Zsuzsanna Vargha
Affiliation
- Graduate Student Fellow, Department of Sociology
Research
Zsuzsanna Vargha is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and Mellon Graduate Fellow at ISERP. She is interested in bringing together insights from economic sociology, the sociology of culture, and science and technology studies to understand consumer markets. Zsuzsanna's previous research project was on the post-socialist advertising industry as transforming professional field. Her interests include risk and calculation, consumption and everyday life, and modern Eastern Europe.
Zsuzsanna Vargha's dissertation looks at the case of consumer banking to understand how markets are constituted and reproduced through interaction. Through the puzzling success of Hungarian home loan agents she examines how markets bring together mass products with a multitude of individual needs. Drawing on ethnomethodology and science studies, market is conceptualized as a tenuous network-building endeavor rather than a straightforward or manipulative relationship of bank and consumer. The dissertation contrasts the case of loan agents with that of clerks at bank branches, who are technologically much more equipped to perform the attachment of product and consumer. Ethnographic methods are used for the study of bank-client encounters to explore the situational-interactive elements of the matching process in markets.
