Reconfigurations of responsibility: health insurance policyholders’ daily experiences of self-tracking

Bastien Presset and Maiju Tanninen

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2025, vol. 18, issue 5, 684-698

Abstract: The implementation of behavioral data and algorithmic technologies in insurance has sparked scholarly debate regarding their capability to disrupt the solidarity models of insurance. While the new insurance technologies’ ability to individualize risk has limitations, their features might accentuate individual responsibility and obscure the reference groups that constitute the foundation of insurance solidarity, particularly for policyholders. Yet, little is known of how policyholders themselves experience these insurance schemes. Based on 21 interviews conducted with users of a Swiss self-tracking in insurance (STi) program, we analyze how policyholders enact responsibility and solidarity together with a STi technology. Our findings reveal tensions in users’ daily experiences, highlighting frictions between solidarity as it is currently implemented in health insurance regulation and practices and the form embedded in STi interventions. Some users enthusiastically adopt the individualizing rationale of the technology, valuing self-responsibility and justifying it with the promise of reduced medical costs for everyone. Others struggle between their conviction with the established forms of solidarity and their desire to benefit from the programs. The results suggest that, although STi encounters regulative barriers, its current forms of implementation in users’ daily lives lead to sociomaterial reconfigurations of morals at the microsocial level.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2025.2458009

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