The “Mortgage, Rationality and Visions of the Future” project, funded by the Hungarian Research Funds, looks at the development of the postsocialist Hungarian mortgage market from its birth in the 1990s till its crisis in 2009-2010. The project is carried out by Léna Pellandini-Simányi (principal investigator), Zsuzsanna Vargha and Ferenc Hammer.
The research draws on actor-network theory, cultural economy and economic sociology approaches and looks at borrowers, banks, regulators and policy-makers. It uses document analysis (of parliamentary debates, regulatory documents, advertisements and the financial press), qualitative interviews (50 borrower and 40 expert interviews) and a representative survey with borrowers. The project involved a workshop titled “Debt trails: Mapping relations of debt and credit from everyday actors to global credit markets”, co-sponsored by the Journal of Cultural Economy.
The project looks at three main areas:
1. Financialization of everyday life, the formation of financial subjectivities
This area asks how everyday financial subjectivities are formed, how different discourses and “agencements” (banks’ and mortgage brokers’ marketing devices, financial literacy programs of the government, etc.) shape the experience of taking out and living with mortgages. As part of these questions, we inquire into to what extent the “financialization of everyday life” can be observed in Hungary, and into the ways in which class divisions are reshaped by mortgage borrowing.
This strand was further developed in a follow-up project, titled the ‘The driving forces of the financialization of everyday life’, supported by the Swiss National Science Research Fund (investigator: Léna Pellandini-Simányi).
Papers related to this strand:
Pellandini-Simányi, L., Hammer, F. and Vargha Zs. (2015): The Financialization of Everyday Life or the Domestication of Finance? How Mortgages Engage With Borrowers’ Temporal Horizons, Relationships, and Rationality in Hungary. Cultural Studies, 29 (5-6), 1-26, 733-759
Pellandini-Simányi, L. & Vargha, Zs. (2018) How risky debt became ordinary: The normalization Forex mortgages in postsocialist Hungary. Conference paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Consumption Section session, 11-14 August, 2018, Philadelphia, US.
Pellandini-Simányi L. & Banai A. (2017): The conformity-risk paradox: Why increasingly risky mortgages are acquired by increasingly risk-averse consumers, NA – Advances in Consumer Research, 45, eds. A. Gneezy, V. Griskevicius & P. Williams, Duluth, MN: Association for Consumer Research.
Pellandini-Simányi (forthcoming): Beyond subjectivity: Competing governance regimes and the socio-material construction of rational consumer action. NA – Advances in Consumer Research, 46, Gershoff, A., Kozinets, R. and White T., eds. Duluth, MN: Association for Consumer Research.
Pellandini-Simányi, L. and Banai Á. (2017): The financialization of everyday life: Measurement and critique. Society, Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, 30 July- 1 August, 2017, Lyon, France
Pellandini-Simányi L., Hammer, F. és Vargha Zs. (2015) Domesticating Finance: Patterns of Inequality in Living with Home Mortgages in Hungary. 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, Domesticizing Financial Economies, Part 2 session, 2-4 July, 2015, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Pellandini-Simányi, L. (2015) The Consumer Who Wasn’t There: How Home Mortgages Configured Higher Energy Consumption. Beyond Practices: Sustainable Consumption and Socio-technical Systems Workshop. University of Manchester, Manchaster, UK, 25-26th June, 2015
Pellandini-Simányi, L. and Hammer, F. (2014): Performing irrational consumers? Consuming and regulating mortgage in postsocialist Hungary, ESA Consumption Research Network midterm conference, 3-5 September, Porto, Portugal
Zsuzsanna Saffer: A lakáshitelezés médiareprezentációjának elemzése – A diszkurzív hatások szerepe a lakáshitel normalizálódási folyamatában (An analysis of the media represnatation of mortgages – The role of discoursive effects in the normalization of mortgages; Master’s thesis, ELTE-BTK)
2. Marketization and the dynamics of markets
The Hungarian mortgage market was created through a series of (intitally failed, later successful) government interventions in the late 1990-early 2000s, followed by a period of unregulated foreign-currency denominated mortgage boom between 2003 and 2009. This research strand looks at the reasons why market-making efforts failed originally and seeks to trace the dynamics that lead to the boom later on. It maps these dynamics as an interaction between banks, policy-makers, regulators and borrowers.
Papers related to this strand:
Pellandini-Simányi L. (2016): Non-marketizing agents in the study of markets: Competing legacies of performativity and Actor-Network-Theory in the marketization research program. Journal of Cultural Economy, 9 (6), 570-586.
Special issue: Vargha, Z. & Pellandini-Simányi, L. (in progress) Debt trails: Following relations of debt across borrowers, organizations and states. Special issue proposal accepted, in progress, Journal of Cultural Economy.
Pellandini-Simányi, L. & Vargha, Zs. (2018) How existing legal infrastructures matter in the creation of new market institutions: The case of the Hungarian mortgage market. European Academy of Management Conference, Business for Society track, 19-22 June 2018, Reykjavik, Iceland
Pellandini-Simányi, L., Vargha, Zs. and Hammer, F. (2015) Performation struggles in the making of the Hungarian forex mortgage market. American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Economic Sociology Roundtable Session, 22-25 August. 2015, Chicago, USA. (An earlier version of this paper was presented in Economic Geography Discussion Forum, University of Zurich, 1 November, 2014)
Pellandini-Simányi, L. and Vargha Zs. (2014): Market drift or side-markets? Organizing the mortgage market in post-socialist Hungary from birth to crisis, SCORE International Conference on Organizing Markets, 16-17 October, Stockholm, Sweden.
3. Financial predictions and the Westernization narrative
This research area focuses on how borrowers, banks, policy-makers and regulators formed expecations about the future development of the mortgage market and how these predictions transformed the market itself. One key focus of this strand is the ways in which geographical imaginaries of East and West shaped expecations.
Papers related to this strand:
Pellandini-Simányi L. & Vargha Z. (2018): Spatializing the future: Financial expectations, EU convergence and the Eastern European Forex mortgage crisis, 47 (2), Economy and Society. 280-312.
Pellandini-Simányi, L., Hammer, F. and Vargha, Zs. (2014) Everyday economic projections and the foreign currency mortgage crisis in Hungary. Conference on „Consumption and Economic Crises: Post-Socialist Experiences“ organized by the National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, 2014.10.9-10.