UC Irvine

The analytical and empirical shift from the study of the kinds of consumption facilitated by credit, to the processes and performances in consuming credit itself, opens up an array of questions for the social study of money and markets. Consuming credit relies on infrastructures of credit's creation and transmission, which in turn leave data trails in their wake. Both the infrastructures and the data suggest new business models and pose challenges to social studies of financialization because of their decidedly non-market characteristics. Credit may be less about money, and may function less as money, than as a means to other ends of fee generation and data mining. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.