Playing the credit score game: algorithms, 'positive' data and the personification of financial objects

This paper is about how people are learning to 'make themselves up' in response to the market's new algorithmic ways of seeing. More specifically, it explores how the self-datafication of informal financial relations is being used to affect the calculation of credit score. I argue tha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEconomy and society Vol. 46; no. 3-4; pp. 346 - 368
Main Author Kear, Mark
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 02.10.2017
Taylor & Francis LLC
Subjects
algorithmic governance
Algorithms
Arbitration
Bias
Case studies
Computation
Consumer credit
Credit
Credit reports
credit score
Credit scoring
datafication
Financial inclusion
Marginality
Markets
Scores
subject formation
Technology
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ISSN0308-5147
1469-5766
DOI10.1080/03085147.2017.1412642

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Summary:This paper is about how people are learning to 'make themselves up' in response to the market's new algorithmic ways of seeing. More specifically, it explores how the self-datafication of informal financial relations is being used to affect the calculation of credit score. I argue that credit score functions as a legal technology of arbitration beset with contradictions that are giving rise to inchoate struggles over the distribution of calculative agency in consumer credit markets. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of credit building peer 'lending circles', the paper explores how financially marginalized groups and financial inclusion advocates are reacting to the blind spots and biases of credit-scoring algorithms through compensatory and transgressive data-generation practices.
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ISSN:0308-5147
1469-5766
DOI:10.1080/03085147.2017.1412642