Crisis and the construction of home: Narrative accounts of the Financial crisis on the Czech housing market
Abstract
This text deals with the Financial crises from the perspective of everyday lived experience. It presents the analysis of narrative accounts of lay people who were active on the Czech housing market during or after the Crises.
Theoretically rooted in the in the framework of narrative analysis, the text widens the mainstream economical perceptions of Crises bringing the concepts of emotions, ethos and symbolic boundaries into account. On the behalf of the narratives of Crises, the narratives of the process of social construction of home proved to be significant for the narrator's identity construction and presentation.
Text presents three main findings a) Crises is trope, which is used as such in the narratives b) moral evaluation, which might be coined as the bourgeois morality ethos prove their significance in the narratives c) housing choices being based both on "rational" and "irrational" factors i. e. emotions, moral evaluations. The main interpretation of the narrative accounts suggests the crucial importance of the narratives of social construction of home for the expression of being independent, capable, responsible and thus successful person.
The ability to express the capability of securing what is culturally regarded as "good and ideal housing" to the family, represents ones ability to succeed in the complex globalized, post-socialist reality. It also suggests the immanent importance of the category of (individual) success in the contemporary capitalist and post-socialist societies.