Discourses of Thrift and Consumer Reasonability in Czech State-Socialist Society

Abstract

abstract:The article examines how notions of thrift, saving, and frugality were present and active in the state-socialist discourses of economic behaviour and what meaning these notions carried. The research is based on three kinds of data: the official state-socialist public discourse of economic behaviour as presented in transcripts of parliamentary speeches, household guides and manuals, and eyewitness accounts of the state-socialist era recollected in oral history interviews. Such a multi-faceted corpus of discourse data made it possible to examine factual and normative aspects of thrift in state-socialist discourses and compare them with the accounts of everyday practices and tactics that may well contradict the official discourse. The analysis reveals that (a) notions of thrift and saving were strongly present throughout the period in all discourses examined, (b) both terms underwent a semantic shift from a productive to a restrictive meaning over time, and (c) both notions were eventually publicly sidelined by the emphasis on raising revenue. Despite fading from public discourse in the late 1980s, the notion of thrift had by then become instilled in the subjective understanding of the 'reasonable consumer', a concept that can therefore be considered a precursor of the contemporary concept of consumer responsibilisation. keywords: thrift, saving, discourse analysis, socialism, consumers, consumer responsibilisation Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review, 2017, Vol. 53, No. 6: 805-831 https://doi.org/10.13060/00380288.2017 * Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (grant number 15-04863S). We thank two anonymous referees for their many suggestions, which helped us to substantially improve the paper. We are also grateful to Markéta Fuchs for help with the English. ** Direct all correspondence to: Martin Hájek, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, U Kříže 8, 158 00 Prague 5, Czech Republic, e-mail: martin.hajek@fsv.cuni.cz; Tomáš Samec, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, U Kříže 8, 158 00 Prague 5, Czech Republic, e-mail: tomas.samec@fsv.cuni.cz. Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2017, Vol. 53, No. 6 806 The present-day discursive representation of consumer behaviour in Czech society is marked by a visible inconsistency. On the one hand, experts and the media praise rising household consumption as contributing significantly to the growth of the national economy (or so we are told). On the other hand, insistent warnings, likewise supported by experts, against over-indebtedness, both individual and public, appear regularly in those same media. Uncertainty about what is a 'desirable' level of consumption becomes apparent in the context of household saving behaviour. Czech households' bank savings are relatively high compared to their debts and continue to grow despite almost negative interest rates. Consequently, money-saving Czechs are relatively reluctant to make use of consumer credit or other advanced financial services; ...

Introduction: Second-hand Cultures in Unsettled Times

“…At this point, they're the faintest shade of blue, but they're indestructible, blast them!" (Gurova 2009, p52-3) Oral histories, and historical research more generally, are useful for retrospectively exploring how second-hand culture evolves at times of state-imposed economies of shortage -both in post-socialist countries (Gurova 2009;Hájek and Samec 2017;Bartlett 2022), but also in periods of austerity in the West (Hall and Jayne 2016;. This co-evolution of shortage and scarcity with salvage and second-hand relate closely to the current crises and unsettled times that motivated this special issue.…”