Introduction

This chapter raises the question of the global entanglement of local inequalities through a conceptual discussion of household-related payments. As Niklas Luhmann (1988) has pointed out, the notion of ‘payment’ is central for a sociological understanding of economic processes and the logic of the economic as such, as it is through these payments that diverse economic processes become interlinked and the economy becomes observable to itself. Accordingly, systems theory has been often used in order to account for the global dimension of the political economy, especially with regard to finance as a field where payments and promises of payments are the actual commodities traded (see, for instance, Strulik 2006). At the same time, Luhmann's conceptualisation is much less adequate to address another dimension of payments and their capacities to interconnect economic practices, namely, their capacity to organise social relations and to create solidarities, but also to found hierarchies. In other words, while systems theory restricts the capacities of payments to interlinking economic transactions, it ignores the ways in which payments constitute not only the economy but also social relationships in a much broader sense.

The present chapter proceeds from the assumption that a focus on payments can provide an analytical linkage between global economic and financial processes and local inequalities as it considers payments to be highly versatile social devices. Payments do not only execute transactions but create and maintain horizontal, vertical and transversal relationships. For instance, recent work in the social study of finance highlights the ways that household debt becomes permanently entangled with the financial economy, as households’ mortgages and consumer loans serve as collateral for the construction of financial securities (Langley 2015; Bryan and Rafferty 2017). Financialisation is thus active in articulating the frame conditions of the household's economic decisions and social capabilities, epitomised in the capacity of making and receiving payments. Yet, while debt has come under considerable criticism recently (Macho 2014; Lazzarato 2014, 2015), it is at the same time, in the form of credit, the condition for the possibility of achieving more than would be possible if only relying on one's own means (Graeber 2011). In this sense, the ambivalence of debt/credit has been regarded as a particular manifestation of the ambivalence of social relationships as they shuttle between utility and obligation (Caille 2008).