Assembling lines: queue management and the production of market economy in post-socialist services

ABSTRACT

‘Time priority’ by queuing is the epitome of market fairness in stock exchanges, while queuing also symbolizes the shortage economy of state-socialism. How are mundane queues made to constitute markets in settings where they performed anti-markets? The paper looks at this problem through ethnomethodology, which sees queuing as the prime example of how social-moral order is produced by participants of situations. Queues appear out of thin air, and can be analyzed as a ‘designed enterprise’ of small utterances and bodily gestures, accomplishing ordinariness. The paper rethinks how this theoretical approach can gauge the properties of ‘invisible lines’ in automated queues, and broadens its scope by framing queuers as objects of organizational control, and queues as not purely social but socio-technical accomplishments. Based on the observation of a digital waiting system in Hungarian banking, the paper shows how automated queue management changes the temporality and accountability between individuals and organizations, and reorders post-socialist banking as distinctly market-based service. Personal-physical lines are replaced with material ‘governance pairs’, which not only assess but rather format customers’ financial needs. Market economy, as produced in mundane automation ties together an obscure order for service customers with total accountability for bank employees’ performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Queuing
• markets
• accountability
• post-socialism
• banking

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Zsuzsanna Vargha is Associate Professor in Accounting and Organization at the University of Leicester. She received her PhD in sociology from Columbia University, and completed postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, then as LSE Fellow in Accounting at the LSE. Zsuzsanna was the editor of Economic Sociology: The European Electronic Newsletter (2015–2016). Zsuzsanna’s research interests are in the social studies of finance and accounting, and valuation studies, on topics of digital technologies in financial services, management control of selling and advice, mortgage crises and financial regulation, and personalization in consumer markets.

ORCID

Zsuzsanna Vargha http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1578-6531

Notes

1. The paper uses the British “queue’ and the US “line’ interchangeably.

2. The importance of including the organization’s perspective has been clarified in studies of non-market settings. Triage sorts incoming patients and prioritizes them according to their medical needs, thus modulating ‘time of arrival’ by professional principles. In electronic triage, medical experience collides with the bureaucratic rationality of digitalized categories such as vital signs checklists (Ruston 2006), and it involves moral evaluation of patients’ circumstances and life choices, affecting priority (Bjorn and Balka 2007).

3. This approach itself had been influenced by ethnomethodology.

4. Moral philosopher Michael Sandel has famously distinguished between markets and queues, as allocating goods based on the ability and willingness to pay versus to wait (Sandel 2013, p. 32).

5. Exchanges are switch-role markets, where participants alternate between being buyer or seller (White 2002).

6. Social connections are also the fabric of market economies, as the New Economic Sociology has emphasized (e.g. Granovetter 1985).

7. See the recent Polish board game ‘Queuing’ about the 1980s state-socialist experience (Magnus 2016).

8. Pseudonym.

9. Ironically, overt and impersonal sorting is often avoided in countries Hungarians considered to be models. In US banks, customer flow is typically coordinated by a person.

10. The order of these queues remained puzzling to customers as late as 2014, and a large bank reveals the concept of multiple lines to a complaining customer http://homar.blog.hu/2014/01/13/felnapos_sorszamot_kapott_az_otp-ben

11. For a longer discussion on the temporal aspects of queue management, see Vargha (2014)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Columbia University: [Grant Number Harriman Institute PepsiCo Research and Travel Fel].