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2018 | Buch

Ownership, Narrative, Things

verfasst von: Prof. Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Buchreihe : Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies

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This book uses a case study of a low-cost home ownership initiative at the margins of renting and owning provided by social landlords – known as shared ownership – to challenge everyday assumptions held about the ‘social’ and the ‘legal’ in property. The authors provide a study of the construction of property ownership, from the creation of this idea through to the present day, and offer a fresh consideration of key issues surrounding property, ownership, and the social.

Analysing a diverse range of sources (from archives to micro-blogs, observation of housing providers, and interviews with shared owners), the authors explain the significance of the things (from the formal documents like leases, to odd materials like sweet wrappers and cigarette butts) commonly found in the narratives around shared ownership which are used to construct it as private ownership in everyday life. Ultimately, they uncover how this dream of ownership can become tarnished when people’s identities as ‘owners’ come under threat, and as such, these findings will provide fascinating insight into the intricacies of so-called home ownership for scholars of Law, Criminology, and Sociology.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
1. Ownership, Narrative, Things
Abstract
This is a book about the everyday life of “shared ownership”, a peculiar pragmatic invention, both in label and in design. Although it is much messier than this, the marketing slogan for shared ownership is that it involves “part buy, part rent”. However, although shared ownership forms its substantive subject matter, the book ranges across, and makes a contribution to, various methodological pre-occupations of ours—legal consciousness, actor–network theory, property—and diverse interdisciplinary approaches to ownership, home, and things. In this chapter, we set out how we bring these diverse pre-occupations together and introduce this thing called “shared ownership”.
Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace
2. Shared Ownership and Housing Policy
Abstract
This chapter presents a study of housing policy from the periphery. As we develop below, it is not its numerical significance as a tenure that makes shared ownership so important; rather, it is its totemic significance in housing policy and its location as a social housing low-cost homeownership “product” which make it an object of study. Our argument is that, in the very way in which it is discussed and represented in policy and by policy-makers, shared ownership appears as a very simple “product”, albeit one which has gone through a series of different iterations. And, most of all, shared ownership is constructed as ownership. That very simple ownership product, at heart, is how shared ownership came to be represented and translated by a range of others, including buyers—to adopt the metaphor widely used in policy documents, enabling people to “get a foot on the ladder” of “homeownership”. And, of course, these are very legal translations.
Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace
3. The Lease
Abstract
In the previous chapter, we developed a history in which some fairly complex ideas became enjoined into one simple, financialised product, which became known as shared ownership. Despite the complexity inherent in the idea of ownership, shared ownership had a fit with housing policy. We noted how the label led to a legal puzzle, for there was no such thing as shared ownership. This chapter is concerned with how shared ownership became legible. It is a story of the way a long-used and well-known technique, the lease, was manipulated so that it became the device through which shared ownership was and is delivered. It is another remarkable story. It enabled KS3 to say, in one breath, that shared ownership is not complicated, and, later on in our interview, recognise that it was rather more complicated than that. It was the lease which produced the option chaos and, as we develop in this chapter, other problematics. Nevertheless, despite its well-known failings (see, e.g., Karn et al. 1985; Stewart 1981), the lease was adopted as the legal technique for the delivery of this complex idea.
Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace
4. Managing Shared Ownership
Abstract
A key question to be addressed by a housing organisation with a continuing interest (including central government grant) in a property is how to manage that property in the future. There are well-defined techniques for managing social rented housing, which have developed over the last century. Some social housing providers also had a stock of (non-shared ownership) long leasehold properties, the management of which they might have taken on, for example, following the transfer from local authorities after the sitting tenant had exercised their right to buy. However, shared ownership is a rather different phenomenon from social rented housing and other long leaseholds because of its in-betweenness, adding a further level of complexity. A key question for providers of shared ownership housing is how they should treat shared owners—are they akin to long leaseholders or social renters?
Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace
5. Selling and Buying Shared Ownership
Abstract
In the previous two chapters, we have discussed how and why shared ownership became knowable. In this chapter, we move on to consider how shared ownership is sold and why it is bought. One of the issues confronting housing associations wishing to sell shared ownership is the general lack of knowledge about it, even after 40 years or so. That lack of knowledge may be less since the advent of the internet’s search ability and since some Web-based property sale platforms have introduced a shared ownership filter. However, there is still a need to “sell” shared ownership, both in terms of the concept and in terms of marketing properties.
Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace
6. Experiencing Shared Ownership
Abstract
In this chapter, we focus on our buyer participants’ data, and analyse their experiences of shared ownership. Our focus is on how they understand ownership and where they “fit” within it. As we demonstrated in Chap. 1, ownership is a complex and undulating concept in theory. One of the questions in our study was where it stopped and other’s responsibilities started. Shared ownership is a complex product. As we noted in Chaps. 2 and 3, although buyers purchase a share in the property, they do so with strings attached. They are entirely responsible for their internal repairs and improvements; although the association or managing agent is responsible for conducting external repairs and improvements, shared owners are responsible for the entire share attributable to their property (whatever proportion they own); there are restrictions on what shared owners are entitled to do with their property—they are not entitled to sub-let it and, at the time of our research, there were restrictions on re-sale (the association had a limited period within which it could nominate a buyer at an independent valuation).
Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace
7. Assembling Shared Ownership
Abstract
In this chapter, we draw together our analysis of the key themes of this book around five randomly selected narratives provided by the shared owner buyers we interviewed. In these narratives, complex stories are told about ownership, as “merchants of morality” (Goffman 1956: 253), and about what Paul Watt has described as “selective belonging”, a “spatially uneven sense of belonging and attachment” (2009: 2888; see also Jackson and Benson 2014). They are stories of differentiation, picking up on one of the themes of Chap. 5. They are narratives through which identities are performed and co-constituted with objects around the interviewees’ homes, over time. As Benson and Jackson (2017: 6) put it: “The repeated and reiterative narration of negotiations in relation to housing – triumphs, anxieties and ambivalences – reveal differences in what people have, how they make sense of this and how they cope.”
Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace
8. Messiness and Techniques of Simplification
Abstract
In this chapter, the authors conclude their study with a discussion around the techniques we use to simplify what are messy devices. They draw attention to the ways in which these techniques obscure the idea of property. They also outline the limits of their study and the further work needed to think about property and housing from the periphery.
Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace
Erratum to: Ownership, Narrative, Things
Dave Cowan, Helen Carr, Alison Wallace
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Ownership, Narrative, Things
verfasst von
Prof. Dave Cowan
Helen Carr
Alison Wallace
Copyright-Jahr
2018
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-59069-5
Print ISBN
978-1-137-59068-8
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59069-5