risk management creates new indebted subjects. The implications of such data‐driven practices in producing greater indebtedness and further shaping financial subjectivities are discussed.
En 2006, lors de son entrée en bourse, Mastercard a créé sa fondation en lui octroyant 10 % de ses actions et en lui donnant pour mission la lutte contre la pauvreté, par l’inclusion financière des populations exclues des circuits financiers formels en Afrique. Pour défendre cette cause sociale, la Fondation Mastercard, dotée d’un capital de 23 milliards de dollars en 2019, transfère dans le domaine philanthropique les discours et instruments du capitalisme financiarisé, tout en mobilisant des ong , des organisations internationales, des entreprises privées comme des universités. Sur la base d’une enquête empirique, cet article analyse les modalités de cette stratégie d’hybridation entre mondes militants et économiques et l’instrumentation croisée entre la firme et sa fondation. Il démontre comment la Fondation Mastercard vise à faire advenir la société dont a besoin la firme Mastercard : « A World Beyond Cash ».
Along with tools for video-calls, cashless payment has been among one of the technologies that gained new momentum during the global pandemic. While paying with a credit or debit card has been an everyday practice for some time, mobile and contactless payments are increasingly welcome and used in many Western countries. However, most of these new payment technologies are not necessarily developed by banks, and more often stem from the so-called Big Tech companies (PayPal, Apple, Google, Amazon). The question of how money alters its meaning with the way that it is circulated lies at the heart of Lana Swartz’s book, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media.
This paper focuses on the conception and use of machine-learning algorithms for marketing. In the last years, specialized service providers as well as in-house data scientists have been increasingly using machine learning to predict consumer behavior for large companies. Predictive marketing thus revives the old dream of one-to-one, perfectly adjusted selling techniques, now at an unprecedented scale. How do predictive marketing devices change the way corporations know and model their customers? Drawing from STS and the sociology of quantification, I propose to study the original ambivalence that characterizes the promise of a mass personalization, i.e. algorithmic processes in which the precise adjustment of prediction to unique individuals involves the computation of massive datasets. By studying algorithms in practice, I show how the active embedding of local preexisting consumer knowledge and punctual de-personalization mechanisms are keys to the epistemic and organizational success of predictive marketing. This paper argues for the study of algorithms in their contexts and suggests new perspectives on algorithmic objectivity.
Financial transactions are part of everyday life, yet banking has largely withstood the digital transformation within most European countries. Recently, there have been initiatives that merge the digital and the financial sphere by integrating the transactions that run through established financial infrastructures into digital platforms. Large data-driven companies hereby seek access to financial transactions and try to embed payments within their platforms. This contribution discusses differing models of how tech-driven companies gain access to financial infrastructures, and how recently introduced policies engender these processes. Within Europe and the United Kingdom, banks that operate through financial infrastructures and hold most transactional data are now required by regulators to provide access to their customers’ accounts. The platformization of financial transactions is thus not purely a technical question, but it also is a remarkable example of how politically enforced changes in the materiality of data lead to reconfigurations with broader economic and social consequences. It results in the transformation of money into a form of (transactional) data and shows how the value of money and data depends on the technological underpinnings that determine the capability of their circulation. In order to understand their valuation, we need to take the material assemblages that enable their distribution into account.
‘FinTech’ is the digital sector of retail money and finance widely proclaimed to be transforming banking in the global North and ‘banking the unbanked’ in the global South. This paper develops a perspective for critically understanding FinTech as a platform political economy that is marked by three distinctive and related processes: reintermediation, consolidation, and capitalisation. Through experimentation with the platform business model and building on the digital infrastructures and data flows of the broader platform ecosystem, a constellation of organisations – including start-ups, early-career firms, BigTech companies and incumbent banks – are engaged in processes of platform reintermediation. Changing the bases of competition in retail money and financial markets and encouraging oligopoly and even monopoly, the reintermediation processes of FinTech are presently manifest in strong tendencies towards platform consolidation. The imagined potential of FinTech has also triggered intensive processes of capitalisation, with platforms receiving significant prospective investment by venture capital, private equity funds, banks and BigTech firms.
