Capitalizing on financing ecologies: The world making properties of peer-to-peer lending through everyday entrepreneurship

摘要

Within the market-making literature lies nuanced discussions dealing with the plurality and construction of subjectivities and value. These topics have been of particular interest to those interested in platforms hoping to engender so called caring capitalism, which speaks to financial ecologies that are both more-or-less market and more-or-less social. The empirics of this paper draw from research involving two groups: (1) U.S. food entrepreneurs operating less than three years who turned to community-based lending platforms for financing and (2) U.S. food entrepreneurs operating less than three years who turned to conventional national lenders (the JP Morgan Chase's and Bank of America's of the world) for financing. Qualitative semi-structured interviews are triangulated with data from a survey instrument that resulted in the generation of a word cloud for each group depicting respondents' goals and outlooks. The argument is animated by an embodied reading of the "ecologies" concept (e.g., Hall, 2012; Langley and Leyshon, 2017b; Lai, 2016: 30), which is employed to further attune the analysis to the emergence and mobilization of variegated socio-material practices. The goal is to further enliven relational economic geography and sociology as I explore how entrepreneurs come to embody the outlooks they do.