(De)constructing the financialised culture of owner-occupation in the UK, with the aid of the 10Cs

ABSTRACT

Taking owner-occupation as the quintessential form of financialised housing provision, this paper investigates how housing cultures, understood as a set of shared behaviours and beliefs about housing, have been (re)shaped in the UK in a way that favours owner-occupation, and the implications of this shift for agents’ subjectivities. Utilising the systems of provision/10Cs approach, which takes as its starting point that the norms and meanings associated with homeownership are complex and conditioned by the contradictory interaction of cultural and material factors, the paper shows how the rise of owner-occupation reflected changes in socially shared images and meanings around housing as well as material benefits associated with the tenure. However, the complex analysis of material culture facilitated by the 10Cs reveals that the culture of owner-occupation is not hegemonic. While housing policy since the 1980s has given material and cultural impetus to owner-occupation in Britain, the reflexive and resistive capacities of consumers, when coupled with the competing meanings attached to housing and the growing dysfunctionality of the current housing model, have constrained the dominance of the ethos of owner-occupation and render its future vulnerable.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• cultural political economy
• systems of provision
• neoliberalism
• financialisation

Notes on contributors

Mary Robertson is a lecturer in international business at the University of Greenwich. She previously worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Leeds, and has a PhD in economics from SOAS, University of London. Mary’s research interests include housing, privatisation, neoliberalism and financialisation. She is currently on a leave of absence to work as a political adviser to the Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Notes

1. In the DoE (1995) White Paper ‘Our Future Homes' for example, the ‘density’ (number of uses divided by length of chapter in terms of number of lines) of the term ‘home’ is three times higher in the chapter on owner-occupation than in the chapter on private renting, and four-and-a-half times higher than in the chapter on social renting.

2. Gurney also identifies differences between how the two types of rented tenure are discussed, with private rentals usually being regarded as a helpful stepping stone to owner-occupation and social rentals being restricted to notions of decency.

3. Gurney's attempt to reduce neo-liberalism and the Thatcher government to a rationale for governance centred on a particular conception of the consumer is too narrow, not least because it ignores the dynamics of profit-making. But it is sufficiently insightful into an aspect of neo-liberal governance to be useful here.

4. There is an interesting parallel here between the private landlord and those working in finance given how each has been promoted and benefitted by government but, especially in the wake of crisis, are subject to hostile public attitudes (see Happer, this issue).