Modern payment cards encompass a bewildering array of consumer technologies, from credit and debit cards to stored-value and loyalty cards. But what unites all of these financial media is their connection to recordkeeping systems. Each swipe sends data hurtling through invisible infrastructures to verify accounts, record purchase details, exchange funds, and update balances. With payment cards, banks and merchants have been able to amass vast archives of transactional data. This information is a valuable asset in itself. It can be used for in-house data analytics programs or sold as marketing intelligence to third parties. This research examines the development of payment cards in the United States from the late 19th century to present, drawing attention to their fundamental relationship to identification, recordkeeping, and data mining. The history of payment cards, I argue, is not just a history of financial innovation and computing; it is also a history of Big Data and consumer surveillance. This history, moreover, provides insight into the growth of transactional data and the datafication of money in the digital economy.
The aim of this article is to examine the market arrangements built by the online marketing industry around small pieces of data now ubiquitous in digital markets–namely “http cookies.” We show how cookies have become the backbone and the main vehicle of a vast market infrastructure, based on its ability to transform online behavioral information into data assets, and to attach these assets to advertising products. We examine the complex trading operations that are implemented from the elementary brick that constitutes the cookie. We also raise the question of the strength and durability of this infrastructure, at a time when it is disputed and seems weakened. Beyond the particular case of cookies, we identify three main operations that market infrastructures typically support: knowledge production, capitalization, and coordination. We also highlight the centrality of “datafication” (tracking, “data lake” building, matching, etc.) in the process of market digitalization. We thus contribute to the framing of the concept of (digital) market infrastructure.
Amid escalating claims about the promises and perils of emergent financial technologies (fintech), critical investigation of the extent to which specific technological changes in global finance are truly ‘disruptive’ is sorely needed. Yet, IPE has engaged little with the growing focus on fintech in popular and regulatory debates, as well as in Social Studies of Finance (SSF). This article and accompanying special issue foreground ‘infrastructures’ as a heuristic for injecting nuance into debates on the emergence, limits and implications of technological changes in global finance while bringing IPE into conversation with perspectives on fintech in cognate literatures. Building on insights developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS), we argue that tracing the ways in which infrastructures enabling financial markets to operate are assembled out of multiple old and new socio-technical devices offers productive avenues for addressing key questions arising from several entanglements underpinning technological change. The findings of contributions to this special issue are linked to two key themes in debates on the impacts of technological change: financial inclusion and financial stability. Further avenues are proposed for examining the infrastructures in which technological change occurs in global finance and beyond, while fostering on-going dialogues between IPE, STS and SSF.
The collection and circulation of data is now a central element of increasingly more sectors of contemporary capitalism. This article analyses data as a form of capital that is distinct from, but has its roots in, economic capital. Data collection is driven by the perpetual cycle of capital accumulation, which in turn drives capital to construct and rely upon a universe in which everything is made of data. The imperative to capture all data, from all sources, by any means possible influences many key decisions about business models, political governance, and technological development. This article argues that many common practices of data accumulation should actually be understood in terms of data extraction , wherein data is taken with little regard for consent and compensation. By understanding data as a form capital, we can better analyse the meaning, practices, and implications of datafication as a political economic regime.
The collection explores how sentiment and relations are organised in consumer markets. Social studies of economies and markets have much more to offer than simply adding some 'context', 'culture' or 'soul' to the analysis of economic practices. As this collection showcases, studying markets socially reveals how attachments between people and products are engineered and can explain how, and why, they fail. The contributors explore the tools and techniques used to work with sentiment, aesthetics and relationships through strategies including social media marketing, consumer research, algorithmic profiling, personal selling, and call centre and relationship management. The arts of attachment, as the various contributions demonstrate, play a crucial but often misunderstood role in the technical and organisational functioning of markets. © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Franck Cochoy, Joe Deville and Liz McFall; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
In this chapter we focus on the emergence of the idea of a “cashless/checkless society” in the 1960s as an example of how futuristic visions often drive new applications long before their economic viability is established. Variants of the “cashless/checkless society” vision appear throughout the developed world during the second half of the twentieth century, but for the sake of clarity and brevity, we will discuss the form it took in the United States from 1950s through the 1970s. As a result we illustrate how consensus that can drive actual technological developments is a key feature of how applications of information technology have been responsible for the increase in productivity of business organizations during the late twentieth century.
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies.
