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Credit in Society and in Sociology: On “The Bank and Its Customers” (Bourdieu, Boltanski, Chamboredon, 1963)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2023

Hélène Ducourant  and
Jeanne Lazarus Open the ORCID record for Jeanne Lazarus [Opens in a new window]
Hélène Ducourant
Affiliation:
Université Gustave Eiffel, LATTS, CNRS, École des Ponts. Email: helene.ducourant@univ-eiffel.fr;
Jeanne Lazarus
Affiliation:
Sciences Po, CNRS, CSO. Email: jeanne.lazarus@sciencespo.fr.
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Abstract

In 1963, a young French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, together with two assistants—Luc Boltanski and Jean-Claude Chamboredon—conducted the first sociological study of the credit practices of a major French bank, entitled “The Bank and Its Customers”. This article discusses the context, the findings and the legacy of this study. First, the article sketches the landscape of the emerging mass credit market in France in the early 1960s. Then, the paper summarizes and analyses the report itself. We also demonstrate how bank-customer interactions and credit continued to be a subject of interest for Bourdieu throughout his subsequent career. Finally, the paper seeks to contribute to comparative research on the varieties of national configurations of private indebtedness in relation to the level of development of the welfare state.

Keywords

CreditIndebtednessFrench SociologyBankHousing loan
Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , December 2023 , pp. 385 - 416
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Journal of Sociology

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