Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen

The Domestication of New Technologies as a Set of Trials

This article examines the domestication of technologies by following different phases of adoption. These phases are studied as a set of trials in which the capabilities of humans and non-humans are tested in many ways. I will begin the article by investigating the period in which interest in a piece of technology is slowly aroused. This involves the collective assessment of the ‘need’ for an object and, before an actual acquisition is made, consultations with friends and relatives who can act as ‘warm specialists’. Next, I analyse the initial period of living with new technology: the way the technology in question needs to be fitted into pre-existing technological and human relationships. Finally, I examine the ways in which a technology that has become an integral part of everyday lifeslowly becomes less and less present until, at last, it seems to have been done away with. As a whole, the set of trials forms a general process of domestication whereby new user knowledge is created and the moral order of the household is negotiated recurrently.

The Ethos of Thrift The Promotion of Bank Saving in Finland During the 1950s

This article examines the promotion and legitimization of bank saving in Finnish magazines during the 1950s. While trying to educate Finnish citizens to save, articles and advertisements ended up outlining a general model for the good life, structured by the ethos of thrift. At the household level, thrift meant a plurality of activities, not only passivity or restraint. The bank-saving discourse introduced new techniques of governing oneself and created possibilities for anticipatory pleasure: it oriented people towards commodities and simultaneously tried to tame consumer impulses. As an ascetic practice, bank saving was portrayed as not denying the material world; rather, its effect was to intensify the relation to the goods. Studying these texts and advertisements gives an enriched perception of economic actors who, with multiple techniques and skills, actively looked after their own welfare, as well as that of their families, local communities, and ultimately, of the nation.

Justifications for commodified security: The promotion of private life insurance in Finland 1945-90

This article examines the promotion of private life insurance in Finland between 1945 and 1990. Although a fully-fledged social insurance system was established during this period, private insurance did not become obsolete. How were people encouraged to engage in voluntary forms of insurance in the new situation? We study the ways in which insurance was marketed by justifying its usefulness in relation to the ‘goods’ that were presumed common to all potential customers. The key theoretical frameworks are given by the literature on ‘governmentality’ and by Boltanski and Thévenot’s model of justifications. The first of these is used in our discussion of the general role of insurance as a multifaceted social technology, whereas we use the model of justifications in analysing the core themes of promotion. The promotional materials reveal that private life insurance is not an attractive economic tool for potential customers without reference to at least some moral justifications. However, these justifications are heterogeneous and open to change. In addition, the question of which particular moral emphasis seems most relevant, and when, is related to socio-economic transformations. Especially important are the changes in the interplay between social and private forms of organizing insurance responsibility.

Any Room for Aesthetics?: Shopping Practices of Heavily Indebted Consumers

This article describes the everyday practices of consumption of heavily indebted people and discusses the links between economic resources and everyday aesthetics. It is based on interviews with people in a Finnish debt adjustment programme. Becoming overindebted has markedly changed the interviewees’ habits of consumption that are now characterized by constant and careful control of the resources and a self-understanding of never buying anything unnecessary. Becoming indebted has also affected the interviewees’ relations to the social world: on the one hand they now feel themselves inferior compared to other consumers with more resources; but on the other, some of them feel critical and superior in relation to the whole consumer culture; indebtedness has given them ‘new values’. Despite this critical stance, small pleasures and aesthetic judgements intermingle in the interviewees’ practices of shopping. Thus it becomes evident that degrees of freedom or aestheticism in consumption are not completely reducible to resources.

