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”.
Despite the evident complications and ambitions inherent in our methodological range, our arguments in this book are quite simple, and can be boiled down to three basic propositions. First, and foremost, we argue that apparently binary constructions of homeownership and renting, and social and private housing, are simply not useful to describe and represent the everyday lives, experiences, and crisis points of shared ownership. In our rendering, property is porous and fluid, flexible and accommodating. It is consistently inconsistent, and this is reflected in our data. Listening to a shared owner describe how they felt out of control at different times and for different reasons—whether that be as a result of dripping water or problematic neighbours—but then subsequently say that they felt like an owner because they were in control represented a kind of compartmentalisation of their identities, and we argue that this was more than a compartmentalisation to the extent that it represented a fluidity inherent in the nature of ownership.
Part of our research has been to ask how the shared ownership label came into being in the first place, and became blackboxed over time, the process that is ascribed to the complex internal workings of systems or products that, over time, become seemingly self-evident and no longer attract attention. Similarly, we have asked how housing associations (which provide most shared ownership) have integrated shared ownership into their housing management portfolio, alongside their rented products. And finally, we asked how buyers experience shared ownership, from learning about it, to buying it, to engaging in it as part of their everyday lives. It is these three inquiries which animated our understandings in this book. What underpins our analysis is an attempt to appreciate the hold that ownership has in the everyday lives of policy-makers, housing providers, and buyers. In the first part of this chapter, we consider the relevant parts of the literature on property and ownership, and argue for an interactive, mutually constituting triptych of law–property–society.
The second proposition is that, although shared ownership can be presented as quite a simple device—you buy a percentage share of a dwelling, and rent the rest—it is much more complex, and, indeed, as we were told, we are still not entirely sure what the status is of shared owners (at least legally speaking). That status, however, is one which travels, and changes as it travels. It was an innovation, designed in the 1970s, to address a particular moment in the ongoing housing crisis through the creation of an intermediate tenure, with the purpose of enabling those on marginal incomes to get “a foot on the ladder” (an expression about which we have much to say). In the second part of this chapter, we introduce shared ownership and its status within social housing provision, and draw attention to certain ruptures at the heart of social housing in England (the location of our study).
Like anything relatively new and innovative, shared ownership makes people think, and it brings out into the open what they think it is. It makes people think about how it is going to be structured, financed, and produced. It makes people think about how they are going to sell it and, in so doing, distil what is a rather complex legal arrangement into a marketing slogan. It makes organisations that provide it think about how they are going to manage it. It makes those who buy it think about what they are buying and what they think they are. In other words, something like this that is new requires a range of rather ordinary organisations and ordinary people to address really basic, but important, questions. At points of crisis, these answers may well become crystallised, or alter as a result of interactions with others. This is not to suggest that such an innovation provides a kind of “state of nature”, in which primary understandings are developed. However, what we have found is that these thoughts, the questions raised, and their answers have consequences, and the purpose of this book is to unwrap those consequences.
Thirdly, we argue for the importance of what Daniel Miller (2010) wonderfully calls “stuff”, but to which we refer simply as things (there is no particular significance to this change other than that the latter more easily embraces both human and non-human actors). In our study, things range from the formal (such as the lease, which underpins the shared ownership relation) to the maxidress (operationalised by one of the people to whom we spoke to divide herself off from the other) to other actors (either as a group, such as “owners ” or “social ” renters, or as individuals). Indeed, we argue, perhaps counter-intuitively, that all things are imbued with and are repositories of a legal consciousness. This idea of the legal consciousness of things—which, properly, is a footnote in that literature—requires some extrapolation, which is the purpose of the third part of this chapter.
