Sociology at Stanford talk: Frederick Wherry

Please join us for a colloquium being given by Frederick Wherry, Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

Relational Tradeoffs for the Credit Constrained

Why do struggling individuals make their lives even harder through their spending practices? And how do they understand, keep track of, and act on their budgeting priorities? This article revises some of the current psychological explanations for how individuals account for their money by incorporating the role of relationships and meaning systems into these informal accounting systems. Using the case of an innovative social program called Lending Circles at the Mission Asset Fund where previously “invisible” behaviors indicating a person’s credit worthiness are brought out of the shadows, we present data on the subjective experiences of the people of color using this new program to build their credit histories, including 56 client interviews and three years of periodic direct observations of staff and clients navigating relationship concerns, life-stage transitions, and meaningful collective events. We show individuals engaged in relational tradeoffs as they negotiate the need to save face by protecting their credit scores and the need satisfy the ritual and interpersonal demands of their relational environments. In these relational tradeoffs, individuals were able to improve their credit positions with assistance from the Mission Asset Fund, yet these gains in the credit score sometimes generated conflict with the very family members benefitting from the individual’s improved credit score. The paper is co-authored with the project’s co-PIs Kristin S. Seefelt (Michigan) and Anthony S. Alvarez (Cal State Fullerton). The research assistant for the project was Marlene Orozco (Stanford). And funding for the project came from The Behavioral Economics Program at the Russell Sage Foundation and the JP Morgan Chase Foundation.