Editorial: Insurance and the economization of uncertainty

When one reads newspapers or watches TV nowadays, one is struck by the amount of news on the economy and, especially, the portrayal of the state of economy as increasingly fragile and uncertain. At least since the beginning of the 2007 and 2008 financial crisis, the media have constantly bombarded their audiences with stories about how bleak and, perhaps more importantly, unpredictable the economic future seems. Economic news has become ever more central to the way in which we understand our world. In combination with its somber tone, this also creates certain myopia for the observer. It is easy to forget that uncertainty has been characteristic of economic life as long as there has been something called ‘economic life’. What is new, however, is the pervasive economization of uncertainty. More precisely, it is only recently that uncertainty in itself has become a fundamental component of economic life. A crucial role in this is played by the technical means with which uncertainties are managed. When uncertainty is standardized, homogenized and made calculable, it can be given a price and it can be bought and sold. Not only has it been economized, but also it has been made into an essential commodity of the current capitalism. In the context of this special issue, the word ‘economization’ is important in both of its two meanings. First, in everyday usage the term refers to the efficient use of resources. This points to the importance of studying the ways in which life’s complexity is trimmed down with equipment designed to reduce uncertainty, including insurance policies, health care arrangements, pensions and saving plans. The second meaning of the term ‘economization’ is more specific. It derives from Çalişkan and Callon’s (2009, 2010) recent reframing of the project of studying ‘performativity’ in the creation of markets. Here, ‘economization’ refers to the way in which diverse practices are rendered as ‘economic’. In this usage ‘economization’ does not refer only to orthodox economics and its applications. In addition, also practices such as accounting, actuarial calculations, marketing, logistics and the design of commercial spaces may all contribute to the emergence of the ‘economic’ (see also Callon 1998; Callon et al. 2007; MacKenzie 2006, 2009; MacKenzie et al. 2007). On a general level, it is easy to detect three main forms in which uncertainty is ‘economized’. To begin with, multiple risk technologies have been developed to ‘tame’ uncertainty by attempting to predict and manage the extent of (economic) harm. These have been used in various fields of practice, not only in finance, engineering and infrastructure maintenance but also in health care, for example. Insurance is preeminent among risk technologies. Insurance practices operate through standardizing harmful events, giving them monetary value and spreading and mitigating their effects. During the twentieth century, a range of insurance tools were used by states, private businesses and households in order to gain a degree of control over uncertainty. Consequently, insurance

Objectifying Climate Change Weather-Related Catastrophes as Risks and Opportunities for Reinsurance

For quite some time, reinsurance companies have been pricing the ongoing climate change using weather- and catastrophe-related instruments and thus have been able to make money through climate change. Yet, at the same time, for reinsurance companies it is crucial that the likelihood of the events they underwrite is diminished as much as possible. Consequently, while profiting from the situation, these key actors of global capitalism also work to prevent climate change from taking place, and support the kinds of measures, on all political scales, that diminish the likelihood of severe climate change destruction. This article analyzes the materials that the reinsurance company Munich Re has distributed to stakeholders and asks how climate change is objectified by the reinsurance industry. How are weather-related catastrophes made into a financial risk and opportunity? The key conceptual tools for answering these questions are provided by Michel Serres’s work on world-objects.

Domesticating insurance, financializing family lives: the case of private health insurance for children in Finland

ABSTRACT This article explores the domestication of a financial instrument that is much used in contemporary Finland, but that most of its users do not primarily think about in terms of being a financial instrument: the private health insurance for children. In Finland, all children are covered by social insurance and are entitled to free public health service with very low costs, if any. Yet, some 40 percent of families want to supplement this service with private products. Many fear that the popularity of the private health insurance for children contributes to a vicious circle that ends up weakening the legitimacy of, and the service given by, the public health sector; inequality in the face of health risks threatens to be aggravated, as well. Therefore, this financial instrument has become an object of political controversy. The main question of the article is: how do economic, political and moral valuations become intertwined in the domestication of insurance? The concept of ‘domestication’ is found helpful for analysing the pragmatics of valuation and for appreciating the dynamics and the heterogeneity of forces at play when financialization influences everyday life. The study argues that when financial instruments are appropriated they are also transformed; thus, they should not be viewed as homogeneous tools that have similar effects in all contexts of use. The main empirical materials studied are interviews with families with and without private health insurance policies for their children.

Latour's empirical metaphysics

In this article we examine the mode in which Bruno Latour engages in metaphysics in his social scientific and philosophical project. In contrast to Graham Harmans recent reading of his work, we take seriously how adamant Latour is about not creating a metaphysical system, and how he is thus essentially sharing the anti-metaphysical tenor of much of the twentieth-century philosophy. Nonetheless, he does not shun making bold claims concerning the way in which the world is. Therefore, we need to ask: what are, then, the purposes for which Latour evokes metaphysics? We recognize two main answers to the question. The first purpose is the creation of a makeshift, pragmatic, methodological ontology. His concepts such as trial, event, proposition, collective, and mode are not meant to describe ‘the furniture of the world’ in the style of classical metaphysics. Rather, they form a kind of ‘minimum-wage metaphysics’, an ‘experimental’ or ‘empirical’ metaphysics that serves the purpose of opening the world anew, in conjunction with empirical research. The second purpose is Latours elucidation of the metaphysics of modernity, in order to make our own preconceptions visible for ourselves. According to him, metaphysical assumptions are an unavoidable part of our relationship to our world, but we, the moderns, tend to give a distorted description of these assumptions. The ‘modes of existence’ of Latours recent book are aimed at elucidating the complexity of moderns’ real metaphysics. Yet they do not constitute a list of what there essentially is, but provide a toolkit for understanding our ways of being and our practices.