Definición de variables e indicadores para conformar el procedimiento de evaluación.

The opening of the human mind to different sets of naïve theories provides a critique of economistic (Higgott 1999, 26; de Goede 2003, 80), hence limited, conception of agency. As the VoC literature is unable to present a theory of the individual, this is where this framework comes in (Hay 2005). I then argue that not only does such an understanding narrow the view of what to integrate into debates about differential socio-economic modes of capitalist organisation, but also that it is the cause for two further interlinked flaws, first a conception of rationality that artificially extracts the economic from its social environment (Zafirovski 2000, 186) and second, a conception of the political that is limited to distribution issues. However that is not to say that the individual is the wrong point of departure (Boudon 2002, 12 and 2003, 394), it only means that an alternative, more open ontology needs to be put in place.

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Because the treatment of the individual is so central to the argument that is put forward in the thesis, I start by outlining an ontology that puts the individual, and subsequently the state, back into the study of economic regimes (Watson 2007). By doing do, the social and the political are connected to the economic (Beckert and Streeck 2008). Sociological elements and insights from social psychology are taken as points of departure to investigate the nature of the human mind, as well as variations in moral frames of meaning and collective behaviour, hence politics (Edkins and Pin-Fat 1999). The argument develops through five stages: the Indeterminate Mind; human sociality; interaction and naïve theories; the normativity of collective life; and politics as exclusion. By engraining politics into everyday meaning of the economy, and enabling for varieties of interpretation of good i.e. appropriate economic behaviour, the thesis shows how variation in the definition of economic subjectivities is produced and reproduced, and how such variety is political.

The starting point in this endeavour is best summed up with Vico‟s words.

(…) I propose here the following axioms (…) By its nature, the human mind is indeterminate. (Vico 1744, 75, original emphasis)

At the start of the 18th century, the philosopher Vico claims that the human mind is indeterminate (1). Together with his „verum esse ipsum factum‟ (“the true itself is made; Von Glasersfeld 1997, 75), he expresses the idea that the truth, or what people take as truth is „made‟. By stating that the mind is indeterminate, he takes distance from any materialist stance that the human body, and with it the human mind, are predetermining factors in the way that our species can interact with each other and

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with the environment. Current scholars interested in the distinction between material and ideational domains adopt a very similar attitude to Vico (Sorsensen 2008, 7; Cartesen 2010, 849). Theoretically speaking, he posits that the human being as such is an unfinished product, it always in the making (Butler 2000, 12; Bröckling 2007, 19), that it can adapt to various social circumstances and that its existence involves a process of acquiring a mode of how to make sense of its own situation (Béland 2008).

More than two-hundred years later, Berger and Luckmann claim that even though the materiality of the human constituency is a limiting factor in what the individual can do and be, it cannot be seen as strictly determining the way by which the human mind makes sense of the collected experiences, present and past (Berger and Luckmann 1966). All constructivist theory must by definition start with the assumption that varieties of interpretations exist. Some political economists have fallen back onto Braudel to make this point about the elasticity and indeterminacy of human life (Germain 1996). Indeed, the whole idea is not only that reality is constructed (Guzzini 2000), but also that it can be constructed in different ways, at least two. In order for this to be possible, a necessary condition is the indeterminacy, plasticity (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 66) of the human mind, as construction takes place in the mind (Grafstein 1997, 1042), as opposed to the material world imposing itself on it. In other words, constructivism and its extension in terms of varieties of conceptions of the lived environment, in time and space (Watson 2005a, 18; Bröckling 2007, 31), can only exist once the material determinacy of the human mind is rejected. In this sense, constructivism is anti-essentialist (Alker 1990, 163; Schmidt 2001b, 140). This affirmation about the individual forms the core of

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constructivist thought (Sterling-Folker 2000, 98), and is the point of departure by which this thesis is approaching the issue of comparative capitalisms and differential logics in housing and mortgage markets. Indeed, if there is no naturally given way to consider or make sense of these two domains, then varieties in their constitution itself are possible, and political. That is not to say that differences are necessarily observed, it just puts forward the mere possibility of varieties of housing regimes.