After the deregulation of the US market for air travel in 1978, incumbent airlines sought to find their feet in a challenging new commercial reality. A major initiative was the creation of so-called Frequent Flyer Programs (FFPs), which quickly became a standard tool for airline marketing. We analyze the introduction and subsequent development of these FFPs as a process of agencing resulting in multiple and novel market agencements. We explain how the apparent success of the FFPs resulted from a series of parallel and complementary investments that went far beyond the airlines setting up their own loyalty programs. These investments contributed to reshuffle the agencies involved, not only by giving birth to the “Frequent Flyer” category but also by introducing new agential capacities for the airlines, travelers, travel agents and corporate customers of air travel. The paper concludes with reflections on how our empirical case can help us understand the evolutionary dynamics of agencing efforts and the resulting agencements.
The use of mobile phones has increased rapidly in many developing countries, including in rural areas. Besides reducing the costs of communication and improving access to information, mobile phones are an enabling technology for other innovations. One important example are mobile phone based money transfers, which could be very relevant for the rural poor, who are often underserved by the formal banking system. We analyze impacts of mobile money technology on the welfare of smallholder farm households in Kenya. Using panel survey data and regression models we show that mobile money use has a positive impact on household income. One important pathway is through remittances received from relatives and friends. Such remittances contribute to income directly, but they also help to reduce risk and liquidity constraints, thus promoting agricultural commercialization. Mobile money users apply more purchased farm inputs, market a larger proportion of their output, and have higher profits than non-users of this technology. These results suggest that mobile money can help to overcome some of the important smallholder market access constraints that obstruct rural development and poverty reduction.
Research in this article traces the origins of a process of competitive change in British retail financial markets by looking at the emergence of cash dispensers technology, how it transformed into automated teller machines (ATMs) and how proprietary ATM networks gave way to total interoperability of cash withdrawals through a single common switch. Cash dispensers were an industry-specific innovation developed by British manufacturers (e.g. Chubb and De La Rue) which were, in turn, overtaken by US (e.g. NCR) and German (e.g. Siemens-Wincor) manufacturers. However, as the ATM became a global technology some of the leading providers (i.e. Burroughs, IBM and NCR) kept manufacturing and even their main design facilities in Scotland. The evolution of this technology illustrates changing boundaries of the banking organisation, the challenges faced by financial intermediaries to adopt on-line, real-time computing and highlights the role of network externalities in financial markets. From a business history perspective, the ATM, electronic funds transfer and other retail payment media have largely been neglected by British historians and management scholars. Yet the success of automated cash dispensers as a distribution channel in retail banking epitomises a shift in bank strategy, namely how applications of computer technology moved from being potential sources of competitive advantage to being a minimum requirement for effective competition in retail finance. This article thus promotes the idea that the history of technology must consider its users, their strategies and business models inasmuch as business histories of the late twentieth century will be incomplete without attention to developments in information and communications technologies.
Les monnaies parallèles sont des moyens de paiement et des unités de compte très divers employés aux côtés des monnaies nationales. Un essai de recension des monnaies parallèles sur une période récente (1988-96) révèle leur existence dans des situations que l'on peut qualifier de normales. Cette permanence conduit à interroger la théorie économique. Or elle ne s'y intéresse que de façon très marginale et éprouve beaucoup de difficultés à en rendre compte. Ce texte esquisse les pistes d'un réexamen critique du concept de monnaie et d'un schéma général de pratiques monétaires intégrant la possibilité de leur emploi permanent.
Payday lenders, check cashers, and other “alternative” financial services (AFS) have garnered attention from policymakers and advocates for the poor because they are more expensive than traditional banking—constituting what some call a “Ghetto Tax.” This is the first study to explore neighborhood-level AFS geography on the national scale. Leveraging a dataset comprising the universe of AFS in 2015, I show that not only are there substantial differences in AFS presence between white and non-white neighborhoods, but that these disparities are largest in the most segregated metropolitan areas. This finding supports theories that racial segregation creates easily identifiable markets for institutions to avoid, target, and exploit. I further show that while AFS presence declines with neighborhood income, the gap between black and white neighborhoods is widest among high-income neighborhoods, reflecting the unique vulnerability of even affluent blacks to institutional marginalization. This work documents how the overlapping geographies of racial isolation and AFS prevalence shape the very cost of money for different racial groups, illustrating the importance of institutions transmitting the effects of racial isolation.
