An ethnography of advice: between market, society and the declining welfare state 2015-2018

This dataset results from an anthropological project that investigated the mediations that advice enables between the state, the market, charitable initiatives, families and ordinary citizens in the UK as well as selected European sites affected by austerity politics, namely Spain and Switzerland. The welfare state is not just a political-economic but a moral formation, which creates multiple boundaries of inclusion and exclusion through a variety of actors, officials and institutions. These boundaries at times challenge, and at other times reproduce, dominant logics of extraction and accumulation. Advisers are often the last call for help for their clients/dependents who find themselves increasingly at the mercy of local authorities, immigration regimes, landlords, banks and debt collection agencies. But competing visions of moral worth and social justice continue to permeate the everyday deliberations of those who administer, support and advocate advice. Struggles and dilemmas over how best to instantiate social justice, provide assistance and balance individuals’ moral judgments against the collective good frequently occur. In analyzing advice as part of a broader landscape of governing the welfare state, our research explored both the dovetailing of and divergence between political, economic and legal imperatives and domains. To accomplish our research, four main themes (1) Empathy and expertise, (2) Brokerage or self-help, (3) Shifting advice frameworks, and (4) Comparative insights on UK-based problems, were addressed through eight research sub-projects. (2) Ryan Davey ‘Debt advice in Plymouth’; (3) Tobias Eule ‘Face-to-Face Interactions at the State/Market interface in Germany/Switzerland’; (4) Alice Forbess ‘Housing and welfare advice in Portsmouth; (5) Ana Gutierrez Garza ‘Advice as social struggle: housing and debt in Spain’; (6) Deborah James ‘Debt advice in London’; (7) Insa Koch ‘Social housing and austerity politics on council estates in England’; (8) Anna Tuckett ‘Providing immigration advice in austerity UK’; (9) Matt Wilde ‘Advice and the UK Housing Crisis’. These include statements of methodology; tables of contents of fieldnotes; anonymized ethnographic interviews and anonymized fieldnotes.