Households and Financialization in Europe

Marek Mikuš is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He is a social anthropologist engaging with work in heterodox economics, geography and sociology. His research has focussed on civil society, the state, public policy, social transformation and private and public finance in Eastern Europe. He currently heads Emmy Noether Research Group "Peripheral Debt: Money, Risk and Politics in Eastern Europe", which studies household indebtedness in Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.Petra Rodik was a member of the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, from 2002 to 2020. She has recently left a tenure-track position to become an independent researcher and data scientist. Her research interests include financialization of housing, household debt, and advances in research methods.

• Introduction: Households and Peripheral Financialization in Eastern and Southern Europe Section I: Collateralization of Social Ties 1. Within and Beyond the Household: Spanish Mortgage Debtors’ Tactics to Cope with Financialization in a Semi-periphery 2. "I would not be a loan guarantor even for my blood brother": Financialization of Inter-household Solidarity and the Privatization of Risk in Bosnia and Herzegovina Section II: Spaces of Financialized Housing and Reproduction 3. Semi-peripheral Financialization and Informal Household Solutions: Embedded Scales of Uneven Development in Hungarian Urban Fringes 4. The Strange Non-death of the "Normal" Household: Ciudad Valdeluz and Homeownership Across the Economic Cycle Section III: Financialized Households in Public Discourse and Culture 5. Household Credit in the Making and Breaking of Greek Households: Two Decades of Financialization 6. "For the sake of consumer protection": Blending Paternalism and Neoliberalism in the Discursive Financialization of Households in the Czech Republic Afterword

"[Households and Financialization in Europe] opens a new way of thinking and widens our knowledge about semi-core and semi-peripheral financialisation. It enriches the theoretical understandings of processes of financialisation from a household perspective, providing rich cases to serve as empirical base for further theoretical development. The reader is constantly challenged to expand the categories of 'family’, 'household', family ties', social network’, confronting the wide empirical variety coming from the semi-peripheral countries studied. The methods used inspire all readers to understand the logic of a set of different disciplines (sociology, anthropology, geography etc.) and offer a good example of multidisciplinary research under a common theoretical agenda."Gabor Nagy, Research Centre for Economic and Regional Studies Budapest, Hungary, writing in the International Journal of Housing Policy, 22.1, 2022