Delivered. Sociologist of the uses of money, the stories and the actors who surround it (banks, bankers and consumers), Jeanne Lazarus, researcher at the CNRS and at the center for the sociology of organizations at Sciences Po, reveals in this work an unknown part of the public policies, significant of the evolution of the role of the social State during the last decades, over the extension of the sphere and the culture of the “market”.
In the 1960s, when the welfare state was set up, the political powers promoted “banking”, that is to say everyone’s access to banking services, so that the general increase in income and consumption is channeled and rationalized by the know-how of banking professionals.
In the 1990s, this banking policy changed in nature. This time it is a question of protecting consumers, weakened by unemployment and falling incomes, from a banking know-how that has suddenly become very aggressive: it is then that the laws against over-indebtedness and for credit regulation. Jeanne Lazarus describes the construction of institutions, combining associations, banks and administrations, responsible for fighting against banking exclusion to allow, here again, a category of the population to find the “normal” way of access to credit and the consumption.
Control of individual behavior
But, in fact, the social protection system for the entire population against the vagaries of life (unemployment, aging, illness) and the resulting loss of income is, in the 2000s, increasingly overwhelmed by the extent of the difficulties of a society in crisis – especially since he is simultaneously called upon to save money and rationalize. By equipping itself with another device aimed at the most financially fragile and by calling on new actors combining associations and bankers, the welfare state is inaugurating a new form of social engineering.
The principle is no longer to pay out direct compensatory assistance, but to guide people’s behavior so that they can do without social assistance. Just as we are concerned about “risky” behavior in the field of health, or “activation of expenditure” in that of unemployment, we are concerned about the “financial education” of low incomes. “The standards for the good use of money are embodied in banking products, in legislative regulations, but also in conceptions of the level of consumption perceived as fair and monetary inequalities deemed acceptable. »
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