UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference
Inclusion Exclusion
Friday 17 February 10:00 – 11:30: Panel D1: Enterprising to survive: Informal networks in South Eastern Europe
Narcis Tulbure (University of Pittsburgh): ‘Bani albi pentru zile negre (nest egg)’
My paper will explore the practices associated with the sale of life insurance as well as various hybrids of private pensions and life insurance programs through prieteni, cunostinte, rude ("friends, acquaintances, relatives") in post-socialist Romania. Built on schemes known as multi-level marketing (MLM) in business jargon, such insurance companies promise to offer security and a worriless future at a time when people loose their jobs in the state sector, the value of social security or retirement benefits has plummeted, and the official or informal costs of medical assistance are hardly affordable.
Such enterprises have spread rapidly all over Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism and are used for the sale of a multitude of products or services - from, medical supplies, beauty products and cosmetic accessories to house appliances, electronics and car insurance. They involve the construction of extensive networks of distributors, sales representatives and regional managers through which the products are sold, offering opportunities to earn money for a large number of active and dynamic people. The distribution networks grow continuously, every new customer being a potential distributor and manager to build his own small network of friends, acquaintances and relatives that will buy the products. Insurance companies selling life insurance and savings instruments, quite successful in Romania where classic private pension programs are not yet available, target active individuals, younger to mature but rarely older ones, with a certain economic and social capital, that is, ones that can afford to invest in such products and, simultaneously, develop the distribution network by persuading further clients. At the same time, the selling sessions involve the rhetoric of marginalization and loss, strategies for making people aware of the discomforts of sickness and old age, as well as on the "necessity" of providing children with a capital by the time they start college or establish a family. In the process, conceptions revolving around the person, family and social relations are reconfigured in connection with ideas about work, entrepreneurship and monetary gains.
In my paper I will try to address a number of questions such as: how are ideas of marginalization and loss constructed and used during the selling sessions? How are capitalist processes that reinsert themselves in this part of the world adopting and refashioning critical discourses on disruption and change just to insinuate themselves as the solution? How are former categories of personhood and family refashioned in the process? What are the discursive strategies, material practices and graphic artifacts employed by insurance agents during their meetings with clients?
My paper will draw on fieldwork conducted in Bucharest and Caracal (a small town in Southern Romania) during the summers of 2004 and 2005. I will rely on observation conducted during selling sessions and meetings between insurance agents and their potential clients, interviews with clients and insurance agents, as well as on the examination of graphic artifacts used during the meetings and later for record keeping.
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