Beyond Subjectivity: Competing Governance Regimes and the Socio-Material Construction of Rational Consumer Action

Rationality – originally assumed to be perfect, then to be more bounded – is the core tenet of economic theories of action. Consumer behavior provides a more nuanced picture with an entire subdiscipline dedicated to the different modalities in which consumers process information and make decisions (Mowen 1988; Novak and Hoffman 2009; Olshavsky and Granbois 1989; Solomon et al. 2006; Yoon, Sarial-Abi, and Gürhan-Canli 2012); only some of which, as an exception rather than a rule, resemble the rational decision-making model of economics. In recent years, CCT research took a step back from the question of how consumers make decisions and inquired instead into how consumers evolve into subjects capable and willing to make certain decisions: how they become particular consumer subjects. Research on the formation of consumer subjects in CCT (Giesler and Veresiu 2014; Karababa and Ger 2011), sociology of governmentality (Langley 2007; Miller and Rose 1990) and history of consumption (Trentmann 2006) suggests that consumer subjectivity arises through particular, historically-specific discourses. Building on a Foucauldian tradition, many focused on how discourses assume and call forth particular consumer subjects, such as responsible consumers (Giesler and Veresiu 2014), active consumers (Karababa and Ger 2011) or ‘compliant patients’ (Thompson 2003). Extending these studies, this paper focuses on rational choice and proposes a model of the construction of rational consumer action. We develop our arguments through the case study of mortgage borrowing in post-socialist Hungary, based on 50 interviews with borrowers, 49 expert interviews with bankers and regulators and extensive archive data. The model conceptualizes consumer choice as an outcome of ‘performation struggles’ (Callon, Millo, and Muniesa 2007) between devices and discourses produced by different organizations, which are shaped by organization-specific information on consumers, organizational interpretative frames and organizational aims.