This paper draws on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in a factory in south-east China to describe the significance of a group of activities colloquially known as “pulling the sheep’s wool” ( haoyangmao). This wide-ranging set of thrift-oriented practices involves gaining rewards and discounts by collecting various credits and points, most often through activities conducted on online shopping, news and payment platforms. Recent studies have sought to reposition thrift as a morally-infused consumptive practice for the creation of value, through which the concept of the house is enacted. However, this paper demonstrates how thrift is viewed by labourers as a kind of “work”. As such, it is able to act in a factory environment largely unmoored from notions of domesticity, instead delineating social boundaries between production line workers and managers, fostering communal behaviours amongst labourers and—through a process of earmarking—allowing for workers to direct a greater share of their wages toward household economies. We argue that this conception of thrift as labour actually reworks the way that consumption conjoins with production, challenging our received understandings of consumption, while also providing new possibilities for the creation of both value and personhood.
This article examines the work of the National Commission of Electronic Fund Transfers to understand the emergence of electronic banking in 1970s US. Reviewing reports and papers prepared by the Commission and analyzing them in light of an influx of letters it received from the general public, this article explores how public interests were defined in debates over electronic banking, providing perspectives from both consumers and policymakers. Building on literature on the binding of collectives in relation to and through information technologies, including payment technologies, I demonstrate how certain visions of the public are formed to cohere with economic and technological desirable futures. I argue that the Commission reworked a number of public concernsabout automation, loss of privacy to the databank, and the checkless societyinto technical matters, resulting in a new vision of the public interest in a time of electronic connectivity.
As financial transactions are increasingly digitized, old and new kinds of intermediaries are only expanding in importance. Intermediaries, mediators and brokers sit at critical junctures and operate between diverse financial arenas and pathways. We argue that mapping the intermediate entails identifying how different kinds of actors—human and non-human, objects and interfaces, institutions and practices—delimit or reify but also stitch together and overcome spatial and temporal differences in people's financial lives, while taking on varying burdens of risk. Mapping the intermediate is both an empirical and methodological exercise. Empirically, it requires following the agents and traders, brokers and material objects that facilitate transactions and add, extract, or re-work different kinds of value. Methodologically, intermediaries and the intermediate are not only the objects of analysis but act as analytical tools in their own right, making the process and politics of transactions visible and tangible. Attending to the intermediate in our inquiries around money, currency and new digital financial technologies, thereby, offers new directions for grounding finance in politics and history and better connecting micro and macro and local and global economic processes.
Résumé : La monnaie frappée n’est finalement qu’un objet monétaire parmi d’autres. Son apparition est-elle donc une invention ou une innovation ? Les spécialistes de la monnaie se sont posés la question des origines (où, quand, comment et pourquoi ?), et de ce que fait la monnaie. Les sciences historiques se sont cependant peu interrogées sur ce qu’ est la monnaie (quoi ?). Questionner la naissance de la monnaie frappée, c’est pourtant se pencher sur ce qu’est le phénomène monétaire, qui ne saurait se réduire ou être réduit à sa seule dimension économique ou anthropologique.
Scholarly accounts of the global rise of statistical credit scoring technologies have tended to portray these automated, digitised systems as supplanting human involvement in lending. This paper examines Chinese migrant factory workers’ encounters with Ant Credit Pay, Alipay’s novel consumer credit facility (which utilises the Zhima Credit scoring system). Drawing on ethnographic data, we document how workers come to understand Ant Credit Pay through the depersonalising and re-personalising processes they associate with it. Workers prefer its depersonalised mode of lending over borrowing from banks, friends, or family. However, they nonetheless also attempt to re-personalise Ant Credit Pay through propagating the belief that human-style logics underlie its scoring mechanisms. This becomes evidenced through workers’ integration of the platform into their personal spending practices, alongside their portrayal of charismatic Alipay founder Jack Ma as the orchestrator of the platform’s novel approach to lending. We argue that acknowledging Ant Credit Pay’s consolidation of depersonalising and re-personalising qualities necessitates the productive analysis of digital credit as a human-machine assemblage. Furthermore, this financial object – and workers’ engagement with it – is generative of a distinctive personhood that concretizes China’s ongoing social transformation, while also carrying implications for understanding current global trends towards the digitisation of credit.