By doing so, this perspective pulls together two distinct areas of investigation in order to bring out the deeply political character of the individual itself, more precisely of the conception of the individual. This might seem as a long warm-up to the final argument, but it is crucial to point out that, in my view, varieties of capitalism are only possible because varieties of constructed realties are possible. Previously, I have criticised the literature for not clearly discussing its ontological position of the individual and claimed that this then filters through the firm-centred approach that follows. Against this approach, I foreclose that this thesis can only be fully appreciated if the reader shares its ontological position, even if this might only be for the time he/she deals with the chapters presented here.

On the one hand, taken individually, the human mind is indeterminate; on the other side it also seeks the contact with other human beings. Social psychology is littered with examples and experiments showing that the human individual, at the stage of birth or in adulthood, is profoundly affected by the people surrounding him/her (Hogg and Cooper 2003). Human affection and recognition is one of the ultimate drivers of action. In sociology, Durckheim‟s Suicide shows that people across cultures with very few ties to peers are much more likely to put an end to their

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existence than those in company (Durckheim 1989). The ethnomethodological approach displays that people rely on collective schemes of interpretation in their everyday life, and that „breaching‟ those patterns of commonly shared patterns of sense-making is profoundly disturbing to them (Garfinkel 1984; Pollner, 1974; Odysseos 2002, 374; Rasmussen 2008, 1785). In short,sociality, the tendency for the human being to form into groups or communities, is a factor that is universal (2) (in contrast to the exact setup of the human mind; Rakoff, 1977, 90; Ashley1983, 477; Ruggie 1998, 857; Brito 2008, 54; Langley 2010, 73). Most theories attribute sociality to the presence of uncertainty, or even insecurity in the environment of the individual (Bates et al. 1998, 14). Housing and mortgages are domains among the many arenas in modern economic regimes characterised by uncertainty in the way that people cannot make sense of them in an easy and straightforward way.

From (1) it can be redefined that there is no predetermined guide for action, and not for the interpretation of the external world. In a universe of open possibilities with no given criteria of evaluation, the degree of uncertainty is maximal (Trope and Gaunt 2003, 191). On the one hand, the future is open; on the other hand it is this very indeterminacy that is hindering any initiative to act as all alternatives seem of the same value. An indeterminate mind is thus inclined to set up categories in order to structure the interpretation of the lived environment (Tajfel 2010). In other words, openness and closeness are the two sides of the same coin (Butler 2000, 23).

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Even though the focus on ethnomethodology is not further developed throughout the thesis, it is mentioned here as it shows how a constructivist approaches brings up the questions that are dealt with in the thesis.

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(…) understandings are largely determined by external social factors. Consequently (…) “the actor‟s own understanding is an area of underdetermination” (Yee 1996, 206, quotes Hollis and Smith(1991)).

Once the axiom of human indeterminacy is accepted, the properly constructive aspect of constructivist theory comes into play. Upon an open field of alternatives (1), an interactive and collective process takes place among social agents (2) that reduces the original uncertainty ((1) + (2)) into a more or less coherent interpretation of the lived world (Edkins and Pin-Fat 1999, 4).

Through „habitualization‟ (Garfinkel 1974; Bourdieu 1994), the construction involves patterns of repetition, the setting up of agreed modes of interpretation that reduce the multiplicity of theoretically possible options to one that will then be followed, in the way people make sense of it and how they act. What is crucial here are the interactive features of the reduction of potential interpretations of the lived environment (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 70; Pusey 1987, 106; Soeffner 2004, 20). The argument picks up on this concept later on in this chapter when the relevance of the state is explained. As housing and mortgages go, everyday people interpret the corresponding markets in specific terms, the latter having the possibility of being different in separate socio-economic contexts. Consequently, people will act according to the premises of the theories that make sense to them (Bates et al. 1998, 13; Joas and Knöbl 2009, 123). However, that is not to mean that agents are denied creativity in the ways that they act upon the facilitated subjectivities. It is just that that is a topic that the thesis does not address in more detail.