We are constantly being shaped and mediated by an infinite series of devices, from papers or bricks to computers and microchips; or, in this study, from documents to feature walls, water as it drips through your ceiling, and flowers that you place outside your front door. Bruno Latour’s classic, ironic, and pseudonymous study of the “sociology of the door closer” (Johnson 1988) emphasises this problematic of a sociology which rejects, or minimises the significance of, the material. Zooming out from this discussion of the piston automatic door closer, he argues (1988: 303): “The label ‘inhuman’ applied to techniques simply overlooks translation mechanisms and the many choices that exist for figuring or de-figuring, personifying or abstracting, embodying or disembodying actors.” The dividing line between people and things is negotiable and negotiated, and in action. Miller (2010: 96) plays on the meaning of the word “accommodating” to the same effect, arguing that it involves a “sense of an appropriation of the home by its inhabitants”, and that it also implies “the need to change ourselves in order to suit our accommodation”. So, in short, things are more than the object of ownership stories; they are also about producing networks, relations, and events, questioning what goes as unseen and unquestioned in the constitution of everyday life (Cloatre and Cowan forthcoming).
In the fourth and fifth parts of this chapter, we set out our various datasets and the structure of this book, respectively. These parts enable you to orient yourself within our framing and the book itself.
Law–Property–Society
The mutually constituting law–society relationship has considerable heritage in socio-legal studies. It represents a break from the problematic “Law and …” scholarship in which law takes the front seat, driving our ideas about society. We have inserted property in the middle in part because that is the subject of our study, and in part also because of property’s mediating influence between law and society. In this part, we develop this proposition through a consideration of three different sets of literature. The first set is what might be termed the standard literature on ownership in law. This is well travelled, and so we do no more than highlight its contours. It is important for our study because our data challenges the pre-established conceptions about property boundaries and exclusion. The second set is literature taken from housing research. As we discuss this research, a key binary unfolds between owning and renting. It is not one which has a strict basis in property law, but one which has taken hold in law–property–society. This relates to our subject of study—the location of shared ownership within this idea of tenure. A succession of moves ended with the production of the label “shared ownership” and its relation with ownership, but this was not a pre-given. In the third part, we present our perspective on this literature, linking it with recent property scholarship.
Ownership
The classic lawyer’s exposition of ownership is that ownership is “the greatest possible interest in a thing which a mature system of law recognizes” (Honore 1961). Further, “ownership … and similar words stand not merely for the greatest interest in things in particular systems but for a type of interest with common features transcending particular systems”. That focus on the “thing” is important because ownership is the relationship between the person and the thing. These common features include a bundle of 11 leading incidents and correlative obligations. As Honore put it,
No doubt the concentration in the same person of the right (liberty) of using as one wishes, the right to exclude others, the power of alienating and an immunity from expropriation is a cardinal feature of the institution. Yet it would be a distortion – and one of which the 18th century, with its overemphasis on subjective rights, was patently guilty – to speak as if this concentration of patiently garnered rights was the only legally or socially important characteristic of the owner’s position. (Honore 1961: 113)
Nevertheless, he regarded the right to exclusive possession of a thing as “the foundation on which the whole superstructure of ownership rests”. Yet if the right to exclude was the foundation, he noted that the right to use “at one’s discretion has rightly been recognized as a cardinal feature of ownership”. This way of framing the concept of ownership as a matter of common sense and common knowledge is one which appears to be a particular trope of jurisprudential scholarship about ownership. This transcendental common-sense truth suggests that it is a kind of blackboxed idea. That is, we know instinctively what it means; it’s obvious. It is no longer controversial.
This kind of common-sense reasoning also underpins a second branch of scholarship, which suggests that the chief incident of property, perhaps that which enables us to refer to a thing as “mine”, relates to exclusivity of possession—our ability as an owner to keep somebody else off our property; what Blackstone (1765: Book 2, Chap. 1; see also, Hume 1740 [2004]) in his Commentaries on the Law of England described, in tune with the natural lawyers’ conception of dominion, as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man [sic] claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”. Morris Cohen (1927: 12), for example, recognised that, in law, what is significant is not our relation with the thing, but our relation with others in relation to the thing. The thing lacks relevance; what is important is that “the essence of private property is always the right to exclude others”. The modern origin of this line of analysis appears to be a supposed deficiency with the bundle of rights t...