The Making of a ‘Good Deal’

Abstract

Economic rationality and reciprocal help are values that are often posed as contradictory within exchanges. However, there are instances when these values work in tandem, such as when justifying informal purchases of work, svart arbete, in contemporary Sweden. Svart arbete are omnipresent exchanges in Swedish society, and there are many reasons for performing them. On the one hand, a good deal is part of everyday social life when people help each other. On the other hand, a good deal also reinforces views that economic rationalities are values that do not exclusively adhere to formal markets. This article focuses on the values that construct the ‘good deal’ when getting your car fixed informally. These overlapping and somewhat contradictory values in theory, but commonplace in practice, illustrate how notions of reciprocity and economic calculations interweave and are difficult to entangle one from the other. The ‘good deal’ thus concerns how illegal, yet licit purchases of services are made acceptable when posing them as cheap and simple transactions that simultaneously invoke a realm of closer relations.

KEYWORDS:

• valuation
• informal car repairs
• Sweden
• economic and social rationality

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am most grateful for constructive comments by the editors and to the two anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Daniel Seabra Lopez and Smoki Musaraj and to Maria Eidenskog, Lisa Lindén and Karin Thoresson.

Notes

1. This term will be used regardless of whether it is applied to singular or plural events. In Swedish the plural would correctly be written as svarta arbeten.

2. Exchanging svart is cheating the state. A related area to this article is how people perceive governmental involvement in formal markets and in what contexts this involvement can justifiably be avoided. Neither these issues nor the cultural importance of work will be dealt with here.

3. According to SCB, Statistics Sweden, there are no publicly available statistics for the consumption of services. An estimate for 2008 is that 47.7% of the products included in the Consumer Price Index can be considered as services (email from the Price Unit at SCB 12.1.2008).

4. They propose to call services goods as one ‘can be defined by a combination of characteristics that establish its singularity’ (Callon et al. 2002, p. 198). They make an etymological distinction and characterize a good (service) as always slightly different from other goods, whereas a (manufactured) product goes through a number of stages. Its meaning changes, and it singles out but also coordinates different actors at each stage. For example a car moves in its trajectory from design to fabrication, sales, usage, second-hand deal, object of collection, antiquity and scrap.

5. An alternative theoretical frame for proposing values in Swedish society from justification could be the worlds of worth theory as proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006). I have referred to this theory elsewhere (2010), and it proves helpful for making actions understandable and meaningful in relation to what people believe is worthy behaviour given the circumstances under which they act. If actors are able to justify their informal purchases, they can prove themselves worthy within their own and others’ opinions and regard themselves as moral beings. However, the aim in this article is to unveil the economic calculation, the technical knowledge required and access to tools, as well as the reciprocity the informants refer to within one framework. Therefore, I chose this other tack.

6. For estimates and further discussion on the Swedish tax wedge, see Henrekson (1998), SOU (1999). Currently (2012), an employer pays 1500.00, so the employee receives 500.00 net (http://www.ekonomifakta.se/Documents/whiteboard.pdf accessed 19 December 2012).

7. Note the opposite notion of open-ended reciprocity. For example, Graeber points to communist societies where no balance of accounts should exist. Instead there is giving and taking according to each community member's needs. However, open-ended reciprocal relationships can easily degenerate into systems of patronage and exploitation (Graeber 2001, p. 225).

8. Swedes are one of the larger per capita consumers of milk in the world.

9. In the economic literature, ‘good deals’ refer to financial assets with specific features and properties that encourage them to be quickly acquired in the market (e.g. Campbell & Diamond 1990; Cochrane & Saá-Requejo 2000; Černý & Hodges 2004). These types of offers are quickly grabbed by consumers because they are regarded as ‘good’. When markets move, what was considered a good deal can quickly turn into one of lesser economic value.