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For the moment, the process by which a certain interpretation „makes sense‟ stands at the forefront. The notion captures explanations that are easily understandable, i.e. where the complexity of potential explanations is narrowed down (Bruner 1991). Collective narratives are established to offer a consistent set of statements about the nature of the lived environment and about the position of the individuals within (Suhr 2010, 29). What is constructed is a collective (2) story that is able to reduce uncertainty (1) by offering a causal model at which end sits the situation as experienced at present or a situation to be experienced in the future. The way that people see what is around them is thus not only dependent on the materiality of the latter but also on this process of validation of some modes of explanation and the exclusion of others (Brito 2008, 54). This is just what Vico meant with his “verum esse ipsum factum”. What people make of their own housing and their own housing finance management is then influential upon their behaviour in that very market.

This process is interactive as it involves at least two individuals or actors, without meaning that every agent has the same amount of power in the determination of the outcome. This is developed later on in this chapter and in subsequent part by introducing a constructivist account of institutional analysis. So now, constructivist theory often stresses how modes of explanations in the form of theories can take on a quasi-own existence in the form of institutions that then act as external forces upon the individual (Durkheim 1895). This is certainly a useful heuristic observation, but what I am mostly concerned with here is the individual level per se. Indeed, the concept of naïve theories (Heider 1958) points towards the sets of explanatory frameworks that people tell themselves or believe in as they reduce uncertainty. Naïve as they „de-complexify‟ the situation faced by explaining it through a single,

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causally coherent mechanism (Leiser 2001). That does not mean that they are logically coherent with the other naïve theories facilitated as is illustrated in the case studies. „De-complexification‟ is the process by which the multiplicity of potential explanations is being narrowed down. Naïve stands hence in opposition to overly complex, and is not meant to have a pejorative undertone. In this sense, constructivism is always a theoretical perspective that points towards what has not been constructed, what interpretations have been side-lined (Soeffner 2004, 28).

In the process of adopting a certain set of naïve/everyday theories, moral judgements are formed about those that are right and those that are wrong. In other words, the closure of the openness posited by the human mind involves statements of the good and the bad, of morality. „Original violence‟ (Laclau 1990, 34) is performed against alternative conceptions of good individual life (or in the case of this thesis: good housing and mortgage practices) and collective life (good macroeconomic house price trajectories and good mortgage conditions for instance). Stated bluntly, the modes of explanation chosen are qualified as good, and those conceptions of the experienced world that are not adopted are denominated as bad. Stated differently, a certain legitimation regime (Habermas 1976, 70) is put into place that defends one set of assumptions of how to look at/make sense of things and ignores the other ones (“housing is this, a mortgage is that, and nothing else”).

Legitimation is nothing else than the instalment of a structure of intersubjective meaning (Bieler 2001, 95), acting from the basis of naïve theories that promotes certain worldviews over others. Some scholars have even talked about “cognitive

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legitimacy” in this respect (Suchman 1995; Jensen 2003, 524; Gordon et al. 2009, 16) to refer to the psychological bases of such a notion. In this sense, legitimation is the process by which individuals collectively agree with a certain interpretation of the material, or human, environment, and with the type of actions that consistently (in their eyes) follow from it. The concept of legitimation must thus be located at the individual level, i.e. in naïve theories. At the same time then, naïve theories are also at the basis of how people make sense of the general housing and mortgage conditions and their individual practices within them.

