| Summary: | 博士 === 東海大學 === 社會學系 === 101 === Pawn transaction, a type of loan behavior, is a little understood economic activity in Taiwan. This dissertation analyzes “semi-formal finance” and creates three classifications of pawn transactions: object-based (licitness), law-based (legitimatizing illicitness), and violence-based (illicitness). Object-based transactions are formal transactions on the exchange values of the objects; whereas law-based and violence-based transactions are both in the informal domain, in which people rather than objects serve as the basis of transactions. The first type is strictly monitored by the government; the other two types are not, resulting in problems such as loan sharks and violent debt-collection practices.
In the category of formal transactions, pledging transactions, formal finance, and relation finance have different borrowing logics. The pledging transaction is unique in its way of using an object as credit assurance, thus identifying the pawner’s credibility without judging his or her liability, while also creating a social vacuum space. This dissertation describes how pawn transactions in Taiwan tended to be based on local habitus during the period between the Qing Dynasty and Japanese colonial occupation; however, since then it has become a chartering and localizing industry under party-state capitalism, thus creating a local valuation system and constraining object-based transactions.
In the area of informal transactions, I investigate the development of institutional environments in pawn markets from the World War II to 2010 to analyze transaction mechanisms and transformations derived from interactions between those mechanisms and the legal system. A long-standing state policy is to strictly control pawn transactions to prevent dealing in stolen goods. Law-based transactions occupy a grey legal area in which pawnbrokers move informal transactions into the legal system, situating them between old customs and current state laws in order to legitimatize them. Violence-based transactions are based on a penalized system which is slowly being systemized, thus marginalized state laws.
Revealing the formality of informal transactions, the author discusses the relationship between institutions and actors based on the literature of new institutionalism and the sociology of law and economy to show that pawnbrokers, who play the role of integrators between the formal and informal sectors, exploit information from the spaces between formal and informal institutions. It is noted that the process of legitimatizing illicitness is practiced under the protection of the state legal system. This dissertation shows that when it comes to a conflict between individual interests and the legal system, both the state and the market actors have the right to interpret the law. Of course, the actors have interpreted those laws to their advantage, while at the same time giving a certain degree of legitimacy to informal pawn transactions in Taiwan.
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