Resumen de Credit (re)connections: : Finite objects, affiliations and interactivity at two Portuguese retail banks
The present article discusses the argument that presupposes the progressive abstraction, rationalization and centralization of credit. This involves not only re-connecting the development of retail banking credit services to a range of specific consumption products but also showing how a relationship between credit and the everyday must largely be established on the basis of such connections rather than on the supposedly general purpose character of credit. An empirically based finitist approach is thus developed that perceives the application of credit to a range of products or services as always dependent on a (variable) set of locally arranged connections involving institutions, people and objects, which, in turn, take a definite set of past practices as their main point of reference. Three examples of such connections are considered: objectification processes tying up credit services to particular products; affiliations between banks, business partners, clients and other counterparts around certain products; and interactivity between credit devices (such as credit cards) and credit users. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the marketing departments of two Portuguese retail banks.
