Digital householding: calculating and moralizing domestic life through homemade spreadsheets

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among young heterosexual middle-class couples living together in Warsaw and its suburbs, this article explores the role of their homemade accounting and budgeting spreadsheets in the manufacture of domestic economic life. We argue that such digital forms actively intervene in the representation, constitution, shaping, and performing of their respective households as calculative agencies and moralized domains. We present and analyse a case study of five couple's householding with software, and based on that analysis call for an extension of the current interest in the generative role of financial devices from markets to households.

KEYWORDS:

• Households
• calculation
• digital technology
• devices
• morality

Acknowledgments

This article was completed during a visiting research stay at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Thanks to our colleagues in Cologne for thoughtful comments and critiques. An early version of this article was presented at 28th SASE Annual Meeting in 2016. We are very thankful for the comments received then, as well as for further critiques and suggestions offered by Zofia Boni, Joe Deville, José Ossandón, Tim Rosenkranz, Fabio Parasecoli, Marcin Serafin, Magda Szcześniak, Karolina Sztandar-Sztanderska, Leilah Vevaina, Iwona Zielińska, and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mateusz Halawa is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research in New York and a Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His work focuses on the cultural analyses of economic life. He is currently writing on the rise of mortgage credit in Poland, looking at the relationship between social transformations and finance.

Marta Olcoń-Kubicka is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is a qualitative researcher specializing in ethnographic research into economic practices. She is currently working on a monograph on household financial arrangements.

ORCID

Mateusz Halawa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0470-5609

Marta Olcoń-Kubicka http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3080-7166

Notes

1 ‘In the future,’ wrote the scholar of couples and their money Jan Pahl in the year 2000, ‘the man who keeps the accounts for the couple on his computer spreadsheet is likely to have more power in financial decisions than the woman who simply gives him the information to enter on that spreadsheet’ (p. 515).

2 Perhaps the strongest impulse to rethink the relationships between software, calculation, and culture came midway during our fieldwork when – unaware of the forthcoming ethnography of the role of Excel in events leading up to a wedding in Papua New Guinea (Pickles 2017) – we spoke with the curators of an exhibition about Polish wedding customs in the twenty-first century at the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków (Majkowska-Szajer and Zych 2016). Based on a multi-year research project, the curators had decided that alongside dowry chests, dresses, and other paraphernalia, the Museum’s inventory was now to include a ‘bride’s Excel,’ a spreadsheet featuring accounting, cost projections, and analytics, a guest list complete with measurements of the bridesmaids, and links to catering firm websites.

3 All participants in the study have been asked to provide pseudonyms. Some details of descriptions have been changed to protect their privacy.

4 In fact, even among couples who had not used homemade spreadsheets before, taking out a long-term mortgage in order to buy and furnish an apartment was often a motivation to start accounting and budgeting (as documented in the ongoing fieldwork on the productive lives of mortgages in Poland; see Halawa 2015). This suggests that despite the ethnographers’ interest in Kamil and Ania’s Excel, its transformation is not an artefact of research, but an effect of the need to deal with an increase in the complexity of obligations and the lengthening of financial time horizons for the couple.

5 Ola came to question the hermeneutic authority of Łukasz’s spreadsheet only a year after from the events described in this section. We documented this during a visit that concluded our fieldwork in their household. Disillusioned with the apparent incapacity of Łukasz’s spreadsheet to generate a better life for them, she has decided that the Excel was unnecessarily complex and ultimately unfair to her. She would open the document looking for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to a question like ‘can I afford a new pair of shoes?’ But she would find that the numbers provided none. The household as rendered by Łukasz’s spreadsheet was illegible to her, and asking him to interpret the statistics for her has become too close to asking him for permission to buy shoes. ‘It was your Excel, your way of thinking,’ she told Łukasz. Based on our last conversation, it seems unlikely that the spreadsheet in this form has remained in use.

6 In her study of evangelical financial ethic in the US Caitlin Zaloom (2016, p. 334) discusses a case of the confluence of religion, calculation, and software: ‘Christian budgeting left patterned traces of kingdom activities. Equipped to inscribe biblical inspiration in the budget and to read signs of the kingdom in the numbers, participants could look at their spreadsheet and see the hand of God.’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland under [grant number DEC-2013/09/B/HS6/03426] and [grant number DEC-2011/01/N/HS6/05095] and by the Max Planck Partner Group for the Sociology of Economic Life at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.