Towards a Material Culture of Financialisation

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First is to comment upon the nature of financialisation. Second is to frame how this leads financialisation to be understood whether consciously or otherwise. And, third, is to draw out implications for surveying households as their experiences and understandings of, and reactions to, financialisation without specifically designing a questionnaire itself for this purpose. As should already be apparent, underpinning this contribution is the presumption that financialisation is a characteristic of contemporary capitalism (and that the term is also an appropriate category for representing this characteristic). The material culture of financialisation is addressed by drawing upon the 10 Cs approach that was developed for the study of consumption, highlighting how it is Constructed, Construed, Commodified, Conforming, Contextual, Contradictory, Closed, Contested, Collective, and Chaotic.