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The Lived Experience of Financialization at the UK Financial Fringe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2021

LINDSEY APPLEYARD Open the ORCID record for LINDSEY APPLEYARD [Opens in a new window] ,
CARL PACKMAN ,
JORDON LAZELL  and
HUSSAN ASLAM
LINDSEY APPLEYARD
Affiliation:
Centre for Business in Society, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK. email: ac1113@coventry.ac.uk
CARL PACKMAN
Affiliation:
Fair by Design, c/o Barrow Cadbury Trust, Kean House, 6 Kean Street, London, WC2B 4AS, UK. email: C.Packman@barrowcadbury.org.uk
JORDON LAZELL
Affiliation:
Centre for Business in Society, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK. email: ab6264@coventry.ac.uk
HUSSAN ASLAM
Affiliation:
Centre for Business in Society, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK. email: ac6040@coventry.ac.uk
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Abstract

The financialization of everyday life has received considerable attention since the 2008 global financial crisis. Financialization is thought to have created active financial subjects through the ability to participate in mainstream financial services. While the lived experience of these mainstream financial subjects has been the subject of close scrutiny, the experiences of financial subjects at the financial fringe have been rarely considered. In the UK, for example, the introduction of High-Cost, Short-Term Credit [HCSTC] or payday loan regulation was designed to protect vulnerable people from accessing unaffordable credit. Exploring the impact of HCSTC regulation is important due to the dramatic decline of the high-cost credit market which helped meet essential needs in an era of austerity. As such, the paper examines the impact of the HCSTC regulation on sixty-four financially marginalized individuals in the UK that are unable to access payday loans. First, we identify the range of socioeconomic strategies that individuals employ to manage their finances to create a typology of financial subjectivity at the financial fringe. Second, we demonstrate how the temporal and precarious nature of financial inclusion at the financial fringe adds nuance to existing debates of the everyday lived experience of financialization.

Keywords

FinancializationCreditRegulationLived ExperienceAusterityPayday Loan
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 24 - 45
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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