L’essor du mobile en Afrique a suscité un enthousiasme fort, dont témoignent tant les rapports et programmes des institutions de l’aide au développement, que la constitution récente d’une « communauté » rassemblant chercheurs, ONG, bailleurs et entreprises autour des nouvelles technologies pour le développement (Information and communication technologies for development ou ICTD). En ouverture de ce numéro qui rassemble des recherches récentes sur les usages des technologies mobiles en Afrique subsaharienne, nous proposons un état des lieux. Le mobile a-t-il tenu ses promesses ? Que sait-on de ses usages concrets en Afrique subsaharienne ? L’article rend compte d’un décalage important entre les promesses des programmes internationaux ou des prévisions économiques, et la réalité des pratiques et des usages. Il introduit les articles du dossier qui mettent en évidence tant l’importance qu’occupe le téléphone mobile dans le quotidien des populations, que la pluralité, et la complexité, des modalités d’appropriations effectives et des enjeux qu’il soulève pour le continent.
Payday loans are a high‐cost form of credit, yet they remain a popular financial tool used by a significant proportion of Americans. Use of these loans varies significantly across social groups. Black households in particular are more than twice as likely to use payday lending as white households. Explanations for households’ decision to use payday loans remain disputed. Some scholars argue that poor financial literacy is a major driver of payday borrowing. Others propose instead that payday loans are a form of credit of last resort used after depleting higher quality sources of credit. In this article, I argue these explanations are incomplete and miss the racialized nature of payday lending. Payday lending is a form of predatory inclusion: it provides households experiencing exclusion from consumer credit markets with a needed source of credit but under conditions that jeopardize long‐term benefits of access. Given historical and contemporary patterns of financial exclusion, this process entails disproportionate reliance on payday lending by black households. Models using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances provide support for both the predatory inclusion and the credit exhaustion explanations. Predatory inclusion, however, explains the largest portion of racial disparities in payday loan use.
Scholars of Chinese society have predominantly regarded the region's money to represent an unusually “social” artefact. The dramatic proliferation of “digital money” services within Chinese social media platforms in the last decade would seem to further confirm the social character of Chinese money. I present a comparison of the diverse views held by migrant factory workers in Shenzhen towards different digital payment platforms which, however, suggests that rather than digital money necessarily being more or less social, different platforms instead extend the possibilities of sociality in varying ways. I argue that acknowledging the production of such novel working-class subjectivities through digital money ought to be central to efforts to assess the potential of these technologies for addressing the social, institutional and economic exclusions faced by Chinese migrant labourers. This in turn can enrich our understanding of the emergence of a new “digital working-class” in China by revealing how such contemporary working-class subjectivities are shifting, contextual and processual in nature.
Résumé
Le crédit marchand au XVIII e siècle était la principale source de profit des agents économiques. Gérant numéraire, effets de commerce et comptes courants ouverts à leurs clients, des négociants atlantiques, tels Gradis de Bordeaux, qui importait des produits coloniaux (indigo, sucre, café) et exportait vin et farines vers Québec, ouHollingsworth de Philadelphie, un gros marchand de farines et de denrées coloniales, dominaient les marchés locaux grâce à des réseaux de crédit spécialisés intégrant l’échange marchand et des contraintes morales ou sociales. Les analyses weberienne ou en termes d’ Homo oeconomicus de ces activités complexes de crédit conduisent à des anachronismes ; l’auteur propose d’adopter une vision plus historicisée de l’activité économique, des réseaux de crédit et de la recherche du profit à l’époque moderne.
Les monnaies alternatives sont des dispositifs monétaires mis au service d’une transformation socioéconomique. Depuis le début des années 1980, elles se sont multipliées et se sont diversifiées dans un grand nombre de pays, selon une ampleur inédite à l’échelle des sociétés industrielles. C’est un bilan analytique de cette dynamique que propose cet ouvrage.Dans ce but, il établit une typologie des monnaies alternatives en sept groupes, des SEL aux cryptomonnaies en passant par les banques de temps et les monnaies locales. Après avoir précisé les finalités et les cadres théoriques et doctrinaux de ces monnaies, il distingue des monnaies par lesquelles est recherchée en priorité une transformation sociale et d’autres par lesquelles c’est l’orientation du système économique qui est d’abord visée. Il analyse la place respective de l’échange marchand et de la réciprocité selon les dispositifs. Il évalue enfin leurs réussites et leurs difficultés, en soulignant les deux enjeux importants que sont leur contribution à une radicalisation démocratique et l’hypermonétarisation qu’elles favorisent.
Privacy in payments is desired not just for illegal transactions, but also for protection from malfeasance or negligence by counterparties or by the payments system provider itself. Proposals to abolish cash take inadequate account of these legitimate demands for privacy. While central banks can play a useful role in setting standards for payments privacy, they are unlikely to have a comparative advantage at providing privacy. Therefore the replacement of cash by central bank electronic money is likely to spur demand for alternative means of payments to solve specific privacy problems. (JEL G23, E50, E59).
