Using a moral economy perspective to understand working-class finance and the decline of home credit in the United Kingdom
本文通过70余次访谈等资料，分析英国家庭信贷行业衰落中主流与替代道德经济的冲突，揭示媒体、政治、学术和商业行为者如何延续对替代实践的误解，并推进了道德经济理论。
This article considers how discord between dominant and alternative moral economies has contributed to the decline of the home credit industry in the United Kingdom. Drawing on qualitative data from over 70 interviews, as well as media reporting and grey literature, authentic historical analysis is utilised to examine how collective values and perceptions shape discourse and reproduce inequalities. It is argued here that media, political, academic and business actors operating within the dominant moral economy may perpetuate hegemonic (mis)understandings of alternative practices. This article advances Graeber’s work on debt and develops Polanyi’s and Thompson’s theorising on the moral economy, by arguing that social and cultural relations should be understood as being connected to – but separable from – economic relations. Analysis of the decline of home credit illustrates how cultural and economic behaviours converge to create unjust and partitioned moral economies.