Challenging the Norm? The ‘Ethopolitics’ of Low-cost Homeownership in Scotland

Influenced by Nikolas Rose’s concept of ethopolitics, this paper explores attitudes to home and tenure amongst low-cost homeowners in Scotland. In doing so, it seeks to highlight the contested nature of contemporary governing practices and the way in which ‘governable subjects ’ can challenge, reinterpret and resist dominant policy discourses, which promote homeownership as the preferred tenure of choice, whilst simultaneously pathologising and problematising social housing. (1984), Bauman (1998) and Rose (2000) have conceptualised this divide in terms of culture, consumption and aesthetics, with those who exercise the wrong choice, conceived as ‘flawed consumers ’ in need of punitive state interven-tions (see for example, Flint, 2003; Flint and Rowlands, 2003; McIntyre and McKee, 2009). A relational approach which focuses on the mobilisation of various forms of capital does not, however, tell us much about how these low-income groups directly experience or consume housing on their own terms (Allen, 2007). The literature on tenure has also tended to focus on the points of distinction between homeowners and renters, thus ignoring how experiences of homeownership vary quite significantly and reflect wider socioeconomic inequalities in society. As Hanley (2007, p. 18