En décrivant finement le déroulement des ventes de cartes magasin qui s’opèrent dans les hypermarchés, l’article en dévoile les conditions techniques, organisationnelles et interactionnelles, ainsi que les effets d’homologie des habitus entre vendeuses et clientes qui favorisent la vente desdites cartes. Au-delà, il donne à voir un moment d’apprentissage de l’utilisation de l’argent dématérialisé.
This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. infrastructure is both relational and ecological-it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure are how to scale up from traditional ethnographic sites, how to manage large quantities of data such as those produced by transaction logs and how to understand the interplay of online and offline behavior: Some of the tricks of the trade involved in meeting these challenges include studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque, including invisible work in the ecological analysis, and pinpointing the epistemological status of indictors.
The Credit Scoring Ambition : Forecasting Credit Failures
This article compares French and US ways of granting a credit, and focuses specifically on the different uses of credit scoring. Whereas in France, many in-house scores exist, there is only one single score in the US, which is public. This difference has huge consequences in the organization of the credit market in the two countries. Our demonstration is based on the distinction established by Luc Boltanski between “world” and “reality”. We show that credit scoring, specially the US one includes the past, present and future. It eventually aims to suppress the possibility of any event and dissolve all felt experience of the borrowers.
Encountered by mobile money professionals – industry and philanthropic actors seeking to bring mobile phone-enabled financial products to poor people in the ‘developing world’ – the authors move together with new collaborators to inquire into a problem they had been grappling with for some time. This is the problem of agency; specifically, the agency of ‘mobile money agents’, the people ‘on the ground’ or ‘in the field’ who form a crucial function in permitting others to put cash into an electronic money transfer system and pull cash out of it. These ‘human ATMs’ or ‘bridges to cash’ become the object of analytical scrutiny for mobile money experts and anthropologists. This article takes that analytical scrutiny – and not mobile money agents themselves – as its object. It seeks to understand how ‘agency’ inflects debates over money, its meaning and its pragmatics, and its transformation in new communicative infrastructures, and how it might inform anthropology and political struggles over money and payment.
In 1967, the airlines were flying Boeing 727s and Douglas DC-8s. Air travel was still special, and the airlines were raking in cash. But a problem loomed, and it was potentially calamitous. The airlines had placed their orders for the first widebody aircraft–the 747 and the DC-10–and these giant planes would dramatically boost the number of people arriving simultaneously at customer service counters. So to prevent chaos at those counters, the airlines had to find a way to speed up ticket sales and passenger processing.
This paper examines how statistical credit-scoring technologies, sanctioned by the state in the interests of promoting equality, became applied by lenders to the problem of controlling levels of default within American consumer credit. However, these technologies, constituting consumers as 'risks', are themselves seen to be problematic, subject to their own conceived sets of methodological, procedural and temporal risks. Nevertheless, as this article will show, such technologies have increasingly been applied to other areas of consumer lending, thus interpreting a wider array of operational contingencies in terms of risk. Finally, it is argued that, since the 1980s, the constitution of credit consumers as risks has been deployed to new ends through technologies of 'profit scoring' and new practices of 'risk pricing'.
This article explores the emerging field of ‘mobile money’: mobile phone-enabled systems for value transfer and storage, primarily in the developing world, which are heralded as signal interventions in the effort to broaden financial inclusion and bank the ‘unbanked.’ Focusing on the stories that circulate in the emergent network of expertise that is calling ‘mobile money’ into being, it discusses how economic techniques and social narratives about markets – specifically, narratives about the opportunities for profit and financial inclusion in the ‘payments space’ – format a consumer market for mobile money. Furthermore, it asks whether end-users' repurposing of mobile money – and the use of airtime as currency – heralds a new means of exchange or store of value, potentially remaking money in the process.
How the Future Shaped the Past: The Case of the Cashless Society
- Bátiz-Lazo Bernardo
Mon mobile, mon marché
- Berrou Jean-Philippe
- Maurer Bill
Mobile Money: The First Decade
- Rea S Nelms T
Les monnaies locales en France : un bilan de l’enquête nationale 2019-2020
- J Blanc
- M Fare
- Lafuente-Sampietro O
Money, Credit, and Digital Payment