THE AGENCEMENT OF INDUSTRIAL BRANCH LIFE ASSURANCE

Abstract

Agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending upon how they are configured. In advocating the term ‘agencement’ Callon's aim is to signal the close interweaving of words and actions and thus jettison the more Austinian associations of performativity. Agencement calls attention to the various processes by which economic actors, both human and non-human, are endowed with the fixtures, fittings and devices necessary to conduct themselves in particular ways. Thus depending upon how things are arranged or configured, disinterested or selfish, calculative or non-calculative, individual or collective agencies become possible. This model works well to describe the emergence of markets for industrial branch life assurance in the UK from the nineteenth century. Companies like the Prudential and the Pearl reacted to the conflicts, crises and controversies in the commercial market and the competition between socialized and privatized or prudentialist insurance models with Industrial Branch Assurance. This claimed to provide security for the thrifty poor by employing an army of agents whose weekly premium collections helped impose the discipline of thrift and security. Through the notion of agencement, the effect of hybrid combinations of human bodies, material equipment, technical devices and cognitive processes in creating a sustainable market for a peculiarly expensive financial savings product targeted at working class thrift is exposed.

Keywords:

• life insurance
• agents
• agencement
• performativity
• market devices

Notes

1. See Callon et al. (2007) and Mackenzie et al. (2007) for more detailed overviews of the field.

2. For more on the distinction between privatized, prudentialist and socialized actuarial models see Donzelot (1988); Ewald (1991); O'Malley (1996; 2002), Mcfall (2007b). Liukko (2008) offers a provocative challenge to this division.

3. See Deleuze and Guattari (1988) for instance. Phillips (2006) offers a useful, short overview of the translation between agencement and assemblage in the humanities and social sciences. For recent applications of the term to financial and consumer markets see Hardie and Mackenzie (2007); Du Gay (2008b).

4. Figures published in the Manchester Guardian, 11 March 1864, have between 1844–1862, number of companies projected 596, founded 276, ceased to exist 259, amalgamations and transfers of business, 173, wound up in Chancery 57.

5. See for example Wilson & Levy (1937) for a Conservative political plea for the regulation of industrial assurance.

6. In particular see the Insurance Series in the John Johnson collection of Printed Ephemera, Bodleian, Oxford (JJ).

7. Clark (1999) describes a pattern of lending to dissolute aristocrats in the eighteenth century. Correspondence between the Hand-in-Hand Insurance office and Sir Andrew Leith Hay records the company's struggle to recoup an ‘advance of £4000 which was made more in good nature than in the exercise of prudence’, MS8670, p. 280, 28, November 1838.

8. Metropolitan Life Assurance Company prospectus 1835, Box 3 JJ. Notably the Equitable, the industry's flagbearer for safety, prudence and respectability, also eschewed agents

9. Burton et al. (2005) argue that since industrial branch became the unintended victim of 1980s financial re-regulation no scheme with equivalent capacity to encourage consumption of financial savings products among the less affluent has been devised.