Using a moral economy perspective to understand working-class finance and the decline of home credit in the United Kingdom

This article considers how discord between dominant and alternative moral economies has contributed to the decline of the home credit industry in the United Kingdom. Drawing on qualitative data from over 70 interviews, as well as media reporting and grey literature, authentic historical analysis is utilised to examine how collective values and perceptions shape discourse and reproduce inequalities. It is argued here that media, political, academic and business actors operating within the dominant moral economy may perpetuate hegemonic (mis)understandings of alternative practices. This article advances Graeber’s work on debt and develops Polanyi’s and Thompson’s theorising on the moral economy, by arguing that social and cultural relations should be understood as being connected to – but separable from – economic relations. Analysis of the decline of home credit illustrates how cultural and economic behaviours converge to create unjust and partitioned moral economies.