This should however not be interpreted as a theory that denies agential capacity to the individual Indeed, individuals are assumed to possess artifice, “the capacity to respond imaginatively to social and natural conditions” (Germain 1996, 202) or human „fantasia‟ (Alker 1990, 164). Even though certain interpretations of the world are predominant, that does not mean that all others are unable to be accessed through thought processes (Myers 2003, 27). As the subject is always a subject in the making, it can never be fully determinate. Contingency (Butler 2000, 31) and resistance (Lefèbvre 2002, 26; Streeck 2010a, 11) are inherent features in his/her constitution just as is the capacity to imagine alternative worlds. Human agency thus can always think of alternative ways of how to conceptualise housing, but it might be that people behave according to the predominant logic because that one makes more sense to them. The possibility of resistance however always exists. What I want to be clear about is that the thesis is not denying agents their capacity to run counter to the political assumptions about economic regimes, but this is not the main focus here. The open-ended ontology is concerned with the human mind and the ways that people make sense of the world, and that always means that „play‟ between the

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institutional level and the individual one exists (Streeck and Thelen 2005, 11), but before an analysis of such patterns can be assessed, the cultural process of civilisation needs to be investigated (Ferge 1999, 219), to use the words quotes in chapter one.

As shortly mentioned before, a theory is not only a description of how things are, its judgements about good and bad also constitute a prescription of how things should be, hence they function as guides to action (Lukes 1974; Cox 1981, 128). Based on moral conceptions, the constructed conceptions promote certain types of behaviour, those that are consistent with the explanation at hand. In other terms, naïve theories not only interpret the world, they also construct it in material terms in a way so as to fit the theory (MacKenzie 2006). The normative aspects of societal conceptions of good life are hence larger than could be expected. Constructivism is not only about the interpretation of reality, it is also about the (re)production of it, about everyday practice (Soeffner 2004, 23), hence about the definition of economic agency that is political in itself (Bourdieu 2000, 15). To come back to the individual, even though certain worldviews get naturalised (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 77) through sets of more or less consistent ideas, there is always the potentiality of internal contradictions in a symbolic order (Germain 2007, 128) that never fully changes the condition of indeterminacy of the mind. The empirical cases also highlight these internal frictions.

This chapter introduces „axio-rationality‟ (Hobson and Seabrooke 2007, 17; Seabrooke 2007, 403) as a method of challenging a naturalist view of things that

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considers people as interpreting economic affairs according to one particular logic (Hay 2002, 8). But before going over to the discussion of economic rationality, it is important to highlight the political character of constructed naïve theories. Indeed, when a collectivity is formed through the elimination of potential conceptions of the world, the constitution of a community is inevitably political as it excludes alternatives. „Original violence‟ is inevitably performed in the very act of setting up this very community (Butler 2000, 29-31). The act of closing down potential spaces of thought is a political manoeuvre as it attempts to cut off potential avenues, even if they are only conceptual. But because interpretation of the world also creates it in its own image, the exclusion of certain reflections and conceptions must be considered here. In other words, the moral constitution of a set of subjectivities itself leads to particular distributional outcomes. As different worldviews come with different normative baggage (Strange 1994, 1-6), they not only favour certain groups over others, but favour them differently according to the underlying moral assumptions. This is hence an example of how ideas shape policy (Clift 2012), a topic that is theoretically explored in chapter four and showcased throughout the case studies (chapters five to eight, and annexes). Every conception of how things are and should be hence plays into the hands of some people and not of others. This then links what I call the ontological and the distributional elements of the political features of comparative capitalisms.

The exclusionary effect is thus double, once at the conceptual/ontological level, once at the material/distributional level. Hence the very process of setting up a community is a political act. Indeed, it means that conceptions of what housing and mortgages are, and who they are for, create a common set of shared assumptions, but at the

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same time exclude others (violence at the conceptual, theoretical, ontological level). Moreover, by putting forward a certain interpretation of what housing is, who is entitled to which tenure and who is entitled to a mortgage that enables him/her into a certain type of housing, every conception of housing favours some behaviour and socio-economic groups and marginalises others (violence at the material, practical, distributional level). At the same time then, these markets are hence likely to be sites of potential contradictions, in conceptual and practical terms, as they try to cover up their political character. Again, that is to be seen in the empirical chapters.