New paper alert (open access)! *From rational to relational: How energy poor households engage with the British retail energy market*, in ERSS journal, and introduced in this thread. #energypoverty #energymarket #fuelpoverty
https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2214629620303406

This one is led by Pepa Ambrosio Ambala, with our secondary qualitative data dream team: @tom_hargreaves1 @NickEmmel Jan Gilbertson, Angela Tod @carolyn_snell Caroline Mullen @noellonghurst and @RossGillard17 and introducing the fabulous @dr_anneowen for the quantitative input.

The paper draws on the sociology of money and markets literature (introduced to us by @_DrMarkDavis) to understand energy poor households' engagement with the energy market in the UK.

In this literature markets are understood to be constituted of social relations: relations of trust, friendship, power and dependence. In our paper, we explore how people in energy poor households understand the energy market and how that impacts on energy policy.

We draw on our large collection of secondary qualitative interviews collected since 2003 in the UK (hat tip @TimescapeA and @kahryn for methods input) as well as the OFGEM survey on consumer engagement released in 2018, to show how the energy poor experience the market.

We show that having access to good quality information about suppliers, energy tariffs and grants, and having the skills and resources to act on this is important, without these it can be difficult for people to take action. These things tend to be accessed relationally.

As such a supportive network of family and friends mediates people's engagement in the market, as does people’s trust of and resulting loyalty to their energy supplier.

These findings lead us to relational explanations of the retail energy market, with related policy recommendations: if we are to aim for people to act ‘rationally’, they will need support from intermediaries to navigate the market: 'relational' support.

Thanks to @CIEMAP for funding this work, as well as the primary data collectors and funders- all of whom are named in the acknowledgements of the paper.

For completeness - this is the second paper in a series, the first is here: https://twitter.com/LucieMiddlemiss/status/1143415694756896769?s=20

Also - one of my failed grant applications this year was to continue this work. We have proven through these papers that there is real value in reusing qualitative data on #energypoverty . If anyone wants to partner to take this work forward you know where we are!